Balazs Deme

maturing is realizing that FTX was one of the best investors in crypto industry: > $500M in Anthropic would now be worth roughly $30.4B > $1B in Solana would now be worth roughly $5.1B > $648M in Robinhood would be $5.7B > $100M in Sui would be $1.2B > $1.15B in Genesis Digital Assets would be $3.5B > $700M in SpaceX via K5 would be $3B did some estimates and their total portfolio would be up from $4.7B to $52.5B which is a $47.8B in rise absolutely nuts

@alex__mackenzie @generalcatalyst @xav_db @helixdb Love to be a part of the next if you'll have me, Alex & team. This is massively cool!

Every month we at @GeneralCatalyst bring together ~10 engineers & researchers in London to talk about Model Development, AI Infra, Distributed Systems, Databases, High Frequency Trading, Web Browsers, Compilers ++. Had a lot of fun w @xav_db at @helixdb last week talking about building an infinitely scalable database. If you feel like joining the next one, just comment here / dm @sivesh_sukumar @lawrjones @ChewyAI @maxilevi__ @pfau @giaccoangelo @k__monk @fogelin @lucalp__

@milichab This is so sick, Andrew! How much did this cost to get to this point with Cursor in terms of dollars and time you put in personally?

Now launched: iso-coaster.com Free, open-source coaster park builder with shops, water/metal/wooden coasters, guests, food, shops, and more No signup required, co-op included

@bonatsos @generalcatalyst Niko, you've been nothing but absolutely great in all of our conversations over the years. Excited to hear what is next and congrats on the run!

After 15 wonderful years @generalcatalyst I am moving on to new adventures. The best days for GC are ahead! Super grateful to every single one of my teammates that I had the fortune to work with over the years. I learned a lot. Very thankful to our limited partners too for their long-term support. Equally importantly, it's been the privilege of a lifetime to work with so many inspiring tech startup founders from the very early days.

@typesfast It'd be even more interesting how much % of GDP was burned on lawyers drafting policies, compliance tools, and a bunch of nonsense that should have never existed in the first place.

With Europe finally eliminating the cookies law which has plagued the internet with pop-ups since 2011, we can finally take stock of it's impact. How many total people were prosecuted for this crime?

The most frustrating and lonely thing in the world is to be able to see something so clearly and beautifully in your mind, but somehow fail to get other people to see what you see.

@unable0_ If you're in the EU you really can't fall into these traps in your first year of founding. Grants being one of them. The idiotic amount of paperwork pre/post grant just makes it totally not worth it

caught up with a friend from the EU who’s been on a rocketship. one year into his startup and he’s this close to being allowed to hire someone. he’s navigated: - the innovation grant application to apply for an application - a 6-month ethics review to ensure the idea won’t disrupt too much - and a VAT registration seminar (mandatory before building anything) the product doesn’t exist yet, but the paperwork is beautiful. if this isn’t hypergrowth, I don’t know what is. Europe’s really cooking. hard not to be inspired.

@WillManidis I'm with you on the last point completely. Especially as you scale and can do RL yourself to build an even better product. A lot of those legacy industries, not only tax, will be completely left behind

rivet is an extremely special company. I think we will see a ton of success from firms choosing to leverage LLMs to provide better full stack customer experiences, rather than selling these services to downstream legacy firms.

@HugoAmsellem Congrats on the move Hugo, see you on the other side soon as well

👋 Personal update: Just moved to SF after a 15+ years in Europe. A few thoughts: - Remote is dead. Location matters more than anything, again. Being able to meet founders IRL is the core of the art of pre-seed, when most decisions run on intuition. The SF re-migration is real - plus many EU/NYC founders are spending at least a week fundraising in the Bay. - Culture is upstream of everything. SF might be the only place in the world where builders have more status than commentators. As Peter Thiel famously said, Berlin is the place where people move to retire in their 20s. SF is where the most ambitious move to reinvent themselves and (maybe) the world. - Frontiers are expanding. The commoditization that happened to bits is happening to atoms and cells. Biotech, robotics, and hardware are entering their consumer moments - and most teams taking on these impossible challenges are in the Bay. - SF is boring. As a Parisian, I'm dying inside when someone offer to meet for dinner at 6PM. I was actually supposed to move to my fav city in the world, NYC. But as a 1st time GP with @intuitionvc - I have only one shot at this and decided to optimise for quality of obsession, and not quality of life. I don't usually ask for many things, but I feel this is one of the most cornerstone moment of my life. Here's how you can help: 1) Intros to founders building at the frontiers of consumer - I want to be the only culture-first VC in technical cap tables. 2) Flat recommendations as @Clara_Gold and I are starting a war to find 1/2BR (I know) in town, ideally a furnished sublet. 3) Ophthalmologist recommendations - I have recurrent corneal ulcers and need my "eye guy" in every city I move to. 4) Share this post. Much love 💛

OpenAi is moving into banking. I can respect building out their edge in these industries before many of the new startups tackling the same space and build out a feature moat. I wonder what's next.

@anythingai Would love to try! Let's build.

Introducing Anything Max. Autonomous software engineer. Tries your app like a person. Solves 97%+ of the hardest bugs. Ships features on its own. Live now, reply for free weekend access

@ndrewpignanelli @awwwards @altalogy @muamartaw @szafrankasiaa @dcedrych It's so nicely done well deserved! What inspired you during the process?

Cofounder has been nominated for @awwwards site of the day!!! For those of you not in the design industry, this is like a grammy for websites 🥹 It's been my dream for years to be nominated here and so proud to see our site up there. If you liked it please vote for us to win!

A fairly large percentage of global payments volume flows through SWIFT bureaus. They are essentially the "tech" providers for super legacy financial institutions that don't want to/can't build connectivity to SWIFT directly. It seems like the same is shaping up for stablecoins. A bunch of providers essentially providing the same commoditised liquidity or on-ramp services for their local markets.

@lukeknight This is sick, sign me up please!

WHO WANTS ONE?

It's a good exercise to think of the massive markets that legacy inefficiencies create. Traditional money movement vs stablecoins is one of them. But so is HFT and getting sniped by people with more sophisticated setups. In a sense the markets are rigged to take advantage of retail.

@Pavel_Asparagus I think we are way past that timeline. All that matters nowadays is to rip your sick launch video . Just let the views come in who cares

If you have a fundraising announcement i would just hold of a little bit

Innovation not so much. If you are truly working on something groundbreaking, you will still get A+ people for it. It's the anything below that's a problem. At some point the EU just lost the plot, more so than the us, where working in tech became the fashionable thing to do vs something risky, but potentially high reward. The regs are there, but not even series B or later companies can keep up (and they shouldn't IMO). It's just the mentality that if you're laid off since it's not working out the first thing to do is sue or squeeze the company to get more out. 2016/2017 and pre you had people work for low salary or close to no salary just to work in a startup. These people also worked their ass off. People from (mostly) ex-Rocket Internet built the startup & VC scene of Berlin - a thing that hasn't held up since.

@BalazsDeme @HarryStebbings @DinBisevac this made me think that since early hires are a great filter for start-ups that all these eu hiring regs extra compound against early stage/innovation

Whether you like it or not; the best companies I meet today in the US are in office 6 days per week. I do not know one single company in the UK that is 6 days per week. 🤷‍♂️ We need to up our game. We need more intensity.

@BriansAngles Still way better than GPT5 which massively sucks. Even Sonnet 3.5 is still miles better.

Why is Claude Code so much worse, how do I fix it!? 6 weeks ago I felt like a god but now it's so meh.

@maxmarchione I think as evals mature we're going to be seeing insane progress once more industry by industry.

increasingly believe LLMs are approaching their peak and the next step is more effectively integrating what we have into the world. aka openAI will start obsessing over the application layer.