Sabitlenmiş Tweet
Josh Lu
2.4K posts
Josh Lu
@JoshLu
GM @speedrun. Investor at @a16z. Apply here: https://t.co/bbxTvgMK6w You've probably played a game I worked on. Husband, girldad x2, cook, point guard
Katılım Mart 2009
1.2K Takip Edilen12.7K Takipçiler
Agent-native products are coming.
Every product on the internet was built for a human with eyes, a cursor, and a credit card. Agents have none of those things.
Most companies are teaching agents to pretend to be humans. That's a hack. The real opportunity is products designed for agents from scratch.
Everything inverts:
• Discovery → protocol registries, not ads and billboards
• Trust → machine-readable reputation, not brand
• Onboarding → full capabilities upfront, not a narrow slice
• Payments → spend authorization, not checkout flows
• Retention → zero. Agents switch between API calls.
30 years of human product design. Day one of agent product design.
English
If you want to be among the best, you have to build your company in the US. I first came the US when I was 15, and I'm still living the American Dream, pursuing my version of excellence.
There's no program other than @speedrun that would do everything to help the best international founders kickstart in the US. If you've wrestled with H1B / O1 / EB1 / E3 / OPT / STEM and still want to fight for your dream, apply to SR007 now: speedrun007.a16z.com/GF
When they say "they've got your back", Speedrun means it. Special thanks to @tmhammer @andrewchen @JoshLu @zebird0 for all the help on this journey to America.
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
English
I’m officially an alien of extraordinary ability!!
Still a ridiculous phrase, but a useful reminder that for international founders, immigration is part of the startup stack.
You don’t need to start in the US.
But access to customers, capital, talent, and people moving fast matters a lot🇺🇸
Apply. Send the cold email. Get in the room. Apply to Speedrun😉
Also, we’re hiring founding engineers at Sellara :) we're building applied AI for Wall Street, dm me!
Shoutout to the @a16z @speedrun team and especially @tmhammer for the help here!
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
English
My first 6 years as a startup founder:
- Failed with 4+ startups
- Ran out of money multiple times & had $15K credit card debt
- Was rejected by Y Combinator 8 times
- Got 200+ rejections from investors
My last year as a startup founder:
- Got into a16z @speedrun & raised $18M
- Moved to SF & got O1 thanks to @tmhammer & @lighthousehq_
- Scaled Rork to #1 AI mobile app builder in the world
The average journey to a $1B company takes 10 years. I’m on year 7.
Keep building.
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
English
The only reason I’m in SF right now is because @tmhammer helped me get an O-1 visa.
Nilo is now a team of 22 world-class people, and half of them are based in the US. None of this would have happened without @speedrun.
Applications for the new speedrun cohort are open! I’m an a16z scout and can help you prepare and potentially invest, especially if you’re a solo founder.
Also, Nilo is hiring! Links in the comments.
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
English
The U.S has been my home for as long as I can remember, but on paper I’ve always been a guest.
I spent every summer and winter in Los Altos, California, starting the year I was born. I looked forward all year to golfing at Stanford and skiing in Tahoe.
I grew up in a family of founders during the glory days of Silicon Valley. I saw water purification warehouses, animated movie studios, children’s education apps, all built from kernels of ideas into real businesses employing thousands of people, through the sheer determination of my dad and uncle. I always knew there was no other path for me.
So I did all the right things. Went to Duke, studied computer science, learned from the best at every scale of company. I started building things that I thought were cool, trying to figure out what would click and be a real business some day.
But then STEM OPT ran out. 3 shots at the lottery, no H1B. I had to move to London. It felt like the end of the world for me. Partly because I realized I’d be around British people all the time, but more so because it felt like I was being kicked out of my home.
I’ve always believed I was extraordinary and was going to build something great, except now there was a forcing function, and my path back depended on it. So I locked in on building and founded anchr with @tzartaraporvala. The goal was to rebuild the heartbeat of one of the country’s most important supply chains, and fix a trillion dollar industry from the inside.
There’s one firm that we wanted in our corner that cares more than anyone else about rebuilding the core infrastructure of this country – a16z, and we immediately applied to @speedrun. Not only have they been a catalyst for Anchr’s early success, but the team (shoutout @tmhammer) personally supported me through every stage of my O1-A petition.
If you’re a founder trying to find your path to the greatest country in the world by building something special, apply to SR007. Happy to talk through it 🇺🇸
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
English
🇺🇸 WE ACCEPT FOUNDERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD 🇺🇸
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
English
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US
and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up:
* founders building products + teams internationally
* builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope
* students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea
Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun
we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip
you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡
-apply below my friends-
English
AI has transformed how video is created. We think the next wave is about understanding it.
Over the past few years, we've seen remarkable advances in video generation, editing, avatars, and creative tooling. An increasingly important problem is teaching machines to search, analyze, reason over, and extract insight from video - across massive libraries and live streams alike.
We're calling this video intelligence, and we're actively looking to back founders building here. We're most excited about companies pushing on the core capabilities:
- Video-native models - multimodal embeddings, temporal reasoning, and retrieval built specifically for video rather than adapted from image or text
- Real-time and large-scale pipelines - infrastructure for processing, indexing, and querying video at the speed and scale enterprises actually need
- Agentic and reasoning layers - systems that don't just retrieve clips but answer questions, surface anomalies, and take action on what they see
The models and infrastructure to make this real are appearing to be crossing a capability threshold right now. Multimodal foundation models are maturing, storage costs have collapsed, and enterprises are sitting on years of unstructured video with no way to use it.
That infrastructure unlocks a wide range of applications including media and sports workflows, security and physical operations, enterprise knowledge management, advertising analytics, robotics, and consumer products, where video has historically been dark data.
If you're building in video intelligence at the model layer, the platform layer, or in a vertical application, we'd love to talk!
English
@JoshLu Actual footage of me skipping CI’s on that feature creep because it’s time to go to bed 🤣🤣🤣
GIF
English
English
Delighted to announce @meetdexai 's Seed Round, Led by Notion Capital, with @speedrun and @ConceptVC_
covered today in @FortuneMagazine
fortune.com/2026/04/28/exc…
English
Not sure if this is due to the twitter virality or them just generally fixing their mistake but here’s the update… thank you @Taskrabbit for righting your wrongs 🫡🫡
Macy Mills@_CallMeMacy
Okay this is some crazy (bad) customer service from @Taskrabbit. 1. Hired someone to install a washer/dryer. 2. The tasker cancelled as they weren’t able to do it at the time the calendar said available. 3. Get this email from them (photo). Reminder. I didn’t cancel, he did. 4. Write them like “wtf, I didn’t cancel.” 5. They insist on giving me a “one-time exception” of a $97.45 credit to my account to use on my next task. 6. I’ve asked for my money back multiple times, as I didn’t receive the service I paid for. They refuse. Say I’m welcome to charge back on my credit card (which I will). How is this even allowed? 🤯🤯🤯
English
@tkexpress11 @speedrun the powerful thing about this framing is that the context graph advantages can be bootstrapped much more cheaply than classic network effects. you only need a single entry wedge
English
[New] from a16z @speedrun:
Come for the Agent, Stay for the Network
there's a quiet pattern hiding inside the most defensible vertical AI startups right now:
the agent is the wedge
the network is the moat.
here's what I mean:
an HVAC tech needs a part today.
>>Traditionally: hours to investigate, 5 calls, emailing for quotes, waiting days, and comparing PDF catalogues by hand
>>Now: an AI procurement agent identifies the exact SKU, autonomously contacts suppliers, negotiates price, and orders - in minutes
but - the network forming is the real differentiator:
when that agent is operating across thousands of buyers, the system starts seeing real transaction prices - not list prices
> It can tell you you're paying 18% above market
> It can bundle demand across forty facilities and negotiate bulk pricing
= Suppliers start competing to be plugged into the agentic network
these AI procurement agents can become networked, sticky platforms when an industry has some combo of:
+ Fragmented supply and demand
+ Offline suppliers
+ Opaque yet elastic pricing
+ Frequent purchases
+ Different SKUs; or
+ a commoditized product or services
in the past, suppliers thrived off of the offline nature of these markets
with an agentic platform, the demand side can be aggregated and the power balance flipped
you can start to become the interface buyers default to, the channel suppliers need to be on, and the owner of the richest pricing dataset in the industry
by unlocking an efficient marketplace, you can charge on a % of revenue basis vs token or seat basis.
we’re seeing this trend emerge across several SR006 @speedrun companies including Heavi for truck repair shops and Vereda for farmers
few examples of industries ripe for AI procurement agents include:
-- Freight and logistics
-- Agricultural inputs
-- Field services
-- Food service procurement
-- Construction subcontracting
-- Industrial MRO
-- Healthcare staffing
-- And more
if this sounds like something you're interested in, apply to speedrun now
English
Who are all the Brown University unicorns?
Figma
MongoDB
Workday
OpenSea
Casper
Any others?
Olivia Moore@omooretweets
I built a startup incubator at Stanford in 2015 - all of this is absolutely true (and it gets crazier each year!) VCs are ever-present, and the coolest thing you can do is drop out to start a company. Raising money is (IMO) easier than at any other school - no investor wants to miss the next Snap or IG. That being said...I don't think anyone is getting hurt here! For student founders - Stanford makes it very easy to come back and complete your degree. And, you don't get "punished" if your startup doesn't work. Being an ex-founder makes you more attractive as an employee...and as a founder for company #2. Investors spend time at Stanford because it has produced by far the most unicorn founders. If/when Stanford is producing more noise than signal, investors will adjust and spend more time on other campuses (as they have increasingly done over the last ~5 years). It is a fairly efficient system in the long term, even though the lag between investment -> returns means there can be some short-term cycles that look like "bubbles".
English
@JoshLu The singularity is only reached when the AI is productive enough for Josh to accept it
English