eric cohen

slowly, then suddenly @wander

@HarryStebbings @Joshuabrowder Josh is a force. Top investor and person.

I am going to piss off so many friends by saying this but if I could invest in one emerging manager sub $50M fund, it would be @Joshuabrowder. A few things you need to know about Josh: - He makes the founders he invests in live in his spare room at the Four Seasons until they raise their seed - He turned his $100K Thiel Fellowship grant into a $10M angel portfolio - He was one of the first cheques into Micro1, Yuzu and many more - When he found out his father had been taken by the Russians, he was playing poker… (legend!) I have never had founder references like the ones I got on Josh. I spoke to 12 founders. He averaged 9.2/10 across all 12. This is one of the best episodes we have done in a long time and my notes below: 1. Why I Believe Young Founders Make the Best Founders Young founders have no safety net and no option but to win. Corporate engineers often default to hiring big teams, while young founders stay focused on building the product. Their grit is much higher. Without that level of dedication, most people quit at the first real obstacle. 2. How I Test Founder Commitment Before Investing To filter out tourist founders, schedule a pitch meeting at 11:00 PM. Elite founders accept immediately. Mediocre ones push it out by weeks. During the interview, ask rapid-fire questions. If they claim a specific revenue number, have them pull up their live Stripe account on the spot. Look for tactical customer acquisition goals, not vague partnership promises. 3. Why I Make Founders Live With Me After Investing The best early investments come from deep day-one relationships. Living together creates a focused, one-person accelerator where founders get a three-week crash course and avoid years of mistakes. The rule is simple: co-founders share one room near the Four Seasons and cannot check out until they raise an institutional seed round. 4. Why Pre-Seed Companies Fail Startups usually fail for three reasons: they run out of money, they run out of hope, or the co-founders break up. Money problems usually come from weak pitching, which is why founders should drop the deck and show the product live. To maintain hope, ignore Silicon Valley vanity signals and focus on customer progress. To avoid team blowups, handle mechanics like vesting early. 5. What Founders Need to Know About Signing With a VC VCs will say almost anything to get you to sign on the spot. They reverse-engineer your desires and claim they know every customer you want to meet. Impressionable founders fall for it, but the promised intros often never happen. Never sign in the room. Take the night to think clearly. 6. My Biggest Lesson on Reserve Investing Holding back reserves for later rounds has a huge opportunity cost. The biggest value creation happens at pre-seed, so saving capital for a Series A follow-on can limit your upside. Deploying upfront into 20 to 30 pre-seed companies can produce far better long-term returns. Go all-in early. (links below)

@stevegraham @teller Well done Stevie and Dan and team.

Ok, enough talking. Introducing Wiretrap: Agentic Mobile App Reverse Engineering. @teller connects to over 7000 financial institutions, providing developers with a single API to integrate against. We connect using private APIs discovered by reverse engineering their mobile apps. This is a huge engineering cost (we have to analyze every app update to check for API changes), and obtaining accounts at those banks to be able to use their apps and map out the API interactions we need for our own API clients is an operational nightmare. Both are major blockers to supporting more institutions, countries, and product types, especially ones that are not practical to obtain at every bank, e.g. student loans and mortgages. Wiretrap solves for both problems. Wiretrap intercepts network requests a mobile app makes and injects symbolic responses that allow an agent to discover the underlying API contract by simply observing what the app does with them. It can override individual values to trigger different flows, allowing agents to completely map out an entire API without a single request hitting the bank. Check out this brief video of an agent using phony credentials to log into Chase (the request is intercepted by Wiretrap and never hits Chase's API) to get to the account dashboard. Note the symbolic value "req_058.response.body.bankingAccountOverviews[0]. businessName" displayed in the app UI, representing the request and key path the value originated from allowing the agent to join what is displayed on screen with what "went over the wire". Everything you see is inferred by observing how the app interacts with Wiretrap's symbolic responses. Another @teller world first :)

This morning I sat down with @HarryStebbings for the spiciest podcast I have ever done. We are both 29, English entrepreneurs, who went global (me physically and him metaphorically, building the @twentyminutevc International Media Brand). Airing soon! Stay tuned!

@jaentwistle @KyleTibbitts @wander Proud of you and your team. Lots of Wander memories ahead.

@ericbluewatch @KyleTibbitts @wander brick by brick, a castle is built

Happy 5th birthday @wander 🥳 It makes me incredibly proud to have made the world just a little happier, and we are deeply dedicated to having this be just the beginning.

@yudDIDit @editframe Congrats @yudDIDit and team, still early.

Today, @editframe emerges from stealth. Agents need video. Editframe Agent Skills: npm create @editframe@latest Just prompt Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex and get a working video or a full interactive GUI. This video was created just by prompting 👇

@jparkjmc 👍

you're not trying hard enough if you aren't having slumps

We are proud to announce our selection as a prime contractor under the U.S. Space Force’s $1.84 billion Andromeda IDIQ. We’re excited to support Space Systems Command in advancing this critical Space Domain Awareness initiative. Turion was founded on the belief that the next era of space belongs to companies that move fast, deliver results, and never confuse size with capability. This award validates Turion’s speed, grit, and proven technology. We remain committed to developing the tools and capabilities needed to secure the ultimate high ground.

Introducing Adapt, your company’s AI computer. Now available to everyone. → Ask questions across every system → Build internal apps with live data → Automate mundane to complex tasks → Multi-player by design

@TurionSpace @WashingHarbour @Aurelia_Foundry @forward_deploy @FoundersXVC @HOFCapital @IndustriousVC Congrats @RyanWesterdahl and Team Turion. Amazing to watch you execute your day 1 vision. 🚀

Today, Turion is announcing the close of our $75M+ Series B, led by @WashingHarbour, with participation from existing investors @Aurelia_Foundry, @forward_deploy, and @FoundersXVC, alongside new partners Center15 Capital, Magnetar, @HOFCapital, and @IndustriousVC. When we founded Turion in 2021, the mission was clear: build the most capable commercial spacecraft on orbit, win the contracts that would fund our vision, and lay the infrastructure for the space economy. We did that. This round validates our team, our portfolio, and our vision. More importantly, it's an inflection point that expands what we can build and how fast we can build it. The future of space isn't waiting. Neither are we.

In just the last few weeks since @SVMansuri has joined as President and COO, we are now on track to more than double the units on platform m/m. A true force multiplier. Very excited for the future @wander x.com/i/status/20437…

We’re excited to welcome @SVMansuri as President & COO @Wander. From day one, he’s brought a level of clarity, execution and leadership that’s already shaping how and what we build. We’ve never been more confident in our vision to build the infrastructure to experience the world.

we're now pacing to add 7k+ units to Wander platforms this month and im getting as little sleep as you would expect

The marketplace has hit a meaningfully positive net take rate per booking after all costs. It also has a very high NPS (tho more work to do UX wise) at thousands of units. Our customers and our economics have given us permission to hyper-scale - and now we shall.

A counterintuitive dynamic @Wander is guest NPS is ticking up as we scale. March NPS will land in the (very) high 80s.

We added 120 locations in the last 24 hours @wander to the core marketplace. The full platform, is now growing at 3k+ a month. I think 100k total units on Wander is possible by EOY.

we're hiring a distributed systems / ml engineer, starting @ $250k + 2% equity hillclimb's mission is to train AI to self-improve (see more below) if you're interested and think you're a fit send something about yourself + resume to talent@hillclimb[dot]com

Our version of this @wander is @adapt - a system like this is a hard requirement for any company. x.com/i/status/20345…