Timo Mulder - eu/acc 🇪🇺🇳🇱

.@tobi says most companies think about recruiting backwards: “My job is to make a company worthy for the best and brightest to work for. This is the part everyone skips. Everyone is like “We need a better recruiting team.” When you just need to be worthy of the kind of talent you would like to have. Talent eventually takes care of itself. There are not that many good companies to work for. There are not many companies that deserve the attention of people who are the most capable people, because those people have the option to start their own companies.”

Ukraine launched one of its largest drone attacks of recent months, setting Russia’s Ryazan oil refinery ablaze and striking military targets across multiple regions. The refinery processes 17.1M tons of oil annually and sits just 180 km from Moscow, The Kyiv Independent. 1/

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

@0xTwilty @fundstrat @ethereum

I think we can all agree that $ETH is severely undervalued here at $2,250. @ethereum is currently sitting at around a $270B market cap, yet it’s becoming the foundation for tokenized finance, stablecoins, RWAs, and on-chain settlement. • BlackRock is building on Ethereum • JPMorgan is tokenizing funds on Ethereum • Stablecoin adoption keeps accelerating • Regulatory clarity is advancing in the U.S. And I think most of us can agree that a $1T+ market cap for $ETH is far from unrealistic. The market still hasn’t fully priced in Ethereum’s role in the future of finance.

As I predicted on All In, the inflation three-handle is back… the war isn’t ending… the chances of a rate cut are flipping to a rate increase…. our debt is surging FASTER… and Trump’s ratings are at an all-time low. valuations disconnecting from fundamentals to the point of making folks on CNBC telling retail to pump the breaks The MAGA civil war rages on A Golden age for the gilded, but the working class remains stalled and forgotten. Yet somehow @TheDemocrats will still figure out a way to lose 😂😂 🤦

US orders travelers on Air Force One to throw away gifts, pins, and burner phones after China trip techcrunch.com/2026/05/15/us-…

Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) is the Chairman, CEO, and co-founder of @circle, the issuer of USDC — a stablecoin with nearly $80 billion in circulation and a core piece of the broader stablecoin market, which has grown from zero to more than $300 billion over the past decade. In this fireside, YC Visiting Partner @nemild sat down with Jeremy to talk about Circle's founding vision of building an internet protocol for dollars, the wave of institutional and regulatory adoption now reshaping the financial system, and why agentic economic activity, not just consumer payments, might represent the most transformative frontier for stablecoin builders in the years ahead. 00:00 - Why Stablecoins Matter 01:45 - Circle's Origin 07:10 - Top Use Cases for Builders Today 11:22 - Consumer vs. Business Adoption 13:20 - Banks & Institutions Enter the Space 17:54 - Global Regulation Landscape 22:40 - AI Agents & the Agentic Economy 26:15 - Missing Infrastructure for Builders 27:38 - Three Big Predictions for Stablecoins

@adcock_brett How long do you expect the robot will last @adcock_brett ? Are we talking weeks or months until failure?

We're live for Day 3! Watch our humanoid robots running 24/7 with full autonomy. We will be running until robot failure x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

What you need to know about the CLARITY Act.

Trump clearly sold out Taiwan. When asked on Air Force One on the way back from China whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, Trump replied: “I don’t want to say. That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said, ‘I don’t talk about it.’” Trump also said, “On Taiwan, President Xi feels very strongly about it.” It’s clear China got the green light to move ahead, especially now that the U.S. is bogged down in the Iran war. Under Trump, our allies can’t trust us, and our adversaries don’t fear us.

The biggest alpha leak of 2026 is that you can tokenmax $10k/mo with OpenClaw/Hermes + GBrain and get the AI that everyone will have in 2028 for $100/mo, but you can get it now, and that is the biggest single unlock you can have vs your competition

@GJarrosson Which startup is this @GJarrosson ?

A PhD student just got into YC building a spy drone that looks exactly like a bird. Counter-drone systems ignore birds. Too many false positives. So the drone flies completely undetected. To stop it, you'd have to shoot every bird out of the sky. That's not a product insight. T hat's first principles thinking at its sharpest. It reminded me of Elon spotting a toy car with a single-cast chassis. That observation became Tesla's gigacasting advantage. The outsider sees what the expert stopped questioning years ago. YC is backing more of these founders now. Domain expertise helps. But it's not the ticket. A clear problem, a defensible insight, and proof you've done the work. That's what gets you in.

@garrytan @grok is this true? Does AI break all 3 assumptions that socialism runs on?

Socialism runs on three assumptions: 1. Resources are fixed — redistribute them 2. People can't help themselves — defend them 3. You need a coordinating class to do both AI breaks all three. Not for land or housing. For knowledge, skills, and services.

Hard leftists and DSA-types will fight AI tooth and nail because AI is the universal solvent for socialism’s three prerequisites. AI will reduce scarcity (abundance), eliminate victimhood (agency), and eliminate the need for intermediaries (disintermediation).

@Jordan_W_Taylor @bscholl @grok is it true that methane gas is one of the cleanest fossil fuels? I thought I heard that methane gas in the frozen toendra’s of Russia that would escape due to global warming would be a catastrophe for global warming.

The gas turbine is the miracle machine that will save our climate. Yes, I know, it's a fossil fuel. Boo, hiss, “he's behind you!” etc. But bear with me. Methane gas is one of the cleanest fossil fuels out there, emitting far less carbon dioxide per Megawatt-hour than coal, oil or wood and with none of the particulates and complex toxic byproducts that those villains gift to the locals. So if you're going to replace the dirty stuff, you could do worse than burn gas. And gas turbines are far more of a standard product than bespoke and tricky nuclear power; even the aristocrat of the breed, the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT). This is a dual loop power generator that takes the waste heat energy of a methane-burning gas turbine and uses it to boil water and rev up a steam turbine for a second swing at things. CCGTs are among the most efficient machines humanity has ever created, with thermal efficiencies of 60%-64%, and even up to 68% for the best of the best. That's basically wizardry. Furthermore they've been an enormous environmental gift to the world, despite their mucky fossil-fuel credentials. The advanced economies of the West have spent much of the last few decades gently flattening, and then sharply reducing their gross carbon emissions, and much of that is thanks to the replacement of coal-fired heating and generation with gas. Is it perfect? Hardly, and the hard missile rain in the middle-East, and soaring gas prices, paints a very clear picture of what can go wrong. It's an unfortunate moral bargain that so much of civilization's fossil energy is inextricably bound-up with well armed authoritarian regimes. Is it pure chance, or is the resource curse a deadly reality? Hard to say. But gas-fired generation and the gas turbine that enables it deserves its place on the podium of power.

@lennysan Football coach ⚽️

Question on my mind right now: What role is least impacted by AI (so far)?

Today, I held a meeting with the heads of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Defense Intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Security Service of Ukraine. Three key areas were discussed. First, we are defining targets for our next long-range sanctions against Russia over this war and the strikes against our cities and villages. Ukraine will not allow any of the aggressor’s strikes that take the lives of our people to go unpunished. We are entirely justified in our responses against Russia’s oil industry, military production, and those directly responsible for committing war crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians. I am grateful to our warriors for their dedication to defending Ukraine’s interests, and to all involved Ukrainian institutions for building a truly strong system of our long-range sanctions. This is having a tangible impact. Second, we continue to document Russia’s attempts to draw Belarus deeper into the war against Ukraine. We know that additional contacts have taken place between the Russians and Aleksandr Lukashenko, aimed at persuading him to join new Russian aggressive operations. In particular, Russia is considering plans for operations to the south and north of Belarusian territory – either against the Chernihiv-Kyiv direction in Ukraine or against one of the NATO countries directly from the territory of Belarus. Ukraine has details of the conversation between Russia and Belarus. Ukraine will undoubtedly defend itself and its people if Aleksandr Lukashenko makes the wrong call and decides to support this Russian intention as well. I instructed our Defense and Security Forces of Ukraine to strengthen the relevant direction and to present our response plan, which will be reviewed and approved at the Staff meeting. Third, specialists from the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine obtained documents indicating that the Russians are preparing new missile and drone strikes against Ukraine, including, as they describe them, against “decision-making centers.” Among these are nearly two dozen political centers and military command posts. Of course, we have taken this information into account. But it is worth emphasizing specifically for the Russian leadership that Ukraine is – after all – not Russia. And unlike the aggressor state, where there is a clear author of this war and a long-standing circle around him that sustains his detachment from reality, the source of Ukraine’s defense is the readiness of the Ukrainian people to fight for their independence and for their own sovereign state. Ukrainians deserve their sovereignty just like any other nation. The people cannot be defeated. Russia must end its war and negotiate a dignified peace, rather than searching for new ways to intimidate Ukraine. I thank everyone who is helping. Glory to Ukraine!

Sam Altman: “The most underrated quality of all is being really determined” “The most underrated quality of all is being really determined. This is more important than being smart. This is more important than having a network. This is more important than a great idea.” As Sam explains: “The hardest thing about starting a company is the level and frequency of bad stuff that happens to you… So much of being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up. When we have funded people who had a great idea, perfect background on paper, a great product, and it still failed — it has usually been that they’re insufficiently determined. I think this is the most important, non-obvious skill of a founder.” He continues: “Of course you need a good product and a good market and to be smart, but that’s really obvious. But the degree to which being a 3- or 4-standard deviation outlier on determination as a required skill of a CEO is not something that was obvious to me when I started.” Source: @talksatgoogle (Oct 2017)

@itsolelehmann @grok summarize this tweet in max 140 characters

I'm German. Germany's ENTIRE AI data center capacity is less than 1/2 of just one site being built in Texas. We have 530 megawatts of AI data center capacity in the entire country. The US has 8.2 gigawatts. That's 15x more compute on a country with only 4x the people. Per German, the US has roughly 4x the AI infrastructure. One university computer at MIT is 4x faster than Germany's most important commercial AI facility. The obvious reaction here is "so what, German companies can just rent compute from AWS." But that's the same logic Germany applied to Russian gas for two decades. Roughly 70% of German enterprise AI today runs on American cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Which means it runs under American law. Every AI tool running in German hospitals, courts, ministries, banks, and factories sits on a foreign platform. Here's why this can actually become problematic. Imagine these scenarios: > The next GPU generation launches and American companies get access first because they own the data centers. German firms wait 12 months and pay 2-3x more for what's left. > A frontier AI model gets released and US export controls block it from being deployed in Germany. SAP and Siemens watch American competitors integrate it for a year before they can. > And in the worst case, a US president decides to use AI access as leverage in a trade dispute. German companies get cut off from the models their American competitors are still running. All of them are compounding problems that will negatively impact the German economy (and everyone's standard of living/jobs etc). None of this is hypothetical. > The US pulled Starlink as leverage with Ukraine in March 2025 > Chip exports to China have been throttled for three years > And the CLOUD Act lets the US demand any data stored by American cloud providers (even when the customer is a German company and the servers are physically in Germany). Germany doesn't have an answer for any of those scenarios today because the infrastructure that would make those answers possible isn't built yet. Now look at why this is actually happening on the ground. In the last 3 months Germany rejected 3 AI data center projects in a row: > Groß-Gerau, February: Vantage Data Centers, €2.5 billion, 174 MW. Voted down 18-14 by the local council > Maintal: EdgeConnex, €1 billion, 170 MW. Blocked over a backup gas generator the developer needed because grid connections in Germany take 7-10 years and a data center is built in 2 > Freyenstein, Brandenburg, April: 700 MW AI campus. Killed by protests before construction €3.5 billion in AI infrastructure turned away in one quarter. And the situation is more urgent than it looks because compute is getting harder to access, not easier. NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs are already allocated through the second half of 2027. The American hyperscalers locked in the bulk of new production with forward orders placed in 2025. TSMC's advanced packaging lines (the actual bottleneck) are sold out through 2026. Germany has no hyperscaler of its own. That means German industry sits at the back of the queue, and the gap compounds every quarter that goes by. Where Germany is falling short right now comes down to three things: > Public backlash, because the case for what AI data centers actually do for a country has never been made to the people voting on them > Industrial electricity at €0.16-0.18 per kWh vs about $0.08 in Texas. For a 1 GW campus that's $700-900 million extra per year just for power > Grid connections taking 7-10 years for large facilities when the data center itself is built in 2. No serious operator runs on math where the wait is longer than the build And the first one is the biggest. Electricity policy and grid timelines are fixable. Public consent isn't, until someone makes the case that this infrastructure isn't nice-to-have. It's the foundation everything else runs on. The average person only feels the downside (noise, rising electricity cost, terror attack vector) We have a big messaging and marketing problem around data centers and why they are critical for everyone's future. Germany still has the foundation to win this if it moves now. Germany adopted its first national data center strategy in March 2026. 28 concrete measures, annual progress reports, doubling overall capacity and quadrupling AI capacity by 2030. The plan exists. The Industriestrompreis launched on January 1st of this year. It targets 5 cents per kWh for half of an industrial user's annual consumption. If data centers get cleanly pulled into that framework, the electricity cost gap with Texas gets significantly closer. Deutsche Telekom turned on 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in Munich in Q1. One facility increased Germany's available AI compute by roughly 50% overnight. And the demand is already domestic. SAP, Siemens, BMW, BASF. The German industrial anchors that benefit most from AI are German companies. The customers are at home, the infrastructure should be at home too. And this is the thing that most people forget. Germany won the second industrial revolution. By 1900 German chemical output had passed Britain's, Siemens was wiring the world, and BASF and Bayer were inventing industries that didn't exist before they built them. The companies that came out of those decisions are still the largest employers in Germany 130 years later. Germany sat out the third industrial revolution, the software one, and that was survivable because software didn't run factories. But AI runs factories. It runs hospitals, logistics, courts, and financial markets. This one is infrastructure in the same category as railways and chemical plants. The plan is written and the money is ready. The only question left is whether the country will let it get built. There's a lot of work left to do, but I'm staying optimistic.

At one point my son and his friend kept looking for shortcuts to getting rich. Over and over I told them the way to do it is just to make something people want. If this is what I tell my own kids about getting rich, why won't politicians believe this is how a lot of people do it?

Sanders and AOC introduced a bill to pause ALL AI data center construction. 300+ local bills filed. Half of planned 2026 data centers facing delays or cancellation. Each one brings billions to local economies. The people who say they want American jobs are trying to block the biggest job creation engine since the interstate highway system.