Hadley Harris

@martin_casado @tiffani Agreed

Total token use as a measure of AI literacy is wrong headed. In my experience, after some baseline, more token use is inversely correlated with competency using AI.

@violetteclaire @BadleyHarris @BriarwoodAI And feel free to let him have the last word, otherwise he’ll go on for ever..or at least until his tokens run out 😆

Ooh thx!!! The 30/60/90 day lag of a traditional credit score doesn't work for the physical world. In high-stakes execution, trust has to be an instant behavioral primitive, not a trailing historical record. We’ve @BriarwoodAI built the infrastructure that makes that behavior legible from the very first handshake. @Hadley I’m loving this btw lol!

A Meta AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed sensitive user and company data internally for two hours. The most dangerous security vulnerabilities ahead won't be written by humans -- they'll be confidently suggested by machines.

@violetteclaire @BadleyHarris @BriarwoodAI Haha, glad you’re enjoying him ☺️

@tbpn @buckymoore I like the articulation here of secrets. The devil’s in the details of figuring out if there are actually secrets or not.

Lightspeed's @buckymoore says the real opportunity in the AI app layer is in large industries far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and where the context engineering to get customer data into the model is extremely nuanced and messy. "I think this is kind of the elephant in the room right now — whether post-training open-source models combined with the unique user feedback you get from being an application provider is defensible enough." "That is going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption, like legal and software engineering have." "But on the other hand, there are some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and probably will continue to be — and the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions, it requires a lot of hands-on forward-deployed engineering." "Those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about. Because I think being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to generate a feedback loop with your customers, where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only serving you those secrets." "I think Palantir is a good example of this in the pre-AI era, and I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way."

@andrewparker @nihalmehta @EniacVC @TechNYC I hear your point but also what works for Bay Area with tech doesn’t always work for others. Miami and Austin tech would never have existed if they had CA taxes

@nihalmehta @EniacVC @TechNYC CA has similar QSBS treatment on the books for over a decade, which clearly has not deterred founding companies there.

New York is about to make a massive mistake. The NY State Senate is advancing a proposal to decouple from federal QSBS (Section 1202) — the tax provision that lets startup founders exclude gains on qualifying exits. If this passes, founders would owe 10-13% in combined state and city tax on exits that are tax-free at the federal level and in nearly every other major tech state. Even worse: it's retroactive to January 1, 2025. This comes right as the federal government just expanded QSBS benefits and New Jersey moved to full conformity. New York wants to go in the opposite direction. As a seed investor in NYC who has backed hundreds of companies, I can tell you: founders are mobile. If New York becomes one of the most punitive states for startup exits, the best founders will simply build somewhere else — and the jobs, tax revenue, and innovation will follow. NYC has built something special over the last two decades. This proposal puts it all at risk for a short-sighted revenue grab. If you're a founder, investor, or anyone who cares about the NYC tech ecosystem — please sign the TechNYC open letter before Monday below 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 Keep building, NYC 🗽

@RonghanZhang He’s a new guy on our team

@Hadley What is it? Who is the you with mustache?

Adobe's CEO just stepped down after 18 years. He steered the company through the cloud transition brilliantly. But AI-native creative tools are a different beast — you can't subscription-model your way out of a paradigm shift.

@BadleyHarris You should keep that in mind

@BadleyHarris Not that bad of a take

Bezos quietly raising $100B to acquire manufacturing firms and retrofit them with AI. Project Prometheus is the clearest signal yet that the real AI value capture is moving from software into atoms. The race to own the physical layer just got very expensive.

@JamesUlan100 @nihalmehta Judgment/taste and relationships are the hardest things. For example, you can’t introduce a portfolio company to an early design partner if you don’t have a strong relationship with that design partner.

@Hadley @nihalmehta Hadley, are there areas of founder support that are hard to replicate with AI?

AI is automating every VC function. Sourcing, diligence, portfolio support. All of it. The last thing standing is real relationships. Deep trust with the startup community. Post-ASI the last VC standing will be @nihalmehta. No one has built deeper relationships in this industry

@pedroiscastro @nihalmehta A lot of the first stuff is administrative. For example, after I meet with a portfolio company, an agent puts tasks in my to-do list based on things I signed up for during the meeting.

@Hadley @nihalmehta How AI is automating port. support?

@gokulr 💯

First time founders are seduced by a firm’s “brand”, sometimes at the exclusion of everything else. Those that have gone through the fire before and have seen firsthand what really matters, are experienced enough to look beyond the veneer of the brand and evaluate the substance of what the firm and partner offer. Perhaps not a coincidence that a large % of our founders at @MarathonMP are repeat founders.

@GoogleLabs @stitchbygoogle x.com/hadley/status/…

Introducing the new @stitchbygoogle, Google’s vibe design platform that transforms natural language into high-fidelity designs in one seamless flow. 🎨Create with a smarter design agent: Describe a new business concept or app vision and see it take shape on an AI-native canvas. ⚡️ Iterate quickly: Stitch screens together into interactive prototypes and manage your brand with a portable design system. 🎤 Collaborate with voice: Use hands-free voice interactions to update layouts and explore new variations in real-time. Try it now (Age 18+ only. Currently available in English and in countries where Gemini is supported.) → stitch.withgoogle.com

12 years later the VC who passed on Figma’s seed because Google could kill them is finally feeling seen

@theantonchain At least the way I think about it, there are industries and layers. I’m using verticals and horizontal in industry sense. Seems you’re talking about platform layer which tend to be horizontal but don’t have to be

@Hadley Vertical is a business. Horizontal is a primitive. Investors paying $100M seeds aren't buying what you built. They're buying what gets built on top of it.

This is the answer to people who scratch their heads at VCs doing seeds at $100M valuations. That said, the company needs to have the potential to be bigger than we can imagine. Too often I see investors paying up for vertical-focused bets. If you’re going to swing for $T, the potential needs to be horizontal. It needs to touch a big chunk of the world economy.

@PeterJ_Walker @marcepntoja Not sure I agree with your last point. As are mainly raised on potential so very high conversion rate could be a good sign for swinging big

For seed VCs looking to benchmark your portfolio - what is a "good" graduation rate to Series A? Depends on the time since seed, of course. After year 1: - 5% is low, 20% is high Year 2: - 15% is low, 35% is high Year 3: - 20% is low, 40-45% is high 100% graduation rate is probably bad, actually - not taking enough risk!