Slow Ventures

America invented drones. Then China took 70% of the market while we debated permits. The airspace below 500 feet is the most valuable undeveloped real estate in the country, and we're not even allowed to use it. New deep dive from @angelesahr on why the low-altitude economy is a $1T+ infrastructure layer hiding in plain sight. See reply for full deck.

OpenAI is a distressed company, AI is boring now, and @brit called the Taylor Swift wedding before anyone else. Full quad tomorrow, 8am ET / 5am PT. Catch it wherever you get your podcasts. Topics: -OpenAI offered the U.S. government a stake, distress signal or marketing? 
-Trump Accounts, Gwen Shotwell donates SpaceX equity 
-MacKenzie Scott, stop judging her philanthropy 
-AI labs are killing their own developer ecosystems 
-Are frontier AI labs actually distressed businesses? 
-Should Microsoft just sell Xbox? 
-Brit is bored of AI, evolutionary, not revolutionary 
-Post-AGI funds are premature, physical AI is next 
-Going long on offline, the World Cup, concerts, and real life 
-Vox Americanus update 
-Taylor Swift's wedding strategy

The post-agent business believes and embraces that software and cognitive/computer-based labor is going to zero. And so the post-agent business counter-positions its product, go-to-market, and strategy around context, attention, trust and brand to produce nfx.

I sat down with Michael Brown the CEO of Teamshares on the eve of their NASDAQ debut for a special edition More or Less ... it has been a hell of a ride over the last 7 years and more to come! (link in thread)

"There’s a huge amount of shovel-ready projects in the country, and no amount of AI job displacement will solve the fact that all of our bridges are falling down." @yrechtman's ideas for how to put AI-displaced citizens back to work

In typical fashion, hollywood and wall street are years behind tech and silicon valley. @mmlightcap can probably teach these folks a few things, if she's feeling generous :)

Taking $10M when you need $2M doesn't fund your success. It funds your inability to admit you were wrong for 5 extra years. @wquist

You could always hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines for $400/mo. Most people didn't. Same thing is happening with AI. The market for general intelligence tools is just power users who already pay for it via headcount. @justinbanusing

Goldman Sachs has a massive engineering team and is barely using AI in their investment bank. If that's where we are with the sophisticated end, the deployment decade hasn't even started. @yrechtman

Creators have negative CAC. The content that builds your audience is the same content that acquires your customer. You get paid to grow. This is core to how we think about our Creator Fund. The organic audience isn't just a nice marketing asset. It's a durable cost structure advantage that shows up in the margins before you ever touch paid.

Branding yourself as an 'AI product' is a liability now. The companies that win just say 'I save you 10 hours a week' and let the tech be invisible infrastructure. @CloutedHQ

The best investments are the ones where everyone hated the deal. Andreessen passed on Solana at $0.04. Showing up despite being tired is the actual alpha. @lessin on @petkevichdan Cars and Capitalists

reminder: you companies worth is directly related to how much value you create for customers. doesnt feel like it needs to be said, but here we are.

Limited drop only: shop.slow.co/products/when-…

It's time to wear what we've all been thinking...

Anthropic suing the Trump admin while its co-founder preps a Vatican AI speech. Rome wasn't built in a day but the AI religion is moving fast. History rhymes harder than expected. @lessin

Nobody believes in you, so make them. Announcing our $7M seed round led by @Slow.

Selling out 40,000 seats with zero existing followers isn't a content strategy, it's @CloutedHQ's formula for an era of distribution-first marketing. "The only thing remaining valuable is distribution and data. The Clouted team has built real infrastructure for a problem that every brand and creator in the world has but nobody has solved at this level." @lessin Today, Clouted is announcing their $7M round led by us, alongside @GoldHouseCo, @weekendfund, @ZVC_Official, @GondorCapitalIO, @IterativeVC, @AppWorks,@_surgeahead, and @speedrun.

“Caviar bumps.” Wine pairings. How to read the room. Welcome to tech bro etiquette school. on.wsj.com/4eUThoa