Pascal Unger

Early-stage hiring can be a lot like venture investing: It's power-law driven: a few people contribute most of the value. So it’s far more important to hire the best people than it is to avoid making bad hires. Which means you’re not making mistakes, you’re likely not taking enough swings. It's also people-focused rather than process-focused or role-focused. When you’re looking for venture investments, you’re not pre-defining everything at the outset. You're not saying something like “okay, I have 15 companies I'm going to invest in, 5 will look like this, 5 will look like that, etc. They should have this kind of product, have these kinds of metrics, have these sorts of strengths." Instead, you meet a lot of companies, and occasionally you meet one where you’re like, “Wow, these founders are GOOD. We need to invest in them, because they are generally putting it all together in some unique and differentiated way, that we never could have pre-defined a priori, but when you see it, you absolutely know. Once you identify that company, then you do whatever it takes to get them; doesn’t matter whether there is a “slot in the portfolio” for that kind of company, you just do it and you regret nothing. The best hires do not come from pre-defining “Mission, Outcomes, Competencies” and then searching for people who fit those requirements. The best hires are much more likely to come from a process where, everyone at the company gets together and says, “Okay, who are the two dozen absolute best people we know, and how do we hire those people, for some role.” You identify those people, you spend a lot of time with them, and then the minute they become available on the hiring market, you are ready to make them an offer immediately; and you just figure out a job for them. The parallels to VC don’t end there, the toughest part about hiring a superstar is not the diligence process, but the winning. The best candidates are in extreme demand. The close process must similarly be tailored to that person. Make the process fit the candidate vs the other way around. To be sure, this analogy is most relevant when it is in a value-creation role at a hot company that can attract elite talent, not a value-preservation role or for non-elite talent. What distinguishes these rare and exceptional people is that, in addition to doing a great job at what they’re known for, they will also reach into all of these corners of your company and tie off every loose end and fix every broken pipe and tune up the whole machine way beyond what any job description could ever have anticipated, or any hiring manager could assess for. Great people like this are just absolute risk-killers inside your company; just like great founders are. They will just sit at their desk for hours and crank through fix after fix after fix for the pure love of the game and for the good of the team, and after the fact you’ll look back on the work they did and think, “wow, the impact they’ve had is so beyond anything we could’ve articulated.”

Under the directives of the President of the UAE, we launch a new government model. Within two years, 50% of government sectors, services, and operations will run on Agentic AI, making the UAE the first government globally to operate at this scale through autonomous systems. AI is no longer a tool. It analyses, decides, executes, and improves in real time. It will become our executive partner to enhance services, accelerate decisions, and raise efficiency. This transformation has a clear timeline. Two years. Performance across government will be measured by speed of adoption, quality of implementation, and mastery of AI in redesigning government work. We are investing in our people. Every federal employee will be trained to master AI, building one of the world’s strongest capabilities in AI-driven government. Implementation will be overseen by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, with a dedicated taskforce chaired by Mohammad Al Gergawi driving execution. The world is changing. Technology is accelerating. Our principle remains constant. People come first. Our goal is a government that is faster, more responsive, and more impactful.

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

Anthropic made its first dollar three years ago. last month it crossed $30B in revenue. that money is coming from somewhere, and your CFO probably can't tell you where. the problem isn't the spending. the companies on Ramp investing the most in AI have more than doubled their revenue since 2023. the problem is that no one can see where it's going: which team drove the spike, whether it's COGS, Opex or R&D, if commitments are actually being used. your AI providers aren't going to help you spend less. they're not going to tell you a competitor's model does the same job for a fraction of the cost. or that an open-source alternative works just as well. so we built something. Ramp pulls token-level usage data directly from Anthropic, OpenAI, and OpenRouter into the platform where you already manage cards, bill pay, and procurement. connect an API key — five minutes, no engineering — and finance can see every dollar by provider, model, team, and project. free for all Ramp customers. if you want it too, Veeral shows how to set it up in minutes. the companies building financial discipline around AI now will know where to double down and where to cut. everyone else will be explaining to their board why their fastest-growing cost is also their least well understood.

Cancer is cured by AI. GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij was diagnosed with stage 4 spinal cancer. Every trial rejected him. His doctors had nothing left to offer. So he stopped being a patient. He built an AI research team. Fed them 25TB of his own medical data genomics, scans, treatment history, everything. The system found a treatment his entire oncology team had missed. Then engineered 19 custom vaccines from his own DNA. Relapse-free since 2025. Then he uploaded the entire blueprint. Free. For every person sitting in that same room, hearing the same verdict, with nobody left to call. Medicine runs on averages. AI runs on you.

Starting tomorrow at 12pm PT, Claude subscriptions will no longer cover usage on third-party tools like OpenClaw. You can still use these tools with your Claude login via extra usage bundles (now available at a discount), or with a Claude API key.

EMPIRE STATE EXODUS: FC Barcelona, the world-renowned soccer powerhouse, is closing its NYC office and moving its North American HQ to Miami. A South Florida real estate executive says the state's “liberating” business climate, supportive government and global reach are pulling major brands away from traditional hubs like New York.

A CEO from one of our portfolio companies shared this with their team. I’m re-sharing it with their permission, because it resonated and reflects what all founders and CEOs should be communicating. -- We are living through a period of compounding change. And in moments like this, the biggest risk is no longer making the wrong decision. It is moving too slowly while the world moves around you. There are two paths. We can play defense: - Protect what we have - Optimize what works - Wait for clarity It feels safe. It isn’t. Or we can play offense: - Learn faster than the environment changes - Use new tools to solve old problems in better ways - And create entirely new strategies and businesses That’s where the opportunity is. Challenge yourself to do things faster and better than you have ever attempted. Stay uncomfortable. Stay on the front foot.