Ashish Pandhi 🦁

@mikulaja Their disclosures at the bottom of the email had me dying of laughter. Who is their chief compliance officer?

Periodic reminder that Mastercard- and Morgan Stanley-backed TomoCredit is still running a straight up fraud:

@rauchg @heyaleksandr @vercel Honestly this is the most frustrating thing for me. I set up each vercel account for each company I’m working at, each with a paid seat. I have one GitHub account shared across the companies. I don’t mind paying for extra seats but vercel to GitHub shouldn’t be 1:1

@heyaleksandr @vercel I think this is the root cause. Will dig with the team on a nice way to handle this. Thx for reaching out! x.com/robipop22/stat…

plz stop removing me from my own team😭 @vercel @rauchg

Thiel Fellowship upped the stakes this year. $100,000 → $200,000. 2 Years. These are the 15 names under the age of 22 you're going to want to watch. From Anchorage, AK to Hong Kong, Tokyo to Germany, Miami to Colombia, Luxembourg to Waterloo, the Thiel Fellow Class of 2025 are disrupting biotech, hardware, AI, crypto, & more. Ferdinand Dabitz @FerdiDabitz Jackson Denka @jacksondenka Juan Ebrath @RealJPGE Colton El-Habr Elias Fizesan @Eliasfiz Fabian Gruber Carlo Kobe @CarloWKobe Jennifer Lin @Jlindig0 Koki Mashita @koki_mashita Soren Monroe-Anderson @soren_ma Steven Pang @thewildstevenp Hooman Reza Nezhad @hoomanrenezhad Aidan Smith @aidanmantine Teddy Warner @WarnerTeddy Sigil Wen @0xSigil “Per the Roman dictum “corruptio optimi pessima” - the corruption of the best is the worst - higher education is the worst institution we have. For these exceptional fellows, we are providing an alternative,” Peter Thiel, Chairman of the Thiel Foundation.

Welcome 2025 Thiel Fellows! WHO ARE THEY? Ferdinand Dabitz, Berlin, Germany - @FerdiDabitz Ivy is building the world trade bank — a global instant payments platform. Jackson Denka, Los Angeles, CA - @jacksondenka Azura is a trading platform that utilizes on-chain rails to enable price discovery for everything from crypto and equities to beliefs and memes. Juan Ebrath, Bogota, Colombia - @RealJPGE Phase is a research lab on a mission to unlock whole-body regeneration and make living matter programmable — from healing hearts to regrowing limbs. Colton El-Habr, Philadelphia, PA Orbit builds non-invasive neurostimulators that utilize the brain’s existing infrastructure to modulate the body’s autonomic nervous system — an API to the human mind. Elias Fizesan, Luxembourg - @Eliasfiz Canopy Labs is building the foundation models to power digital humans that are indistinguishable from real ones. Fabian Gruber, Erlangen, Germany Manex AI is developing an AI-powered solution to automate manufacturing processes for dark factories. Carlo Kobe, Hamburg, Germany - @CarloWKobe Fizz is developing an AI financial advisor for the pocket of every young adult. Jennifer Lin, Miami, FL - @Jlindig0 Jennifer’s startup is giving patients with rare diseases accelerated access to new cures with clear indications of efficacy. Koki Mashita, Tokyo, Japan - @koki_mashita Aeolus is building the planetary defense system for extreme weather. Soren Monroe-Anderson, Anchorage, AK - @soren_ma Neros is a defense technology company building drones critical to a modern arsenal at massive scale. Steven Pang, Hong Kong - @thewildstevenp Orbit builds non-invasive neurostimulators that utilize the brain’s existing infrastructure to modulate the body’s autonomic nervous system — an API to the human mind. Hooman Reza Nezhad, Waterloo, Canada - @hoomanrenezhad Solcoa Industries is producing the first zero-carbon, American-made rare earth metals at scale. Aidan Smith, Mountain View, CA - @aidanmantine Innerphases is developing human-native communication devices that change the way we work and think. Teddy Warner, Charlotte, NC - @WarnerTeddy Intempus is equipping robots with emotional intelligence, making them more predictable and easier to understand. Sigil Wen, Toronto, Canada - @0xSigil Extraordinary brings the world’s top talent to America’s technology companies.

@0xDawggy this is actually really interesting

Another interesting find on today's blockchain deep dive CA: Gwux9Ewr9ztiC7rB75waPxv5tcsJSbnPzd9ctKw9pump The send team leaked their wallet kh12…B6BJ in this post ( look on the top right ) solscan.io/account/kh12KK… The wallet kh12…B6BJ sent sol three times to this wallet 6PvsTRA31mU3k6uMZ5kWqXH31CtUFpJV5t8Cv8DbZEmN #transfers" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">solscan.io/account/kh12KK… The wallet 6PvsTRA31mU3k6uMZ5kWqXH31CtUFpJV5t8Cv8DbZEmN then deployed a pump fun token $SEND and tagged it a community token. pump.fun/profile/6PvsTR This is the platform that made it possible for cooks like $Buzz $APY $Neur $Jail $PPCOIN $X and they deployed their own community coin $SEND This deserves millions imo, $SEND has a ATH 135m MC & the coin is still sitting comfortably at 40m. The Hackathon Progenitor

@shaoruu @cursor_ai Being able to have .cursorrules or similar at a per directory basis (for monorepos with multiple apps and packages). Also it never gets the shadcn command right in yolo mode even if I add the right command to the global prompt in settings

what's one thing you really want added to @cursor_ai composer, or just to cursor in general? open to all kinds of ideas :)

@mckaywrigley @shaoruu @cursor_ai Honestly this. An example of use case here is that chat was really good at understanding the code and building a mermaid chart of how the data flows. Wanted to act on it from there but had to ask it for a prompt with context for composer. Felt hacky

@shaoruu @cursor_ai Would love to take chats over to composer sessions. Sometimes I’m 4-5 messages into a chat and I realize “Oh I now want to use composer with the context of this chat”

@KianSadeghi5 constantly killing it 🔥🔥🔥

Today Nucleus Longevity just dropped. See how your DNA shapes how long you will live. New video below!

@RoryOReilly @Millions Honestly, @KnotAPIs is one of the best fintech products I’ve seen. I just recommended it to another fintech founder today

While working on @Millions, we started developing what we called "Millions Account Updater," a feature that allowed cardholders to add their Millions Card everywhere (check out the old designs!). What we didn't realize was that this "feature" would evolve into devoting over 100,000 engineering hours to building out @Plaid for merchant connectivity. Within a relatively short period of time, we've gone from launching with early card issuers to partnering with billion-dollar challenger banks, and soon, we'll be launching with some of the largest banks in the world (shh!). Today, we're celebrating our highest card update day ever, which also marks the 2-year anniversary of renaming Millions Account Updater to @KnotAPIs! Shoutout to @kieransoreilly for the brilliant naming idea—you always know best. Here's to many more milestones ahead!

@yo Strong agree. Startups are hard enough as is. If the culture sucks and the work is grueling, people will burn out quickly and leave.

A lot of founders view company culture as 'corporate fluff' I couldn't disagree more. People won't operate at full capacity (or truly care about what you're building) unless they're happy and excited to work there. And that's not gonna happen unless you invest in your team and create an environment they love being a part of. This obviously gets harder once you go fully remote, but one of the things I'm most proud of @JUICELABSNYC is how we've kept our strong culture despite the distance. We use apps like Donut for random 1:1s, @heytaco for giving props when props are due, and @roam to make it feel like we're all in the same office. Plus weekly team game nights and annual offsites to bring people together across different states. It might sound corny but these little things add up and truly make a difference.

@yo Spicysnacks.com next?

Domain of the day: SaltySnacks. com (I don’t even like salty stuff)

@pitdesi I think plaid revenue will increase a decent amount as they roll out more of their fraud tooling for fintechs. Cognito acq has paid off nicely for and plaid signals looks like a promising competitor to sardine. Kyc, transfers, and fraud tools in one place

👀 Plaid at $280M revenue, <$70M in annual burn, $180M in cash as of Q3 They were reportedly at $170M ARR in Dec 2020, and some reported $250M in 2021.

Adopting a cat with a weird little meow is like winning the lottery

you know an engineer is cooking when they start chewing on the hoodie strings 😮‍💨

@yo Facts

@_Liso_ May not be good for the body but it’s good for the soul

This is why people are fat in America

Gossip? Oh you mean trickle down yaponomics

@RogueCfpb @kmdrew This is why I’m a fan of @synctera’s approach here. You still have a direct relationship with the bank and Synctera provides a compliance team + APIs for you to start with. As you scale, you can swap in your own vendors/team

@AshPanGeek @kmdrew The cost of creating multiple direct connections, to multiple banks, with multiple data standards and varying technical ability, is extremely high. That’s where BaaS, as a technical pathway, can absolutely drive massive value.

Counter point: not many banks are great at tech and building APIs and, perhaps more importantly, going direct makes building redundancy VERY expensive for fintechs. And if fintechs learned anything from SVB’s collapse, it’s that building a business w/o redundancy, is a death wish

@RogueCfpb @kmdrew The downside to this is that it is incredible expensive. It’s the route we went with for Zurp (direct relationships with bank, card network, etc) but it’s extremely slow and expensive to go that route. May not be a bad thing to have that as a barrier to entry though

@kmdrew Complete agreement. Since the dawn of BaaS, I’ve been yelling that from the mountaintops to anyone who would listen. Banks and fintechs CANT offload their compliance responsibilities to third parties. I’m bullish on the BaaS tech. Maybe I misunderstood your larger point