David Cancel

@bhalligan 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

This is a photo of my 5 years ago today. I’m quite sure, life can be short. Live it. Love it.

This. WTF @collectivei? Just hearing from friends that you did the same thing to my contacts. This is unreal.

@bhalligan 👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽

The older I get, the more I think outstanding taste in people is the only real alpha.

2025 had the lowest rate of - mass shootings since 2006 - homicides since 1950s - teenage pregnancy in recorded history - suicides since 2020 - road fatalities since 2019 - drug overdose deaths since 2019 - alcohol consumption in recorded history - inflation since 2020

@gradypb @GuptaRK22 @bhalligan 👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽

@GuptaRK22 @bhalligan do you mean this document, by chance?

I once saw a document describing the pros and cons of @bhalligan. “DGAF” was the first item in the pro column. It was also the first item in the con column. In related news, his podcast is very fun.

We just raised $20M (Menlo, Sequoia, Felicis, Snowflake, Databricks) and launched Kai—the first superintelligent AI co-worker for customer success. It shouldn't take 100 people to serve 1,000 customers. Kai knows every customer, acts instantly, never drops the ball. Agency.inc fortune.com/2025/11/12/eli…

So proud of you my brother!

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Most people have no idea what it actually takes to be a founder. They talk about vision, grit, or passion. Those words are props. What you really sign up for is a life where every decision feels like it costs something real. You will spend years being misunderstood. By your team, your family, even the people you hire to help you. You will fail in public and still need to keep the energy up in private. Every founder lives with the weight of knowing that you can do everything right and still get crushed by luck, timing, or somebody else’s mistake. Founders aren’t braver than anyone else. They just get used to uncertainty, then stop waiting for clarity. Most of your wins won’t feel like wins at all. The first revenue will be too small. The first team will outgrow you or leave. The first product that feels right will barely matter to the market. You will doubt yourself in private, sometimes every week. The founders who last figure out how to keep moving while the ground shifts underneath them. Most outsiders want the founder badge but none of the scars. They want the upside, not the drag. The hardest part is sticking around after every plan gets blown up and you have to rebuild with less optimism and more scar tissue. What makes it work isn’t relentless hustle or some mythical trait. It’s learning to make peace with constant discomfort, and then making decisions anyway. If you need constant reassurance, you’ll give up before the real work begins. If you want everyone to like you, you’ll never make the calls that matter. If you can’t handle months where nothing feels certain, this life will eat you alive. But if you can hold your own in chaos, get better at being wrong, and still want to show up and try again, you just might have a shot at building something that matters. That’s what it actually takes. And nobody cares until you make it work.

Dear Founders, Take money off the table in the next round. Love, Brian.

I often re-read @natfriedman's personal website (former Github CEO)

If a few of you are up, would love for you to try an early alpha version of what I've been vibe coding on. A domain suggestion tool. agent.ai/agent/domain-s… Super-easy, you enter an idea/concept and it generates a list of domains and their prices (on the major marketplaces). Note: It takes about 30 seconds to run (it's putting the LLM through its paces).

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Congratulations team!! So proud of the entire ⁦@Olo⁩ family. ⁦@Olo⁩ Enters into Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by ⁦@thomabravo⁩ businesswire.com/news/home/2025…

@dafrankel @epaley Sooooo happy for @epaley and you. What a team of legends! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

I’ve been fortunate to know @epaley for almost 25 years. First as a classmate, then as his seed investor, and for the last 16 years as a business partner. Today, I add “proud constituent” and “devoted advocate” to our list of affiliations, though none will ever outweigh “friend.” Eric has chosen to step away from @fcollective to assume the role of Secretary of Economic Development for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Anyone who has ever met Eric will instantly know why he is an inspired choice and a perfect fit. He has an exceptional mind for business but is also one of the most ethically centered people I’ve ever met. I first encountered Eric during our orientation at Harvard Business School. We debated case studies vigorously, played squash competitively (he whipped me), and became close friends. Before we cofounded Founder Collective, I had the good fortune to seed-invest in Brontes, the 3D dental scanning company that Eric co-founded in Boston, together with FC Managing Partner @micahjay1 . I distinctly recall feeling that it didn’t matter to me what they would build; I just wanted to be involved with founders of this caliber. I always prefer to invest in the “who” over the “what” and never have I been more validated than my investment in Eric and Micah. After successfully selling Brontes to 3M, the stars aligned once again for us. Eric and I explored setting up a venture fund that would seek to support tech founders at the very earliest stages of their journey. It wasn’t an easy decision. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis made raising a fund at that moment a challenging proposition. However, the opportunity to work with Eric was enough of a catalyst for me to relocate my family to Boston from halfway around the world. We thereafter took the time to work fastidiously through co-managing a fund. This included facing the friction of working as equal partners and celebrating our individual strengths. We learned how to respectfully test each other’s convictions and to celebrate when events validated them. This conviction has influenced a generation of entrepreneurs and startups globally – including Uber, The Trade Desk, and Coupang, to name a few – as well as five $1B+ startups in Massachusetts: WHOOP, Formlabs, Desktop Metal, Drift, and PillPack. Individual achievements celebrated together taste so much sweeter. Micah joined us a few years later. Partnership augmentation is challenging when one cares deeply about culture and mutual respect. We have never taken for granted the privilege of working with close friends. Eric has a knack for separating work and personal, which I so admire. He can strongly disagree with a professional issue but show up for a family dinner and not mention a word of it. I am beyond proud of Eric’s appointment, and I simultaneously join the line of those who will miss his daily presence and wisdom very much. My advice is to stock up on hugs. As investors, we back founders at the early stage, but we have responsibilities that last decades. I recall that after a portfolio company went public, we debated whether to distribute shares or cash to our patient investors. It was a tricky decision with significant implications. We had already consulted some of the most intelligent people we knew, and I suggested we ask a few more. Eric turned to me and said, “We are the adults.” That’s shorthand in our partnership; we can ask for advice endlessly, but at some point, we have to make the call and live with the consequences. Eric values every perspective, but he never forgets where responsibility lies and gladly accepts it – to all of our benefit. While we have been blessed with investment returns and consider ourselves privileged to work with this special team, it is the principles, values, and standards that Eric has infused into Founder Collective that will most endure. At Founder Collective, putting founders first is a principle structurally designed into the fund and grounded in deep respect and firsthand knowledge of how hard it is to build something that lasts. One of my favorite business aphorisms is, “whoever builds, leads,” and Eric is a born builder. His colleagues know he is phenomenally talented and I’m sure locals would agree that he is “wicked smaht.” But it is his commitment to ethics and morality that set him apart in an industry filled with straight-A students. I’ve lost count of the times Eric has backed founders – against his short-term financial interests – when other investors sought to take advantage of them. True public servants seem to be frustratingly few and far between, but Eric always puts values ahead of valuations. Put simply, Eric is a “mensch.” Now that this news is public, I’m heading off to buy Massachusetts bonds and grab lunch with my friend before duties to the Commonwealth monopolize his calendar.

@hnshah @eliast 🙏🏽

@eliast @dcancel I hope he comes out of retirement. It’s time.

How long before internal CEO letters start leaking pushing to hire influencers as the marketing team? B2B marketing is so meh. Name one company doing it well. I will wait.

Worth reading Sam's thoughts on SaaS.

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Buffett: "Who you associate with is enormously important. And don’t expect to make every decision right on that. But your life is going to progress in the general direction of the people you work with, admire, and befriend." Charlie Rose Interview 2009:

@eliast "For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught To say the things he truly feels And not the words of one who kneels The record shows I took the blows And did it my way Yes, it was my way" 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

I'm from Nicaragua. Dark-skinned. Loud. Impatient. Kind of rude. Super direct. For 30+ years people tried to "fix" me. At Drift, I hired coaches, changed my style, followed the advice. That's when Drift failed for me. I failed Drift. At Agency, I'm just being myself. No softening edges. These aren't bugs. They're features that let me cut through noise, move fast, speak truth, and fight for customers. If you can't win being yourself—what's the point?