@dberenzon point them to check out @HappenstanceAI if they haven’t already :)
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Jake Jolis
1.2K posts
Jake Jolis
@jakejolis
gp @ zeno investor in the 1st rounds of incredible products including applied intuition, steadily, salient, sieve, outset, and many others
Los Angeles انضم Mayıs 2012
22 يتبع833 المتابعون
@TheIcahnist that vc fund is @matrixvc . and for those who have been to golden gate park, hellman hollow is named after him
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>be Warren Hellman
>born into an old SF banking family
> youngest Lehman partner at 26
>leaves Wall Street, co‑founds a VC fund that backs Apple and SanDisk
>buys “boring” but cash‑rich businesses: software, financial services, data companies
>1985: helps the Levi’s family take the company private in a $1.6B LBO, biggest U.S. buyout at the time
>investment later worth ~25x his implied cost at the peak
>also takes a big stake in Nasdaq, buys into Young & Rubicam, Getty Images,
>instead of retiring to a yacht, obsesses over bluegrass
> “screw it, let’s just build our own festival”
>bankrolls Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: free, no sponsors, three days, Golden Gate Park
>pours tens of millions into it so hundreds of thousands of strangers can listen to banjos every year
>also a hardcore endurance athlete
up at 4:30am, doing 16‑mile workouts, >wins national titles in ride‑and‑tie in his age group
The Icahnist@TheIcahnist
Warren Hellman was a banjo‑toting billionaire dealmaker. He helped pioneer modern private equity, then spent his fortune throwing a free bluegrass festival for hundreds of thousands every year.
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Have a long overdue trip to Austin + Texas upcoming..
Which factories & companies should I visit?
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@scottastevenson there is an SMB version of this where stripe used to count the value of un-discounted subscriptions towards "MRR" even when there is a discount, which can be 100%. i'm sure it was just one view and i'm not sure it's default, but startups do use it
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It’s worse than I thought. Getting a bunch of DMs on this.
Report below of companies doing this with $0 in year one.
So $1m in reported ARR might actually be… $0 of real ARR. A free 1 year pilot.
Scott Stevenson@scottastevenson
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M). They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now. The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract. In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation. On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins. At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing. And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
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Jake Jolis أُعيد تغريده
EQUITY VESTING
I’m starting to see more founders put into place 6 year vests for founding / early employees, and I think it really aligns incentives around thinking long term and sticking around to build an enduring company.
Founders: don’t take 4 year vests as written in stone. Rethink it from first principles, considering what you’re trying to build.
4 years made sense in an era when the average time to IPO was 4-5 years. That era is gone. The best companies today take 10-15 years to reach their full potential. If your vest schedule is shorter than your ambition, you’ve created a misalignment.
A few things worth rethinking:
•Cliff length (discussed above)
•Back-weighted schedules (more equity in years 4-6, not front-loaded; Amazon has done this for many years?
•Refresh cadence (how do you keep people incentivized post-vest without diluting everyone?)
The vest schedule is a cultural document. It signals how long you think this will take, and how serious you are about people staying for the whole ride.
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@ankurnagpal too good to be true. form doesn’t allow for fractional dollar value inputs less than 1 cent. unless they’ve acted on my bug request
Jake Jolis@jakejolis
@jgebbia Perfect quick one to start! IRS started allowing online 83(b) filing BUT form (sa.www4.irs.gov/ola/forms/new/…) doesn't allow fractional inputs for "value per item" lower than 1 cent. I am trying to input a "value per item" of $0.0017. Validation check blocks it from being entered.
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The IRS now allowing you to submit an 83(b) election online is a game changer
This has now eliminated my only remaining reason for going to the post office
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the legend @qasar building the defining physical AI company of our generation @AppliedInt
TBPN@tbpn
Applied Intuition CEO @qasar says the market for physical AI is "way, way bigger" than the market for white-collar AI: "I used to be at Y Combinator. I was the COO, ran the firm, and funded lots of interesting companies. And one of the analogies I used to use to help founders understand market potential and size is: I grew up in Detroit. You're sitting in the Detroit metro airport at a gate, and you look around. How many of those people are using Claude Code? Frankly speaking, not many." "But how many of those people drive? How many people work at construction sites? How many of those people ride in buses? How many of those people serve in our armed forces? The point is: a much, much larger group." "The market for physical AI is way, way bigger. Purely because the surface area is much bigger."
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re. 4: The key is that not every purported “network effects business” has an actual network effect. Just because a chicken and egg problem exists, or there are “two sides”, does NOT mean there is compounding value with scale! Notoriously weak example would be marketplace for house cleaners. Having more cleaners on the platform - whether in my city or globally - doesn’t really help me as a user. I only need one. Retention likely even worsens over time as users defect offline once relationship has formed.
Purest example in the opposite direction would be something like Airbnb, of which much has been said :)
The laziest way to sound short-term smart as an investor is to pass on a network effects businesses because the early metrics / unit economics look bad. Retention, LTV : CAC, gross margins kinda suck. So you have to deeply deeply understand what compounds in the future and what doesn’t.
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Jake Jolis أُعيد تغريده
Founder cheat code: always go for things that feel unreasonable.
Go after the market everyone says is too big or too hard.
Raise the big round
Hire the person that you think is out of reach.
Charge more money.
Set crazy goals.
The world will match your ambition.
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A rule of thumb that has served me well: Beware of anything with "innovation" in the name.
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@nikitabier @bgurley dead internet theory —> dead everything theory
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@bgurley Spam laws will need to be rewritten soon. Machines should be prohibited from communicating with humans unprompted.
Nikita Bier@nikitabier
Prediction: In less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam & automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense: iMessage, phone calls, Gmail. And we will have no way to stop it.
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I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized emails slip through spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form.
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@elonmusk user request: would be awesome if it avoided potholes 🤗
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@hthieblot among repeat/experienced founders, quietly becoming more common
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Unpopular opinion:
If I started a company today, founders & founding employees shouldn’t fully vest in 4 years.
Building a real company takes a decade.
What I recommend to founders:
Founders
6-year vesting, 1-year cliff
Back-weighted:
Year 1 — 10%
Year 2 — 15%
Year 3 — 15%
Year 4 — 20%
Year 5 — 20%
Year 6 — 20%
Founding Eng / Growth
• 2–5%+ equity
• ~$120k salary
• 6-year vesting, normal weight
• 1-year cliff
Employees
• 4-year vesting
• 1-year cliff
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Peter Lynch: "People are very careful — they spend hours to get $50 off an airplane flight. They look at everything. And [then] they'll put $10,000 in some crazy stock they heard about on the bus."
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@jaisajnani speaking of heads up someone oughta give said VCs a heads up on how their ironclad, contractual liq pref tends to get treated in these acquihires :)
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wonder who's giving the major lab corp dev teams a heads up that based on the IC memos sent out across VCs last night, they're now on the hook to acquihire a dozen more 'cracked n of 1 teams' for at least 2x the liq pref in the next 12 months
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"Hi Michael, came across Stripe and thought it was interesting."
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Churn is the worst reason to have slow growth. Churn means you're not just unknown, or that there's a big threshold to sign up. It means people are actually trying the product and deciding they don't like it.
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Introducing the new /crawl endpoint - one API call and an entire site crawled.
No scripts. No browser management. Just the content in HTML, Markdown, or JSON.
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