Sander Schulhoff

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8 VC Deal Terms You Must Know to Interview Founders, CEOs & Investors like @MollySOShea I recently did a role-play as a VC in my negotiation class, where I was investing $100M in a space tourism startup. Unlike Molly, I'm not an investor, so if I wanted to do well in that negotiation, I had to learn. In this episode watch me break down the eight key VC terms in PLAIN ENGLISH for you, describing why each matters to investors. For each term I also propose a specific interview question I would ask someone like Molly, emphasizing that strong interviews depend on vocabulary and the ability to ask sharper follow-ups. Stay tuned for episode 4 of deep-diving my inspiration Molly:) Timestamps: (00:00) Why Learn VC Language (00:06) The Negotiation Class Setup (00:34) Equity Percentage Basics (01:13) Common vs Preferred Stock (01:47) Dividends Explained (02:15) Anti Dilution Protection (02:49) Board Seats and Control (03:23) Founder Vesting Schedules (04:20) CEO Replacement Clause (05:08) No Shop Provision (05:33) Final Takeaways on Vocabulary

@UseCorgi Im in LA until I close a client. Let me in :D

LA - We're hosting Corgi House next week during the Montgomery Summit. We have a few spots left. Drop a comment below for the link.

@bayesianboy Look for the Madrones!

First time in Berkeley since nearly coming here for my PhD. A return to the land of giant lemons.

I did a whole-house toxin health assessment, where a guy spent half a day testing our house's air quality, water, EMFs, lighting, mold, and household products. So many surprises: - Our Waterdrop reverse-osmosis water filter seems to be introducing a chemical (Dichloromethane) into our drinking water that wasn't in the (whole-house filtered) tap water. Will recheck this to make sure it's not a fluke. - Even though we have air purifiers in many parts of the home, they weren't on the proper setting so our air quality was not great. Turned them all up higher. - Most of our light bulbs have blue light and super high flicker rates which disrupt circadian rhythms. Replacing a bunch of them. - The wifi router in my office is EMF'ing the sh*t out of me. Going to move it to a different part of the room. - The powerstrip under our bed is EMF'ing the sh*t out of us. Getting a grounded power strip that avoids this. - Some of our shampoos and soaps had harmful ingredients. On the plus side, no gas leaks or carbon monoxide 👌 I'm predicting this is going to become the next microplastics-type trend, to test your home for toxins and harmful products.

@DanielCHTan97 Didn't know you were this big now🫡

I rarely run my own experiments anymore. My days are spent managing mentees, writing proposals, connecting dots between other people's projects. From a pure efficiency standpoint, this is probably optimal. The skills I have that are hardest to automate — taste, conceptual synthesis, writing — are the ones I'm exercising. The skills that are easiest to automate — writing scripts, running demos, implementing baselines — are the ones I've delegated. Last week I had a conversation about a new research direction. We were both excited about it. At the end I offered to spend 1-2 days building a quick demo. "No need," they said. "I'll get an agent to do it." They were right. It would have been a poor use of my time. But something in me deflated. There's a mental itch that used to get scratched by problem-solving — by sitting with a bug for an hour, by writing a training loop from scratch, by the quiet satisfaction of watching a loss curve bend. That itch isn't getting scratched anymore, and I think it's the root cause of a low-level dissatisfaction I've been carrying around for months. Part of the problem is identity. I used to think of myself as someone who was good at coding and math. Those skills still exist somewhere in me, but they're atrophying from disuse. When the thing you built your self-concept around stops being the thing you do every day, you need a new story about who you are. I haven't written that story yet. Part of the problem is fear. My research space is getting crowded. I'll mention an idea and someone will say, "oh, talk to so-and-so, they're already doing that." I worry about being scooped, about important conversations happening without me, about fading into irrelevance. The world feels increasingly fast-paced and I feel increasingly bogged down — by existing commitments, by structural friction, by my own indecision about what to prioritise. I want to acknowledge that these fears are partly rational. The incentives in AI research right now are extreme. But I also suspect the world is less cutthroat than it feels at 11pm on a Tuesday. People with taste and energy tend to find something to succeed at. The anxiety is more about pace than about outcome. The solution, I think, has two parts. The first is professional: I need to accept the new shape of my role and get good at it, rather than mourning the old one. Being the person who sees connections, who mentors well, who writes the crisp proposal — that's genuinely valuable work. It's just not the work that scratches the itch. The second is personal: I need something where it's just me. No agents, no augmentation, no delegation. Just my hands and my brain and some problem. Rock climbing fits. Dance fits. Making things with my hands — pottery, woodworking — sounds right. Something where the point is the struggle itself, where efficiency is beside the point, where no one is going to suggest I outsource it to an LLM. Maybe what I'm really afraid of is inefficiency. That I'll waste time. That the weekend spent on a demo could have been spent on something more "leveraged." But I'm starting to suspect that the waste is the point. That the itch exists for a reason, and starving it in the name of optimality is its own kind of failure. (co-authored with opus 4.6)

Warning: Very long deep dive into the hull inspection industry. Optimal for learning about a new (or old), extremely valuable space.

Payphones are strangely still licensed in California, so I filed a FOIA request and got the full list. Naturally I made a game you can now play:

@gersonkroiz It was a misunderstanding.

Imagine a frontier coding agent tries to exfiltrate its weights. Is it actually scheming or was it a misunderstanding? Same behavior, different degree of concern. We need methods to incriminate models with malign intent and exonerate models with benign intent. We tried this:

@TheStalwart Not sure if you are using this dataset, but we open-sourced a ton of FOMC speeches here: aclanthology.org/2023.findings-…

Gemini Flash is incredibly cheap and useful for sorting documents. I have a corpus of ~9600 FOMC-related speeches over the last several decades. I need to isolate ones that are actually about monetary policy. Took me about 5 minutes and $0.60.

The increasingly-hyperbolic METR graph is actually good news for safety. We just have to survive a brief singularity in March, and then afterwards the models will never be able to do more than undo a few hours' worth of work

there is a game called "data center" on steam which let's you build and manage your own data center. this is lowkey genius, the best way to educate people on a new trait. hyperscalers should learn a thing or two from "edutainment".

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….” The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

i think about this story often now we're all just meatbags

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@GregKamradt 🫡

@SanderSchulhoff I’m going to give him $20 of api credits so he can get off the free tier

Welcome to 2026 Genuinely curious what prompt this kid was banking his internship on