Alex Nicita
1.1K posts
Is anything new actually being said in AI other than growth adoption, lawsuits, fraud, job fear, & incremental “breakthroughs”?
Am I missing something? What should I be asking?
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NY is trying to plug a budget hole by retroactively taxing startup exits (by decoupling from QSBS)😔
California did something similar in 2012, but fun fact: it was not for budget reasons.
CA used to offer QSBS tax breaks only if companies did most of their business in California. In 2012, it was ruled unconstitutional because it discriminated against out-of-state businesses.
So instead of fixing it, California repealed its QSBS benefits entirely and applied that change retroactively, clawing back money from people who had exits years earlier.
California’s ecosystem gravity is too strong for a 13.3% state tax difference to overcome, but it does accelerate the relocation calculus for individual founders approaching a liquidity event, I know plenty of people who moved before a liquidity event, and the same is likely to happen in NY.
NY, CA, and WA are all trying their hardest to see who can be the least entrepreneur-friendly.
nihal@nihalmehta
New York is about to make a massive mistake. The NY State Senate is advancing a proposal to decouple from federal QSBS (Section 1202) — the tax provision that lets startup founders exclude gains on qualifying exits. If this passes, founders would owe 10-13% in combined state and city tax on exits that are tax-free at the federal level and in nearly every other major tech state. Even worse: it's retroactive to January 1, 2025. This comes right as the federal government just expanded QSBS benefits and New Jersey moved to full conformity. New York wants to go in the opposite direction. As a seed investor in NYC who has backed hundreds of companies, I can tell you: founders are mobile. If New York becomes one of the most punitive states for startup exits, the best founders will simply build somewhere else — and the jobs, tax revenue, and innovation will follow. NYC has built something special over the last two decades. This proposal puts it all at risk for a short-sighted revenue grab. If you're a founder, investor, or anyone who cares about the NYC tech ecosystem — please sign the TechNYC open letter before Monday below 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 Keep building, NYC 🗽
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Just spent two hours talking to this guy about AI:
- completely changed the game
- most efficient team member
- outperformed with limited resources
- misunderstood in the court of public opinion
- always has the answer
Turns out he was actually talking about Allen Iverson.
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Actual Saturday in the life of this mid-30s guy in the suburbs:
4:30am - wake up
5am - 12 mile run
6:30am - lift
8am - cook breakfast for family
9-5pm - activities w/ family
5pm - cook dinner for family
6pm - sauna
6:30pm - movie w/ family
8pm - sleep
Wouldn’t change a thing.
Murray Hill Guy@MurrayHillGuy1
Day in the life of a mid 30s guy in the suburbs (Saturday edition/no kids): 7:30am — wakes up before his alarm anyway 8:00 — walks the golden retriever 8:30 — chug a black coffee 9:30 — Costco run that somehow turns into $347 12:30 — eats samples like it’s lunch 2:00 — “quick” nap that ruins the rest of the day 4:30 — stands in the backyard staring at nothing 6:00 — gets yelled at by his wife for something he definitely did wrong 7:30 — 1.5 beers = exhausted 9:15 — falls asleep mid-movie he picked 2:30am — wide awake for no reason, contemplating everything Same script every weekend
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@abemurray What’s the routine? @jantschulev has an amazing process for the perfect pour
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i'm just playing for fun - it's never been more fun to play and build
you get deep into it, the problems are just as challenging as writing code back in the day
but you can spend more time in the flow of the truly hard problems
not the annoying code pieces of them
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if you make your coffee right it's like drinking a cigar
just heavenly in the mornings
yes i am weird
(also, cats. you're welcome)
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@JoshConstine I wish more founders had soft-landing opportunities, especially young ones. It’s tremendously difficult to navigate M&A as a teenager, much more so than building the future you want to see, IMO
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Pretending you want to acquire a company to steal ideas isn't just lame.
You are giving that founder the revenge motive / super villain origin story that's makes them grind like hell to destroy you. And you deserve it.
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Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) describes how @MichaelOvitz and CAA took over Hollywood:
"One of the practices was at every agency, they would have their staff meeting at 9AM. The staff meeting would go from 9AM to 10AM. Then at 10AM, they would start calling their clients.
So of course Michael's like, alright. We'll have our staff meeting at 7AM. We'll be done at 8. Between 8 and 9, we'll call the clients. And by the way, we won't just call our clients. We'll call their clients.
Imagine you're Paul Newman. Your agent calls you at 11 — I've got this great role. And you say, the guy at CAA called me about that three hours ago. Your agent is like, they don't represent you. Paul is like, yeah, isn't it great? Isn't that fantastic?
You rinse and repeat that a thousand times.
The people running competitive agencies were managers. Not founders. Not the same thing.
The thing a manager never does unless they're under duress is reconsider fundamental assumptions. They hate that. The whole point of running something big is you don't have to do that. You get to run the big thing at scale.
This is what our founders do every day. Industry after industry after industry."
David Senra@davidsenra
My conversation with Marc Andreessen (@pmarca), co-founder of @a16z and Netscape. 0:00 Caffeine Heart Scare 0:56 Zero Introspection Mindset 3:24 Psychedelics and Founders 4:54 Motivation Beyond Happiness 7:18 Tech as Progress Engine 10:27 Founders Versus Managers 20:01 HP Intel Founder Legacy 21:32 Why Start the Firm 24:14 Venture Barbell Theory 28:57 JP Morgan Boutique Banking 30:02 Religion Split Wall Street 30:41 Barbell of Banking 31:42 Allen & Company Model 33:16 Planning the VC Firm 33:45 CAA Playbook Lessons 36:49 First Principles vs. Status Quo 39:03 Scaling Venture Capital 40:37 Private Equity and Mad Men 42:52 Valley Shifts to Full Stack 45:59 Meeting Jim Clark 48:53 Founder vs. Manager at SGI 54:20 Recruiting Dinner Story 56:58 Starting the Next Company 57:57 Nintendo Online Gamble 58:33 Building Mosaic Browser 59:45 NSFnet Commercial Ban 1:01:28 Eternal September Shift 1:03:11 Spam and Web Controversy 1:04:49 Mosaic Tech Support Flood 1:07:49 Netscape Business Model 1:09:05 Early Internet Skepticism 1:11:15 Moral Panic Pattern 1:13:08 Bicycle Face Story 1:14:48 Music Panic Examples 1:18:12 Lessons from Jim Clark 1:19:36 Clark Versus Barksdale 1:21:22 Tesla Versus Edison 1:23:00 Edison Digression Setup 1:23:13 AI Forecasting Myths 1:23:43 Edison Phonograph Lesson 1:25:11 Netscape Two Jims 1:29:11 Bottling Innovation 1:31:44 Elon Management Code 1:32:24 IBM Big Gray Cloud 1:37:12 Engineer First Truth 1:38:28 Bottlenecks and Speed 1:42:46 Milli Elon Metric 1:47:20 Starlink Side Project 1:49:10 Closing Includes paid partnerships.
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This is mostly a matter of semantics. "Deep tech" itself is a lazy term. I expect we will stop seeing it before long. Reminds me of how funds used to call themselves "internet" investors. It's also a relative term. Cloud infrastructure used to be deep tech. Where do you, as an investor in 2026, make the judgment call to draw the line?
I understand most investors not feeling comfortable underwriting a quantum company's ability to reach 10,000 qubits. But we are in a very specific technology cycle and macroeconomic circumstance. Engineering and science risks are so deeply interwoven into the overarching story that eschewing them as an investor lops off a fair amount of opportunity. As an anecdotal example, it's nearly impossible to have a grasp on the AI arc without being able to articulate the thesis behind model specific silicon and photonics.
Even if you aren't interested in underwriting materials science, there is still huge justification for immersing yourself in the most important R&D efforts of today. Global supply chains and distribution strategies are evolving around these efforts. Component part manufacturers in wire harnesses, composites, actuators, and motion systems are standing up to serve new-age OEMs. Robotics companies are partnering with financial sponsors to distribute into industrials customers. Are you experienced in understanding supply chain bottlenecks? I hope so if you're professionally allocating capital. But before you have a chance to partner with or underwrite any of those opportunities, you better understand the why now...and the BOM cost of a humanoid...which you can only get to if you give yourself the freedom to explore...
Also, the hardest problems with the biggest prizes tend to attract the best talent. If you're in the business of early stage investing, you definitionally care about finding and backing exceptional people. A natural response to this might be "Hey, my network has never been physics labs, so I am not missing out on anything." That is likely wrong. There are two founders in our portfolio executing exceptionally well on hard tech businesses (anti-drone defense and robotics) that spent the decade prior building in consumer, which is where we first got to know them. "You can just do things" etc etc.
I agree with most of Sam's core premise...competitive markets warrant specialization and questions around right-to-win...but also, no advice in the world has killed more careers (or alpha) than "stay in your lane..."
sam lessin 🏴☠️@lessin
The VC Flight to ‘Deep Tech’ is almost certainly the wrong move for you Mr. Lazy-Narrative VC
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@finn_hulse there are LPs in NYC who have never heard of @endowment_eddie
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@NicitaAlex @jsharkey This is such bullshit. Bank branches closed. And it wasn’t the ATMs that did it: it was online banking, which is the convenient teller replacement this analogy ignores every single time.
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The sentiment right now is AI will take all of our jobs. Especially us engineers first.
But...what if no more jobs is a good thing?
I've never had a real job before.
I've built countless websites and apps, constantly searching for that rush of getting 5, 10, 50 users to use the thing I built. It's addicting and deeply fulfilling.
I am honored to be building the platform that helps millions of people discover that feeling for themselves.
Now is the time to go out and start that side hustle.
`claude --dangerously-skip-permissions`
Steven Schwartz 🦅@cultured
We are excited to announce that @tether, the largest stablecoin company in the world, is making a strategic investment of $200M into Whop, valuing us at $1.6B. Our partnership with Tether marks a major step in building the world's largest internet market. Tether is committed to enabling everyone in the world to participate in the new internet economy. The way humans work and create value is changing fast. The world needs both an open internet market giving people a platform to conduct business, as well as a transparent payments network. Tether and Whop together will work to bring a sustainable income to billions of people throughout the world. There is enormous opportunity when you combine Tether’s global scale and wallet technology with Whop’s community of next generation entrepreneurs. My co-founders and I met as teenagers on the internet selling software. We first launched Whop as a way for us to sell our own software to people in Facebook and Discord forums. Prior to Whop, the place we found customers was different from the place we collected payments, different from the place we talked to customers, and there wasn’t a central place to “do business” on the internet. In partnership with Tether, we will be scaling infrastructure in real-time for new business models as they emerge across the globe. The job is just getting started. 🚀
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Alex Nicita retweetledi
BREAKING: @tryprofound raises $96M Series C at a $1B valuation. CEO @thejamescad joins TBPN live at 1p PT.
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Today, Listen crossed $100M in funding.
Building is easy now. Knowing what to build isn't.
Our AI finds and talks to your users so you don't have to guess.
See how Sweetgreen, Microsoft, and Replit use it:
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Alex Nicita retweetledi
A record breaking $188M was earned by people on Whop last month.
> 120+ people made more than $250K
> 300+ people made more than $100K
> 600+ people made more than $50K
> 2,000+ earned more than $10K
> 35,000+ earned more than $1
There has never been a more important time for an open internet market to exist, where people can exchange ideas, software, and even physical products.
With support for physical products added a month ago, we’ve already created an extra $36M in annualized revenue for our merchant base.
We are now working hard to make it easier for more people to create quality offerings, opening up our payments and payouts infrastructure for other platforms, and expanding our affiliates + advertising products so that everyone has out of the box distribution by selling on Whop.
Next up, we’ll be releasing new things you can do with your earned money on Whop.
More soon 🚀
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