Dave Blundin

Who is Dave Blundin anyway? Take a walk with me for a glimpse inside my day to day action at Link Ventures as I answer 31 rapid-fire questions that never make it on the pod! Tune in for the inside scoop on what we’re building, what we look for in founding teams, and my thoughts on AI in this special moment in history. youtu.be/ZDKwsDavHCY?si…

Full episode: youtu.be/CsRx7kFN4bo

Four American labs are now at the frontier: @AnthropicAI, @OpenAI, @Meta, and @SpaceXAI. GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 both dropped last week. Is the duopoly is over? @Apple also sued OpenAI for trade secret theft. They filed their lawsuit in Northern California, and it is very hard to win a case like this there. You almost have to be desperate to file one. Once you get a reputation for suing people, it's very hard to recruit. Something big must be at stake for Apple to file.

There are a lot of questions about the rightful place for AI in the classroom. While I'm still thinking about this, putting cutting edge AI in the hands of teachers will help them better understand AI's limits, benefits, and the tells of AI slop. That's only a good thing.

Derek Canja and Nick Leonard (@NWRLeon) are the Co-Founders of @voicerunnin. Watch our full conversation here: youtu.be/22EqOOI3aBw

Claude Code feels a lot like gambling: it’s dopamine inducing, all consuming, and I’ve played my fair share of prompt roulette! Practically: @AnthropicAI continues to lead because they decided to focus on LLM coding capabilities and coding harnesses early. They were quick to foresee AI agents maintaining codebases at the line by line level of detail. The @voicerunnin team is making that same bet for voice agents. Great line, Derek Caneja!

Watch full ep: youtube.com/watch?v=XCunMF…

Fable 5 is back, but with a leash. @AnthropicAI just committed to giving the US government early access to frontier models plus 24/7 monitoring. But they also quietly rewrote their internal policy from "we'll watch and report if subpoenaed" to "good faith belief." For now, they’ve been handed back the responsibility of self policing. Meanwhile, @sama is trying to give the US government 5% of @OpenAI - about $42 billion. The idea that the government is going to set up a sovereign wealth equity vehicle without a constitutional amendment is insane to me. Now that every issue is partisan, won’t the next president just immediately sell everything, turn it into cash, and use it to buy votes in the next election?

@TravelDeepspace @NWRLeon @voicerunnin @Link_Ventures Anyone can make a voice agent. Almost no one can create a GREAT voice agent!

@DaveBlundin @NWRLeon @voicerunnin @Link_Ventures Dave is that a big task? A young graduate has done this for any website. Full interaction voice agent no typing surfing searching or anything. Just like Jarvis 😂

Years ago, I told Nick (@NWRLeon): any day you're ready to start a company, call me. Now he and his co-founder Derek Caneja are scaling @voicerunnin, and it's already the default platform that startups at @Link_Ventures use to implement AI voice interfaces into their products. In this episode, learn why voice models have been surprisingly static for the past year while LLM capabilities have skyrocketed, why "prompt and pray" voice agents don't work in production, and why VoiceRun bet the farm on a product built for coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, which puts them in stark contrast to the GUI-centric “drag and drop” alternatives of their market peers. The mighty team of 6 (plus an army of agents) is taking on well funded competition in the multi-trillion dollar AI Voice market. Thank you Nick and Derek for coming into the Link Ventures podcast studio!

@NWRLeon @voicerunnin @Link_Ventures Big Nick supporter since day -1457!! 🙌

@DaveBlundin @voicerunnin @Link_Ventures Thanks for having us on and for being an early believer!

Tune in! youtube.com/watch?v=22EqOO…

@Zyphullen @Link_Ventures Many brownie-like options and individually portioned ice cream cups!

@DaveBlundin @Link_Ventures Are there brownies or cookie cakes? If not, hard pass. I have standards 😂

My favorite part of the @Link_Ventures office is the kitchen. And not only because of the unlimited snacks and caffeine. It’s the best spot to bump into founders sparking up some of the best conversations of my week. I might hear about a new customer, or about closing a round with new investors, and often I learn a new orchestration or prompting ideas I hadn’t thought of yet. 57 seconds into this and you've already met Chris Harris and Jess Sciore (@blitzyai). Check out the full walkthrough I did if you haven't had a chance yet!

@theanimatednate @Microsoft @Google @amazon @Meta @PeterDiamandis Or better yet...do you have Starlink?

@DaveBlundin @Microsoft @Google @amazon @Meta @PeterDiamandis Watching the new pod now while flying it was a nice thing peter released it gives me something good to watch for the flight

The Big Five are spending on AI faster than they're earning: @Microsoft, @Google, @amazon, @Meta. If CapEx exceeds cash flow, it can only persist as long as investors keep funding it. @PeterDiamandis asked me: What happens if sentiment shifts? Here's my take: sentiment won’t shift. If anything, the investment will become more justified over time. The world still sees compute as a rapidly depreciating asset but that’s simply not what it is anymore. Short of a massive leap in photonics or quantum computing, GPUs will continue to be highly sought after and have a predictable service life. This is already turning GPUs hours into a commodity. Think about it like buying a house: when you buy a house, you finance it, and the house is collateral. In a world where compute becomes acceptable collateral, the hyperscalers could easily raise 10x to 100x on their cash flow in equity and debt, if they choose to. In reality, there’s a lot of investable dollars in the world that want to flow into AI but can’t. AI is still the largest wealth creation moment in the history of humankind.

@theanimatednate @Microsoft @Google @amazon @Meta @PeterDiamandis Glad you downloaded it in time!

@Microsoft @Google @amazon @Meta @PeterDiamandis Oops... + @X @SpaceX and @Oracle

Not financial advice. Watch the full ep: youtu.be/kPSLLeccrik

Full video here: youtu.be/ZDKwsDavHCY

This is huge! If you've ever run small thinking models locally you'll recognize the doom-loop pattern. We welcome Antidoom with open arms! 🙌