If you’d told 16-year-old me I’d one day close a $45M Fund II with my cousin Sasha Kaletsky, I’d have been flattered – but would have had no idea what you were talking about. Venture didn’t exist in Knysna, South Africa, where I grew up and was just starting a YouTube channel.

From our note to LPs yesterday on "app slop": "It might seem that as apps become easier to build, the quality of apps would increase. The opposite is true: the easier apps are to build, the less effort people are incentivized to put into them, and the lower-quality they become."

Perplexity is one case but we need an AI GAAP. Gross margins for example: - can include/not GPU capex & depreciation - can include/not training - can include/not free user inference Definitions can change gross margins from 80%+ to negative. Who is going to create the standard?

“Consumer is back” US GDP has always been 70% consumer Consumer technology is over 10% Every trillion dollar technology VC backed company started in consumer The biggest outcomes of every era have been consumer My dear boy, consumer was never over

How it feels to announce a new VC fund

Congrats to our portfolio company Creatify AI for announcing their $15.5m Series A, reaching $9m ARR only 1.5y after launch, and launching AdMax! While others overpromise vaporware demos and underdeliver, Creatify has relentlessly focused on product and are seeing results.

Introducing Eleven v3 (alpha) - our most expressive Text to Speech model yet. - Full emotion control - Multi-speaker dialogue - 70+ languages It’s a research preview: takes a bit of prompting, but when it’s right, the output is breathtaking!

UPDATE: Grok global daily downloads now ~100k per day, down -94% since peak Consumer AI is looking like a winner take all market

Hard paywalls are back. When the iOS App Store launched in 2008, monetization was simple: apps were either Free or Paid. Free Apps had either ads or microtransactions, and Paid Apps required upfront payment for access (iBeer, for example, was a steal at $2.99). At the time,

Of the innovations which meaningfully shaped the modern consumer internet, Apple Pay is the most underrated.

Recipe for low quality app ecosystem: -hard paywalls (buy-before-you-try) -low friction to purchase with apple pay -hackable app store rating system -marketing via paid, not word of mouth -no publisher brand loyalty, one-shot game Unfortunately, in 2025, all of these are true.

Consumer AI in 4 charts: DeepSeek Downloads: -95% since peak Revenue: 0 Grok Downloads: -88% since peak Revenue: $30k daily Meta AI Downloads: -75% since peak Revenue: 0 ChatGPT Downloads: near ATH, growing fast, 3x others combined Revenue: $2m daily (US app stores only)

🚨 BREAKING: Today’s the day!! Palabra.ai API is up and running - real-time speech-to-speech translator - no third party dependencies. If your project uses speech in more than one language, here’s what you get 🧵

I un-retired from Polymarket! Crazy story this time… On Jun 13th I put my entire $40k Polymarket account on Cuomo winning the NYC primary at $0.62. I was the 8th largest Cuomo holder. It surged to almost $0.80. Then I saw the early voting data, did some social listening and ran

We got married! Happy days!!