
Jon Lai
6.8K posts

Jon Lai
@Tocelot
GP @a16z @speedrun 🌱 | former PM @RiotGames @TencentGlobal | dark souls fan & dad to 3 zerglings




30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-





AI has transformed how video is created. We think the next wave is about understanding it. Over the past few years, we've seen remarkable advances in video generation, editing, avatars, and creative tooling. An increasingly important problem is teaching machines to search, analyze, reason over, and extract insight from video - across massive libraries and live streams alike. We're calling this video intelligence, and we're actively looking to back founders building here. We're most excited about companies pushing on the core capabilities: - Video-native models - multimodal embeddings, temporal reasoning, and retrieval built specifically for video rather than adapted from image or text - Real-time and large-scale pipelines - infrastructure for processing, indexing, and querying video at the speed and scale enterprises actually need - Agentic and reasoning layers - systems that don't just retrieve clips but answer questions, surface anomalies, and take action on what they see The models and infrastructure to make this real are appearing to be crossing a capability threshold right now. Multimodal foundation models are maturing, storage costs have collapsed, and enterprises are sitting on years of unstructured video with no way to use it. That infrastructure unlocks a wide range of applications including media and sports workflows, security and physical operations, enterprise knowledge management, advertising analytics, robotics, and consumer products, where video has historically been dark data. If you're building in video intelligence at the model layer, the platform layer, or in a vertical application, we'd love to talk!

















