ANNOUNCING Today, we're launching the $100M Anthology Fund, an Anthropic and Menlo Ventures partnership to fund Seed and Series As of the next generation of AI startups around the world, with unique benefits! There's never been a better time in technology to be building. 1/7

There are countless examples of people who have left rocketships to start amazing companies! – Dustin Moskovitz left FB to start Asana in 2008 – Adam D’Angelo left FB to start Quora in 2008 – Brian Armstrong left Airbnb to start Coinbase in 2012 – Sterling Anderson left Tesla Autopilot to start Aurora in 2017 – Kyle Vogt left Twitch to start Cruise in 2013 – Joe Lonsdale left Palantir to start Addepar in 2009 – Aravind Srinivas left OpenAI to start Perplexity in 2022 – Ilya left OpenAI to found SSI in 2024 In fact, the biggest private company today came from founders leaving a rocketship too! Brian’s point is well-taken: many of the people in this list might have even been financially better off if they’d stayed. Hell, the risk/reward might even be awful. However, there are many examples of people who have. Starting a successful startup is insanely hard. And I think the data might actually show those who jumped off a hot startup to start their own are more likely to be succeed than those who were never a part of a rocketship to begin with.

Top 20 Startups by Web Traffic founded since 2020 1. DeepSeek 2. Perplexity 3. Suno 4. Polymarket 5. Gamma 6. ElevenLabs 7. Lovable 8. Arena 9. xAI 10. Supabase 11. Manus 12. Higgsfield 13. Cursor 14. Fanvue 15. OpenRouter 16. GPTZero 17. Genspark 18. ShopMy 19. Venice 20. Whop Some interesting observations: — Only 25% were not AI: Polymarket, Supabase, Fanvue, ShopMy, Whop — 20% were acquired — Startups that didn't surprisingly didn't make the cut: Kalshi (founded 2018), Mistral (10M), OpenEvidence (11.4M), Cognition — All but 2 are unicorns (GPTZero, Fanvue), 7 decacorns, but there's no clear correlation between traffic and valuation

Had one of the most surreal weeks. We got to host and chat with Ravi Ashwin (@ashwinravi99) about some of his best cricket moments and actually bring Robin Uthappa (@robbieuthappa) to play cricket with us on a baseball field in San Francisco! Ash walked us through the emotions of leaving that wide in the last ball in that India vs Pakistan 2022 T20 World Cup game “I trained myself to know that if my left eye doesn’t see it, then it’s a wide. But if it had hit my leg, it was over for me.” Robbie whacked us around the park so bad he had to bat for both sides to make it an even fight but we did get him out caught once!

"Thinking Machines' Tinker does a few hundred million of ARR" - Dylan Patel, on his latest podcast TML was valued at $12B and trying to raise at $50B. Tinker is an API that helps you post-train LLMs. This is the highest known revenue for any of the now ~75 neolabs.

Meta's Trust & Safety teams are an unmitigated disaster. Read this message sent to me by a Meta employee. Search "Instagram suspension" on X/Reddit. It's full of complaints, even after the major account suspensions 3wks ago. Their core product is falling apart in pursuit of AI.

Telegram is the only bootstrapped 1B active user product in the world. – ~30-40 “core” employees – $30B valuation – 1.3B monthly active users – Founder is the 2nd most decorated International Olympiad winner of all time with 7 medals (4G/3S/0B) across math (IMO) and cs (IOI) – ~$1.5-2B revenue last year, with a business across advertising (14%), subscriptions (26%), crypto (34%) and more – HQd in Dubai and domiciled in the British Virgin Islands It’s the only business to be self-funded and needed the fewest users to get to global scale. We talk a lot about 1 person $1B companies but Telegram is a 30 person $30B company!

WhatsApp may be the statistically best app we've ever made. It's a product manager's dream with its unparalleled addictiveness (DAU / MAU) of 87% and stickiness (M1 retention) of 86%, both #1 in the world while having the #1 most monthly active users for any non preinstalled app of 2.7B users. Here are the top 25 most used apps in the world by MAU on both these metrics. Some surprising observations: — There are now 15 1B user apps in the world, 8 by Google, 4 by Meta. — The 3 that aren't are TikTok, Telegram (!) and ChatGPT — Telegram has more users than Spotify, Pinterest, Netflix, Amazon, Snap! — ChatGPT's one month retention is #5 after WA, Instagram, Chrome and Youtube. 2yrs ago, it was been #20 by M1 retention — Shopee, a shopping app in southeast Asia, is huge and retains users better than Amazon! Useful way to break down consumer businesses especially within certain categories (X vs Reddit vs Threads is a good one). It's shocking how few new apps have been able to break through in the past 10yrs.

We hosted an intimate event on Agentic Engineering in SF with speakers at the forefront of AI yesterday. Three big lessons I took away: – @steipete: I now force contributors to OpenClaw to use a skill that pushes their prompt history of the code change to find signal in noise, to avoid often bad PRs that are 10,000 lines from a prompt “fix this” – @trq212: I used Claude to be a video editor to create a launch video with visuals, while having it interactively teach me about color grading as it did the edits. I didn't even know it could do that! Getting the most out of a model is finding your unknown unknowns. – @georgepickett: I spend a lot more human energy on crafting a plan upfront and getting all my clairfications answered upfront before leaving Codex to spin for days, armed with Ousterhout’s coding principles as a skill, on a well-crafted /goal We had about ~30 odd people including some recognizable names like Theo (@theo), Gergely (@GergelyOrosz), Andy (@andykonwinski), Jerry (@MillionInt), Dave Morin (@davemorin), Patrick Hsu (@pdhsu), Eric (@ericho), Bucky (@buckymoore), Joff (@mejoff) with a surprise visit from cricketer Robin Uthappa (@robbieuthappa) We were graciously hosted by @timshi_ai at his house and cohosted with @GregKamradt. Videos will be up soon! If you're interesting in coming to these, give me a shout in comments or in DM. (also incredible to see how huge the ClawFather is in the flesh)

Most software engineers are facing an identity crisis bordering on depression. As CTOs aggressively evangelize tokenmaxxing, a class divide ensues. The lazy. The lazy push code. They don't write it. They don't manually test it. They don't even read it. They're on autopilot. See Jira ticket, prompt for task, submit code. Many of them are barely on their computer the whole day. A comment on the PR asking why they did this? The lazy ask AI. A Slack message? The lazy ask AI. Need to prepare for standup? The lazy ask AI. As long as it sounds enough like them and isn't detected. Some of the lazy are even overemployed, and work multiple jobs. The lazy smart ones get away with this, and even rewarded. After all, software engineering for the lazy is just a dance to convince your colleagues you're smart and hard working. The craftsmen. The craftsmen are tired. Very tired. 15 PRs in queue. Slack blowing up. The entire burden of review falls on the craftsman. The burden of understanding. They try. They work their way through the code, thoughtfully commenting to improve what ships. The response? A lazy: "That's a clever idea! You're absolutely right." with an incorrect change. It's fine, the craftsman says. I can fix them. They write a doc urging his colleagues to be better. The next day? 20,000 line PR to review. Day after day, their workload grows. Bugs seep into production. No one seems to care. Another round of AI is thrown at it. Their animosity to their colleagues rises. Eventually, they give up. It's just not what it used to be. The craft they loved is dead. They eventually wake up, a lazy. This isn't all companies. Many companies are genuinely more productive, adopt the right set of principles and practices around AI development and have highly talented teams that trust each other. It tends to happen in bigger companies that are 10 yrs old with a higher talent variance. But it happens. A lot.

The founder of Indian startup Cred, Kunal Shah, will be global head of the most used daily product in the world (2.3B DAU), WhatsApp! Let’s take a look at the business of Cred: Cred’s valuation has flip-flopped from its peak but in 8yrs, they built a $4.5B biz with ~1000 employees doing $333M/yr growing 17%yoy, with Meta buying 20% of it for $900M. Kunal says they’ve hit they’re first quarter of operating profit (exact loss numbers for FY26 here are speculative) but the business is definitely trending up. Cred has ~17M users and 12.6M monthly transacting users at $26 per user per year ARPU (~₹2500). 1% of Indians use Cred, 1 in 3 of the country’s credit card users. Credit card penetration in India is 3-4% vs say 66% in the US, 50% in high income and 25% for other lower/middle income countries; perhaps if that grew more quickly, the business would have an even better outcome. When I analyzed it in 2022, I was too harsh about its future prospects. The business has grown significantly since with a path to sustainability. More importantly, this is the first time I’ve seen a non-silicon valley founder catapulted to lead such a critical product. Think what you may of Cred, it was a big bet that’s come off quite well. And this appointment is just testament to Kunal’s tenacity as a founder and leader.

I thought peptides were mostly an internet thing before I walked into a clinic in SF and they had them all laid out like a choose-your-own-adventure brochure

Pretty neat that with one URL change, you can now replicate and iterate on AI papers without having to even provision your own GPUs

the midjourney roadmap was public the whole time

I thought this was a joke. Meta now has made 30-50% of software engineers on core teams become data labelers. Their job is "giving human feedback on AI-generated Github repos" in an org called Agent Data Optimization. Maybe we are all training data generators after all.