Dave Munichiello 🇺🇸

1/3 Today GV is excited to announce we are leading the first round of funding for @Modular_AI, investing alongside @GreylockVC and Factory.

What a day! Congrats again to team @Modular @clattner_llvm @iamtimdavis

6/ Had the honor of spending the day with the Modular and Qualcomm leaders at investor day today and Chris just shared the vision ahead: “Any model, any chip: data center to edge”

5/ Read more on why we backed this team from day one and the future of unified AI inference: gv.com/news/modular-q…

1/ I am honored to congratulate @clattner_llvm, @iamtimdavis, and the team at @Modular on the announcement that they have signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by @Qualcomm.

@hughes_rhys @GVteam @clattner_llvm @iamtimdavis @Modular Always love conversations about founders, their backgrounds, and the people they attract! Here, you helped me decode Tim Davis’s Aussie-forward 🦘approach, entirely new to me! : )

When I joined the @GVteam 5 years back, my partner @davemuni could not stop talking about @clattner_llvm and @iamtimdavis and the potential of the @Modular team. Dave’s vision; and Modular’s potential, now fully realised today as we announce the business being acquired by @Qualcomm! For those of us that have had the privilege of spending so much time with Chris and Tim, we know this really won’t change what makes them so special and they’ll be straight back into it today! Legendary humans, incredible outcomes, and the perfect example of GV founders! 🔥

@clattner_llvm @iamtimdavis @Modular @Qualcomm Absolutely love teaming with you, dude. Our relationship and the way we've rapidly learned together over the years epitomizes everything that I love about silicon valley, startups, and the founder mindset.

@davemuni @iamtimdavis @Modular @Qualcomm Dave, you've been an incredible partner to Modular, but also to me individually for many years now. Thank you for the support and guidance through many epic steps of our journey. I love your deep systems knowledge, passion for founders with high potential, and high ambition!

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

@ereqdesign All three examples, both in time and cost

With intelligence comes compression. Millennia of trial and error, encoded in DNA. Market consensus, collapsed into one price. Human thought patterns, compressed into neural weights. Intelligence isn’t the data. It’s the pattern left behind.

@manishkuma4248 Starting with lots of data doesn’t hurt, but humans generalize and pattern recognize with sparse data

@RonConway You’ve got this, Ron. Wishing you strength through the battle.

I want to share some difficult news. I was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and I want you to hear it directly from me. Treatment is starting immediately and will include multiple strategies over the course of about a year. While I will be stepping back from some of my usual activities, I will continue to support SV Angel founders, who I love with a passion. SV Angel remains unchanged. Topher has made all of our investment decisions for the better part of the last decade, and Ronny joined as Managing Partner in 2024. They bring experience from nearly every major technology cycle in Silicon Valley and are now focused on partnering with founders building the future of AI. SV Angel has a deep, experienced team that remains fully focused on supporting exceptional founders. With a more focused and balanced schedule, I can prioritize treatments while helping SV Angel founders at inflection points like we always do! I’ve chosen not to share the specific type of cancer since I don't want speculation about my prognosis. I appreciate your understanding and respect for this. I am optimistic about my prognosis. I am fortunate to have the best/amazing team of UCSF doctors in San Francisco, and as you know, I never back down from a fight. Thank you for your support, it means a great deal to me.

At GV, we bring more questions than answers to this space. But we deal in decades, not rounds. We partner with founders who embrace uncertainty to boldly build ambitious products and emerging capabilities designed to span generations and define this next era of technology. A must-read for anyone building in AI: open.substack.com/pub/professork… (3/3)

This piece is a welcome shift from overconfident pontification about where AI is headed - and gives permission to embrace the uncertainty of this moment. "In an emerging sector, the hard question is not only who performs best on a metric today. The harder question is which metrics, product forms, complements, and organizational capabilities will ultimately define leadership at all." (2/3)

It’s easy to get caught up in weekly AI leaderboards, but the constant churn of new stars is a distraction at this stage of market maturity. @Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani has a strong new piece comparing today's AI landscape to the 1926 auto industry - we are still in a period of deep "ferment." 🧵👇 (1/3)

The future of work = delightfully effective AI agents. Imagine a rockstar colleague with deep expertise who just gets stuff done 24/7 via voice, video or text. Already transforming Legal, Coding, Support, Medicine… now crushing Sales with @rox_ai Autopilot. Early backer here - try it! 🔥🚀 t.co/GMhncSV1gg

Thirteen years ago, @kraneland presciently convinced the @GVteam partnership to invest *our entire fund* into @Uber. That went very well. Positively psyched to see him back at it in global mobility with this @Waymo investment! Let’s go! 🚙 🚀

Huge congrats to my incredible London-based counterpart, @thulme! Thrilled for you and the Q.ai team on this monumental exit to @Apple in their second-largest acquisition ever! From co-leading the Seed in the summer of 2022 alongside Aleph to partnering deeply with Aviad, Yonatan, and Avi on multiple stealth AI breakthroughs at the AI-physics nexus reshaping human-computer interfaces, it's been truly inspiring to watch your journey together unfold from a distance. Can't wait to see their tech reach billions. Proud to be your partner! 🚀🍏