Founder, CEO @edaphic_co. 13 year career in VC (fmr @500GlobalVC), now looking to enable the next million founders in the AI era.
Austin, TX
Joined December 2008
- Tweets6.5K
- Following426
- Followers4.1K
- Likes18.3K
Tim Chae retweeted
"The winner of the AI race will not be the company with the smartest model.
It will be the company that is most effective at making the local hero—the teacher, the accountant, the community leader—ten times more powerful.
Because in the end, intelligence travels through systems, but adoption travels through people."
@heysakina on what she learned growing YouTube internationally and what it means for the AI race: a16z.news/p/the-sovereign-wa…
Tim Chae retweeted
Software agents can self-improve via self-play RL
Introducing Self-play SWE-RL (SSR): training a single LLM agent to self-play between bug-injection and bug-repair, grounded in real-world repositories, no human-labeled issues or tests. 🧵
Tim Chae retweeted
Among many weird things about AI is that the people who are experts at making AI are not the experts at using AI. They built a general purpose machine whose capabilities for any particular task are largely unknown.
Lots of value in figuring this out in your field before others.
Tim Chae retweeted
We're launching Lightfield today.
It's a CRM designed for founders going zero to one—shaped in the past year by hundreds of founders who took a bet on us and now use it daily, and a waitlist of 20,000 more.
When starting out, it takes countless hours of talking to customers to figure out what works.
From day zero, Lightfield builds and updates itself from your unstructured conversations with customers.
It becomes your customer memory: helping you execute deals, communicate without missing details, and understand patterns across your business.
It's free to try. Would love to hear what you think: lightfield.app
Tim Chae retweeted
People are turning against a system they never actually experienced.
The conditions Thiel describes aren’t the result of capitalism working too well. They’re the result of capitalism being slowly replaced by policy-driven scarcity.
Student debt didn’t rise because markets ran wild.
It rose because government guaranteed the loans.
Housing didn’t become inaccessible because property rights failed.
It became inaccessible because zoning boards, permitting regimes, and “planning authorities” restrict supply by design.
Wages didn’t stagnate because capital exploited labor.
They stagnated because taxes, inflation, and regulation drag wealth creation down while inflating the cost of living.
So the resentment is real. The generational break is real.
But the target is misplaced.
People are losing faith not in capitalism, but in a system that wears capitalism’s language while operating as coordinated political control. Ownership was throttled, not by markets, but by policies that prevent individuals from accumulating and applying capital.
If you remove those restraints, opportunity expands.
If you double down with more control, you get collapse.
The question is not whether people will rewrite the system.
The question is whether they’ll recognize which system failed.
Tim Chae retweeted
1/ A repatriated Korean worker from the Hyundai-LG battery factory secretly wrote a detention diary about their 7-day experience in ICE custody in Georgia. The worker says ICE officers mocked them with words like as "North Korea" and "Rocket Man" despite holding a business visa.
Tim Chae retweeted
prediction:
individual ai productivity tools will feel as outdated as personal websites within 18 months
the future is organizational ai consciousness
shared context, synchronized decisions, collective intelligence
Tim Chae retweeted
We are outta Delaware and now in Nevada a16z.com/were-leaving-delawa… We’re Leaving Delaware, And We Think You Should Consider Leaving Too | Andreessen Horowitz @JoeLombardoNV
Tim Chae retweeted
Susan Li is CFO of Meta and has never(!!) done a podcast. We talked about AI capex, whether your baseball hat should say FCF or EBITDA, how Meta allocates GPUs, and working with Mark Zuckerberg.
Tim Chae retweeted
We started to build Tome in 2020. 5 years and 25M users later, it’s become clear to us that LLMs are good at starting work, but lack the context required to finish it.
As reasoning improves with new models, we’re getting better at creating decent first drafts of code, design, and presentations - but a human with deep understanding still needs to take them to completion.
This a context problem. If a model had all the context a human does about their customers and audiences, its reasoning capability could believably take the work the whole way. Until then, the model will sound like a fresh college graduate with surface-level understanding of your business and customers.
Instead of continuing to build an AI slide product that will never build a high quality presentation by itself, we’ve pivoted to making it possible to create high quality work product with AI from a different angle.
This month, we’re sunsetting our slides product to build a new kind of CRM that can completely understand your customers and go to market. The CRM automatically gathers context about the people you serve from the web, your interactions with them, the way they use your products, and similar customers you work with. The data is available to both humans and machines. With this higher level of understanding, we believe that high quality automation and more actively steering your go to market will be possible.
Naively, we thought that a classical CRM would do this. We thought it could be a data lake with complete knowledge of your customers and their relationship to your business across every single data source. Instead, most CRMs are used for record keeping and workforce management.
Tome is becoming Lightfield (@lightfld) to build the CRM that ought to exist today.
It’s designed to make sense of unstructured data and for humans and machines to work together. We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. We’ve started to onboard B2B founders. Sign up on Lightfield.app if you’re interested in trying it.
Tim Chae retweeted
if you could press a button that cures your child’s brain tumor in exchange for ending your life immediately, every parent would hesitate for zero seconds before fighting to be the first to press it
the cruelest thing is that no such button exists.
but there is always a move 👇
Tim Chae retweeted
⚡️Maven is hiring! ⚡️
We've got two roles for experienced operators who want to dig their teeth into a big challenge:
Growth Product Manager
Product Marketing (Retention)
Would love intros to anyone who would be a good fit. More detail here: bit.ly/jobs-at-maven
Tim Chae retweeted
Congrats @SakanaAILabs on releasing Evolutionary Model Merge, a new method to automate foundation model development. More here: sakana.ai/evolutionary-model…!
Serendipity brought @hardmaru @TonyW & myself together last week in Tokyo for a fun post-launch meal @ 魚の中俣 銀座 🥳🐟🐠
Tim Chae retweeted
Proud to share some *insane* data: Maven courses have 14x more retention than video-based courses (aka "MOOCs") from companies like Coursera and Udemy.
From enrolled to Week 1, Maven courses have a 93% activation rate. MOOCs have a 39% activation rate. That's a 2.5x difference.
From Week 1 to Week 2, Maven courses have a 96% retention rate. MOOCs have a 16% retention rate. That's a 6x difference.
From enrolled to Week 2, Maven course have an 89% retention rate. Week 2 retention of MOOCs is just 6%. That's a whopping 14x difference!
Why are Maven's cohort-based courses so much more engaging?
- There's a live instructor who has been vetted for their industry experience
- You take the course at the same time as a community of peers who are in the same position as you
- There's interactive projects and discussions to help you learn
14x is a staggering difference and we're quite proud of the effectiveness we've seen of Maven courses.
Tim Chae retweeted
If you are an AI researcher like @hardmaru and @YesThisIsLion with a proven track record of doing the unproven, take a look at the openings here.
Join them at @SakanaAILabs as they push the boundaries of what foundation models can do.
Sakana AI is hiring researchers and engineers who are passionate about novel approaches to develop the next generation of nature-inspired foundation AI models!
For more details → sakana.ai/careers/
We’re looking for candidates who we believe have the potential to build great things—people who have passions in pushing the boundaries of areas such as evolutionary computation, generative AI, open-endedness, collective intelligence, artificial life and autonomous agents.
Ideal candidates can demonstrate this by highlighting previous projects or publications related to AI that they are proud of showcasing. For candidates with academic backgrounds, we will be interested in your publications at peer-reviewed journals or conferences. The ability to write high quality code and having experience contributing to popular open-source software projects will be a strong asset.
To apply for this role → sakana.ai/careers/
ALT nature-inspired prototype
Tim Chae retweeted
Jeff Bezos explains what it means to disagree and commit
“Disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing.”
There will be disagreements in any endeavor in life where you have teammates.
“In society, and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms we use to resolve disputes. And a lot of them are really bad. An example of a really bad way of coming to an agreement is compromise.”
He continues:
“The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it’s low energy, but it doesn’t lead to truth… You shouldn’t allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.”
Another bad resolution mechanism is the more stubborn person winning:
“You have two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition. And whichever one gets exhausted first, capitulates to the other one. Again you haven’t arrived at truth and it’s very demoralizing.”
Jeff tells people on his team to never get to a point where you’re resolving something by who gets exhausted first:
“Escalate that. I’ll help you make the decision.”
When making decisions, you want to get as close to the truth as possible:
“Exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking. And compromise is not truth-seeking.”
But there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that’s where “disagree and commit” comes in:
“Escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say ‘we can’t agree on this. We like each other and respect each other, but we strongly disagree with each other and need you to make a decision so we can move forward.’ Decisiveness and moving forward on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions.”
Companies tend to organize hierarchically in which the more senior person ultimately makes the decision. But as Jeff explains in the clip below, that wasn’t always the case—he would often be the one to disagree and commit:
“I would often say: ‘You know what, I don’t think you’re right. But I’m going to gamble with you and you’re closer to the ground truth than I am. I’ve known you for 20 years—you have great judgement. I don’t know that I’m right either—all of these decisions are complicated. Let’s do it your way.’ But at least then you’ve made a decision, and I’m agreeing to commit to that decision. I’m not going to be second guessing it. I’m not going to be sniping at it. I’m not going to be saying ‘I told you so.’ I’m going to actively try to make sure it works. That’s a really important teammate behavior.”
Tim Chae retweeted
The Biden Administration’s crypto timeline:
- Sam Bankman-Fried is the second largest donor to Biden’s presidential campaign
- Biden appoints Gary Gensler as chairman of the SEC
- Gary Gensler hosts friendly meeting with Bankman-Fried and FTX execs, no action letter discussed
- After winning favor with the SEC, FTX is exposed as one of the largest frauds in history by the crypto community
- The SEC attacks sound, legal businesses who have been attempting to work in good faith with regulators for over a decade (Coinbase, Kraken)
Tim Chae retweeted
Escalar una startup requiere encontrar el balance entre growth y runway.💸 Te compartimos un framework y consejos que te ayudarán en la construcción de tu compañía
Te invitamos a leer este artículo hecho por @tchae, Managing Partner @500GlobalVC, aquí: 👉medium.com/@500latam/growth-…
