Jon Lai

a few tips for @speedrun applicants: 1) brag about your team. what's the most impressive thing you've done? we look for a history of excellence - professional, academic, personal achievements, side hustles, weekend projects etc 2) founder market fit. what's your earned insight into your problem space? what gives you an unfair advantage? why will your team win vs the competition / frontier labs? 3) product validation. what have you already built? there are so many ways to quickly prototype these days. what tests have you run to validate that people want what you've built - revenue, users, waitlists etc? 4) network your way to a warm referral. this bumps you for priority review. we have >600 Speedrun founders and many more in the broader a16z network. the networking you do here reflects the work you do every day as a founder - recruiting, sales, fundraising, etc you may have noticed >50% of these tips are about the team. the most common mistake we see in apps / interviews is that founders spend most of their time talking about the product idea and not enough time on the team. whereas we base our investment process primarily on the team

pretty cool - AI agent builder @lyzr__ai closed a $100M Series B with its own agent helping to run the fundraise process agent handled investor Q&A, wrote diligence memos, tracked engagement across 130+ investors etc killer product demo too - show don't tell!

@julleybuilds 100%

@Tocelot that tech is wild for kids bc it finally stops the robotic wait time that kills their flow

my kids love GPT Live. full duplex enables it to handle interruptions and follow along as my boys chatter naturally - no more awkward silences or talking over they'll chat for hours about every little question and part of their day what an incredible time to be a kid

@internetkid @athyuttamre They’ve been crafting D&D type adventures already for each other! I expect the genre expansion to happen quickly =)

@Tocelot @athyuttamre What a time to be a kid. Try having them build games for themselves in Codex! 👾

@infragrid @a16z @speedrun @ashwinkodib @ephraim888sun welcome to Speedrun! let's build!

Today, we're excited to introduce Infragrid. We're thrilled to announce that we've raised our pre-seed from @a16z and will be joining the @speedrun SR007 cohort this July. Our mission is simple: turn the last mile of work into software. Every company has a massive competitive advantage hidden inside the way its best people work. That operational knowledge lives across playbooks, screen recordings, documents, spreadsheets, emails, business systems, and years of experience -- but it's rarely captured as software. Infragrid is a workflow intelligence company. We've built a software factory that compiles workflow intelligence into production software. By capturing how businesses actually operate, Infragrid automatically generates connected data, compiled workflows, browser automations, and AI applications—all from a single platform. We believe the next generation of enterprise software won't be hand-coded from scratch. It will be compiled directly from how businesses already work. We're just getting started. Huge thanks to our a16z speedrun team @kenanhsaleh @tkexpress11 , @_CallMeMacy, @Chen, @custo_lejla, @tmhammer, @andrewchen, @tabishgilani, @emilybenn12, @thetalentcarver, @nazzari, and @justmazer. If you're building in commercial real estate, banking, or insurance and want to automate complex operations with AI, we'd love to talk. hello@infragrid.ai

Unreliable systems and misbehaving agents are surprisingly similar. Odd behavior. Messy leftover state. After graduating from @andy_pavlo's lab @CMUDB, @17zhangw and I started @OneWillAI to adapt decades of database solutions to today's agent problems. onewill.ai/blog/2026/stea…

@lmwnshn @andy_pavlo @CMUDB @17zhangw @OneWillAI Let’s go team! Excited for the future of gamified agent UX =)

@sarthakcore Yup continuous learning ftw

this is spot on i think people often confuse a launch with actual traction. the secret isn't just having beats it's making sure every beat creates real feedback loops that actually change product direction instead of just generating hype for a week. continuous learning is the only sustainable GTM strategy these days

Always Be Launching pre-AI, a launch was a single moment in time. you'd spend months prepping the team, polishing product, lining up creators, wordsmithing PR etc. that playbook stopped working a while ago the best founders today launch in micro-beats: - beat 1: we formed a team and joined a16z Speedrun! - beat 2: announcing our company, website of what we do and why - beat 3: product v1 release / preview, video of how it works - beats 4-6: customer case study, product update, key hire etc think of launch as a series of small beats that compound. after every beat - you gather feedback, learn, and iterate. michael truell famously launched Cursor 8 times before it took off another heuristic - if you're an early-stage startup and a month or two has gone by with no public launch beat, you might be skewing too conservative on GTM

@kseniam0s You might be waiting forever!

@Tocelot don’t wait for the right & perfect time because it may never come

@xiz25 There’s usually a tipping point where you’ve compounded enough that one of your beats pops off

@Tocelot The launch doc is where old launches get stuck. The better signal now is a trail of small proofs: a rough demo, a screenshot users corrected, a feature people asked to try again. Which beat usually tells you the launch is real?

@Chipagosfinest Easy to go down the product building rabbit hole and stay there for a while. And sometimes that does work! But more forgiving to do the small iterative launches imho

@Tocelot compounding wins are how you get momentum. crazy how often people get lost in the sauce and forget.

@ByblosRadar Yes important to gather feedback and learn after each beat!

@GoldenbergLior Awesome, build that tower!

@Tocelot Dud that today. Shipped a product Which is a full product offering with value propositin by itself but serves the grabd mission. Step by step. Building a tower

@tahaishret it’s definitely a video meta these days!

"always be launching" is right. and every beat that goes viral is usually a video. that's what we make. here's a recent one ⬇️

@audrlo Hah thanks Audrey - @quolabsai is a great case study for this!

@Tocelot true

@hannaan_atomik Nice! how do you distribute the videos?

@Tocelot We make launch videos, and make them go viral through our distribution network. 23% of X launches run through us :) !

@sujoygolan It’s like music! =)

@Tocelot A series of small beats is a great way to put it!

@bonlee__ Never stop launching =)

@Tocelot The microbeats never stop! You can keep spinning this for 3-4 years

@PimDeWitte @khoslaventures @generalcatalyst @JeffBezos @ericschmidt @NicoRosberg Congrats Pim and team!

Today we're announcing our $320M Series A at a $2.3B valuation, led by @khoslaventures , with @generalcatalyst, @JeffBezos , @ericschmidt, @NicoRosberg, alongside leading researchers from frontier labs and academia.

@PavanKumarNY Let’s do it!

@Tocelot gotta keep launching!