Link Ventures

Happening now at @ImaginationinAction: Link co-founder Dave Blundin interviews @OpenAI founder @Sama re: building in the #AI world. With AI accelerating into all human endeavors, how do we build on existing platforms? #LinkVentures #ImaginationinAction

Four American labs are now at the frontier: @AnthropicAI, @OpenAI, @Meta, and @SpaceXAI. GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 both dropped last week. Is the duopoly is over? @Apple also sued OpenAI for trade secret theft. They filed their lawsuit in Northern California, and it is very hard to win a case like this there. You almost have to be desperate to file one. Once you get a reputation for suing people, it's very hard to recruit. Something big must be at stake for Apple to file.

If your CTO doesnt talk like this, you’re ngmi.

Claude Code feels a lot like gambling: it’s dopamine inducing, all consuming, and I’ve played my fair share of prompt roulette! Practically: @AnthropicAI continues to lead because they decided to focus on LLM coding capabilities and coding harnesses early. They were quick to foresee AI agents maintaining codebases at the line by line level of detail. The @voicerunnin team is making that same bet for voice agents. Great line, Derek Caneja!

Fable 5 is back, but with a leash. @AnthropicAI just committed to giving the US government early access to frontier models plus 24/7 monitoring. But they also quietly rewrote their internal policy from "we'll watch and report if subpoenaed" to "good faith belief." For now, they’ve been handed back the responsibility of self policing. Meanwhile, @sama is trying to give the US government 5% of @OpenAI - about $42 billion. The idea that the government is going to set up a sovereign wealth equity vehicle without a constitutional amendment is insane to me. Now that every issue is partisan, won’t the next president just immediately sell everything, turn it into cash, and use it to buy votes in the next election?

@DaveBlundin @NWRLeon @voicerunnin @NWRLeon / @voicerunnin were some of the first in our space post-covid. We owe them huge gratitude for helping create the vibrant Link ecosystem of today!

Years ago, I told Nick (@NWRLeon): any day you're ready to start a company, call me. Now he and his co-founder Derek Caneja are scaling @voicerunnin, and it's already the default platform that startups at @Link_Ventures use to implement AI voice interfaces into their products. In this episode, learn why voice models have been surprisingly static for the past year while LLM capabilities have skyrocketed, why "prompt and pray" voice agents don't work in production, and why VoiceRun bet the farm on a product built for coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, which puts them in stark contrast to the GUI-centric “drag and drop” alternatives of their market peers. The mighty team of 6 (plus an army of agents) is taking on well funded competition in the multi-trillion dollar AI Voice market. Thank you Nick and Derek for coming into the Link Ventures podcast studio!

The Big Five are spending on AI faster than they're earning: @Microsoft, @Google, @amazon, @Meta. If CapEx exceeds cash flow, it can only persist as long as investors keep funding it. @PeterDiamandis asked me: What happens if sentiment shifts? Here's my take: sentiment won’t shift. If anything, the investment will become more justified over time. The world still sees compute as a rapidly depreciating asset but that’s simply not what it is anymore. Short of a massive leap in photonics or quantum computing, GPUs will continue to be highly sought after and have a predictable service life. This is already turning GPUs hours into a commodity. Think about it like buying a house: when you buy a house, you finance it, and the house is collateral. In a world where compute becomes acceptable collateral, the hyperscalers could easily raise 10x to 100x on their cash flow in equity and debt, if they choose to. In reality, there’s a lot of investable dollars in the world that want to flow into AI but can’t. AI is still the largest wealth creation moment in the history of humankind.

My favorite part of the @Link_Ventures office is the kitchen. And not only because of the unlimited snacks and caffeine. It’s the best spot to bump into founders sparking up some of the best conversations of my week. I might hear about a new customer, or about closing a round with new investors, and often I learn a new orchestration or prompting ideas I hadn’t thought of yet. 57 seconds into this and you've already met Chris Harris and Jess Sciore (@blitzyai). Check out the full walkthrough I did if you haven't had a chance yet!

@DaveBlundin Thanks for representing us so well! 🙌

Who is Dave Blundin anyway? Take a walk with me for a glimpse inside my day to day action at Link Ventures as I answer 31 rapid-fire questions that never make it on the pod! Tune in for the inside scoop on what we’re building, what we look for in founding teams, and my thoughts on AI in this special moment in history. youtu.be/ZDKwsDavHCY?si…

Things have been taking off lately at Talvy. Something about this scares me. We’re closing the biggest deals in our history right now. The sort of momentum you dream of as a founder. But this success is reminding me of a feeling I’ve had with old startups, where early wins felt promising before everything came crashing down. That gutting feeling of “what if it all goes wrong?” So under all the good news, there’s been a sentence running in the back of my head about this: “This one better be the one.” Luckily, things are different this time. But it isn’t because I got smarter, or that the timing is finally right. It’s that the people who are around me this time around are the best supporters I could ever ask for. In the past, I had to deal with members of the board who didn't have our best interest. But now at @Link_Ventures, I have advisors who have looked out for us every step of the way. And before, I felt like I had to carry the weight of leading the company alone, but now I have a team full of my best friends who I can trust to carry the weight of every decision with me. So as I write this out, it confirms that the fear I was talking about earlier belongs in the past. Because I fully believe in my heart that the people I’m building with are just as bought in as me in the present. This feels like “the one”.

@voicerunnin ran it's first ad! So of course it was on Moonshots podcast hosted by @PeterDiamandis and featuring @DaveBlundin, @alexwg, and @salimismail. For those considering podcast ads, here are some brief learnings: 1) Making high production content is easier than ever. You need a nice camera and mic + Claude Code. Claude Code will use ffmpeg to align your mic audio with the camera audio, then use Hyperframes from @HeyGen to create some nice overlays and animations. 2) When you're recording, learn to let go. You'll never like every part of every take. Take a bunch, pick the best, and go with it. 3) We got a surprisingly amount of signups and demo requests. I now have a better appreciation for why creators charge so much. 4) Podcasts won't let anyone run ads on their podcast! This is kind of obvious in retrospect, but you really have to convince them that your content will be well received by their listeners. They understand that ads intrude on their listeners, and so having highly relevant ads is important! Happy to answer other questions people might have!

Incredible to have @PhilipJohnston on the pod! 10/10 guest - he'll be back soon to update us on the space compute buildout. We were all jumping out of our seats (especially @alexwg 😄)!

For most of my life, @exxonmobil was one of the top three most valuable companies in the world. Oil felt like the biggest industry on Earth. Then AI happened. The global market for compute is already bigger than oil in market cap terms. And here's the thing: oil is basically the same size every year. Corn is basically the same size every year. Neither one is on an exponential ramp. Compute is a fundamentally different commodity because demand for intelligence may be exponential. If our thesis on the Moonshots podcast is right, we're going to tile the Earth with compute and then expand into space, and it seems like that expansion never ends. That means the market Kush Bavaria (@bavaria_kush) and Wayne Nelms (@wayne_nelmz) are building at @OrnnExchange, a futures and options exchange for compute, could end up bigger than the entire options market some day. That's the size of the prize they're going after.

For the first time in US history, the government placed a national security hold on commercial AI models. This is now part of the release cycle for cutting edge @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI LLMs. The models are so insanely capable that government feels they must be controlled. The question is: what you achieve by doing that? You can already take Opus 4.8, put a brilliant harness around it, and beat Mythos. So, the cat's out of the bag. Meanwhile, Anthropic caught Alibaba running 25,000 fake accounts to siphon @claudeai - a total of 28.8 million completions. Anyone who's shocked by this is way out of touch with China's AI strategy.

Every business school textbook just became obsolete. @OrnnExchange uses a Mac Studio that reads all their Slack, email, and meetings transcripts. Any employee just asks it questions instead of scheduling an infinite cycle of meetings. This is one of many management tactics that didn't exist until this year and it's so dramatically better.

REDUX: If you didn’t yet, check out my epic interview with Kush Bavaria (@bavaria_kush), CEO and Co-Founder of @OrnnExchange! Fresh off the $33M raise, and now backed by @a16z, @Link_Ventures, and others, the Ornn team went from idea to $100M+ valuation within 8 months - possibly the fastest for an MIT company ever. Plus, Larry Fink publicly calls for exactly what Kush & team are already building. The desperation for Ornn’s product is growing daily. My agents are literally grinding to a halt. The foundation labs need an ocean of compute hours that doesn’t exist. Ornn provides hyperscalers the stability to rationalize that investment, while creating an entirely new asset class for investors who want to back the AI revolution. Link below - tune in!

Big news from team @blitzyai! They just topped SWE-Bench Pro, beating out Mythos 5 and Opus 4.8 by a long shot!! The best part: this was done without using any Fable/Mythos at all. I can’t wait to see the baby coding AGI they create when they do have access to it. Congrats Niraj, Brian, Sid and the rest of the team (humans and agents) building this phenomenal tech!

A team of three students just won $10,000 for stopping AI agents from hallucinating by grounding them in math. That's a wrap on ClawWeek. 🥇 Gliomach takes first ($10,000). Adam McIntyre, Šimon Lašák, and David Remenyik. 🥈 DevBrain, second ($5,000): an orchestration layer that streamlines communication across a dev team, made fully speech-controlled with VoiceRun. 🥉 Beacon, third ($2,500): a real estate agent that prices homes from images, catching things like roof and water damage, and sharpening its own accuracy over time. The night before final pitches, every single team pulled an all-nighter. We stayed up with them, going through every pitch until the sun came up. The dedication was unreal. This was everything we hoped ClawComp would be 🦞