Chance
108 posts
Chance
@ChanceMathisen
Student of the game | @fprimecapital
Katılım Ocak 2022
3.3K Takip Edilen126 Takipçiler
Congrats to @SocketSecurity on their Series C! AI has dramatically accelerated software development, but most security tools haven’t adapted. Earlier this year, several companies suffered from malicious attacks in open source software such as Axios npm. Socket identified the attack and protected their customers in just six minutes!
That’s why the largest and fastest growing companies (Anthropic, Cursor, and 3 of FAANG) use Socket to defend themselves. We’re proud to have led Socket’s Series B and the enormous progress they’ve made since then
Feross@feross
Today is a big day for @SocketSecurity. We just raised a $60M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ThriveCapital with participation from @a16z, @AbstractVC, and @CapitalOne Ventures. Total funding is now $125M. Four years ago, we started Socket because open source dependencies were flowing into production faster than anyone could vet them. AI has massively accelerated that. Code is being written, shipped, and deployed before any human reads it. Security has to operate at that same speed. One data point from Thrive's diligence that I keep coming back to: they first discovered Socket because @cursor_ai, @OpenAI, and @AnthropicAI all independently told them it was the most important security tool they'd adopted for AI-driven development. Three of the most sophisticated AI companies converging on the same vendor unprompted. Since our Series B, Socket has grown to more than 20,000 organizations, protecting over 1.5 million repositories and blocking more than 1,000 supply chain attacks every week. The team is now over 100 people. Three out of five FAANG companies are Socket customers. So are the companies building the most ambitious AI products: @AnthropicAI, @cursor_ai, @xai, @figma, @vercel, @Replit, @scale_AI, @GustoHQ, @Mercadolibre, and @cribl_io, alongside Fortune 100s in financial services and global media. What we've shipped since the last round: • Socket Firewall blocks malicious packages at install time, before they reach a developer's laptop or CI pipeline. Free for everyone. • Reachability analysis via our acquisition of Coana, eliminating 50-80% of irrelevant vulnerability alerts by focusing only on CVEs that are actually exploitable. • Socket Certified Patches for remediating exploitable CVEs in seconds without waiting on upstream maintainers. • Coverage extending to browser extensions, editor extensions, MCP servers, and AI tools via our acquisition of @secureannex. When the Axios compromise hit, our detection systems flagged the malicious dependency within six minutes. Within 24 hours, more than 2,000 organizations onboarded to Socket to block it. Where the funding goes: deeper investment in Firewall, massively expanding Certified Patches, moving protection closer to every point of install across the developer toolchain, and new product launches pushing Socket into a category we haven't entered before. We're hiring across engineering, sales, customer success, and threat intel. ❤️ Thank you to our customers, investors, and the open-source community for your support. Together, we’re making software safer for everyone.
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this fails for two reasons:
it’s out of touch and demeaning.
eric is 71, worth $43.3 billion, and has a 27 yo girlfriend. he’s addressing graduates my age that are experiencing a shift we have never seen before.
yet, he claims he can understand and feel what we do.
he can’t.
he then goes on to talk about not giving up agency before pivoting to say ai is inevitable and the only area you can shape.
this is giving up agency. ai is the only problem worth working on.
his conclusion puts ai at the center of the story. “ai agents are solving problems you could never do on your own. ai is solving protein folding.”
who the hell does that resonate with?
certainly, not a group of 22 year olds that are looking out into an ominous job market while also experiencing the emotional rollercoaster of graduation.
imagine if he had started like this:
“you’re entering a world that is changing faster than we’ve ever seen. you’re scared because many people in my exact position are telling you ai is going to take your jobs. you watch TikTok’s that tell you ai is using all of the water.
i cannot relate to you. it’d be silly to tell you i can fully understand your emotions and feelings. i graduated in (no shade Eric) and only experienced the first technology revolution. i try to stay in touch with students like yourselves and other young entrepreneurs. you give me hope.
i hope to share an alternative story about this crazy moment from what i’ve heard at schools like yours.
professors have directed ai to solve a 50 year old genomic protein folding problem that will help cure cancer, provide new antibiotics, and even aid in providing clean energy. students with ESL and insufficient tutoring are going deeper on subjects in realtime by telling ai what else they want to learn about.
i hope you exercise your talents, no matter the field, to solve similarly ambitious problems. together we will build towards a better future than the one my generation thrust upon you.”
as a fellow Gen Zer, with many friends at labs and many friends in the trades, i can tell you people do not want to hate this technology nor you.
we use it to write our essays, create memes of our friends, to build incredibly, ambitious projects in record time, and to connect with our families (more on this tmrw).
i hope we can inject a little hopium and come back down to earth. go reconnect with friends from college, your hometown, or the barista at your local coffee shop. nurture your relationships, ask about their fears regarding technology, and what they want to see more of.
i’m sure at the very least you’ll have an interesting conversation. you might even forget about the permanent underclass for just a moment. maybe that’s enough.
Jason Scheer@jasonscheer
What a horrible message. Bad speech, bad message, bad ability by Arizona to read the room once again. It fails time and time again to win in the PR department
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Announcing agentive multi drone swarms on Dimensional
Agents can coordinate action across multiple robots and write mavlink native physical “skills”
Arm(), Takeoff(), Search(), Follow(), GoTo(), Search(), DropPayload()
DimOS as the physical harness & hardware guardrail layer
San Francisco, CA 🇺🇸 English
Insane concentration of talent
Alex Shan@alexshander03
We’re launching @JudgmentLabs today and announcing $32M in funding. As AI agents take on more of the work that creates economic value, they generate massive amounts of production data: the clearest record of how they behave with users, software, and the real world. Judgment builds infrastructure for improving AI agents from production data.
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We’re launching @JudgmentLabs today and announcing $32M in funding.
As AI agents take on more of the work that creates economic value, they generate massive amounts of production data: the clearest record of how they behave with users, software, and the real world.
Judgment builds infrastructure for improving AI agents from production data.
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thank you @colossusmag and thank you to @JeremySternLA for coming to visit the Cog office!
to give my side of what seems to be the most controversial story of the article: I went to a Founders Fund game night and Mango showed up because Brian from FF is also on the board of Cloud9. I have played a lot of melee (probably my most played game after, like, competitive programming) so was pretty excited to get to play him.
the setup was mega laggy but we played for a while. I took one game (he played falcon and wasn't trying that hard). would not use the phrase "beat him to a pulp," i'd obviously get washed in a real tournament set lol.
not sure how Jeremy even heard this story but seems his sources run deep :)
Colossus@colossusmag
Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.
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There is a lot of writing on here that is not actually slop (checked by @pangramlabs), but sort of feels slop adjacent. And people always just eat all of it up. Maybe it’s the aesthetics of these X articles or people have some form of psychosis.
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@lefttailguy Much harder to orchestrate existing talent to new requirements rather than actively seeking those who fit the bill
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These are temporary recompositions not long term reductions in headcount. Having too many people whose incentives are aligned with the old organizational topology makes it very difficult to replatform in an AI-native way. Meta, for example, is cutting folks in droves but is also hiring aggressively. They are hiring researchers, yes, but also engineers and product folks with massive sign on bonuses and crazy tactics like overnight exploding offers, etc. The common theme is that they are laying off politically savvy/management types and hiring super AI-pilled systems thinkers into IC roles.
Once companies figure out the best way to instrument their inherent capabilities with AI, they can start scaling heads again. Much harder to figure out those new primitives when you’ve got politically savvy/non-truth seeking folks dominating the company, defending the status quo, etc. Different technological/organizational regimes mean different kinds of people are 10x. Yes, high IQ and high energy will always be important, but certain flavors of people are 10x complements to AI while others are not. Easier to figure out who those people are when you trim the fat and see who’s able to survive and ideally thrive in its absence. Then, you can start running lookalike audiences on those people.
rohit@krishnanrohit
One bearish sign of all the AI layoffs is that the companies couldn't figure out how to produce even more by keeping the people and adding AI. I'm not entirely sure how to think about this.
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Ironically, just invested in a co that came from a cold email
Ryan Hoover@rrhoover
RIP cold pitching. I’ve received 5x more inbound this year. It will 5x again by EOY. May build solution for this.
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12 months after starting my fund: 30 seed investments, 10 have graduated to Series A, 21 companies are marked-up.
Introduced 6 of the Series A cos to their lead
Also learned I have Cursor stock because a company I invested in as an angel in Dec 2024 got bought by them 😮💨
sudarshan@ItzSuds
Quick Update: have 8 series As from seed now. Most likely 1 more by end of month. The sun is a little brighter. The air feels a little cleaner. I’m benching 250 for reps & I’m not depressed anymore My dream of escaping the post-AGI poverty underclass feels slightly in reach now
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Announcing Weekend Fund IV, backed by operators and founders (and maybe you).
When we raised Weekend Fund III, we did something different.
Toward the end of our raise, we announced the fund in public and accepted applications from LPs.
Our goal was to make early-stage venture more accessible and align ourselves with an army of operators and founders to help us and the startups we back.
Over 1,000 people expressed interest to join and hundreds did, but there was a problem. Legally, only accredited investors could participate as an LP. Accreditation laws are well-meaning but limit access to the majority of consumers.
With WF IV, @vedikaja_in and I are doing something different.
Like before, we’re onboarding engineers, designers, researchers, data scientists, salespeople, and other domain experts as LPs in the fund. But this time at a larger scale with USVC.
AngelList recently announced USVC, a new kind of fund that’s accessible to everyone, including the non-accredited. It holds positions in private late-stage companies like xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, and Vercel. I personally invested.
Today, they just announced their investment in Weekend Fund IV, one of the first early-stage funds added to their portfolio.
If you’re interested in being a part of Weekend Fund and getting exposure to generational startups mentioned above, visit usvc [dot] com.
Of course, don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.
Investing in startups is risky and you may lose all your money. USVC shares are illiquid with no guarantee of repurchase.
Consider investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. Read the prospectus: usvc [dot] com/prospectus.
Also, USVC is currently limited to US citizens. They’re working to open the fund to other geographies.
Lastly, my DMs are open. :)
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Re: OpenEvidence...Actually, the 90% was sourced from a piece by The Information, which spoke to "person(s) involved in the deal." Deal referring to their $250M round at $12B. Not saying it's exact, but I do think it's directionally correct and I also know they use an ensemble of smaller models that are much less expensive to inference, have lots of prompt caching, AND they don't have large training runs that they'll have to continue to amortize over time.
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Ed Zitron@edzitron
@lefttailguy 90% gross margin is from a single unsourced Sacra pdf
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I am thrilled to announce Worldbuild I, a $30M fund to partner with founders when conviction cannot be outsourced.
I sat down with @alexrkonrad to share our story (link below).
We are a thesis-driven firm that focuses on the nuances, runs toward new ideas, and aims to lead with original thought.
Worldbuilders we aspire to partner with create new categories, play infinite games, and produce a gravitational pull of attention – just as the most ambitious founders & creatives in history have done.
While quietly laying the foundations for the firm, we have been fortunate to partner with founders at the earliest stages of their journeys, including Evan at SF Compute, Paul at Browserbase, Srikanth at Truffle, Baiju at Aetherflux, and more.
Worldbuild is in many ways a culmination of my life experience and what will now be my life’s work. I have always found myself surrounded by entrepreneurs: my dad, my wife, my best friends; and there is nothing more fulfilling than being their consigliere and first call.
If you’re building your world, I'd love to connect.
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Altara is helping material science advance at AI speed.
Catherine & @EvaTuecke have an amazing team and the potential to build a generational company.
I'm proud that we at @Neo were among their first investors.
Catherine Yeo@catherinehyeo
Introducing Altara: the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world. Today @evatuecke and I are excited to announce our $7M seed led by @GreylockVC, joined by @Neo, @BoxGroup, @Liquid2V, and angel investors including @JeffDean and leadership from OpenAI & AMD. We’re already working with early customers in semiconductors, batteries, and advanced materials. More below.
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Today we’re announcing Tessera’s $60M Series A led by @a16z.
Enterprise transformation is broken – years-long timelines, massive cost, and high failure rates. Tessera is rebuilding it with AI, delivering in weeks what used to take years.
We’re hiring engineers, researchers, and operators who want to help rebuild how the world’s most important systems evolve. If that’s you, reach out.
Kabir Nagrecha@KabirNagrecha
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