My favorite thing about this round is bringing in more of our role models to help us build a lasting business: - Vinod Khosla: Sun invented much of the tech that makes the cloud today, and Vinod was so early on AI writing the first venture check in OpenAI. - Hamilton Helmer: Author

🎉 Ansa is out of stealth! Excited for The Fintech Fund to work with sophia goldberg and JT Cho to make cheaper payments a reality Ansa. techcrunch.com/2023/04/26/fou…

The cost to build LLM applications just got a lot cheaper, thanks to .'s open-source MPT models and new inference service. You can now replace public foundation models (i.e., GPT-3) with a private alternative hosted on your own infrastructure and save up to 15x on

Toast continues to be a beast

🎯 Great for Braintree, but bad for PayPal’s gross profit (what matters in payments) Unbranded volume increased from 19% in 2018 to 30% in 2022, while branded declined from 36% to 30% Problem: The declining branded volume accounts for ~70% of PayPal’s gross profit

The plow increased the productivity of farmers by 5-6x. That productivity uplift enabled significant portions of the population to shift from food gathering (the primary “job” at the time) to producing specialized goods and services. It set the stage for significant economic

Congrats to Naveen Rao, Barry Dauber, and the entire . team! Great move by Databricks. wsj.com/articles/datab…

Many AI startups are trying to automate work currently done by human workers - making common, existing workflows 10x faster/cheaper. Fewer are leveraging AI to do tasks that humans can’t do well. Things get interesting when AI can do a task >100x better than the top expert

Global conflicts are escalating on multiple fronts as evil rears its ugly head. As the global military superpower, we (America) will be involved in one way or another. Importantly, our allies will depend on us for military supplies. We aren’t prepared. Our stockpiles are

The dark art of tool and die making.... Check out Will Summerlin and Aaron Slodov's (Aaron Slodov) conversation below.

How much will AI companies collectively be worth in 2035? Here is a very simple way to think about it: Human knowledge workers are paid $32 trillion annually. AI can automate a significant % of knowledge work. The value of automation is clear - AI will be 10x-100x better

There is a lot of activity in the AI legal space. Check out Will Summerlin's conversation with Jordan Domash about how Responsiv reduces outside counsel spend and helps in-house legal teams be more productive - and why using ChatGPT or Perplexity isn't an option.

AI will solve this

AI is mostly talked about in the context of B2B software and co-pilots for knowledge workers. But like any technology, it will have a profound impact on humans on a social level. How will it change interpersonal relationships? Will Summerlin sat down with Maggie Sin to discuss!

On this week’s episode of the Autopilot podcast, we speak with Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI. Fireworks helps companies deploy the best AI models at the fastest speeds. It has raised $25 million from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Databricks & others. Links the comments.