Lawrence Lin Murata (e/acc)

At @slopepay, we’re excited to announce our $30M round led by @USV with major participation from @sama - bringing our total equity/debt funding to $187M. Since launching in Aug ‘21, we are over 8 figures in ARR and are a lean team of 18. In the midst of this excitement, I wanted to share color on what it took to get to where we are. A 🧵

Very excited that our book, Shipping Machine Learning Systems: A Practical Guide to Building, Deploying, and Scaling in Production, is now available. Early in my career, Martin Kleppmann’s Designing Data-Intensive Applications gave me a framework for thinking in systems. It stuck with me not because of flashy techniques, but because it was clear, opinionated, and grounded in real-world constraints. When I was shipping ML systems at my startup, Datmo, and later at One Concern and Best Buy, I kept running into challenges no book had fully prepared me for. My co-authors, Anand and Mohamed, saw the same patterns in their own work. - Systems, models, and agents that silently decayed in production - Debugging pipelines with logs, traces, and version control - Evaluation setups misaligned with actual product outcomes - CI frameworks using LLM-as-a-judge to catch regressions - Architectures that didn’t survive first contact with users - Constantly shifting constraints: latency, cost, throughput, org structure These are the kinds of issues that led to this book. We structured it around the crawl → walk → run progression most teams follow (or should). The goal was to document what we wish we’d known at each stage, and the tradeoffs that matter in practice. Whether you’re working with traditional ML models or AI agents, building infra or running models in prod, I hope this book helps. Thanks to many who have reviewed or contributed to the book! @chipro @Hassan_Sawaf, Riham S., @emadelwany, @_moelgendy, Ritesh Bajaj, @anders_ai, Sahil Khanna, @qasimmunye, @LawLM @qasim31wani @melissapan and others. Cambridge: #description" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">cambridge.org/us/universityp… Amazon: amazon.com/Shipping-Machi…

YC S21's @slopepay is partnering with Amazon to bring fast, transparent, and affordable financing to eligible U.S.-based Amazon Sellers. Independent sellers now represent 60%+ of Amazon’s sales, yet access to affordable financing remains one of the biggest concerns for small business owners. Slope is helping close this gap – unlocking growth, supporting entrepreneurship, and strengthening one of the most important engines of the U.S. economy. Congrats on the launch, @LawLM, @alicevdeng, and the Slope team! cnbc.com/2025/12/16/slo…

Startups are hard and building something from scratch is challenging. It feels like just yesterday when it was just @alicevdeng and I working out of my apartment where we would always joke around about working with the likes of @Amazon one day. Startups are strange that way -- things move slower than you hope day to day, but faster than you expect year to year. Hard work and relentless focus really do compound. 4 years later, here we are. Don’t bet against “slope”!

@victorcardenas Love it

Slash keeps up Ramp at night.

With so many daily AI workflows and tools, it’s crazy to think of how much changes downstream when better models get released

Congrats @tankots @SahajGarg6 @WisprFlow! It's been exciting to see your trajectory since Stanford/CS+Social Good to now Wispr. Wispr became a crucial part of my daily productivity stack and works so much better than other solutions.

Slash, @slashapp, just crossed $150M in annualized revenue profitably. We went from $2M -> $150M in 24 months making us the fastest-growing business banking* platform of all time. 700 word post on 4 guiding principles that got us here. This cost us >$10M dollars to learn... (Bookmark this) I'll cover: • Picking the right market (where 99% of founders go wrong) • Why revenue is the ONLY business metric that matters • Why market saturation is fake • What every founder does day to day that they shouldn't 1. Attack “small” markets: Startup founders - myself included - gravitate towards working on companies that have huge upside. Here's the problem: it’s difficult to find aggressive product-market fit / build a differentiated product if you don’t sell ONE offer to ONE person. I'll repeat: one offer, to one person Examples: • PayPal didn't start by trying to own 70% of online payments they started with payment processing just for eBay merchants. • Uber started as black cars for rich SF people. Ask yourself, what am I selling and to who? If you're selling more than one thing to more than one person, in the beginning, you're not niche enough. Slash started by building a better credit card for SNEAKER RESELLERS. Ridiculously niche. And that tiny wedge alone got us to $5M ARR in 11 months. Once you dominate the niche, you earn the right (and the cash) to expand outward. We STILL go after “small” verticals because our competitors are too arrogant to do it. We walk in and own them. 2. Revenue is the only metric that matters. Everything else is cope. If your revenue isn't growing, nothing else matters. Revenue gives you two things: A) Money to redeploy. (Obvious.) B) Momentum. A team that’s winning wants to work harder. A team that’s losing checks out. To become a unicorn, you have to outwork everyone else. To outwork everyone else, you need morale. To get morale, you need wins. To get wins, you need revenue. Everything ladders back to one thing: Sell more, sooner. Drive sales and demand → everything else falls into place. 3. “Market saturation” is fake. When starting Slash, everyone told us we'd never be successful because Ramp, Brex, and Mercury were already worth > $10bn. The reality is that fintech is only 5% penetrated. 95% of business deposits and corporate card spend still runs through the legacy banks. Many markets are similar to B2B fintech. They can “feel” settled because there is a sexy startup that everyone’s heard about, but dinosaurs have all the rev share. There's always a way to find your wedge. 4. 99% of founders do the wrong thing at the wrong time When you start your role as the founder is to do EVERYTHING. And you should outsource nothing. Example: If you run an ecom business you should write film and edit EVERY single script. If you're a CTO you should write every line of code. Biggest 🚩in an early stage founder is someone who says they need to "outsource to an expert". No. You ARE the expert or you become one. Founders who outsource early are lazy. When you grow this needs to change rapidly. >10M ARR you need to SHIFT fast. Your role as the founder should be to bring in people competent enough to deliver on all of your initiatives. There is simply too much to do and it won’t be possible for you to brute force your way out of every problem. We're winning because 65% of our team is on the spectrum. We have savant engineers who this year alone have, shipped treasury, Stablecoin Payments, check deposits, SWIFT, Global USD, accounting automations, a completely new interface, and more. We have a world-class GTM and ops team. Because of it, we blow our competitors out of the water when it comes to revenue / employee, payment volume / employee, and other efficiency metrics. -------- If you have read this far, thank you. I got told countless times Slash would never be anything. We want Slash to be the first trillion dollar fintech company in the world. At our current growth rate we'll hit 1 billion dollars in revenue run rate in 18 months and 100 billion in 7 years. We’re giving it our all to accelerate our growth rate and hit these metrics even faster.

We’re excited to announce our partnership with @Samsung, bringing Net 60/90 payment terms* directly into the Samsung Business checkout experience. * Slope is a financial technology company, not a bank.

One underrated effect of AI is how much it’s raised the baseline of health knowledge. The average person I meet today understands nutrition, sleep, fitness far better than five years ago. Often thanks to AI surfacing insights that used to require me digging through research papers. Since health compounds like money, this easy access to health advice / info will meaningfully improve the longevity and health of AI-native generations.

Accidentally said “assumptions” instead of “priors” and they kicked me out of SF

SlopeScore from @slopepay is the first cash flow score purpose-built for business lending, helping fintechs, banks, and lenders unlock more credit access for SMBs. Congrats on the launch, @LawLM, @alicevdeng, and the Slope team! slopepay.com/blog/slope-lau…

Today, we’re incredibly proud to announce SlopeScore, the first cash flow score specifically built for the complexities of SMB lending. What started off as internal tooling is now available to fintechs, lenders and banks.

Excited to share our new partnership with Alibaba, the world’s largest B2B marketplace. Thank you Spencer from Bloomberg for covering our story. This milestone is especially close to my heart. My parents have run a toy wholesale business in São Paulo, Brazil for more than three decades. Since I was 6 years old, I was helping them organize paperwork, manage products, handle the cashier, and order inventory from China. I grew up living the very challenges that small business owners face -- balancing day-to-day operations with the seasonality, exchange rates, customs, and shipping timelines that can make or break a business. During the pandemic, when my parents could no longer fly directly to China to source inventory from factories, they turned to platforms like Alibaba. Fast forward to today, I’ve had the privilege of going to Stanford, studying AI with amazing professors like Andrew Ng, and building a company focused on solving the exact pain points my parents struggled with -- now in partnership with the very platform they depend on. Because I’ve been in their shoes, I’ve poured my heart into building tools that help businesses get approved for financing when traditional lenders would say no. Just last week at Alibaba’s CoCreate, I heard these same struggles firsthand from hundreds of buyers navigating tariffs and working capital challenges. Especially in this tough tariff environment, it’s an honor to stand beside these businesses when they need us most and to bring this vision to life together with our partners at Alibaba. Pictured below: Me as a baby in my parent’s wholesale toy shop in Brazil and me now :)

All tech progress boils down to figuring out how to turn energy into leverage. The timeline accelerates because each breakthrough creates better ways to extract more leverage, then compounds as we do it again.

Happy great lock-in of Sept-Dec to those of you who celebrate!

People with a large context window have a competitive advantage, even more so now than ever

Memory is never static. Useful patterns that endure become wisdom

Is “hallucination” a feature of thought itself? Historically many who pushed the edge of knowledge eventually went crazy

We tend to get even more signal from what questions candidates ask than from their answers. It really shows what they care most about vs what they want to tell you about.

Can’t imagine life without AI. Despite limitations, it feels like adding a few new direct reports