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Josh Lu
2.5K posts
Josh Lu
@JoshLu
GM @speedrun. Investor at @a16z. Apply here: https://t.co/bbxTvgMK6w You've probably played a game I worked on. Husband, girldad x2, cook, point guard
Katılım Mart 2009
1.2K Takip Edilen12.7K Takipçiler
every early-stage startup needs attention.
your weekend vibecoded website isn't cutting it
you watch videos but don't know how to make one
'new media' seems distant, inaccessible
you can't tell your story, so others won't either.
here at @speedrun we've designed brand, story, and launch programs to help fix this.
if you're still considering applying, I'd love to work with you later this year.
DMs always open to founders or creatives looking to work with us.
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@speedrun @evajsteinman As a lifelong derm patient I'd be very grateful to the next wave of entrepreneurs building in this space.
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REQUEST FOR STARTUPS: There has never been a better time to build at the intersection of health and AI.
Every corner of medicine is being reimagined, and dermatology is one of the most compelling places to start.
Hear it from @evajsteinman 👇
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Half of my dms are "how do i get views??" (other half is abg bots ofc)
Can't go through everyone's strat so we're going to answer them live.
Me, @Jibran_05 and @rjvir are going to roast your UGC strat tomorrow on spaces.
You'll have 90 seconds to pitch your company + current content to get feedback on how to make it go viral.
Raj built NGL (150 million downloads), Jibran runs Lightreel, and has helped hundreds of apps reach top charts.
Calling it office hours cuz i know you nerds miss school :)
See you there pookies 👇
x.com/i/spaces/1qGvv…
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Agent-native products are coming.
Every product on the internet was built for a human with eyes, a cursor, and a credit card. Agents have none of those things.
Most companies are teaching agents to pretend to be humans. That's a hack. The real opportunity is products designed for agents from scratch.
Everything inverts:
• Discovery → protocol registries, not ads and billboards
• Trust → machine-readable reputation, not brand
• Onboarding → full capabilities upfront, not a narrow slice
• Payments → spend authorization, not checkout flows
• Retention → zero. Agents switch between API calls.
30 years of human product design. Day one of agent product design.
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If you want to be among the best, you have to build your company in the US. I first came the US when I was 15, and I'm still living the American Dream, pursuing my version of excellence.
There's no program other than @speedrun that would do everything to help the best international founders kickstart in the US. If you've wrestled with H1B / O1 / EB1 / E3 / OPT / STEM and still want to fight for your dream, apply to SR007 now: speedrun007.a16z.com/GF
When they say "they've got your back", Speedrun means it. Special thanks to @tmhammer @andrewchen @JoshLu @zebird0 for all the help on this journey to America.
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
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I’m officially an alien of extraordinary ability!!
Still a ridiculous phrase, but a useful reminder that for international founders, immigration is part of the startup stack.
You don’t need to start in the US.
But access to customers, capital, talent, and people moving fast matters a lot🇺🇸
Apply. Send the cold email. Get in the room. Apply to Speedrun😉
Also, we’re hiring founding engineers at Sellara :) we're building applied AI for Wall Street, dm me!
Shoutout to the @a16z @speedrun team and especially @tmhammer for the help here!
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
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My first 6 years as a startup founder:
- Failed with 4+ startups
- Ran out of money multiple times & had $15K credit card debt
- Was rejected by Y Combinator 8 times
- Got 200+ rejections from investors
My last year as a startup founder:
- Got into a16z @speedrun & raised $18M
- Moved to SF & got O1 thanks to @tmhammer & @lighthousehq_
- Scaled Rork to #1 AI mobile app builder in the world
The average journey to a $1B company takes 10 years. I’m on year 7.
Keep building.
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
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The only reason I’m in SF right now is because @tmhammer helped me get an O-1 visa.
Nilo is now a team of 22 world-class people, and half of them are based in the US. None of this would have happened without @speedrun.
Applications for the new speedrun cohort are open! I’m an a16z scout and can help you prepare and potentially invest, especially if you’re a solo founder.
Also, Nilo is hiring! Links in the comments.
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
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The U.S has been my home for as long as I can remember, but on paper I’ve always been a guest.
I spent every summer and winter in Los Altos, California, starting the year I was born. I looked forward all year to golfing at Stanford and skiing in Tahoe.
I grew up in a family of founders during the glory days of Silicon Valley. I saw water purification warehouses, animated movie studios, children’s education apps, all built from kernels of ideas into real businesses employing thousands of people, through the sheer determination of my dad and uncle. I always knew there was no other path for me.
So I did all the right things. Went to Duke, studied computer science, learned from the best at every scale of company. I started building things that I thought were cool, trying to figure out what would click and be a real business some day.
But then STEM OPT ran out. 3 shots at the lottery, no H1B. I had to move to London. It felt like the end of the world for me. Partly because I realized I’d be around British people all the time, but more so because it felt like I was being kicked out of my home.
I’ve always believed I was extraordinary and was going to build something great, except now there was a forcing function, and my path back depended on it. So I locked in on building and founded anchr with @tzartaraporvala. The goal was to rebuild the heartbeat of one of the country’s most important supply chains, and fix a trillion dollar industry from the inside.
There’s one firm that we wanted in our corner that cares more than anyone else about rebuilding the core infrastructure of this country – a16z, and we immediately applied to @speedrun. Not only have they been a catalyst for Anchr’s early success, but the team (shoutout @tmhammer) personally supported me through every stage of my O1-A petition.
If you’re a founder trying to find your path to the greatest country in the world by building something special, apply to SR007. Happy to talk through it 🇺🇸
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
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🇺🇸 WE ACCEPT FOUNDERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD 🇺🇸
Tom 🔨@tmhammer
30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up: * founders building products + teams internationally * builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope * students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡 -apply below my friends-
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30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US
and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up:
* founders building products + teams internationally
* builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope
* students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea
Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun
we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip
you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡
-apply below my friends-
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AI has transformed how video is created. We think the next wave is about understanding it.
Over the past few years, we've seen remarkable advances in video generation, editing, avatars, and creative tooling. An increasingly important problem is teaching machines to search, analyze, reason over, and extract insight from video - across massive libraries and live streams alike.
We're calling this video intelligence, and we're actively looking to back founders building here. We're most excited about companies pushing on the core capabilities:
- Video-native models - multimodal embeddings, temporal reasoning, and retrieval built specifically for video rather than adapted from image or text
- Real-time and large-scale pipelines - infrastructure for processing, indexing, and querying video at the speed and scale enterprises actually need
- Agentic and reasoning layers - systems that don't just retrieve clips but answer questions, surface anomalies, and take action on what they see
The models and infrastructure to make this real are appearing to be crossing a capability threshold right now. Multimodal foundation models are maturing, storage costs have collapsed, and enterprises are sitting on years of unstructured video with no way to use it.
That infrastructure unlocks a wide range of applications including media and sports workflows, security and physical operations, enterprise knowledge management, advertising analytics, robotics, and consumer products, where video has historically been dark data.
If you're building in video intelligence at the model layer, the platform layer, or in a vertical application, we'd love to talk!
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@JoshLu Actual footage of me skipping CI’s on that feature creep because it’s time to go to bed 🤣🤣🤣
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Delighted to announce @meetdexai 's Seed Round, Led by Notion Capital, with @speedrun and @ConceptVC_
covered today in @FortuneMagazine
fortune.com/2026/04/28/exc…
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