Jon Lai

6.8K posts

Jon Lai banner
Jon Lai

Jon Lai

@Tocelot

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

San Francisco, CA Katılım Eylül 2008
2.6K Takip Edilen44.1K Takipçiler
Sabitlenmiş Tweet
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
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
English
48
26
576
34.4K
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
@MaikaThoughts We’ll miss you Malika! But so excited for your next adventure! 🙌
English
1
0
2
313
Fareed Mosavat
Fareed Mosavat@far33d·
Agent-native products are coming. Every product on the internet was built for a human with eyes, a cursor, and a credit card. Agents have none of those things. Most companies are teaching agents to pretend to be humans. That's a hack. The real opportunity is products designed for agents from scratch. Everything inverts: • Discovery → protocol registries, not ads and billboards • Trust → machine-readable reputation, not brand • Onboarding → full capabilities upfront, not a narrow slice • Payments → spend authorization, not checkout flows • Retention → zero. Agents switch between API calls. 30 years of human product design. Day one of agent product design.
English
47
18
122
18.5K
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
@far33d agent native infra is the future!
English
0
0
1
106
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
we love working with international founders looking to build a bridge to the US - @speedrun can help you with everything you need to build in the US from visas to customs to banking to talent 🌎
Tom 🔨@tmhammer

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-

English
20
2
95
8.5K
Yoshi Mua
Yoshi Mua@yoshi_mua·
@Tocelot @speedrun Hey @Tocelot ! Our team is entirely comprised of 1st gen american/immigrant and international. I'm looking for a bridge to the US for half my team. 👋 We're building something really cool in consumer AI for intra-family lending.
English
2
0
2
75
Daviesolu
Daviesolu@DavidAkinl33695·
@Tocelot @speedrun Building the bridge! We’ve applied with Millenia, a living simulation MMO where every player action ripples across a global ecosystem, an unscripted world. Excited for the chance to scale this vision over the developmental phases with the @speedrun team.
English
1
0
3
49
Luke
Luke@Luke_rc01·
@Tocelot @speedrun We can help you maintain that number for SR007. Two cracked founders from Colombia 🇨🇴 — we already applied.
English
1
0
5
69
Troy Kirwin
Troy Kirwin@tkexpress11·
We're launching a new program @ NY Tech Week for global founders starting with Israel June 1 - 7 we’re bringing 7-10 Israeli founders to NYC for a curated Tech Week experience - up to $ 5K to cover travel cost - small dinner with the a16z speedrun team - access to executive buyers/customers at our AI Faire - invite to VIP a16z events - and more meanwhile, there’s a bunch of other awesome Israeli focused and general Tech Week events that week to attend if you’re an Israeli builder just beginning to think about starting a company and want to test your ideas with the US market: apply below!
Troy Kirwin tweet media
English
56
40
602
561.8K
Misan
Misan@imis4n·
@Tocelot @JasonSCui been waiting for this. video is still such a black box for most tools - search barely works, can't reason about what's actually happening in the frame
English
1
0
1
59
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
request for startups from my partner @JasonSCui - video intelligence companies teaching machines to search, analyze, reason, and extract insight from video
Jason Cui@JasonSCui

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!

English
15
1
52
11.1K
Mandar Wagh
Mandar Wagh@waghweb·
We are not video intelligence in the traditional sense but we sit one layer upstream. Before any robotics model can reason over video, someone has to clean, validate, and standardize the training data. That is Black Robotics. The robotics vertical you mentioned is exactly our customer. blackrobotics.tech
English
1
0
2
105
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
@manee_sha_rma @speedrun we accept many solo founders! just go into detail about your background and what you've built, and then any plans to hire folks as the company scales
English
1
0
3
102
Jon Lai
Jon Lai@Tocelot·
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
English
48
26
576
34.4K
Matt Beebe
Matt Beebe@TheMattBeebe·
@Tocelot @speedrun Does #2 ever outweigh #1? Seems like solo founders can't overcome lack of a strong #4 (which I painfully admit makes sense tbh) even with a solid story around #3
English
1
0
1
153
H
H@rotatingcabinet·
@Tocelot @speedrun Jon, what happens when you guys select the first 70? Do you guys stop parsing through the applicants? Just wondering if you make it through everyone
English
1
0
0
150