Chris Brown

Primary learning from the first decade of my career: in the long run, it is counterintuitively easy to do hard things and hard to do easy things

@anothercohen @la_Barbecue texas tea looks elite too

Best BBQ in Austin

announcing our most recent AI investment

Here's the vicious cycle we're in right now: 1. VC raised more money than it can reasonably deploy. 2. So a lot of firms started telling their LPs "we only invest in companies growing $0→$10M→$100M ARR" — and went chasing the handful of companies that could hit that curve (often by selling into the labs or by subsidizing growth with negative-margin, token-losing pricing). 3. Those companies turned out to be exactly as fragile as that description sounds, unless you got a fast exit like Cursor. 4. Now the AI trade is starting to unwind, and the same firms are quietly dumping the names they were bragging about eighteen months ago. Meanwhile, founders building genuinely durable businesses — growing $0→$1.5M→$5M, which is a great trajectory by any historical standard — got shunned for not fitting the curve. My message to those founders: keep going. Ignore what VCs are telling their LPs to justify their own fee acquisition strategy. Growth that's rented disappears the moment the subsidy does. Growth that's earned, on real retention and real unit economics, is the only kind that's still standing when the tourists leave.

@crislenta unbelievably capable and smart but an approach to work that is defined by the blind pursuit of pedigree, a fuel tank that runs on angst, and a noticeable absence of purpose, loyalty, and competitiveness

@almostcmb What’s a striver type?

Of course Travis and Uber were a west coast story, but this persona today is pretty much only found in NYC. SF is now filled with (talented!) striver types, and increasingly so. It’s pretty notable if you look closely

@aashaysanghvi_ yes

@almostcmb I'd argue you find it in LA and TX these days too

@lessin this is my favorite thing you’ve written and you didn’t even need to throw it into a little formatted screenshot

Never Compete. I was on with someone from our team at slow talking about competition recently… ‘how do you compete in venture capital’, etc… win deals. My honest philosophy? I hate competition professionally (love it in sport, but not business)…. And I think competition is especially stupid in early stage venture capital, where you are competing over / crawling over each other for out of the money call options on things that almost certainly will not work. Early stage VC competition on deals almost by definition leads to over-pricing / overpaying … and it also demonstrates a fundamental lack of creativity. Egotistically, if you want your money to matter / to make a difference, you want to be funding otherwise unfunded opportunities — where you see something others don’t… where money is most expensive, commands the highest return AND - to put a nice spin on it - where the money matters the most. So if you find yourself in a competition over a seed deal, IMHO you are a bad capitalist / limiting your returns, an un-creative person / a mere ‘market participant’ (yuck), and also misusing the incredible mandate and license you have to find things and make them happen in the world. You have to be careful about seeing mirages, because some things / most things are not funded because they are actually bad.. you can’t like things just because they are unliked… BUT your job is to have discipline in the wilderness / in the wander, and as the game evolves … both as a capitalist, and egotistically as someone who realizes how awful it is for your tombstone to say ‘market participant’

@dvasishtha this got a lol out of me

I'll believe in AGI when my AI CRM doesn't merge all the Neil Patels

@mil000 free espresso did it for you?

Mercury is genuinely such an aspirational company in terms of advertising. They make it look easy every time. Can Rho please take notes.

I'm working directly with the administration to get a determination on if the robot ban does, in fact, affect robot bands

Great framing, but I don’t think it plays out that way. Nothing special about actuators. Nothing special about batteries. Nothing special about compute. Nothing special about weights. Early institutional demand just bullwhips into cheap oversupply. A story as old as time.

The MTA is effectively a criminal organization holding U.S. GDP hostage

@jibranhutch amen

I know the poster probably doesn't recognize this, and by no means am I saying this stuff isn't common in SF, but posts like these come off as incredibly gauche and tone-deaf. Our new American industrialists and technological leaders need to stop worshiping the superficial hierarchy of "success prestige" that they themselves have created within higher ed since the 2000s, and recognize that worshiping money is not cool or ironically cool. What has always confused about the strivers is that they believe "grinding" or "working hard" is good in and of itself. What they fail to recognize is that simply "grinding" without any purpose makes you beholden to whoever profits from it. I want these strivers to think harder about why they are in the jobs they are in, why they work for the people they do, and, eventually, what purpose their grind really serves. Grinding it not a virtue. A virtue takes a positive position, by which I mean a declarative one. imo this country needs a counter-elite of young American industrial and technological leaders who direct their grind, above all else, toward the prosperity of the nation, and by that I mean its people and their collective economic and national self-interest. Unless our smart young people find it within themselves to grow up a little, they will continue to work hard for some vague notion of personal or societal prestige that forever leaves them empty.

@iiiitsandrea crime

The “Graza of peanut butter” is now available in the US.

@mountainwesttax this is the best tweet i have ever seen on the site

How is everything in SF somehow 30 minutes away

@reidRMC Incredibly clarifying - so far to go from here

I can't stop thinking about this, concentrated to 4 categories that have broken out Coding Data Inference Creative

IME, low entry caps in tranched rounds tend to be small funds, while increasingly higher caps are (relatively) larger funds The presence of small funds almost by definition does not reduce the long term funding risk for a company (ie, they do not have the ability to continue funding the business) Obviously there’s some immediate “legible to capital” value that qualifies as decreasing funding risk, too. But if the next tranche comes hours or days later, it does not seem very reasonable to make the argument that was ever a factor…

@almostcmb @BraytonKey I think you’re undervaluing how much certain segments of venture are disproportionately funding risk The market speaks to how much that risk is reduced based on the size of the step up That said, if the buyer is *not aware* of the price disparity, that’s a different analysis

A security’s price is the present value of future cash flows The discount rate used is effectively a quantification of the perceived risks If perceived funding risk is high, then any investor whose sheer presence reduces that perception has implicitly increased valuation

If you are young and hungry and curious you should apply to this job, although I would recommend not walking into a glass door on day one as you’re about to begin your first deal review