Hadley Harris

The bottleneck for world models is data. And unlike LLMs, world models will need fully licensed training data, a lot of which is going to come from video games. Origin Lab is building the bridge between AI labs and the industry sitting on it. Congrats on the $8M seed, thrilled to be backing this team!

I’d bet most of these companies got funded primarily on the founder, not the theme. The “hot” theme of the year almost never produced the most valuable company of the year. The outlier founder did, usually working on something the consensus hadn’t caught up to yet. Exceptional founders see the future before everyone else. Too many VCs try to predict the future and then find founders to align with it. But for most truly transformational companies, the bet is on the founder who has seen a future few else have.

I remind myself of this quite often.

I’d bet most of these companies got funded primarily on the founder, not the theme. The “hot” theme of the year almost never produced the most valuable company of the year. The outlier founder did, usually working on something the consensus hadn’t caught up to yet. Exceptional founders see the future before everyone else. Too many VCs try to predict the future and then find founders to align with it. But for most truly transformational companies, the bet is on the founder who has seen a future few else have.

Lots of skewed data about the seed market right now. Cleanest picture I could pull:

Nobody talks about this, but trading cards are one of the largest hobby markets on the planet. Pokémon alone has outsold every video game franchise in history — by card revenue. Sports cards never lost their audience. They just never got a great digital home. That changes today. @Trovexyz lets you rip sports and TCG packs from your phone. Not browse. Not bid. Rip. The most addictive moment in the hobby, rebuilt for your screen. We've backed a lot of founders. The ones who win in consumer are almost never the ones who "identified the opportunity." They're the ones who couldn't imagine doing anything else. @mkatz0630 is that founder. 2x @EniacVC-backed. A collector long before he was a builder. He didn't study this market — he grew up in it. That's not a detail. That's the whole thesis. The best consumer companies aren't built by people chasing TAM. They're built by people who are a little obsessed. Mike is a little obsessed. And Trove is live today at @Trovexyz.

I already use Oboe for most of my learning and the new version looks 🔥. Can't wait to dig in!

AI is making you stupid. Today, we're introducing the all new Oboe, designed to make you smarter. Think about the last 10 answers you got from an LLM. How many of them do you actually remember? Probably none, because LLMs are not good teachers. But @oboelabs helps you learn the way humans are supposed to: through guided conversations, frequent checks for understanding, real-time adjustments, and multiple formats for all learning styles. Here's everything we're introducing today:

@laneburgett Super excited to be involved!!!

Actor has raised a $4M seed round. I am excited to show a snapshot of what our deployed robot models can do in the real-world. We're incredibly grateful to be supported by investors from Eniac Ventures, Hyperion Capital, Hummingbird VC, 2048 Ventures, Nova Fund, Vanderbilt Alumni, and many incredible angels. If you are interested in deploying machines with us, contact me : )

You may have never heard of MoPub. Or MAX. But they built the invisible rails of mobile advertising. @jimpayne did both. MoPub was the mobile ad exchange that wired up the smartphone internet — sold to Twitter in one of the defining ad tech exits of its era. MAX became the mediation layer that every major app publisher depends on today. Two companies. Two categories defined. And now Jim is back for a third time with @cloudx, leveraging the largest computing shift of our lifetimes -- AI. Most founders never get one of these right. Jim has done it twice — and he's not done. On Episode 31 of the @humanunicornpod, we get into the full arc: what he learned building at scale during the mobile boom, why he kept coming back, what founders consistently get wrong about timing and distribution, and what he's seeing now that makes CloudX the bet of his career. Three-time founders are a different species. This one will show you why. 🎧 Link in comments

@RonghanZhang I can see why

@Hadley Dude is a top-rated.

Damn, this might take awhile

@atiq020 You should send this to @nihalmehta. I'm a Celtic fan

@Hadley the Knicks swept Philly. Dominated them. You must be in a great mood. Any chance I can pitch you?

@mignano While my gut still says most people will choose the convenience of a single-provider, all-in-one-box solution, I think there’s going to be a subset of the population that wants to control its own data. And even if it’s just that subset, that’s still a very big company.

Mother’s Day should be on a Monday. Moms get the day off, kids go to school, dads go to work.

@butshaunn @MarqueeNY 😆

@Hadley @MarqueeNY Most people optimize for salary. Some people accidentally optimize for identity compounding through late night sets.

Fun fact, when I graduated college I used my signing bonus to buy turntables. Been getting back into it recently. Here’s a live set I played last night at @MarqueeNY on.soundcloud.com/5tren3hJr8q8Kf…

@tryattention is quietly crushing it amongst generational scaling leaders like Anthropic, Profound, and Snowflake. ps. Best gift to my mom for Mother’s Day 🙃

@deedydas @tryattention is the quiet killer on this chart

This graph of the top 69 software products by growth vs adoption is the best snapshot of the current winners and losers in tech. — Scaling leaders (Anthropic) — Incumbents at Risk (OpenAI) — Rising Challengers (Granola) — Long tail (11x) Spend data from Ramp, up to Mar 2026.