angela

SR007 APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN NOW If you're building the next great company, we want to give you up to $1M in funding and $5M+ in credits, plus the most powerful launch platform in tech. Apply before 11:59pm PT on May 17, 2026. It only takes 5 min 👉 speedrun007.a16z.com/x

ok - dropping big dates/news for a16z speedrun: - starting TODAY, founders can apply for the 2026 program that runs July 27 to Oct 11 in SF here's the link: speedrun007.a16z.com/ac - we will be investing up to $1M and funding 70+ companies over the next few weeks - But there's also $5M in credits/tokens/etc from AWS/GCP/Open AI/Azure/NVIDIA/Deel/Stripe/etc. You'll also work with our amazing operating team (GTM, talent, brand, people, and more), and join our community of elite founders - we offer a Global Founders Program for international founders, to help with visas, banking support, relo recommendations - yes you can be solo (but better if you're further along, and have built a team). No you don't have to have an idea yet. Yes you have to know how to build (even if you're not technical) - Also, in other news: speedun is officially moving full-time to SF. (prev it alternated SF/LA) this is for all the obv reasons - we've continued to have an insane lineup of speakers, including the founders of Carta / DoorDash / Twilio / Figma / Zynga / Airtable / Twitch / and of course, lunch/dinners with Marc/Ben alongside a16z team - and much more - the deadline for applying is May 17!

I just built this for my grandma. Meet Sam, the first AI caretaker for seniors. Order one of the first 1,000 units (see below).

Introducing Code on Canvas in @pencildev AI design tool for Claude and Codex. Design ❤️ Code are officially in a relationship, opening new ways to create on canvas. Ask agent to generate custom design tools inside Pencil on the fly, create interactive components, generative art and more, but still keep the full manual design control. This is just the beginning. Let us know what you think. And let's take it to the next level together. Download the new Pencil update today.

@WadiaVarun huge congrats!!

1/8 Our preprint is now a peer-reviewed paper :) Big thanks to our reviewers who pushed us to examine our results more carefully and Olivier Wyart (headquarter.paris) for the exquisite visual. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@swang_co @thecollectiv3e @CommaCapital @n8n_io wishing I was in NY 😭

most notable events in NY this April that are worth going to: 4/8 YC Alum meetup 4/8 Game Night with Vega x @thecollectiv3e 4/8 Female Investor Coffee at LVMH (by me) 4/8 Founders Pickleball by @CommaCapital 4/9 @n8n_io community meetup 4/10 Founder OH (by me) 4/12 NVIDIA Hackathon Fair with @AntlerGlobal 4/14 Claude Code for developers by @AnthropicAI 4/21 Spring Tech Mixer 4/22 Future of AI Infra by @MongoDB and @EssenceVenture 4/23 Vertical AI panel by @M13Company ny is blooooming this spring…

@madelinehpark come back soon 🥹

6:30am at sfo

Really exciting work! Excited to see other Caltech teams push the frontiers of AI

@amypretzel this video is so cute 🥹

capy just dropped and i wanted to make something cool. used vizcom to generate all the animated capybara scenes and remotion within capy itself to stitch it into a video. such cute capybaras! u guys gotta try this combo its so fun. literally took me 1 hour.

@YengT9 100% agree

This is such a bad take on consumer. A lot of the best products win because they tap into creativity or the simple human desire to make beautiful or interesting things, not just because people think they’re getting rich??

@smayan98 insane!

@YengT9 great product with amazing taste!

We spent 6 months at 800 users. Then we hit 20,000 in eight weeks. Here's what we learned building Lekondo: 1. Go far > Go fast. Rapid growth means nothing if users leave. We focused on retention before scale, and held 35%+ because we grew with intention. There's a version of speed that's really just impatience, and impatience before you've understood the shape of what you're building is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make. Don't raise money until you understand exactly what that capital unlocks. 2. Design is undervalued, and I mean design in the fullest sense of the word. When I talk to our users about why they stay, a huge part of it is that the app is simply delightful. And delight, in practice, comes down to two things. First, the core experience has to be intuitive and approachable, but with genuine depth. You can pick it up in seconds, but weeks later you're still discovering new dimensions of what's possible. That kind of balance requires enormous restraint. Second, and this is the part most people skip: performance. We're an image-heavy platform. If things are slow, if there's friction, if there's lag, the spell breaks. Our stack is AWS and GoLang, and that wasn't an arbitrary technical decision. Kudos to Mitchell Overfield for being one of the most technically gifted minds I've ever had the privilege of working with. When infrastructure works, you don't notice it, and that's the whole point. 3. Your users are your best marketers. Yes, marketing matters. You should be testing every channel: Instagram, TikTok, Substack, paid, organic, all of it. We do. But here's what we've found: marketing gets people in the door, and what gets them to invite their friends is the product itself. There's a threshold, and I don't think you can engineer it exactly, where the experience becomes good enough that sharing it feels natural. Telling a friend about something great is one of the most human things there is. 4. Curate your information diet. This is your most effective advantage against incumbents. Large companies cannot adopt new technology waves as fast as you can. Too much process. But that only matters if you can actually see the wave coming and understand how big it is. Your job as a founder is to determine the order of magnitude of a shift before everyone else does. That judgment call changes everything about how you build. And that judgment comes from your information diet. The world is large. There are many worlds within it, and most of them never meet. Lekondo sits at the crossroads of fashion, commerce, and philosophy, all supported by a robust technical platform. That combination works because we spend time in domains that seem unrelated and pay close attention to where they intersect. Reading widely, thinking across disciplines, and staying curious about fields outside your own compounds in ways that are hard to predict and almost impossible for a larger company to replicate.

@hausdorff_space Congrats on the launch! Excited to see the world love the product as much as I do!

@SahooAadarsh this is awesome! really great work aadarsh :)

Perception is actionable. Humans don't just see objects, we see affordances and constraints. "Something to sit on." "Region unsafe to walk." "Something that will tip if I bump it." But today’s vision models mostly see… labels. So we built ConverSeg: Conversational Image Segmentation 🧵 glab-caltech.github.io/converseg/

@robynxpark love this!

after years of leaving it on the back burner, finally got around to creating a home on the internet - tonally inspired by my favorite impressionist paintings. done in a single evening with claude + netlify. no excuse not to ship that site you've been meaning to make!

come work with me @a16z! we're hiring a partner on our Speedrun investment team - this is a small, fast-growing team inside a16z focused on first-money-in investing in brand new AI start-ups building at the frontier if you’re technical and love working hands-on with founders at the 0-1 stage, come talk to us or refer a friend we should meet! since launch, a16z @speedrun has invested in over 200 startups with $300M+ in capital deployed. alumni include @floraai @runware @Fundamental @hedra_labs @k_idofficial @rork @Nexxa_AI and many more. we recently raised a fresh new fund to back the next generation of founders our investment partners help identify and select the companies we invest in - thinking critically about new technologies and market trends. they also serve as mentors for our founders, helping them make progress across product, GTM, fundraising, etc a few things we look for: - experience as a builder (engineering, product etc) or an investor - technical / passion for AI - you've embraced AI in your workflows and are passionate about optimizing your coding agent’s performance, with a side project (or two) in flight - interest in start-ups - founder empathy is a key a16z cultural value. you've either founded a start-up, worked at one, or are contributing on the side - social network - you're at home conversing with other builders, and might be active on X, LinkedIn, or Substack please send a note to speedruninvesting@a16z.com with your Linkedin and a link to a product or terminal session you’re proud of creating. we can't wait to meet you!

Come join us!

- @fearn_ai is building the future of intellectual property and they're hiring! @hanhanhan_kim and @af_gao are adding to their office in📍 Noe Valley, San Francisco two roles: 1. Member of Technical Staff (Infra) 2. Member of Technical Staff (AI research intern) Read more about the two openings here: bit.ly/4af9gJP ++Email: careers@fearn.ai Work for another a16z @speedrun startup: bit.ly/3LTQmAd

@sarahookr @adaptionlabs congrats!

Beginnings are very special. Today is an important day for @adaptionlabs. Today a handful of one-size-fits-all-models are optimized for the average use case. Averages erase the exceptional. Everything intelligent adapts. So should AI.