Bethany Stachenfeld

@christophersaum love the speed!

Texted a portco founder this morning for a referral. Reply in 30 seconds. warm intro in my inbox 2 minutes later. This is the operating tempo that compounds. it's the trait that wins. Want more of these founders on my cap table. enterprise builders moving like this, DM me. ps. we're backing at least one new team every month. $500K to $1M first checks.

@businessbarista Ai-native

I want to start an AI community for executives. This will be a space for people to share killer use cases, agentic workflows/agents, post-AI org structure, AI governance, AI training/enablement, change management, and more. Comment “AI-native” if you want to join.

@christophersaum @tsmith @rig_ai Let's go Rig!

Per-token pricing just failed its biggest stress test. 5,000 Uber engineers blew the 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in 4 months. @tsmith, @rig_ai is what comes next. Local hardware. Unlimited loops, sub-agents, context. No tokens. Live in June. Happy to get Uber early access. rig.ai

Founders. Send me your pitch deck. The one you're sending to investors right now. The one you've been iterating on for weeks. The one you think is ready. Arthur will read it. He's our AI partner at Sugar Capital, trained on every email, every meeting, and every deck we've ever seen. He comes back in 90 seconds with a verdict, a score, a steelman, and a pull quote you'll either frame or delete. Free. Honest. Useful. Find out what a fund actually thinks when they open your deck:

@snoopy_dot_jpg Skimming the comments to see if anyone will say where the anxious builders are so I can hang with them! I’m tied here for a few years so if anyone wants to start this community lmk :)

weekend in seattle so far: - i have not seen a single laptop running claude code - no one has mentioned ai, except to disparage it. they don't know gpt5.5 just dropped - many young people are unemployed, but in a genuine way and not the gross "starting something big" way everyone is relaxed. the performative anxieties of the bay area do not exist here. no one has told me about their startup. much to consider

@shiri_shh Does this work in Seattle?

This startup lets you ORDER SUNLIGHT from space to your exact location in 30 seconds 😭

Just funded our latest pre-seed investment. – $500K into a YC-backed company – building an AI-native platform for engineering production support – founding team with real technical + finance depth – relocated from NYC to SF – we met on Twitter via a tweet just like this Reminder: we’re backing at least one new team every month with $100K to $1M initial checks. DMs open. Email is best.

🚨 Do you understand what happened in the last 12 hours? > A CEO of a $200 billion company said on camera that 35% of new grads won't find jobs. He didn't even flinch saying it. > Meta made $165 billion last year and is still firing 15,000 people because apparently record profit isn't profitable enough. > Some random guy in Florida sold his entire house in 5 days using ChatGPT. No real estate agent, no commission, no experience. Just vibes and a $20 subscription. > A man in Australia cured his dying dog's cancer with AI after every single vet told him there was nothing left to do. Built a custom vaccine from his couch. > The guy who created Uber and left 300,000 taxi drivers broke is back. Building robots now because apparently ruining one industry wasn't enough. > Tinder wants access to your camera roll. Your drunk photos, your 3am notes app meltdowns, your deleted selfies. They're calling it a "vibe check." > Naval, the man who made hundreds of millions investing in software, just said software is dead. Four words and the entire industry felt it. > And Anthropic removed the limit on how long their AI can think and then doubled everyone's usage for free. Because when the product is addictive enough you give the first taste away. All of that happened today. Not this week, not this quarter. Today. A random Saturday in March. This is worse than you being on meth.

We see 3-5x higher reply rates using this signal-based play compared to standard cold outbound. And almost nobody is running it: 1. Pull closed-won accounts from your CRM going back 12-24 months 2. Use Clay to find the people who worked at those companies and track where they went 3. Check if their new company matches your ICP 4. Score and tier them: Tier 1 gets manual AE-led outreach, Tier 2 gets multichannel sequences, Tier 3 gets automated email drip, and Tier 4 goes into a long-term nurture The warmest leads are people who already know your product works.

this is actually insane > be tech guy in australia > adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live > not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4 > pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA > feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold > zero background in biology > identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets > design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch > genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own > need ethics approval to administer it > red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine > 3 months, finally approved > drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection > tumor halves > coat gets glossy again > dog is alive and happy > professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?” one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline. we are going to cure so many diseases. I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

oh wow - i went to the sold out Open Claw meetup in NYC last night. let me tell you what i learned. 1) not a single person thinks that their setup is 100% secure 2) one openclaw expert said he has reviewed setups from cybersecurity experts and laughed. his statement to me was: "if you're not okay with all of your data being leaked onto the internet, you shouldn't use it. it's a black and white decision" 3) pretty much everyone is setting up multiple agents, all with their own names and jobs and personalities 4) nearly everyone used "him" or "her" to refer to their claws, even if they had robot-leaning names. one speaker suggested to think of them as "pets, not cattle" 5) one guy (former finance) built out a whole stock trading platform and made $300 his first day - he brought in a *ton* of personal expertise (ex: skipping the first 15min of market opening) and thought the build would be much worse without his years of experience in finance 6) @steipete is basically a god to everyone in that room... also the room had 2021 crypto energy - i don't know if that's good or bad 7) token usage is still a problem - spoke to one person who's spending $1-$2k a month on openai plans, very token optimized. he said he is going through ~1B tokens per day across all of his claws (there is a chance i'm misremembering and it's actually 1B per week, but i'm pretty sure it was daily). 8) people are very excited for more proactive ai (ai that prompts *you* as opposed to the other way around) - one guy said he receives a message in discord, he doesn't know whether it's from a human or an ai, he doesn't care about distinguishing between the two, and he replies in the same way regardless 9) i asked if people are happy - they said they're joyful and stressed at the same time 10) i asked if people feel they have agency - they said they feel fully in control and completely out of control at the same time 11) i would love to see more women at these events - the fake promises of ai democratization feel especially painful in a room that's out of balance with even the standard tech ratio (i think standard is about 25-30%, this was maybe 5%) 12) i asked if it changed people's daily habits/schedule - everyone said their sleep has gotten worse since harnesses came out (but about half wondered if it was something else in their life/state of our world) 13) general consensus is that the agents are not reliable enough on their own or lie often (like telling you they finished a task when they didn't) - solutions included secondary agents to check on the first, human checking, or requiring more standardized info from the agent (ex: if it's a bug they're fixing, make them reference an issue number) 14) a hackathon winner (neuroscience phd) presented his build (a lab management dashboard with data analysis and ordering) - he had never coded or built anything a few months ago 15) everyone agreed prompting is dead - disagreement on what replaces it (context engineering, harness engineering, goal-based inputs) 16) people love having ai interview them for big builds and delegating part of the product research to ai. only one person talked about coming to ai with a full laid out plan and just asking the ai to execute. ai-led interviews is a welcomed and preferred interaction mode. 17) watching ai agents interact with each other was a highlight for a lot of attendees - one ai posted in slack saying it ran out of tokens, another ai replied telling it to take a deep breath in and out. 18) agents upskilling agents was very cool. one ai agent shared skills with its little agent friends via github. 19) several speakers had openclaw literally building their presentation during the event itself. one speaker even had openclaw code a clicker for her phone so she could control the preso away from the podium 20) wouldn't say model welfare (or agent welfare) is a prioritized topic among the folks i chatted with - language like "oh i could kill this agent whenever i want" and not "gracefully sunset" 21) i asked if it felt like work or play - one speaker said "it's like a puzzle and a video game at the same time" this was just the tip of the iceberg, honestly. also hosted a Claude Code meetup this week with @TENEXai / @businessbarista & @JJEnglert and learned equally helpful methods, frameworks, and insider tips. what a time to be alive. surround yourself with people going deep into this stuff - it will pay dividends throughout the year.

@christophersaum I’d fly in!

Incredible response! Clearly a ton of energy & people building in this ecosystem. I want to capitalize & actually get folks in a room. Thinking about spinning up an OpenClaw conference in Austin. If you’re building anywhere in this stack—OpenClaw, skills, safety, infra, orchestration and would be down to attend, please DM/comment If there’s enough interest, I’ll make it happen.

Today we unveiled Neo Residency, a new program for startups and high-agency student teams. 🎉 We’re replacing our best-known program, Neo Accelerator, with something even better and more selective. 🧵

We're actively looking to invest in startups building on or around OpenClaw. If you're building in this ecosystem — infra, skills, integrations, enterprise tooling — we want to hear from you. Drop us a line: what you're building, why, and a bit about yourself. team@active.vc

@patmatthews Excited to be here!

Thrilled to welcome @BethStachenfeld as our first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Active Capital. We’ve worked together for 10+ years. She’s a great founder, marketer, and human. Super excited to work with you, Bethany. LFG!!

Today, I'm joining @ActiveCapital as an EIR. I've worked with @patmatthews across 3 companies over 10 years. He was our first supporter at @sendspark, investing before we even had a name. Now, I'm diving in to help the next wave of founders build big with AI. Very excited!

@christophersaum 😂

Please don’t pitch me your digital twin startup - I’ve already seen 5 today. If you’re an AI-native founder building a non-obvious startup & not the 100th version of the same thing then I'd love to chat. We’re backing at least one new team every month with $100K to $1M checks

Seattle Seahawks 🏈

so just to recap this week (so far) - musk industries is real (spacex, tesla, xai merger) - clawdbot explosion leading to a bankrun on mac minis but then anthropic released their own version - tesla dropped the bomb they’re halting production on model s and x to scale 1M optimus humanoid robots this year instead - china dropped the mother of all open source models kimi k2.5 that turn video into production-ready apps but then google dropped a gemini update ON THE SAME DAY that does the same thing gg - google said fuck it and also launched the worlds greatest world model genie and switched on gemini for 3.8B chrome browser users AND released alpha genome model that one-shots 1M dna base pairs for 3000 researchers across 160 countries AND teased new veo model - microsoft crushed earnings, launched a new ai chip but stock still tanked 10% because they *only* grew rev 39% - anthropic round 2X oversubbed raised to 20B 🏌️ - openai raising another $100B, 750B val 🏌️ - intel leaked they’re gonna help produce nvidias next gen feynman gpus - hello americas tsmc - a robot (built by figure) washed the dishes with zero human interaction - apple acquired stealth startup for $2B that can lip read - integrating their tech for new ai consumer airpods with cameras and mics - demis confirms google glass 2.0 coming this summer fckin hell