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The opportunity to zig while the rest zag could be a whole follow up piece to this. Take the gains offered by “our new AI toolkit” and go find interesting problems to solve in verticals outside AI with an enhanced set of resources.
Absolutely true for financial tech but that’s one of probably countless.
Bravo @zebriez - great read.
The people of Silicon Valley are unwell.
If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn, you’ve got it bad. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, invites from friends to hang out are waning, even weddings are on hold. This is the time to make your mark and make your money, after all.
If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100M on the table, you fucking idiot. Being an underdog isn't as fun as you thought.
If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death.
"Too many of my friends are spiraling," Brie Wolfson writes. "I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this."
It’s all too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. Every month, a new frontier model is released. Every day, a new unicorn is minted. Seriously. 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far.
So what’s left for the sane ones? Brie went looking for teams playing a different game. She found one in Ottawa: a search infrastructure company that many of the AI darlings rely on.
It's growing fast, and its people are well.
Read @zebriez’s latest company dispatch from inside the sane asylum of turbopuffer.
colossus.com/article/sane-as…
This is why we push our tech and this industry. So that people are never locked out of their own money.
Paraguay's president resigns following a crisis over a bank collapse, leaving millions of customers unable to access their money cnn.it/4Ach622
This is a great read, but still more interesting to me and far less discussed is the teams that opt not to raise a big seed or Series A - there’s far less written about how to make that work.
My advice would be:
1. Start where demand exists then find inefficiencies projects or users will pay you to solve (ie. make it faster, safer, easier, etc)
2. Take a bet on what the world looks like in 3y and work back to a problem people are overlooking today.
3. Scale alongside what your business can support.
Having to generate revenue or attract & retain users are both amazing forcing functions to get clear very quickly on PMF and what deserves resourcing.
These constraints will help you build a business that lasts, over one that burns fast, bright, then out.
Vintage seed raising gold.. 🤠🥇💰
swooshing.wordpress.com/2009…
Since launch, we have seen a steady, albeit significant growth in USDT volume moving through our Legacy Mesh product.
Getting more hands on the product makes it easier to spot what inefficiencies we can solve for to keep improving the user experience.
One perk among many of growing a product with PMF.
Know before you go: liquidity edition.
Our new dashboard shows pool balances and transfer limits for USDT between @Ethereum, @trondao, @ton_blockchain, @Solana, and @Celo, refreshed every minute.
Preview, then make moves ↓
Business is coming back to basics: smaller teams, tighter focus, less complexity.
That’s been our approach from day one at @USDT0_to.
Working backwards from demand makes it easier to decide what to build and what to ignore.
Don’t lose your edge trying to do everything.
Our approach to product development has been to find existing demand then improve the user experience.
@Ethereum ↔ @trondao already had significant transfer vol, so we built this product with the goal of making the movement between the two easier.
Let demand guide the roadmap, then continue to iterate based on how people use the product
AI is exposing every point where moving money is constrained by inefficiencies imposed by tradfi.
Stablecoins solve the 24/7 problem, and @USDT0_to makes those assets work everywhere.
The next big opportunity is to connect this (better) infra to the financial systems businesses routinely use.
Machine speed money is here, now we need to connect it to the broader financial system. TLDR from my recently published piece:
- AI agents run 24/7 but banks still don't
- Stablecoins give agents machine speed money
- Fragmentation recreates issues in tradfi we set out to solve
- We need trusted assets that move everywhere 24/7
- Where humans oversight is still important
Our AI spend at Everdawn is up significantly too.
The more important number is output. That went up far more.
One engineer, or one team, per product is no longer efficient.
Internally we now push what I call a parallelization workflow instead.
Each engineer picks up several tasks across several products at once, with multiple agents running per workstation.
The bottleneck turned out to be the MacBooks themselves. We could not deploy more agents per machine. So we invested in hardware and allocated a dedicated AI budget.
The result is a lean team with the throughput of a 100+ person engineering org.
We launched Everdawn into a perfect storm. I have not had a period like this as an entrepreneur.
Companies using AI now spend an average of $1,024 per employee on it
Nearly 2x what they spent last year
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
The alarm never rings at a convenient hour.
Really proud of our team and close partners stepping up to the challenge yet again.
We actively helped freeze funds stolen from Binance and we shut down the perpetrators who tried to route through @USDT0_to infrastructure…. we continue to remain proactive.
It’s an intricate coordination between investigations, security operators, signers and outside partners.
Thanks to everyone involved.
Legacy Mesh is back online.
Transfers were paused earlier as a precaution during the Binance incident and are flowing again.
We are still monitoring closely and will keep acting wherever we can, as we did with the freeze on Polygon.
$6.18M USDT0 frozen on @0xPolygon.
Our team is continuing to monitor the Binance incident and has frozen funds connected to it. We’ll keep acting as the situation develops.
polygonscan.com/address/0x52…
Kevin retweeted
Tether froze more than 1.567B USDT related to a potential Binance exchange hack.
Protecting the industry and our partners is our main priority.
Stay safe everyone.
I see volume as the heartbeat of an ecosystem. Love seeing @StellarOrg thrive with our USDT deployment!
We planned to release this at Meridian, but when assets on your network are made to move, milestones tend to come early 👀 @USDT0_to
“Just sell some gold”
We don’t use that kind of language in this house.
Luckily XAUT0 lets you put your gold to work without selling it.
Brought to you by gold bugs building the products we wish to see in the world.
One simple mission here: Make it easier to buy and move gold and if we succeed, potentially unlock infinite network effects.
We have done it with the dollar, and now we’re over halfway to moving $1 billion worth of gold with our XAUT0 product!
I got into gold before Bitcoin was created.
Still love the asset, but the experience of using it has always been… well bad.
That's what makes this so epic to me.
We're finally at a point where builders can do something genuinely interesting with gold beyond giving people another way to buy and hold it.
Very excited to show what happens when gold gets put to work.
Gold has outlived empires, currencies, and financial systems. The mechanics of using it have not aged nearly as well.
@Tethergold made owning gold as easy as using the internet. XAUT0 brings it to the networks where finance is being reimagined.
Liquid gold, everywhere.