Much taller IRL
Salt Lake City, UT
Joined May 2007
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Presented w/o comment other than…
True story- the Vail board members I met had never heard of Instinct, let alone the other personal agents, at a time that it was growing 10% a day w/ 50%+ of its usage being travel and hospitality.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
First of Kind: The @rauchg interview
Season 3 starts now. I sat down with Guillermo in San Francisco to talk about layout shift, random acts of AI, and a dragon painted in a single stroke.
00:00 Human Effort Is Still Underrated
00:44 Chief Executive, Chief Designer
02:33 Two Bets: Software and English
05:15 Gmail Was My Siren Call
11:06 Exposure Hours
14:49 Layout Shift / One Stroke Dragon
17:10 No Random Acts of AI
25:17 Can Agents Have Taste?
30:15 Software Factories and Manufacturing Agent Customers
34:59 Everything Is Communication
38:04 A New American Story
41:52 Lifemaxxing
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of @vercel. Growing up in Argentina, he taught himself English in order to teach himself programming, then went on to create @nextjs and other foundational technology for the real-time web.
In our conversation, Guillermo explains why he designed Vercel’s first command line before writing any code, why layout shift erodes trust, and why his company won’t commit any “random acts of AI.”
G is not just a chief executive. He’s a chief designer.
—
Guillermo Rauch: One Stroke Dragon
First of Kind, S3:E01 @firstofkind
Hosted by @soleio and produced with @room3nyc
Powered by our sponsors:
@framer @noondesign @bot @tryramp @vercel @meetgranola @profound
Bryce Roberts retweeted
loved foursquare a ton but this an example of death by capital stack.
- more than 1x liquidation stacks
- $400M+ raised including debt
acquisition price is not high debt gets paid first, nothing left so preferred gets canceled, common gets canceled.
the danger of over-raising, not just the latest valuation you have the clear, but the size capital stack you're creating along the way
Linear is profitable and the assets are more than we have raised. At this point if shut down the company investors would actually make money just from the cash assets.
Cofounder of Foursquare on its recent acquisition:
"I was heartbroken by this ending"
Appreciate the retro, @dens.
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
I think about this graph every day.
A Rorschach test if there ever was one…
$81/month - that’s the median AI spend per employee at venture-backed companies, according to @tryramp’s AI Index. That’s at least 10x everyone else!
When you spend every day surrounded by founders building with AI, it’s easy to assume the rest of the economy spends the way their companies do. Ramp’s data says otherwise.
Of course, PE-backed and traditional companies are moving too. Their spend more than 2x’d over the past year. But they’re starting from a few dollars a month, about the price of a large cup of coffee.
Those of us in venture work inside a bubble of early adopters. For anyone selling into the token path, that’s good news: most of the market hasn’t started spending in earnest.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
Many (most?) investors disagree with me on this, but they are wrong. Gross margins on token spend, *at full utilization,* is the single most important metric for AI application companies. It's the purest measure of your value-add on underlying intelligence. 2/
Bryce Roberts retweeted
Also destroys outcomes for many founders who build big successful companies and who also over raised, leaving themselves underwater on their cap table
Equivocating ambition w/ massive funding rounds is the cancer of an entire generation of founders and a magnet for scam artists.
Invest in founders with a level of ambition that makes you uncomfortable.
I’ve sat at the table with a number of entrepreneurs who are raising seemingly back-to-back mega rounds every 3 months in the last year.
I’m an extraordinarily aggressive risk-taker, but in all these meetings I’ve felt physically uncomfortable.
To the point when I noticed I was gripping the chair in a meeting with a founder.
This is what it takes to win big and be truly venture-backable today.
As an OG, it’s still absolutely wild to me that every fundraising announcement discloses the valuation.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
Your security team is not a video production studio 🎬 Stop making them act like one.
Policy PDF, prompt, or this morning’s threat advisory in. Branded, company-wide training out, same day.
Content Studio:
Just did a video on this for our IG page.
Agree/Disagree on these tiers?
The #1 thing founders get wrong about fundraising is underestimating the importance of who makes the intro. For many VCs, the source is 50%+ of the decision-making.
Spend way more time than you think you should figuring this part out.
Goal of the 1st meeting is always to get the 2nd meeting
Bryce Roberts retweeted
$ firstofkind s3
✓ loaded firstofkind.com now live
Sign up for merch drop and E01 release.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
I'm hiring my next Chief of Staff. You won’t know every field I work in. What matters is how quickly you learn, the questions you ask, and whether you can think from first principles. You’ll help evaluate opportunities and work with founders building consequential companies. Technical background preferred. Three-year commitment. Menlo Park, in person. Apply: jobs.ashbyhq.com/khoslaventu…