Jonathan Golden
406 posts
Jonathan Golden
@jpgg
Startup investor, ex-Partner @NEA, Product at @Airbnb, @Dropbox, @Hubspot
San Francisco, CA Katılım Temmuz 2007
1.4K Takip Edilen4.7K Takipçiler
Thrilled to announce our Series B.
Try Juicebox, and win the talent war!🧃
Ishan Gupta@ishangpta
Excited to announce that Juicebox has raised an $80M Series B at an $850M valuation, led by DST Global with participation from @sequoia, @coatue, and @ycombinator. We’ve now raised $116M to build the future of hiring. Read more below 🧵
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@jasonlk Excellent post. Wild to see 2025 and now 2026 shaping up to be more frothy than 2021.
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Jonathan Golden retweetledi
Investors are betting billions of dollars that robotics will experience a Giant Leap.
Meaning: robots are not useful today, but throw enough GPUs, models, data, and PhDs at the problem, and you’ll cross some threshold on the other side of which you will meet robots that can walk into any room and do whatever they’re told.
The Giant Leap view is sexy. It holds the promise of a totally unbounded market – labor today is a ~$25 trillion market, constrained by the cost and unreliability of humans; if robots become cheap, general, and autonomous, the argument goes that you get Jevons Paradox for labor - available to whichever team of geniuses in a garage produces the big breakthrough first. This is the type of innovation that Silicon Valley loves. Brilliant minds love opportunities where success is just a brilliant idea away.
My friend @evanbeard is betting that progress will happen by climbing the gradient of variability. That robotics will progress towards general usefulness in small steps.
The logic is clear:
- Robotics is bottlenecked on data.
- The best data is the data your robots collect actually doing things.
- The best strategy, then, even if it's not the sexiest, is to get paid to collect that data, learn, and iterate.
This is where the vast majority of value lies, and the real path to our abundant robotic future.
For the first co-written essay in not boring world, Evan and I write about the robots.
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ElevenLabs growth:
- 0->$100M ARR: 20 months
- $100M -> $200M ARR: 10 months
- $200M -> $330M ARR: 5 months
All powered by incredible customers - and their impact.
ElevenLabs@ElevenLabs
We closed 2025 at over $330M ARR - driven by our customers’ trust and impact. @matiii joined @Bloomberg earlier today to talk about the work we do with enterprises, our recent research release, and what’s next.
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We actually agree with John.
Unless you're core competency is rolling up - not product - this is a lot harder than people wanna let on.
John Caple@BigJohn043
My view is that these VC roll-ups are going to end poorly. Roll-ups are really easy to describe but much harder to execute. You have to find a bunch of small companies that are interested in selling. You have to DD and negotiate the deals. This is hard in small businesses. But then you have to integrate. The easy part is the IT systems. You generally have to move them to a new ERP and they often don't have CRM, HRIS and operating systems at all. But you also need to evaluate and integrate the team. Often they don't have a real operating cadence. Etc. Etc. It is really hard. VCs are really good at scaling growth tech businesses but this is very very different than running a typical small business. Was on a board with a bunch of VCs once and they literally didn't go through financial statements in board meetings. It is really really different. These VCs have no idea how to do a roll-up and they don't even have the basic skills to learn it. And AI is not a game changer in any of these businesses yet. It is a helpful tool but not a game changer. And everyone is using these tools to at least some extent. It certainly isn't a big enough impact to make up for not doing a good job at buying and integrating. Once again, I think this ends poorly.
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Paying $3 for a Dollar: The Rational Irrationality of Venture Capital
docs.google.com/document/d/1S7…
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Today we’re launching Vybe to the world and announcing our $10M Seed round to make vibe-coding actually work inside companies.
This is why, how and our vision:
Over the last few decades, every fast-growing company has quietly built the same mess behind the scenes: internal ops glued together with rigid SaaS, fragile spreadsheets or custom-coded tools nobody wants to maintain.
Meanwhile, eng teams are stretched thin. Internal tools never make it to the top of the backlog.
Vibe-coding is changing the game but it’s mostly been good for prototypes, landing pages, and side projects disconnected to production data.
Our belief is simple: in the next few years, most internal software will be vibe-coded by teams working with AI, engineers and business teams together.
Vybe is built for that collaboration:
1/ Business teams own the surface area: Business teams (Ops, CX, PMs etc.) can build and iterate on apps themselves: flows, UI, fields, and logic; without waiting weeks for eng to pick up another “internal tools” ticket.
2/ Engineers own the foundation: Integrate production data (Postgres, Salesforce, Jira, and 3,000 integrations), define SQL definitions once, set up SSO auth, access control, and keep everything in Git to help when needed (from their favorite IDE!)
3/ Secure by design: Our security and permissioning layer is not vibe-coded and can’t be modified by AI. Everyone can sleep at night.
4/ Team-ready out of the box: SSO, Auth, environments, deployments, and review flows are built in.
Over the last few months, we’ve been in closed waitlist mode and have hand-onboarded teams to pressure-test Vybe on real production workflows:
- A YC Founder runs his entire CS operation on Vybe and saves ~2 days per week.
- Another company ingested millions of rows from their warehouse to build BI-like internal views that would break typical AI builders.
- One team fully replaced Metabase/Looker by plugging Redshift into Vybe and just… prompting their way to MAU, DAU, funnels…
Remix apps from world-class operators
To make it even easier to get started, we’re launching templates co-created with operators who’ve already solved these problems at scale:
- @collinmathilde (CEO @ Front) – how she runs 1:1s
- @lennysan (yeah, that Lenny!) - how to manage up, do perf reviews and write PRDs
- @sushmars (CTO @ 23andMe) - her 7Cs Framework for Build vs. Buy Decisions
- and many more from the best Tech leaders
Backed by people who’ve lived this pain
We’ve raised $10M in Seed funding, led by @firstround with participation from @ycombinator and an incredible group of operators and founders, including: The CEO Datadog, CEO Grammarly, CEO Reforge, CTO Intercom, Head of Product at OpenAI, Head of Product Anthropic, and 50 more incredible operators who believed in our vision!
Huge thank you to our early customers, team, and investors for believing in us this early. 🙏
We’re now in GA: no more waitlist!
vybe.build
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Today CZI is announcing an unprecedented new scientific initiative to build the future of AI-powered biology. I am joining CZI to lead this initiative as Head of Science, and the EvolutionaryScale team is joining forces with Biohub.
This is the first large scale scientific effort to combine frontier AI and frontier biology.
I feel an incredible sense of optimism in this moment. There is a path to build predictive models of life that can fundamentally accelerate science, and unlock a new understanding of disease.
biohub.org/blog/frontier-…
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@daraladje @jesskah Love the IQ, EQ, PQ (power intelligence) and JQ (judgement intelligence) framework. Commonly, IQ doesn't always mean JQ but you need to have IQ to have JQ. Also, EQ doesn't always mean PQ but you need to have EQ to have PQ.
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Sequoia's Chief Product Officer, @jesskah, won't hire well-rounded people.
She looks for a "spikes" in 1 of 4 traits that predict success:
• EQ: One-on-one people skills
• IQ: Raw intellectual horsepower
• PQ: Ability to navigate politics/systems
• JQ: Judgment on decisions that matter
In this week's episode of The Library of Minds, we went deep on how this framework shaped her journey from Google PM to Polyvore CEO to Sequoia’s Chief Product Officer. Jess explains why velocity is the strongest early predictor of product-market fit, how choosing the wrong business model was her biggest mistake as a founder, and why she now believes AI will spark a new wave of consumer media.
00:00 Intro
1:00 Who is Jess Lee
02:50 The EQ / IQ / PQ / JQ framework
03:44 What early Google taught her
05:35 When ambition becomes a weakness
07:34 Customer discovery vs visionary intuition
09:31 Polyvore: from user → CEO
12:37 Imposter syndrome & finding authentic leadership
15:20 Picking the wrong market
18:24 Firing fast & setting high performance bars
20:12 Building cult-like community and emotional loyalty
22:13 Velocity vs delight in product
24:32 What she looks for in founders (turn-based velocity)
25:59 The business model wake-up call
27:27 Storytelling as a founding superpower
28:26 Hot take: consumer isn’t dead, it’s being reborn
31:50 AI-generated media, fanfic, and the next YouTube
Grateful to be working with her at @withdelphi !
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AI video is cool and all, but sometimes I just like looking out the window.
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@juicebox_work @sequoia Amazing product! Pumped to be part of the journey with @davepaffenholz and @ishangpta.
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Andreessen Horowitz has returned at least $25B net to LPs since its was founded
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@forwarddeploy Love the concept of a forward deployed angel! You're the prefect archetype.
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Who are the best angels?
The ones multiple founders would call their favorite for actually helping.
I’m building a vetted list of Forward Deployed Angels.
👇 Tag the angels who have made the difference, i'd love to meet them and give em a hat
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I am so excited to share that I have joined @baseten as president! @tuhinone @amiruci @saltyph have built a beloved product and a hardcore team...and it's just the beginning. Come join us!
Baseten@baseten
Welcome to Baseten @DannieHerz! We’re thrilled to announce that Dannie Herzberg has joined as our new President to lead Baseten’s GTM and operations. As @tuhinone shared: "Dannie is biased towards action, dependable, and long-term in her thinking, and she knows that the customer experience is everything." Here’s to building the next chapter of Baseten with you, Dannie! Read more from Tuhin about Dannie here → baseten.co/blog/welcoming…
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Announcing Synch 2.0 - Three new products to change how your GTM and RevOps teams work.
1. Always on Salesforce Admin agent
2. Automated CRM Updates & Unified Reporting
3. Pipeline Insights Hub & Deal Risk Scores - Advanced analytics with predictive deal scoring
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Introducing Account Intelligence
Turn customer data → signals → action.
The result is fewer blind spots, faster reactions, and proactive workflows that drive retention and revenue.
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@anneleeskates Congrats! Excited to work together on some great companies!
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Today I’m debuting Parable.
Successful companies make the impossible, inevitable. Their stories live long enough to become parables that inspire generations.
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