Adam Nelson

Nearly every large financial institution has an innovation team experimenting with stablecoins.  Nearly every F500 CFO is stablecoin curious. But enterprises are still transacting nearly zero volume. That gap is why we co-led Velocity's $38M Series A alongside our friends and Rain co-investors at Dragonfly. Velocity’s founder Eric Queathem spent nearly a decade at Worldpay leading global strategy and growth. He speaks CFO natively. Our references on him were remarkable in their consistency: top-1% mind, tireless operator, and exactly the person to build the team to 10x stablecoin adoption firstmark.com/story/from-300…

@miamabanta Come visit!

New York isn't a city, it's a living creature. Miss her so much ❤️

@HarryStebbings love to see it !

I have spoken at 100 of the best educational institutions in the world. So many ask: “how do I get into VC?.” I say the same thing; send me three deals per day for 90 days. Simple. Not one person did this. Not one. Until I went to speak at LSE and one incredible student (@NiallKiely20VC) promised me he would. I brushed it off believing he would be like all the rest who gave up after 7 days. Everyday he persisted. His founder recommendations got better and better. He became a part of the team without even joining. Immensely proud to welcome Niall to 20VC for his first week. He earned this with everyday and every founder recommendation. Hustle, persist and never give up.

Damien Lewke (@abcbyDamien) is the epitome of founder market fit. Couldn’t be more excited to be working with him and the wildly talented team at @nebulocksec. AI has rewritten the attacker playbook. The gap between an amateur hacker and a nation-state has alarmingly compressed, and the most dangerous attacks now look completely routine: stolen credentials, valid tokens, and sessions that slip past every tool trained to known-bad signatures. Nebulock flips the model: Vespyr, its autonomous threat hunting agent, works continuously across identity, endpoint, and cloud telemetry to hunt for how adversaries actually behave, already running 300M+ investigations and surfacing 4,000+ high-confidence findings that existing tooling missed, often within hours, in environments running best of breed detection / prevention tooling. What's in front of this team is even bigger: they’re building the foundational security analytics stack, baselined on every identity, endpoint, and resource, with agents that get smarter as the collective intelligence grows. Join the hunt 🎯 @sullivan @rak_garg @dannguyenhuu

@bavaria_kush @a16zcrypto Congratulations @bavaria_kush and team!

Today, we're announcing our Series Seed funding of $33M led by @a16zcrypto

@tuhinone Love this! Congrats Tuhin and team!

Guilds Summit: Where the best share how they build. ➡️ 400+ senior executives ➡️ 30+ speakers ➡️ 4 stages One full day of non-stop learning and connection. Already pumped for 2027!

@yrechtman That’s amazing

Desperately searching for a copy but my neighborhood is too woke. None of the bodegas have the Post!

@packyM @jacsrice's favorite musician

Greatest city in the world and it’s not particularly close.

@JeffreyReitman @entropyVC Congrats dude! Can't wait to get our first new one on the board

1/ After founding a gaming company and spending more than a decade in venture, one thing has become very clear to me: I love early-stage investing. Today, I’m excited to share that I’ve started @entropyVC.

@packyM Rohrshach test determined that I'm on her maturity level (and probably artistic level sadly)

My daughter is drawing a family picture and said this one is “daddy doing a handstand”

@mattturck @yanndubs @OpenAI Awesome stuff!

Why AI Progress Suddenly Feels Real - my conversation with @yanndubs, who co-leads the Post-Training Frontiers team at @OpenAI 00:00 - Intro 01:30 - Why recent AI progress feels like a step function 04:13 - Model reliability & the emotional rollercoaster of shipping GPT-5.5 07:33 - How OpenAI structures vertical and horizontal teams 09:49 - Improving model efficiency and test-time compute 12:32 - Yann's journey from Switzerland to OpenAI 15:37 - Reasoning in 2026: Real-world utility vs verifiable rewards 18:34 - GPT-5.5 Thinking vs Pro: Scaling test-time compute 20:09 - How reasoning models become more efficient 23:23 - Pre-training scaling and overcoming the data wall 27:03 - Multimodal data, synthetic data, and embodied AI 31:05 - Demystifying mid-training and post-training 37:21 - Does RL create new capabilities in AI? 38:53 - The challenges and frontier of scaling RL 43:09 - Is building AI models a craft or a strict science 48:21 - How AI models generalize across different domains 54:18 - How reinforcement learning cures AI hallucinations 56:04 - Negative generalization and conflicting instructions 58:05 - Can RL scale to law, medicine, and the broader economy? 1:00:19 - The evaluation bottleneck and Model as a Judge 1:04:21 - Continuous AI progress & continual learning 1:08:49 - Will foundation models eat the agent harness 1:11:23 - Why startups should focus on the last mile of AI

We're thrilled to welcome @arjundundoo to FirstMark as our newest Investor focused on the consumer tech landscape! Prior to joining us, Arjun was at Bird (NYSE: BRDS), where he helped lead M&A and capital markets. FirstMark has a long history in consumer (Pinterest, Airbnb, DraftKings, Ro, Function Health, Discord, etc.), so we couldn't be more excited to have Arjun joining the team, as we double down on backing and supporting the next generation of iconic consumer businesses. Please join us in giving him a warm welcome 🚀

@davidrgoldberg @alpacavc congrats on a great run! excited to see what's next

🦙UPDATE🦙 After 12 incredible years cofounding and building @alpacavc , earlier this year I informed my partners I would not be raising/investing Fund IV with them. I am incredibly grateful for this time and the great work we did. 4 Venture Funds + 1 RE fund, couple hundred million $ invested into some of the most inspiring founders I've come across. But even more grateful for the learnings and the relationships. A special thank you to the founders (and LPs) that put their trust in me and the team. Not quite leaving just yet…I’ll be transitioning to a Board Partner, working even harder with our current portolio founders, remaining on my Boards. Will be passing the torch to @aubriepagano for future VC funds, who will lead Alpaca’s next phase. Outside of my work at Alpaca, I'll be spending time in a couple areas: 1) Angel Investing 2) Leveraging my access and network for select growth deals and secondaries 3) Building a portfolio of local (Miami!) cash flowing businesses...first one closing soon 🍞 If any of these interest you, please don't hesitate to reach out!

Yesterday, 150+ AI CEOs gathered in NYC for AI✦NY — an off-the-record summit focused on the most critical challenges defining this moment in AI. We heard from @akofoid (Databricks), @c_valenzuelab (Runway), @kareemamin (Clay), @AmandaKahlow (1mind), Rob Chisholm (Qatalyst) Kunal Madhok (Wells Fargo), Amin Venjara (ADP), and Tom Haslam (KPMG). Co-hosted by @amishjani (FirstMark), and @NeerajVC (Battery), with moderators @abimbhet, @billbinch, @BrandonGleklen, and Scott Goering. Special thanks to @FifthThird @golub @KPMG @CooleyLLP @googlecloud, and @qatalystgroup!

The biggest winner of the neobank takeover is @raincards. From $100 in processed volume in April 2023 to $300,000,000 in April 2026. One of the biggest & underrated growth stories in crypto.

a dayy in the life: episode 9 ft. @cnaut from @raincards we made it rain (payy cards) in the rain office. full episode coming soon™

Speaking at FirstMark's Guilds Summit on June 16 in NYC: Cofounder & CEO, Datadag CEO, Tubi Chief People Officer, Airbnb CFO, Legora Chief Data & AI Officer, Snowflake Head of People, Clay CFO, Shopify Chief Product Officer, Okta Head of Americas, Enterprise, Anthropic Cofounder & CTO, Braze VP Sales, Vercel CMO, Bilt Rewards CFO, Ramp COO, Harvey CFO, Circle CRO, Synthesia Cofounder & CPO, Wealthsimple CFO, Runway Chief People Officer, Headway Cofounder & CTO, Factory Head of Product, Glean CRO, Brex CFO, Mercury Chief People Officer, HungryRoot VP, Global People & Places, Airwallex + more to be announced!

Public blockchains are great for auditability but different use cases need different levels of confidentiality. Now Rain customers have a choice. Today we're announcing our integration with @payy_link bringing configurable on-chain privacy to Rain's stablecoin card programs. Payy Network uses ZK cryptography to keep transaction details private by default, with selective disclosure for compliance and transaction monitoring. @sidgandhi_xyz @calummoore and the @payy_link team were early Rain customers and proved out the tech and demand themselves. Now we're making it available to everyone else.