Cem Sertoglu

And, here we go! Welcome @bek_vc! Everything stays the same, except our name.

@EricJorgenson @elonmusk Congrats, @EricJorgenson

🚨📕 THE BOOK OF ELON IS NOW LIVE!!! 🎉🚀 This is the book we WISHED @elonmusk would write… “All of Elon's most useful ideas, in his own words.” Learn directly from the world’s greatest entrepreneur, like you’re sitting across from him at dinner. It took FIVE YEARS to make this for you. Because it's built from hundreds and hundreds of Elon's public appearances. I went through 3,000,000+ words to collect the most useful and timeless ideas. The final book is ~50,000 words. Every word is USEFUL. (This is what I do. My first book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, is one of the top 100 most highlighted books of all time on Kindle.) Then, I spent $50,000+ on editing and design so it looks and feels beautiful. Then… > Foreword by @naval. > Visuals by @jackbutcher. > Blurb from @mrbeast. > Published by @scribemediaco. > And yes, approval on this idea from Elon himself, thanks to @samteller. I went Maximum Effort to make this an all-timer. We got 10/10 on reviews from early readers, then worked on it for ANOTHER YEAR. Why so much effort? My mission is to create One Million Musks. For a generation to lift our gaze and build, so our grandchildren live in a world beyond our wildest dreams. I’m an independent author. I don’t get an advance. I risk my own time and money to make these books. Then we give away millions of them. Digital versions are free. I believe this book can benefit every human, and if you can’t pay five bucks for it, I want to personally gift it to you. Because I know it is useful. Useful how? You may be seeking purpose, a mission worthy of your life’s effort. You may have a clear purpose and seek the tools for success. You will find both in this book. Get the benefits of Elon’s entire life of hard-won lessons in a five-hour, easy read. (I checked, it’s a 5th-grade reading level.) You’ll feel personally mentored by the greatest entrepreneur in history. Click below to buy it now on Amazon, Audible, or directly from me. Amazon: amzn.to/47avSuh Audible: lnkd.in/gi_7HrFP Me: lnkd.in/gS2xWUWH If you’re not sure it’s worth $4.99 yet, just start reading the free version. PLEASE take 6 seconds to Like, Bookmark, and Repost. Even better: send this to your friends, team, or Group Chats! I guarantee this book will improve their lives. Spread the word! Every little thing helps. Your support spreads good ideas around the world, helping people and making the future better for everyone. Thank you! Forward. Together.

A crazy image

For a minute, forget that venture capital exists. Forget Benchmark, Sequoia, and Y Combinator. Forget Kalanick, Faulkner and Chesky. Gone. No legacy. You're trying to assemble a private market product that appeals to large institutional LP allocators, built on the promise of technology companies. Their preferences are: 1) Strong interim performance, so they can hit internal benchmarks, get bonus compensation and advance their career. 2) Protection against the visible impact of systemic drawdowns, protecting relative performance metrics even in a market correction. 3) Bragging rights, from involvement in strong brands with large media platforms and passthrough exposure to lots of hot logos. 4) A high level of service, with a fully staffed IR team to handle everything and organise spectacular AGMs with all kinds of perks. Essentially, you need to offer a scalable basket of assets that will reliably rise in value, attached to a marketing machine, with a valuation policy that aligns your marks with other managers in your network. The ideal asset for this strategy is the most obvious; the 25 year old Stanford graduate who did 2 years on Meta's product team and is now launching some B2B AI widget — and they've just gone viral with their launch video. The cost of capital for a founder that ticks so many boxes is rock bottom; coordination frictions at a minimum. They're likely to keep raising larger rounds and generating markups on sheer momentum, regardless of any idiosyncratic quality. It's also such an easy profile to identify that you can employ an army of associates and scouts to track them down, assuming they don't respond directly to your heavily advertised "call for startups". Essentially, what you have created is a synthetic "venture" asset, built on the elasticity of software companies, that prints growth metrics for allocators. It can scale as much as required, absorbing as much capital as may be shoveled into it, growing at a rate correlated with how close to the consensus you are. Of course, all of these things are correlated with worse ultimate cash returns, as they reflect attributes that are predictive of worse returns in a market with zero alpha. Surprisingly, that's ok. It's not the point. All you have to do is push exits out to 12+ years, giving you space to raise 3-4 subsequent funds and your allocator friends time to move on to a better role. Along the way you'll be able to extract just enough liquidity to keep things moving. Secondaries in a hot company, a continuation fund or intra-portfolio acquisition, and the occasional opportunistic exit to talk about on podcasts. You wont be breaking DPI records or driving much real technological progress, but the fee income will be lovely and your allocator friends will be totally satisfied with the product you have created.

@Jason instagram.com/w3mountain?igs…

What a horrible season… so many lost lives from one storm. When skiing alone this past week, excited to challenge myself in deep powder, I made my first mistakes: alone is no bueno I lost a ski in the deep powder and went down Was right in the area where I took these photos and videos the day before I wasn’t off the trail, but the trail wasn’t groomed — second mistake I quickly popped back up instinctually (3rd mistake) seconds later the snow gave way beneath me and I flipped over I was now in my back with only my head and one arm above the snow I was in a mini-panic as I had now shifted five feet closer to the tree line Tree wells are no joke and I was feet from them I slowly dug myself out Positioned my skis correctly and walked slowly to someone else’s tread marks Was exhausted, but fine Next year I won’t go out alone I will wear a beacon I will carry a shovel I will get avalanche certified I will stop being an idiot my life is fantastic, I’m loved, I have purpose and I want to ski until I’m 80 I will stop being an idiot

@mariots @openclaw very cool @mariots!

I created a self-referential game engine that uses AI to evolve games! Humans & agents play, and the games create & edit themselves. (Finally let your @openclaw agent have some fun.) Below is the AI playing a game it created where you play a bouncer in the famous Berlin nightclub Berghain (if you let in @elonmusk, you're fired). And another where the AI plays Jesus on the way to Jerusalem (a re-themed Oregon Trail). See how AI and game are talking to each other in the top right. The best agentic coding setups require agents writing code, AND seeing the results. But that doesn't work well for games, because most games have difficult-to-interpret game states that are hard to send back into the coding agent. So I made a game engine that is the right mix between systematic, constrained and expressive. Agents can both CODE and PLAY all games in the engine. It's a self-referential, infinite game design loop. 1/5

@JoshuaKushner Congratulations, @JoshuaKushner!

We are pleased to announce the close of Thrive X. Exceeding $10 billion, Thrive X comprises $1 billion designated for early-stage investments and $9 billion designated for growth-stage investments. We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead. We view Thrive as a company. Our product is partnership - the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders, and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work, and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive. We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back. In this moment, exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments. Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life. We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support. We are grateful for the trust our Limited Partners place in us, and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage. thrivecap.com/thrive-x

@fawiatrowski Hello Victor 🎩

Excited to launch Viktor AI COWORKER THAT LIVES IN SLACK One teammate that handles marketing audits, ad management, lead research, daily reports, and deployed apps. Across every channel. At once. → 3,000+ tool integrations. If one's missing, it builds its own → Persistent memory. Learns your company, notices patterns, follows up on its own Today it's yours. P.S. Early access for now. Slack app review moves at Salesforce speed. Viktor doesn't.

@hkanji Well-deserved recognition. Congratulations @ciaranoleary @jason_whitmire 💪

“When lots of other VCs say, oh, no, this is too early, or this will never be venture capital, then we say this is probably one for us” newcomer.co/p/exclusive-bl…

@HarryStebbings I see this as an efficient strengthening of Uber's Turkish market entry, rather than a good buy for the core Getir business.

The core Turkish business was always very strong and a cash cow. The massive errors came from too much cash too quickly and mass geo expansion, executed poorly. Stripped back Getir in core markets only is a great and strategic buy for Uber.

@elonmusk Update:

@canipekci At our kiosk by Brooklyn bridge. We accept all forms of payment, if accompanied by a $195k cash deposit.

@csertoglu How do we sign up? Can we pay the fee with a token warrant?

Some of them have portfolio companies use my Unicorn Manufacturing Service ᵀᴹ, where I invest $100k at $1bn post-money in any company, for a $200k fee.

Resurfacing this from early December

@MatthewSacchet Very interesting

The science of consciousness needs advanced meditation. Despite decades of research and incredible advances in neuroscience and AI, we are still no closer to explaining how or why consciousness arises in the brain. The hard problem remains as hard as ever. At the Meditation Research Program at @harvardmed & Mass General (MGH), we argue that a key reason for this impasse is the field’s near-exclusive focus on ordinary states of waking consciousness. These states may actually obscure the mechanisms we seek to understand. In our new paper, Toward a Neuroscience of Consciousness Using Advanced Meditation, just out in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Jonathan M. Lieberman and I take this argument one step further. We propose that advanced meditation—states and stages of practice that unfold with increasing expertise—offers a powerful and largely unexplored opportunity for a rigorously theory-driven neuroscience of consciousness. Notably, over the past several years, our team has combined cutting-edge neuroimaging with sophisticated analytic tools to study two highly advanced yet replicable meditative phenomena: advanced concentrative absorption (sometimes called jhāna) and meditative endpoints such as cessation events (related to what is known as nirodha). These are phenomenologically stripped-down states in which consciousness is either radically altered or temporarily suspended altogether. Precisely for this reason, we argue they are exceptionally well suited for what is often called a minimal model approach to consciousness research. If these states approximate the simplest forms of conscious experience that a human being can have, then studying them neuroscientifically may allow us to identify candidate necessary and sufficient neural conditions for consciousness at all. This approach will not solve the hard problem overnight. But it may help resolve many of the “easier” problems (which remain profoundly difficult!) and provide a powerful test case for evaluating competing theories of consciousness based on their ability to explain minimal states. Compared to other non-ordinary states now receiving scientific attention, such as psychedelic states, advanced meditation offers several unique methodological advantages. More than that, we argue it offers a uniquely powerful and underutilized tool for answering one of science’s most fundamental questions: what does it take for us to be conscious at all? If you agree or disagree that consciousness research should look beyond ordinary states, we welcome discussion, critique, and sharing of this work among researchers and others interested in advancing a more explanatory science of consciousness🙏

@auren From the master

@HarryStebbings @infoarbitrage Depends on stage, Harry. If you grow 20-30-50x before you go public, then you can take the multiple compression as you scale. It’s a problem for pre-IPO rounds.

We have a big problem. The venture model doesn’t work with the current public market revenue multiples. Datadog ⬇️ 21% Figma ⬇️ 20% Wix ⬇️ 38% Braze is 2.5x ARR Atlassian is 4.8x ARR Klaviyo is 4.5x ARR Venture doesn’t work unless this changes. Agree @infoarbitrage @bgurley @jasonlk @rodriscoll?

@veitdengler @WashTimes Hear hear! Thanks @veitdengler!

@HarryStebbings x.com/auren/status/2…

Venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not in the OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Mercor etc etc you do not fricking matter.

@azeem @sundarpichai 👍

1/ Two and a half years ago, Google stared down the GPT shockwave. @sundarpichai may (or may not) have hit “code red.” Since Gemini 3 arrived, it suddenly this feels less like another model race and more like a physics demo in vertical integration. Can anyone escape Google’s pull? 🧵👇