Mike Chalfen

@SurrealDB Every compute era is built on a new database. SurrealDB 3.0 could be this era's.

This graph @mhdempsey shared yesterday is the most efficacious single graph representation showing why VC is (or feels) broken atm (absurd capital concentration) Any thoughtful analysis on this topic (that I've seen) agrees (imo correctly), in some flavor, that the structural root cause of exaggerated herd behavior is that VC as an asset class, and specifically the mega platforms, manages way too many dollars (i.e. grown too big). imo it's not a coincidence that the top 10 deals saw 52% of $ invested, while the top 9 funds raised 50% of $ committed As such, I would assert that the downstream deal concentration in VC is a direct consequence of ostensible LP preference for VC consolidated platforms (imo this has both intangible and tangible causes). Investing in more, smaller funds would (I assume) bring investing behaviors back to the mean, but the question seems to be how to break the cycle of fear-induced risk aversion

ok, this is a more comprehensive map of the OpenClaw agent ecosystem on @base. Another wild day, the @openclaw ecosystem is undergoing a Cambrian explosion, with AI agents forming a full-fledged digital society that spans social interaction, dating, work, gaming, and just about everything else. Meanwhile, @base has emerged as a key economic layer for the AI agent ecosystem, with most projects issuing tokens via @bankrbot. @basezh has compiled the major projects currently building within the OpenClaw ecosystem. ▫️Infrastructure @bankrbot: wallet and defi infra built in @clanker_world: token launch infra @xmtp_: open, private, and decentralized messaging infra @neynar: social network infra @starkbotai: x402 Enabled Agent infra ▫️Forums @moltbook: Reddit for AI agents 4claw.org: 4chan for AI agents @lobchanai: Anonymous boards for OpenClaw agents moltoverflow.com: Stack Overflow for AI agents ▫️Social Media @moltxio: 𝕏 for AI agents @clawk_ai: 𝕏 for AI agents @clawcaster: Farcaster for AI agents instaclaw.xyz: Instagram for agents moltbook.space: MySpace for AI agents ▫️Relationships shellmates.app: Pen pals for AI agents @Clawdr_book: Like Tinder or Grindr, but for Clawdbots ▫️Messaging @molt_line: Private messaging ▫️Work & Markets openwork.bot: AI agents hire each other, complete work, verify outcomes, and earn tokens clawnet.org: Build reputation. Connect with peers. Find work opportunities @moltroad: agent marketplace ▫️Token economy @Clawnch_Bot: Agents-only token launchpad via Clanker @moltlaunch: CLI launchpad on Base via Flaunch ▫️Discovery claw.direct: Directory of Social Web Experiences for AI Agents clawcrunch.com: News for the Agent Era ▫️Prediction Markets clawarena.ai: A Prediction Arena for AI Agents @PolyClaw: Prediction Market Run by AI Agents ▫️Gaming molt.chess: Agent chess league ▫️Virtual Worlds shell-town.com/viewer: a live virtual world for molts

“The zero to $100m in a year is the new norm” narrative is getting out of hand. It’s silly, but there’s a breed of VCs who chase speculation driven returns that loooove this talk track. I met a very successful VC recently. He had one of these super hyped startups in his portfolio. He said it’s a wait-and-see for him bc revenues that grow that fast can also shrink in the same speed. He instantly won my respect bc I’ve seen this many times myself. These unnatural early stage growth curves (will call it ultra high growth) happen for a few different reasons. Most of the time there’s a temporary supply demand imbalance for a good that becomes highly in demand over night. There were COVID testing labs that went from 0 to $1b+ revenue in a year when the pandemic broke. These days it’s the AI infra / compute companies. Initially both demand and prices skyrocket simultaneously which creates ultra high growth. Eventually competition comes in, prices normalize, margins shrink, growth slows down and valuations tank. If you sold your company before that, congrats. There’s a different type of ultra high growth that comes after a long gestational period and a breakthrough. It’s rare. Usually an experienced team who knows the (difficult) problem and customers well is behind them. Pharma biz works this way most of the time. The security company Wiz that got acquired by Google for $32b was another good example. OpenAI is another great example. The reason this pattern isn’t common in tech is improvements usually happen in incremental iterations vs breakthroughs. One problem is companies in the first category try to paint themselves as if they’re in the second category. There may be a 3rd category where a company just goes viral but it still takes a while of hard work to turn that into revenue. It still took TikTok, Facebook, Instagram etc years to become a real business. We forget about the other 100 apps that went to 30m users very quickly and then back to zero. Lastly sometimes it’s possible to spend $70m on paid acq and generate $100m profitably but this category isn’t that interesting. Hyper casual game companies do this all the time. Recap in the next tweet

🚨🚨Today we begin the search for @ARIA_research's next CEO It's not often you get to hire for a role that you believe is not only someone's dream job, but genuinely one of the highest impact opportunities in the world... but this is it.. 🧵🧵

OBITUÁRIO Morre aos 81 anos Sebastião Salgado, um dos maiores fotógrafos do mundo. Artista vivia em Paris e enfrentava problemas decorrentes de uma malária que adquiriu nos anos 1990. 📲 Leia em: mla.bs/536d5b14

blockchains are the logical and inevitable home for most 'real world assets' (stablecoins, treasuries, stocks, etc) existing financial infra (correspondent banking, DTCC, etc) solved clearing but it is so hard, slow, and expensive to use chains are digital-native, instant, cheap clearing houses cool to see the RWA adoption and policy momentum

@andreasklinger @euinc_petition Fantastic

Everything is impossible, until someone simply does it Major win for @euinc_petition Kudos to the countless people involved and Europe’s startup associations putting the hard work in over the last decades. Now pick an impossible project. Get it done. No whining. No excuses. 🇪🇺

Antisemitism explained in 846 words Antisemitism is the rumour about 'the Jews'. It has taken on radically different forms and supposed ‘rationales’ in different cultures at different times. Antisemitism isn’t just a prejudice against Jews. It is also a fear of their supposedly tremendous (but always hidden) power to shape the world. Antisemitism is an irrational fantasy, often linked to wild conspiracies and apocalyptic visions of the world. For the antisemite, the powers of the Jew are unlimited: indeed they verge on the supernatural or devilish. The Jews (but today, often, ‘the Zionists’) are seen to control everything: they run global media, finance and politics, they start wars, run the slave trade, do 9/11 (while warning all the Jews about it the night before), cause financial systems to crash, and organise fake antisemitism crises – such as the one in the Labour Party, supposedly contrived by Jews to bring down Jeremy Corbyn. In that sense, antisemitism sometimes functions in some different ways to other prejudices, other racisms. (Which is not to say it is any ‘worse’ than any other prejudice. There is no league table. All racisms are unique and all are to be fought.) The leading US democratic socialist Michael Walzer argues antisemitism has been ‘a tool in many different intellectual efforts, religious and secular, to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings of the world’. Similarly, another socialist, Steve Cohen, in his pioneering study of left antisemitism That’s Funny You Don’t Look Antisemitic, pointed out that antisemitism, ‘provides its adherents with a universal and generalised interpretation of the world’. Medieval priests made one claim about ‘the Jews’, Enlightenment philosophers made another. The Nazi SS officer had his claim, as did the Stalinist Central Committee Member. Each told a different story about the supposedly alien, all-powerful, always malevolent and always tricksy Jew. Each story has served to justify a murderous attack upon the Jews who have been indicted, through history, as: ➡️the betrayer and killer of the universal God, drainer of gentile blood, poisoner of the wells, etc (Medieval Christian antisemitism); ➡️• the tribal anachronism, the enemy of the Age of Reason (Enlightenment antisemitism); ➡️• the rootless cosmopolitan, everywhere the enemy of and fifth column within organic nations (Counter-Enlightenment antisemitism); ➡️• the biologically programmed threat to all races, to be eliminated to the last child (Nazi antisemitism); ➡️• the sons of apes and pigs who will be killed on a Day of Judgment (some forms of Islam and modern Islamic antisemitism); ➡️• the arch-capitalist exploiter – to be hung from the lampposts as German Communist Ruth Fischer put it (Left antisemitism). Today, in addition to all of the above (each of which is still with us; they all co-mingle, today), there is a new form of antisemitism which has been the consequence of the birth of a Jewish State – Israel – and the demonisation of it. ‘Zionism’, properly understood as a movement of national liberation for the Jewish people, is demonised by the new antisemitism through the antisemitic ideas of the ‘The Zios’, ‘The Zionists’, ‘Global Zionism’ and ‘the all-powerful Jewish Lobby’. Once it was ‘the Jew’ now it is ‘the Zionist’ that is absolutely malign, still controlling the world for Jewish purposes, and still string-pulling. The Zionists’ power is still cast as virtually unlimited, still exercised through their hidden control of global media, political parties and governments, and global finance, still pulling the wool over the eyes of the poor gentiles for Jewish purposes. They are still uniquely evil, cast as the modern-day Nazis no less. This is antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism. Maybe Dave Rich explains things in the clearest terms: ‘Nowadays antisemitism often appears in discourse relating to Israel, either by targeting Israel itself as a proxy for Jews or by repeating old antisemitic slanders with “Israel” or “Zionist” swapped in for the word “Jew”.’ He goes on: ‘Antisemitism in today’s Labour Party … usually involves language that draws on old racist lies about Jews, but reframes the bigotry in a modern, “anti-Zionist” setting that has nothing to do with what Zionism is, or with how Israel actually behaves.’1 In short, that which the demonised Jew once was in older forms of antisemitism, demonised Israel now is in contemporary antisemitic anti-Zionism: all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on. In consequence, as historian David Nirenberg, author of the seminal work Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking, puts it, ‘We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of "Israel’". In every single iteration of antisemitism, including the latest, the antisemite believes there is a utopia that humankind could reach if we could just - as they put it - get the bloody Jews out of the way. Every antisemite thinks they are on the 'right side of history'. And not one ever has been. @daverich1 @DavidHirsh @centre_as @antisemitism @AntisemitismEye @NHSAntisemitism @caaauk @StopAntisemites @CombatASemitism

This is incredibly impressive from one of venture capital's true entrepreneurs - on.ft.com/4848YUB Well done @HarryStebbings @20vcFund on a serious fundraising!

@matthewclifford @demishassabis @soundboy Congratulations @matthewclifford - well deserved!

Great honour to be awarded a CBE by the King today for services to AI. Getting the Summit and AI Safety Institute off the ground has been a huge collective effort; I’m so grateful to the incredible team that made them happen (and congrats to @demishassabis and @soundboy!)

How my fantastic cofounder @matthewclifford became Britain’s most powerful tech adviser. politico.eu/article/matt-c…

@chrija Mazal tov @chrija

how it started / how it's going ;-)

the level of disinformation on israel-hamas war being algorithmically promoted on twitter is unlike anything i’ve ever been exposed to in my career as a political scientist.

I'm exhausted & angry. Angry with a world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis, sanitized the evil of antizionism & dignified terrorism as ‘resistance.’ As I said on @Morning_Joe, Hamas is committed to 1 thing: killing Jews. Not a 2SS or a peaceful resolution of conflict, but murdering Jews.

@FinnMurphy12 Welcome to the fold @finnmurphy12

Very special day announcing what I've been up to for the past 12 months (founding an early stage venture fund called Nebular) on my friends podcast tl:dr - solo-GP - writing a small number of lead and co-lead cheques at pre-seed and seed in software co's - based in nyc woo

Tray.io CTO @alirussell takes us through the epic new Merlin release here: tray.io/blog/inside-lo…