AC Chen

@valgui1 +1

I nominate an 8th wonder of the world - a toddler's ability to learn. My first child is just over 2 months old and her week over week learning pace is insane. Her observations and ability to ingest things around her is insane. She learns things so intuitively - mesmerizing.

@haridigresses Hard to beat that tagline -- God Mode for Operators! Let's go Hari!

So excited to launch Autograph today. We raised $2.1M from elite operators, founders, and investors to build a platform that feels like God Mode for Operators. It's a single platform that integrates with existing systems — the alphabet soup of enterprise software, like your HRIS, ERP, FP&A, ATS, CRM, along with data warehouses and spreadsheets — to combine, clean, and make sense of your data. This data feeds a series of pre-built apps and agents that allow you to level up as an operator: run your complex, multi-functional workflows 10x better. We're solving the processes that takes forever and is really frustrating, but is essential to operating and scaling effectively: our first few apps are headcount planning, compensation reviews, and sales capacity. We're moving insanely fast. We're shipping a new app every couple of weeks. Soon, we'll have hiring pipelines, vendor analytics, resource allocation, unit economics, CX capacity, people analytics, and more. The best part? It's incredibly fast to set up thanks to our powerful agentic data engine, that processes any data source like magic. That means no long implementations, no multi-year contracts. We think it's the biggest leap forward for operators since the spreadsheet. Book an 20-minute onboarding to get started!

@Austen I thought this was satire originally

$500/mo? Seems too cheap to be real, no?

@ericbahn @HustleFundVC 🥤

Hi, I’m Eric, cofounder at @HustleFundVC. I work in SF, and noticed that a lot of semi-thirst traps are being posted here for engagement, so that is why I am posting here now. Follow me for more amazing content just like this.

@thesamparr Vinay is a good human! Humble from day 1 when Loom was still just an idea!

I felt this needed resharing. 1. He got an internship. 2. He's still thrilled.

@kevinxu @alpha_ai Having 2 miracle babies 👏

I was the "redditor who made millions on WSB" That was just my first act. I've been locking in. No vacations. No hobbies. No sex. 16 hr/day building @alpha_ai I dont want to be remembered for a screenshot. I want to be remembered for what I built.

@jspujji @kevinleeme San Mateo and Burlingame hands down

@kevinleeme Burlingame is top

My wife and I like to pick random suburbs within an hour of San Francisco to explore and see if we can picture settling down there once the kids are older. One of the biggest variables we evaluate is the quality of the location’s main library.

@typesfast 100%

Boarding passes should tell you what terminal you’re leaving from

@princeghosh97 The gut?

Overheard in NY: You either need balls or brains, worst place to get stuck is in the middle

@damengchen What you decide to use for VPN?

Just got wifi installed in our Shanghai home. 300MB internet costs 749 CNY per year, which is just $104 USD. Free router, free installation, and best of all, no tips!

@haridigresses @bgurley Agree with this so much. Definitely the equivalent of investment banking malpractice and I say that as a former banker too

Time for a quick rant on the deeply broken IPO process. @bgurley has been beating this drum for years, but I don't think anything paints the picture quite as clearly as the Figma IPO. Figma tripled in its IPO debut, leaving ~$2B+ on the table. That value solely accrued to the investment bankers (who provide "price support" during the listing, what a joke), and institutional investors (yes some of this is Blackrock and your retirement ETF, but let's be real most of it is not). Retail investors get left in the cold... Robinhood investors are posting that they got one share, instead of the 600 or 1,000 shares they tried to get. Even HNW investors (who are not UHNW) got zilch... apparently the vast majority of Morgan Stanley PWM clients got no allocation either (and they were the lead underwriter!). This IPO was so obviously mispriced that it should be considered the equivalent of investment banking malpractice. Don't even get me started at the charade of "oh we'll start at $25-28; no no it's now $28-30; never mind it's $33". You might say: "but Hari, how could they know? they needed to play it safe to avoid a bad showing on day 1." Do I have a response for you... 1. Anyone who's ever done a DCF, or used Figma, or worked at a startup/ could have told have told you $33 was too cheap. My estimate is that they're worth $50 - 90 / share ($55 being very very conservative and $70-90 is probably the reasonable range... and shocker, that's where it's trading at the open). 2. There is basically no correlation between how a company does in its IPO vs. it's long term success. 3. Figma didn't even really need the money, they've been profitable for a while. 4. We have a mechanism for price discovery! It's called a direct listing! It's called private secondary markets! Spotify, Coinbase and others have already paved this way. Figma, for some baffling reason, chose not to follow this path. Between selling stockholders (24M shares) and Figma's offering (12M shares), they left billions of dollars on the table. In fact, Figma studiously banned all secondary transfers for years (I would know, I've been trying to buy into the company for years, been a customer and massive fan since like 2019). The process is even run by bankers, but they make lower fees so they don't like it, of course. Two very simple takeaways: 1. If you're profitable and don't actually need the cash, do a direct listing. Anything else is not the responsible thing to do as a company. 2. If you're a consumer or prosumer brand, you should really carve out an allocation for your customers and fans. Airbnb did a terrific job with this. Figma should have, too. I'm still a fan, but damn would I have loved to support the company earlier in the journey.

@damengchen Welcome back! Shanghai? Gotta also check out Chengdu!

5 checked bags, 2 car seats, 3 carry-ons, 2 backpacks, 1 stroller, that’s everything we need to move our family back to China after 15 years in the US. I thought our house was home, but really, home is wherever my family is 💜

@haridigresses @jeffwsurf Awesome breakdown Hari!

Debrief / wrapup on Windsurf-Cognition: Deal terms & dynamics - Amazing that the team is getting taken care of (at least acceleration / participation in the deal terms) –– incredible job by @jeffwsurf and fellow execs - Guessing Founders Fund played a notable role here. They are investors in both Windsurf and Cognition. - I'd guess acquisition price was in the range of $200-400M. Typically, a business in the AI application layer with $80M+ in ARR, 2xing year on year, with 20-30% gross margin (I'm guessing) would be worth $250-500M. But the dynamics here would haircut that by 50%+ => $100-200M. Add in $100M of cash and the fair total consideration paid would have been $200-300M. - That works out to 5-8% of Cognition (last valued at $4B). If so, totally worth it IMHO. - Very curious what that means -- must have been entirely in Cognition stock. So... ~10M shares still remaining on the Windsurf cap table = $200M => a better price / share than the Google acquisition?! Admittedly this is in Cognition stock not Google stock, so it's far more speculative and should carry a premium. Post-merger dynamics - Product is a near-perfect fit for Cognition / Devin, it's a brilliant move by @ScottWu46 - This ~4xes Cognition's team (from 80 to 300, I'm assuming there will be some attrition). Culture will swing dramatically –– a lot of the incoming folks are GTM, while Cognition is mostly product / engineering. Again, complimentary, but a thoughtful integration is going to be critical to avoid organ rejection. Final notes: The fact that the remaining team immediately sold to a competitor speaks volumes. Google would not have wanted to make Cognition (or any other viable AI coding agent player) stronger. This hints that the remaining Windsurf team didn't want to "keep operating this business standalone" but rather wanted to go big –– and found their own way. What a fascinating story. Overall, the space just got a lot more interesting (and competitive), and it's awesome to hear the employees were looked after, even if it's not with an immediate, liquid exit.

This was a fascinating read. I’ve never had a personalized experience at a high-end restaurant, but it sounds like a blast. Lazy Bear seems to be amazing at this. Examples: -adopting a baby penguin for a guest who loves penguins -turning their wine cellar into a movie theater to recreate a high school date night for high school sweethearts -trolling a Dodgers fan by having a menu with printed baseball stats showing how the Giants are better Have you ever had an experience like this? tell me!

@pitdesi You and Rishi could still do this today haha

Turkish airlines has a promo where you can get 1 million miles by flying to all 6 continents they fly. You can do it for about $3k (depending on where you start from) In my 20s my brother and I would have done this, for sport

@nicochristie I helped build Flexport’s v1 in excel. Show me your magic

Introducing Shortcut — the first superhuman Excel agent. Shortcut one-shots most knowledge work tasks on Excel. It even scores >80% on Excel World Championship Cases in ~10 minutes. That's 10x faster than humans. Our early preview is live. Just comment for an invite code.

@ankurnagpal Gymkhana. Must eat

Working from London for 10 days this summer from July 3-13 Been over a year since I was there last so recommendations always welcome And if anyone has the hookup for Wimbledon / Lords test tickets 👀

@braveben @typesfast It started with us drenched in sweat from the terrible “cheap” Phonebooths in Folsom. Smelled awful in the summer

No one is going to believe this, but @typesfast designed these booths that every startup on Earth now uses (not the concept, this exact design)

@typesfast Clearly the cloud is eating the moon

It’s been two years and I still have no idea what Google’s designers are trying to tell us.

@kevinxu Love seeing the scoreboard in proof!

Three takeaways: - Timestamped calls beat victory laps. - Community research spots shifts before the news cycle. - Size grows with conviction, not impulse.

A trader on AfterHour just banked $58 million on one stock. The call has been sitting in plain sight since January. And we got the receipts. 🧵