villi

Today I am thrilled to announce @Category_VC, an early stage venture firm conceived to provide unparalleled strategic and technical support to founders building enterprise software startups. I am also excited to announce Category Ventures I, our $160 million debut fund dedicated to investing in the most ambitious founders. Our mission is to support founders building category defining companies in AI, infrastructure, developer tools, and applications. Category will have broad flexibility to lead pre-seed and seed rounds with investments of $1.5 - $5M. Category was created with the belief that enterprise founders can be better served by their venture investors. We aspire to build a firm that has strong technical expertise, extensive operating experience, and deep founder empathy. My vision for Category is to be an invaluable partner to founders, capable of providing architectural and technical direction, go-to-market support, as well as strategic guidance. During my career as an investor, I have seen the spectrum of the human spirit — greatness, failure, hardship, happiness, heartbreak, and tears of joy. The founder journey is lonely, hard, and unpredictable. I would like Category to be the best partner to founders, a firm built on a strong foundation of core values — authenticity, kindness, teamwork, and intensity. I am eager to build the Category team and partner with amazing founders creating their own category. Let’s go!

It's been amazing to see the vision that @LinghuaJ and @georgehe0 have coming to fruition. They're building out in the open, engaging with users, and are approaching building a thriving OSS community in all the right ways. I can't wait to see where @cocoindex_io goes in the coming months! Will definitely be writing more about it, but if you haven't already, do check it out!

Pigs are at least as smart as dogs.

My wife spoke to a prof getting a vaccine through FDA approval. They said the admin has gutted the agency where now each turn takes many months extending the approval process significantly.

@lpolovets I imagine the price point is 5-10x of Office.

@villi I wonder to what extent in terms of dollars. For example, I think all of MS Office revenue, including, Excel is $50b/yr.

What's Athropic's coding TAM? The company's at ~$50b ARR, and my understanding is that most of their revenue is from developers that spend ~$5k/yr on avg. Given there are ~20m professional developers globally, does this mean's Anthropic's revenue only has 2x-3x upside from here?

"Orchestrating energy end to end, from how it is procured and stored through how it is allocated to workloads in real time, will be one of the most strategic layers of the inference era."

@pitdesi July and August, I am picking B.

E is the obvious choice but not just because of Italy France Spain Portugal…. Don’t sleep on the Balkan Peninsula and Istanbul!

A fantastic essay on the mismatch between AI power demand and the profile power supply, requiring a new orchestration layer. Excellent read!

Fonseca! Let’s go! 🇧🇷

@GavinSBaker I have been watching your debates on this topic and I find your POV unconvincing. Like selling cars into the Chinese market slowed down the development of their car business. Their semi business is inevitable. Slowing the rise of their AI labs is the only play.

We need to change our policies on China and GPUs. huaweicentral.com/we-are-thankfu…

@jaminball I was not

@jaminball “One of”. It was not talking about the one that has raised the most :)

One of the startups that has raised the most money helping brands show up in AI does not show up in either Claude or Gemini when I ask them for the best tools that help brands show up in AI results. 🤔

Wake up everybody.

Whoa! Congrats to the entire @maintainx team and @CTurlica on building an amazing company and business. I am proud to have played a small role in this story. I wish I can say I found Chris, but the truth is he found me when he was raising his seed round in 2019. He wanted to tell me how he wanted to digitize the big binders that spelled out SOPs for OEMs or risky processes/ environments. And if you digitize your SOPs, then you can also iterate and evolve them. I would recall a Xerox technician coming to our office to fix the printer with 2 massive binders of instructions and SOPs. And it hit me that literally every building, equipment, or process comes with binders of SOPs. That is a big market! Chris was an incredible founder with a big vision. I am grateful he was patient with me and allowed me to appreciate the magnitude of his vision and the opportunity. Congrats to all! adsknews.autodesk.com/en/news/autode…

@QuinnyPig Funny enough, I just read an article in a reputable major publication that perpetuated the AWS origin myth. For some reason that story really stuck.

The AWS origin myth was “we had spare retail capacity, so we rented it out.” Twenty years later, Zuck is pitching the same story with H100s instead of warehouses. Reserved Instances, done in faster motion and with worse margins.

@BryanOffutt Yeah, Wiz was incubated in my basement. The founders were working on an observably tool and I convinced them to focus on cloud security.

The amount of revisionist history in venture capital never ceases to amaze me.

@haridigresses Really terrible! Cant believe he said this out loud. Many shitty VC firms do that to young employees.

Yeah this isn't some clever workaround, you're just popularizing a way to screw your "key employees" over. Fuck you.

The CCP is doing a great job turning Americans against investments that will make us more prosperous. Though in fairness, the administration is doing its part.

Reid is a great investor and an amazing guy. Founders would be lucky to have him on their side.