Mehdi

@GilboaAmitay @AriaWestcott Congrats @GilboaAmitay !!

We got an 8-figure acquisition offer 2 days after launch. We said no, because the problem we're solving is worth way more than that. It’s 2026, but teams are only getting lonelier, and context is still the problem. The issue isn’t intelligence. Your team has plenty of that. It’s shared memory and context, the thing that makes 10 A-players feel like 1. That’s what we’ve solved with @playdotfast, while making work more fun. We're killing traditional SaaS, and believe you me, we're leaving no holds barred.

@paddy_dex Just dm-ed.

Officially an a16z speedrun scout! 🕵🏻‍♂️ Participating in Speedrun last year helped catapult Dex to our recent $5.3M Seed round. Now I get to pay that forward. I want to back pre-seed founders who've faced real adversity and built serious grit and resilience. People from different (even difficult) backgrounds working on moonshots that make people's lives significantly better. For teams that fit, I'm ready to offer: → $10k investment, even from day 0 → Insider advice on what the Speedrun team looks for and how to stand out → Direct a16z referrals so you can skip the inbox Apps for the next cohort close May 17th. Over the next few weeks, the team is investing up to $1M +, providing $5M in AWS/GCP/OpenAI/NVIDIA/ credits to the 70+ companies they'll invest in. If you're a fit, shoot me a DM.

@ThibaudSultan Thank you @ThibaudSultan! Looking forward to seeing how things unfold for Obside!

@HotaitMehdi Congrats for the launch!

If you struggle to feed your AI the right context, or manage that context, when building presentations, we'd love to hear from you. Whether you build decks using Claude or Tesserae we realized one of the limiting factors to getting the right deck is working with the right context. Context about how you write, how you reason, how you visualize, and how your audiences like to consume all of it. Most AI manages that context in a static and opaque way, at best updating it through a mechanism you don't understand. It's hard to maintain, hard to keep up to date, and hard to even know what your agents are actually using from what you've fed them. This is an experiment we're running to see if we can more accurately extract the relevant preferences and judgement from your past work, review it, and dynamically update it. So you don't have to. You can then use that context in Tesserae, Claude, or ChatGPT. @kabgaspard and would love to hear your thoughts. Link to Beta below.

@sumukhanadig8 Thanks Sumukha! Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

@HotaitMehdi using this for my next deck!!

@gauravsbuilding @kabgaspard Thanks Gaurav, appreciate the support!

@HotaitMehdi @kabgaspard Congrats guys! Looks great. Very bullish

@BenSltn Thanks ben!

@HotaitMehdi Nice work!

@XiJin12 Thanks Jason! Looking forward to getting your feedback on the Beta!

@HotaitMehdi Looks nice!

@kabgaspard What’s context?

@HotaitMehdi Asked Claude or your favourite LLM to create a presentation for you and got AI slop? You're probably not giving it enough context - this one's for you

@_tenZdhon_ Run as many experiments (2-3 days max) as you can.

founder to founder whats one advice you would give to someone in pivot hell

A big four consultant told me last week that none of his partners have actually downloaded the Claude app. They use it through the browser if at all. Meanwhile his firm is now tracking senior managers on AI usage at promotion time. The people deciding how the work changes are often the furthest from how tools actually work.

@1Umairshaikh Co-founders have felt that pain too.

Solo founders, how do you deal with the moment when your product works but nobody shows up?

@dr_cintas Really cool.

Link: styles.refero.design Follow me @dr_cintas for more AI gems like this. And if you want to actually learn AI, I send daily guides the latest resources and full tutorials here: simplifyingai.co

Stop typing “make it look modern”. There are 2,000+ 𝗗𝗘𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡.𝗺𝗱 files from top products. Colors. Typography. Spacing. Component rules. All packed into a single Markdown file your AI reads before it generates anything. → Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt → 100% Free to use Pick a style you like. Drop it in your repo.

@hthieblot Glad to hear it’s not just me.

Everyone loves the idea of being a founder. Nobody loves the reality: 3 years in, 6 pivots, $0 in the bank, and a co-founder who quit. Parents doubt you. Investors Ghosts. But you still show up at 120%. The exit shows the world who you are. The struggle reveals who you are.

@JustDeezGuy @Clara_Gold Thanks for the recommendations, Paul :).

@HotaitMehdi @Clara_Gold Drive up to Napa/Sonoma, buy award-winning wine for $13/bottle and sandwich ingredients at deli, drive down to Mt. Tamalpais, hike up through redwoods to the top, have picnic overlooking entire Bay Area. My favorite solo or date outing there.

6 months ago, I moved to San Francisco. It’s the best place in the world to build, and one of the worst places to stay human. My unfiltered take: 1. SF is both overhyped and underrated The overhyped part: there are a lot of people with incredible resumes who are deeply unimpressive in real life. They were at the right company, at the right time, in the right market, and got carried by the wave. They made money, got comfortable, and now spend their time “exploring opportunities” over coffee, wasting your time. The underrated part: the top 1% here is insane. But almost impossible to get. Hiring in SF feels like being a guy on a dating app: everyone you want is out of your league, and everyone in your league wants someone out of theirs. The best people have unmatchable packages, endless options, and are optimizing for maximum impact: labs, frontier companies, or startups raising $100M pre-seed rounds. If you raised $10M from Tier 1 investors, you’re not hot shit here. You’re a B-player. It’s humbling. 2. There are fewer mission-driven people than I expected Especially on the application layer. A lot of people are in “secure the bag before it’s too late” mode. And honestly, it gives me the ick. The real religious builders I’ve met are often in labs, hardware, biotech, deeptech, defense — places where the work is hard enough that you can’t fake obsession. 3. The status game favors builders This is what SF does better than anywhere else. It rewards obsession. It rewards weirdness. It rewards people who make building their entire personality. Europe punishes that. SF gives it status. If you’ve felt like an outsider your whole life because you care too much, work too much, think too radically, or refuse to be chill about things that matter, this city will make you feel less insane. 4. The market liquidity is absurd Even if you don’t build a billion-dollar company, if you manage to build a strong product with a great team, someone smart might still acquire you for $ 100M. Yeah I know, it’s not your dream outcome as a founder, but on the days you feel desperate, it helps to keep going. 5. SF does not care about the meaning crisis that’s coming Anyone paying attention here can feel that something massive is happening with AI. But I’m shocked by how little people talk about the meaning crisis coming next. Everyone wants to talk about AI liberating humanity. Almost no one wants to talk about what happens when work — the thing that gives most people identity, structure, dignity, status, and purpose — starts disappearing. The vacuum will not be peaceful. People are underestimating the chaos that comes from humans suddenly having no idea why they matter. And I really feel like no one cares. 6. Personally, I’ve never been more unhappy I moved to SF and entered the matrix. I’ve always been intense. I’ve always worked crazy hours. But here, I lost the last parts of myself that were not about building. I don’t go to events. Most networking events feel like theater for people pretending to be important. The only events worth going to are small, curated dinners with people who are actually alive. I’ve made 0 real friends. I don’t do well with transactionality. I don’t do well with people constantly performing greatness. I don’t do well with rooms where everyone is optimizing and no one is being honest. So yes, SF is lonely, transactional, delusional, addictive, inspiring, boring, extraordinary, and completely insane. But it is still the only place to be right now if you’re a founder trying to build the next wave of humanity. And for now, that’s enough.

A hard truth @kabgaspard I have had to accept: most teams don't like building decks from scratch. They recycle. A slide from last quarter's board deck, a chart from that investor presentation you gave in March, the exec summary you spent three hours perfecting and never reused. So we built Quarry. It lets you assemble new decks from your past ones, whether they were made in Tesserae or somewhere else (PowerPoint, Google Slides exports, etc.). Once you've got your skeleton, keep editing and adding slides using your favorite model (Tesserae, Opus 4.7, whatever you prefer). Public beta link to Tesserae in the comments. Would love your thoughts.

Been building and deploying AI for enterprise workflows for over a year. A single brain for an entire company would be a huge unlock, but I doubt it works once you're past a few hundred employees. Any product in this space needs to be highly specialized. Anyone have a list of startups with proven traction here, beyond the usual ones like Glean, Atlan, or Playerzero?

This is going to be a tarpit idea. It’s good in theory, but impossible to pull off unless it’s an internal company effort by a tyrant like CEO. An external company will never be able to build a software that results in a company brain. It’s mostly because no tool will have perfect adoption from all employees and data will always be fragmented across new systems. Chaotic systems are very hard to capture. It’s impossible to perfectly extract data from all sources as companies evolve and introduces new data sources. You will spend all the time keeping track of the data instead of doing actual work. This is same trap that the second brain productivity folks fall for.

@rxhit05 Referral as (unless subsidized) it's much more likely to correlate positively with all three other metrics.

What matters most in your first 100 users? -feedback quality -revenue -retention -referrals