Antonio Key

I am immensely grateful and excited to join @KauffmanFellows Class 28! Looking forward to experiencing great growth over the next two years by engaging deeply with this global community and its best-in-class VC curriculum.

There are fast clock speeds, then there are @fal clock speeds! Using up our fund reserves for a third time in 20 months 🏦, we’re quadrupling down on the @fal founders and team, this time in their $140M Series D led by @sequoia and @sonyatweetybird with participation by friends at @kleinerperkins and @NVIDIA. Since we led their Series A round at @KindredVentures in early 2024, Fal has achieved so many milestones in an incredibly short time: first million of revenue, then first enterprise customer, then later optimized its first set of high-fidelity generative video models, and now hitting global scale and breakout revenue velocity. This round helps team fal accelerate the future of real-time video, image, and audio models, as the foundational infrastructure layer and cloud for AI-generated content globally. Congratulations @burkaygur @gorkem @isidentical and the entire team on their incredible hard-earned climb, and on another major milestone moment 🚀🚀🚀 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

The MBAification of CS majors has reached new heights. Founders who want a clear formula for garanteed success and have no passion other than being better than the next guy. What happened to building for building's sake? What happened to being passionate about solving your user's problems? The new mindset is: how do I extract the most revenue out of a customer while providing the least value and raising at the highest valuation?

Kraftful has been acquired by @Amplitude_HQ: amplitude.com/blog/amplitude… Our AI product will form a core new VOC part of the Amplitude platform as we announced on stage to the full Amplitude team yesterday. Here’s how we got here... Six years ago, we set out to help teams build products users love. Stepping off the @YCombinator demo day stage, our journey was filled with macro headwinds, setbacks, and pivots. It was a slog. But we learned so much. We finally landed on something truly special two years ago: helping product teams listen to users at scale. Over 50,000 product builders came to rely on our solution. We got named a Most Innovative Company by Fast Company, featured on Masters of Scale, and got some awesome product awards. It was magical to see product people from every type of tech company, major retail brands, car manufacturers, financial institutions, and beyond sign up for Kraftful every day because they heard great things from other products people. Last quarter, we hit record ARR growth — 87%! Things really started taking off. But as a founder, you always want the greatest opportunity for your baby. Talking with @SpenserSkates, @Ajenstat, @dragones, @dazzeloid, and many other Amplitude folks, I realized there’s a much bigger opportunity together. AI has unlocked an entirely new way for teams to perfect products with insights from every feedback channel and user behavior. Together, we’ll make that vision a reality. And frankly, it had to be Amplitude. Back when we started Kraftful, we piped our early data into every analytics platform, hunting for the best insights. Amplitude stood out. Long before they IPO’d and emerged as the clear market leader (Nasdaq: AMPL), it was already obvious in their product. Amplitude was built with the same care and taste that defined our own product journey at Kraftful. Beginning this next chapter, I've been reflecting. The solo founder journey is not for the faint of heart. You're fundraising, building, selling, marketing, hiring, all at the same time. There's no cofounder to step in when you're tired or sick. Eventually, the biggest unlock is building an incredible team and I’m fortunate to have worked with the most amazing team: Renat, Shauna, @spencerpauly, @McIntirec. I'm proud of everything we've built together and excited to continue building at Amplitude. When I shared the news with my son, his response was, “You can’t sell, I have so many great memories of Kraftful!” It makes sense, he was just two when we started. He's never known life without Kraftful. His baby sister was born during a record growth month. I took a single day of mat leave before diving back into putting out fires. We don’t talk enough about how deeply family is involved in building a startup. I’m so grateful for incredible support from @npew, my parents, sister, and the rest of my circle. Huge thanks to @curtisbliu, @paladin314159, @pavan_pati, @DarahEaston, and the rest of the Amplitude team for the warm welcome ❤️ Here's to our next chapter!

YC Demo Day W25 at the Palace of Fine Arts!

Paul Graham on How Writing Reveals What Thinking Conceals:

@chrisboettcher9 Gems 💎throughout this thread

Obesity has been normalized, but there’s nothing normal about it—especially when it impacts the family you’re meant to lead and protect. As a father of 4, here are 21 health lessons I’ve learned about staying strong, high energy, and at my best for my kids:

Shoutout to founders that consistently send monthly investor updates. I appreciate it. I also know how difficult it can be when things aren't going well.

@yanatweets @Kraftful Love this! p.s. SF veteran move...get in the shade to get a good pic in front of the Painted Ladies that time of day

This tiny team served over 50,000 product teams 😮 All while rapidly building out our product. Here’s how we listen to our customers: 📞 Call transcripts I often have 5-6 customer calls per day. But I have my Google Meet connected to @Kraftful. This means every time I have a customer call, all the feature requests, complaints, and insights are automatically pulled into Kraftful. Once the insights are in, I organize them into projects to shape Kraftful’s roadmap. From there, I generate PRDs and user stories directly from what users say during calls. These user stories are then synced to Linear, turning them into actionable issues for the team. This process saves me hundreds of hours synthesizing call transcripts, building roadmaps, and drafting PRDs and user stories. We use Kraftful + Google Meet + Linear, but you can set up the same workflow with Kraftful + Zoom / Fireflies / other transcription services + Jira. 🎫 Support tickets User interactions with our support team or responses to email questions are automatically synced to Kraftful. These interactions are analyzed for feature requests and other product insights. Just like with call transcripts, I use these insights to create projects, PRDs, and user stories. This setup alone saves me hundreds of hours. 📋 Surveys & interviews When customers provide feedback using the thumbs up/thumbs down feature, an in-product survey opens. I also often share Kraftful surveys and AI-powered user interviews with select customers to explore specific questions. Generating a survey with AI in Kraftful takes just a couple of minutes. However, I often prefer using AI-powered interviews over surveys due to their higher response rates and the fact that customers tend to be more honest with AI than during a live call. 💬 Slack At Kraftful, we have a dedicated Slack channel where we post user feedback from sources we can’t directly connect to Kraftful (e.g., conversations at conferences). This channel syncs to Kraftful, where the feedback is analyzed like call transcripts and support tickets. This catchall channel is essential for capturing random insights. 💌 DMs Since Kraftful’s growth has been largely organic, I often receive feedback through LinkedIn and Twitter DMs. I choose not to sync all DMs automatically as some are personal, but Kraftful’s free-form text field is perfect for capturing specific feedback.

.@antoniokey and I are proud to be early investors in @SpillMob at @sunsetvc Read about @phonz's amazing (rebounder) founder journey that has come out of the last few years of layoffs in big tech 👇

In the wake of the big tech layoffs, a new generation of startup founders has emerged. Call them the rebounder founders. trib.al/4QT6Y8J

@tecoker Base 10: 21 Savage

VCs as rappers – no explainers: Sequoia: Jay-Z Greylock: Future Felicis: Gunna Amplify: Young Thug Benchmark: Kendrick Index: Skepta Lux: Tyler the Creator Tiger: Kanye Khosla: Eminem a16z: Drake

@tecoker Base 10?

@rubenharris @tecoker Who is 21 - 21?

@tecoker Nah

Our panelists Antonio Key, Ashtan Jordan, and Jesus Salas turned up the heat, hitting the founders with some tough questions! 🔥 The TxO founders rose to the occasion, delivering insightful answers that impressed. 🌟🎯

@rubenharris @outrivalAI @Career_Karma 😤😤💨💨

1/ Today, we announce @OutRivalAI, designed to transform how businesses connect with their customers through Conversational AI, starting with Admissions Teams in Higher Education. After years of helping people break into tech w/ @Career_Karma we’re expanding our mission. Here is what we are focused on: outrival.com/blog/ai-for-th…

Good morning San Francisco 😍

. @SFBART taking steps to reduce its free rider problem by limiting one’s ability to jump over the turnstile w/o paying #SF #BART

Too many startups/investors are exploring the b2b opportunities with LLMs and not enough are exploring the consumer opportunities. This is the moment consumer founders have been waiting for.

What a treat to listen to @TheValuesVC and @harleyf chat about Shopify’s journey and @BessemerVP's role as one of its first investors. They broke down the funding process—the ups and downs, insights on scaling, turning points, and tough choices. Thank you both for joining us!