Dylan | Epochal Capital

Through Epochal Capital I hold Pre-IPO positions in more than 20 companies across the AI stack: Frontier Labs: @AnthropicAI · @OpenAI · @MistralAI · @cohere Infrastructure: @cerebras · @LightmatterCo · @LambdaAPI · @CrusoeAI · @AyarLabs · @GroqInc · @SpaceX · @xai Platforms & Defense: @databricks · @Replit · @perplexity_ai · @glean · @krakenfx · @shieldaitech · @Apptronik All sourced via secondary markets. Models to metal.

Two frontier labs. One accelerated computing platform. Congrats to @SpaceX and @AnthropicAI on the new compute partnership, powered by 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs inside Colossus 1. The future of AI runs on NVIDIA.

SpaceX as a vertically integrated AI compute company makes an insane amount of sense.

SpaceXAI and @AnthropicAI have also expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity

SpaceXAI will provide @AnthropicAI with access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers, to provide additional capacity for Claude → x.ai/news/anthropic…

We’ve agreed to a partnership with @SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity. This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.

First coding, now finance. The playbook is super clear: go deep into massive verticals, ship workflow-specific agents, wrap them with services/SI partners for enterprise last mile, and keep buying or partnering for proprietary data. AI platforms are becoming vertical operating systems. What vertical is next? Frontier labs will only go deeper and deeper as they get more data from customers and the flywheel spins...

New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more. Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.

Anthropic may have found the fastest route into enterprise AI: private equity’s cap table. WSJ reports Anthropic is nearing a ~$1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, and others to sell AI tools into PE-backed companies. Claude is now going after the companies PE firms already own, already advise, and already pressure to improve margins. That changes the sales motion completely. Instead of fighting one CFO at a time, Anthropic gets a top-down lane into entire portfolios. Here's what we know so far: → Anthropic, Blackstone, and H&F are reportedly putting in ~$300M each → Goldman Sachs is expected to add ~$150M → The venture would develop and sell customized AI tools → The target is PE-backed companies, not random enterprise buyers → The job is not just model access, but implementation inside operations That last point is the whole story here. The bottleneck in enterprise AI is no longer “can the model answer?” It’s: Can it touch workflows? Can it change processes? Can it survive legal, finance, HR, procurement, and security? Can it actually move EBITDA? Private equity is the perfect test lab for that. Centralized ownership. Clear ROI pressure. Hundreds of portfolio companies. A mandate to cut costs, grow faster, and exit higher. This is AI distribution through capital control. The old PE playbook was leverage + cost discipline. The new one may be leverage + Claude agents. And if this works, every major AI lab will want its own version of this deal. Because the next AI moat may not be the model. It may be who controls the rollout.

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

Shout out to @replit engineers and support team keeping everything together as users run armies of agents building everything they ever dreamed of 😅

this has only happened a few times in tech history. a single company becomes the center of gravity for the best tech talent in the world > fairchild semiconductor (late 1950s) > intel (late 1960s) > xerox parc / apple (late 1970s) > google (early 2000s) > openai (2016-2023) anthropic is having that moment right now.

Scoop: Anthropic has gone from rebuffing unsolicited term sheets to discussing funding offers at an over $900 billion valuation. While no term sheets have been accepted, it's one key update amid a historic funding round for the company. w/ my brill colleagues @shiringhaffary @EdLudlow bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

today if you join the right company as an IC, the amount of impact you can have as an MTS shipping code with ai is much much higher than being a CTO. that’s a remarkable change because everyone always thought that the best mechanic for leveraged impact was graduating *up* to managerial life. that’s perhaps no longer the case esp if you’re deeply experienced.

A few good books worth reading: - Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - a classic that celebrates builders. Once you read it, you’ll notice the same characters and events taking place today. - The Changing World Order by Ray Dalio - great for understanding how civilizations rise and fall and how crypto can help create better countries. - From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yu (founder of Singapore) - talks about building a new country, worth reading for understanding nation-building.

Cannot believe this is available for free on the internet Brad Gerstner sits down with Sunny Madra at Stanford University to discuss the economics of AI chips, GPUs, NVIDIA and tokens Sunny is by far one of the most impressive serial entrepreneurs of our time > Co-founded Xtreme Labs, sold to Pivotal > Founded Autonomic, which sold to Ford > Founded Definitive Intelligence, which sold to Groq > Groq ultimately sold to NVIDIA, in their largest ever M&A deal at $20 billion Shoutout to @apoorv03 for hosting them in his MS&E 435 class and publishing these talks for us to listen!

Follow the bottleneck. Chips → data centers → grid equipment → power → gas turbines Grid equipment grew 1%/yr for decades. Then data centers showed up as an entirely new buyer. Gas turbine makers shipped 5–7 GW/yr. Last year? Orders hit 100 GW. @maxlbcook on how he follows the bottleneck across the AI power ecosystem ⬇️

We’ve invested deeply in security at Replit, including our recent launches with Security Agent + Auto-Protect. If you want to move your app to Replit, we’re offering free app imports for a limited time. Bring your app over and keep building safely. Get started here: replit.com/free-import

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone. No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum. Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too. Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund. It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital. And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee. — Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital. Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring. But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line. This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in. Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition. But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital. USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages. It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere. There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid. Get access here: usvc.com

Kraken @krakenfx is a powerhouse and this is a great acquisition. @Bitnomial moves fast and has good regulatory positioning.

You can now configure your app hosting region. Especially useful for compliance & privacy laws.