investor & lawyer interested in AI infra, energy, aerospace, robotics + longboarding, skiing, hiking, tennis
Joined June 2011
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I love this space race so much.
11/18 - Google drops @antigravity
11/19 - OpenAI launches 5.1-Codex-Max
9/30 - Sora 2 release
10/15 - Veo 3.1 release
9/5 - Anthropic ships Opus 4.1
9/5 - ChatGPT-oss announced hours after
Agreed. The biggest of only a couple downsides I’ve seen is that some great people can’t scale with the business, and others could but don’t like the new complexities that come with a bigger org and leave
Friends,
I'm excited to announce that I’ve launched @AlthingVentures, an early-stage venture capital fund.
The fund will have its first close next month and start making initial investments shortly after.
I’m grateful to have an elite Venture Partner team of experts and veteran entrepreneurs supporting our sourcing and diligence. They're truly world-class.
We'll be making seed and pre-seed investments in AI infrastructure, energy, aerospace, and robotics.
Do you know founders building in any of these areas? I’d love an introduction.
Mega funds require a ridiculous amount of dollars in returns to make sense, yet Thrive is one of the few that seems to be capable of doing that
We are pleased to announce the close of Thrive X. Exceeding $10 billion, Thrive X comprises $1 billion designated for early-stage investments and $9 billion designated for growth-stage investments. We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead.
We view Thrive as a company. Our product is partnership - the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders, and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work, and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive.
We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back. In this moment, exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments.
Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life.
We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support.
We are grateful for the trust our Limited Partners place in us, and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage.
thrivecap.com/thrive-x
Despite some shakiness in Delaware's reliability regime and new tax uncertainty in CA, the US remains the best place to incorporate for 98% of businesses
The pattern is clear: Canadian-based YC companies that scaled to unicorn valuations reincorporated in the US. This is a common practice for Canadian startups seeking US venture capital, as US-incorporated entities are often preferred by institutional investors for legal, tax, and governance reasons.
The point that self-driving tax services don't add as much to local GDP is an interesting one, but I think this is a classic air conditioner/paperweight scenario where the benefits to any local economy with Waymo far exceed the drawbacks
We gravitate towards hard-line rules when most often the nuance is in between. I agree with Jon for 90% of cases yet know some successful founders who didn’t and shouldn’t be involved with sales for many of the same reasons Carles mentions
What a wild time in VC
Lightspeed, Insight, Founders Fund, Thrive, a16z and now Lux raising just crazy amounts. The barbell-ification of venture is nearly complete
Thrilled to announce @Lux_Capital's latest $1.5B fund - grateful to continue to partner with founders inventing the future building the most essential infrastructure across AI, automation & bio. Just getting started! 🚀
A favorite aspect of the annual and quarterly letter sharing exercise is seeing how much the investor blurs with the philosopher. Successful leaders will have fully opposing viewpoints with perfectly valid arguments. The next evolutionary step should be moderated debate on TBPN
2025 Annual Letter is live: permanentequity.com/content/…
1) Fear of Man
2) Role of CEOs and board members
3) Hard look at AI, PE fees, and selling
4) Health update
5) Experiments in generosity
When people say taxes, regulation, etc don’t affect behavior, just show them this
Austin, Miami, NYC are the likely relocation locales as founders re-evaluate building in SF. Hopefully the NC Triangle and Denver are targeted too. Great talent hubs currently underutilized
Momentum in SF is so strong that I don’t think the startup ecosystem there is drying up anytime soon
First, the new timeline for building in California will change. Founders will go to there to get started, find initial talent, get PMF and raise money. As their valuation grows, they’ll start looking at alternative HQ locations before switching costs get too high
My guess is we see a thinning at the $200M+ valuations with departures growing thereafter
Momentum in SF is so strong that I don’t think the startup ecosystem there is drying up anytime soon
First, the new timeline for building in California will change. Founders will go to there to get started, find initial talent, get PMF and raise money. As their valuation grows, they’ll start looking at alternative HQ locations before switching costs get too high
My guess is we see a thinning at the $200M+ valuations with departures growing thereafter
Speedy responses will surely be the end state. When talking the chat interface (not the APIs), I think we're in this transition period where users expect better answers to take longer. Users intuited that quicker response times might correlate with shallow / incorrect responses
Chamath points out the accuracy vs speed tension as well
xitter.cf/chamath/status/2004583…
This is directionally right.
The HBM vs SRAM tradeoff in architecture design was clear many years ago. Those that picked HBM are in a queue behind Nvidia and Google. Good luck with that.
More broadly, LLM decode patterns favor SRAM. But unlike Gavin, I think this creates a lane for even more heterogenous silicon to support AI models in the future. Not less.
I suspect that the two axes that matter are accuracy vs speed and if you can design a focused solution for a specific AI use case, there will be a market.
Having spent a decade in the marketing & comms world, I see the appeal of a perfect PR launch. I've also seen how playing this game can lead to quicker funding.
A big caveat though: there are so many failures that had a great launch. And numerous successful, well-funded products had poor PR or non-existent launches.
Figuring out PR and VC influencers out is a nice-to-have, not mission-critical. Product will always be king
There is massive alpha sitting in the market right now for someone who can combine VC signaling + relationships with traditional PR/launch execution.
I'm talking 8-figure company atleast (rates of 10-25K an for an hour of advice), equity in hot companies, retainers from the best founders, and maybe even raising your own 100M VC fund off it
The demand is desperate and the competition is nearly nonexistent
Roll ups are new to a lot of VC folks but this breakdown in service is pretty standard PE stuff.
What’s wild is you think it won’t work because of churn etc, especially if you yourself were a customer of an acquired business. But then it does. Scale is powerful
Short and sweet economic analysis of current private market pricing practices from @cpaik
It has echoes of what we heard from @roelofbotha about the colossal exits required to justify the price action that is common in later stage venture funding
The hard part is that more than a few of these companies are going to get those huge exits. The value generation via AI is just too substantial. The pie is growing so rapidly. Exit projections that seem ludicrous just might not be in a couple years barring broader economic failure
Paying $3 for a Dollar: The Rational Irrationality of Venture Capital
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
I used parentheses and em dashes extensively pre-ChatGPT and now I don't dare lest I get confused for a bot. Don't know what that says about my writing...
