Brian Schechter

“Thomas Edison was not… the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness.” ― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night primary.vc/firstedition/p…

Today, we are announcing our $625M fifth fund. I first experienced Primary 11 years ago as a founder, when Ben and Brad started the firm and made a bet on me as an entrepreneur. Since then, the firm has grown many times over, seen tremendous success, and evolved constantly. But there is a constant at Primary: a deep dedication to the founders we have the good fortune to back. I joined the firm as a partner 5.5 years ago, and that dedication animates everything we do. With this new fund, at this all important moment in the history of technology, we are fired up, committed to innovating alongside the magic makers we get to back!

Primary Ventures raises healthy $625M Fund V to focus on seed investing techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/pri…

@ettinger Andrew is a real one, smart, human, direct, and creative

Wordsss turns two today. We refreshed our website with case studies and new branding. Some thoughtsss: It's never been more true that the best story wins. A small team with the right tools can now build a meaningful technology company, with all the bells and whistles: good enough, generic writing, functional design, and a passable brand. "Pretty good" became the default. To stand out, great companies have become more determined to establish a differentiated point of view with distinctive writing and memorable design. Many of the supposed truths I believed about this business were just stories that I made up. The world is fake and made-up — and (almost?) everyone is winging it. Learning that is terrifying, but liberating. "You can just do things" is only part of the story. The other part: very few people do. "The reward for good work is more work." —@kevin2kelly. No coffee meeting, outbound email, or networking event proved more fruitful for business growth than simply sharing our work. I've worked with dozens of founders and the variance in archetypes is seemingly infinite. There is an infectious magnetism (aura?) some have that is hard to articulate, impossible to replicate, and incredibly energizing. Find people that energize you and spend more time with them. I recognize that the goalposts have shifted, and I'm reminding myself to stop and appreciate how far we've come, while respecting that the floor and ceiling are both objectively higher. It is our moral obligation to be optimistic. And it is a very wise business decision. The world is going to change a lot — faster and more dramatically than ever before. It's going to be weird, but I believe it's going to be wonderful. Buckle up! I keep coming back to one @tyleralterman thought that perfectly encapsulates the greatest lesson of the @wordsssdotcom experiment: "Anyone who's become radically more capable of creating what they want to see in the world passionately launched into an ambitious public-facing project." This has been the most exciting and rewarding chapter of my career so far. I feel lucky and grateful to have made this well-timed bet. Your turn.

Today in @NatureMedicine we report that AI can predict 130 diseases from 1 night of sleep🛌 We trained a foundation model (#SleepFM) on 585K hours of sleep recordings from 65K people—brain, heart, muscle & breathing signals combined. AI learns the language of sleep🧵

We've been working hard and are now doing a public release of our latest iteration of Plural. Short story, we believe GitOps + AI = the Cursor experience for DevOps, but there's obviously way more to it including constant vector indexing of your infra and more. Feel free to check us out, you can learn more here: plural.sh/blog/the-curso…

@demishassabis Token exponential won't stop

You know what's cool... a quadrillion tokens. We processed almost 1,000,000,000,000,000 tokens last month, more than double the amount from May. 📈

Sway: a plan to reimagine democracy I’m starting the most ambitious project of my life: a tech platform to reimagine democracy. I know you've probably got opinions on this. Please give feedback and maybe join us. (🧵 A thread...)

Meet Sohu, the fastest AI chip of all time. With over 500,000 tokens per second running Llama 70B, Sohu lets you build products that are impossible on GPUs. One 8xSohu server replaces 160 H100s. Sohu is the first specialized chip (ASIC) for transformer models. By specializing, we get way more performance: Sohu can’t run CNNs, LSTMs, SSMs, or any other AI models. Today, every major AI product (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Sora) is powered by transformers. Within a few years, every large AI model will run on custom chips. Here’s why specialized chips are inevitable:

Etched, an AI startup founded by college dropouts, raises $120 million to take on Nvidia #Etched @AI_Modeller #SeriesA #AI #Funding #Startups #Harvard #GenerativeAI techstartups.com/2024/06/25/etc…

Etched raises $120M in challenge to Nvidia in AI with transformer chips venturebeat.com/ai/etched-rais…

College dropouts raise $120 million to take on Nvidia's AI chips cnbc.com/2024/06/25/etc…

Thanks for highlighting @ArkBiotech's work. We're proud to be pioneering the tech essential for the biorevolution, from cultivated meat to life-saving medications. @SenFettermanPA the choice is clear: we either seize the opportunity to anchor this future right here in America (Make More Sh*T in America 🇺🇸), or we risk watching more jobs slip through our fingers to overseas competitors. Senator - would love to show you around Ark and discuss how we can strengthen US supply chains, bolster our economy, and improve national security.

Laptop computers (1985): “For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few…the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets.” —New York Times

state space models looking at the chip designed specifically for the models they're about to replace

2/2 the builders behind GitHub Copilot X, Universe, PromptLayer, Structured Labs, and hundreds of enthusiasts. Thanks, Anomoly, for hosting and onda for sending drinks. lu.ma/vlh8lqr3

1/2 Our Meet AI demo next week is oversubscribed by over 100%, and we could not be more excited to bring together GenAI leaders like Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at MosaicML, Zach Sherman, Senior Product Manager at Datadog

Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu want to make LLM inference 140x more efficient and accelerate the path to super intelligence. primary.vc/firstedition/p…

At Primary, we are here to make bold bets to back audacious founders who want to change the world. That framing is so often trite, but it quintessentially what led us to our investment in Etched.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal view on the very appealing chips solution Etched’s Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu have created. wsj.com/articles/start…