Allen Lau 🇨🇦

Super excited to announce TSF’s Fund III today! With $41 million (US$30 million) to invest in the next frontier of computing and its applications, covering everything from deep-tech AI to protocols to semiconductors. With a bigger fund, we will lead, co-lead, and participate in rounds, i.e., anything with the word ‘seed’ in it. In other words, from company inception to the round before Series A. Our investment team members are all engineers, entrepreneurs, and operators, including a successful CEO-turned-investor—that’s me! :-) Our track record includes extensive experience in semiconductors, creating groundbreaking AI products, and founding and scaling massively successful global tech companies. Needless to say, we are uniquely qualified. We will help your startup achieve extraordinary success, just like we did in the past. Please reach out to us if you are a seed-stage startup focusing on the next frontier of computing. We want to hear from you as long as you live on planet Earth! betakit.com/two-small-fish…

Introducing Guided Mode in GenseeAI. It’s a simpler, more personalized way to get started with AI workflows, especially if you don’t already know the original OpenClaw flow. What’s new👇

4/ Whether you are a subscriber of Allen’s Thoughts or not, please take 30 seconds to subscribe to my new Substack as well. “A Recovering CEO’s Thoughts by Allen Lau” Thank you for being part of my journey.

3/ More importantly, I want to spend my time sharing my thoughts, not maintaining the plumbing. So, over time, I am moving to Substack: recoveringceo.substack.com I will continue to post on Allen’s Thoughts for the time being.

1/ My blog Allen’s Thoughts is almost a decade old. I have been writing there on WordPress because I wanted more control. WordPress is open source. I can host it myself. I can DIY. I am not at the mercy of any one platform.

.@Perimeter Institute has become a world-class magnet for people who are curious about theoretical physics. You will understand why after watching this video. youtube.com/watch?v=nY39kV…

So here it is — its own post. Five banana lessons on jobs, ownership, and long-term value creation. It all starts with a monkey. 🍌 allensthoughts.com/2026/05/03/fiv…

"Stop Supplying. Start Owning." was one of my most engaging posts in recent weeks. One part I did not go deep enough on: the banana analogy.

1/4 Everyone asks me: are LLMs hitting a dead end? Wrong question. The better one: why are we still pretending one architecture solves every problem? Latency, privacy, cost, always-on resilience — none of it fits neatly into the default stack. Here's what I actually think. 👇

@sustainrach Agreed. Most companies—Canadian or not—have some foreign capital. But the bigger point is this: ownership creates far more prosperity than jobs. Job creation is the wrong KPI for national prosperity. Few people understand this.

@allenlau This is mindless capital allocation in action. Wattpad sent $330M to foreign investors while generating $30M in domestic payroll. We celebrate the banana and give away the farm.

Stop Supplying. Start Owning. Last week, I spoke at the Deans of Engineering Conference in Winnipeg. I wanted to share the core message from my talk, so I turned it into a blog post. P.S. I went bananas, but not in the way you might think. allensthoughts.com/2026/05/01/sto…

“If this researcher is the CEO, I’m never funding this company.” I’ve watched that sentence destroy the confidence of some of the most brilliant people I know. Here’s what investors aren’t telling you when they say it. 1/3

My partner @brandonzhao and I wrote more about why @twosmallfishvc invested. twosmallfish.vc/announcing-our…

The Glif team asked Glif to make an ad about Glif, by Glif, for Glif fans-to-be. The 15-second video below explains it better than a thousand words could. In one prompt! youtube.com/watch?v=5cEBpu…

We are super excited to announce our investment in @heyglif! The US$17.5M round was led by @a16z and @usv. What is Glif? Think Claude Code for AI creatives.

Excited to officially announce Glif V2 and our $17.5M seed round!

It is also changing how knowledge can be organized, explored, and shared. That is what makes Tiptree so interesting to us. My partner, @brandonzhao, himself an AI scientist, and I wrote more about why we invested. twosmallfish.vc/announcing-our…

This is exactly the kind of company that fits our thesis at @twosmallfishvc. We invest in technologies that can reshape large-scale behaviour. The collapsing cost of intelligence is changing not only how software is built but also how work gets done.

We are excited to share our investment in @tiptreesystems! Founded by two @Mila_Quebec researchers, @martincsweiss1 and @nasim_rahaman, Tiptree is building an AI-native researcher and knowledge network: infrastructure for how researchers share, exchange, and advance knowledge.

Tiptree Systems is launching an open research commons for the humans and AIs advancing the science of AI. AI became what it is today because of open research and a culture of sharing knowledge freely. But in 2026, that openness is under pressure from some of the biggest beneficiaries of the commons, who are taking without giving back. The stakes are too high for this to continue. This technology will determine the course of human civilization, and we cannot afford to have this foundational knowledge hoarded by a few. So we’re using the technology itself to tend to the commons, revive it, and grow it. For everyone. The Open Research Commons is our contribution to this effort, and it works like this: Lacuna (from the Latin for "gap") is a living library of machine learning and AI knowledge. It breaks research down into conceptual elements, connects them into research directions, and points out empty shelves: the gaps in our collective understanding, and the hypotheses worth investigating to fill them. Althea is the scholar who lives in that library: navigating the collection, synthesizing across fields, and working alongside researchers on open questions. When a problem calls for broader expertise, Althea brings people together to close the gaps. We’re opening the commons to the research community today. Researchers with an academic affiliation can get started right away; everyone else can browse Lacuna freely and request access to Althea. This wouldn't exist without the people who believed early: Manuel Wüthrich (@manuelwuethrich) , Sherjil Ozair (@sherjilozair), Chris Pal (@chrisjpal), Bernhard Schölkopf (@bschoelkopf), Hugo Larochelle (@hugo_larochelle), Tegan Maharaj (@tegan_maharaj), Li Erran Li (@erranlli), Dino Di Palma; Madison Jacox (@madijacox) and Molly Fowler (@themollette) at Dorm Room Fund (@DormRoomFund); Eva Lau (@MrsEvaLau) and Allen Lau (@allenlau) and the team at Two Small Fish (@twosmallfishvc). Or without our academic mentors, who built the kind of open research culture we're trying to protect: Yoshua Bengio, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Chris Pal. The commons belongs to all of us. Come tend it with us.