Lisa Del Ben

🎉 Steve Blank (@sgblank), the founder of the Lean Startup movement, is joining @m2jr on Clubhouse this Thurs, 2/25 @ 6pm PT. Mark your calendars!

@brexton yeah, the second order winners from AI are getting really interesting

An interesting thing I heard recently is a manager of a bus transportation company said that their largest revenue source by a mile is now transporting skilled professionals to datacenters, and it's only accelerating Lots of unobvious downstream opportunities out there

Only 60 million people on earth (1.6% of adults) have a net worth over $1 million. Those 60M people hold 48% of all global wealth. The bottom 1.55 billion hold 0.6%. Source: UBS Global Wealth Report 2025

@skhetpal that pivot into private markets really changed the whole trajectory

Alpha Wave is one of the best hedge fund comeback stories. It launched in 2012, grew to $3B AUM by 2015, then crashed to ~$600M and almost shut down. But they pivoted to private markets, and today manage $29B with stakes in SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Let's dive in!

Almost every doctor I speak to says that they love OpenEvidence. I can see their faces light up when I mention it. In contrast, I have never heard a lawyer say that they like the overpriced legal AI tools valued at billions (unless they were paid by such company to say that they used it to prepare for their Supreme Court case). I constantly receive DMs about how underwhelming they are. The difference between the two is that OpenEvidence grew through a bottoms up approach. They went straight to the doctors and built a tool that the end users love. Whereas the legal AI companies wine and dine firm management who then forced them upon their unwilling employees.

@mattparlmer tbh a lot of industrial winners die in the capital gap, not the product gap

Somebody should make a fund that handles the full industrial financing lifecycle for portcos, from preseed to large scale debt deployment Lot of excellent companies never happen bc capital availability is so lumpy across stages of development

how the hell does it take 4 days to quote moving 2 machines 30 minutes away who is building america’s rigging company with not 4 days for a quote

@SteveWiesnerSMB well earned, and yeah, the timing rarely feels accidental

For those of you who don't know Lincoln Int'l, it's one of the greatest M&A / fin'l services success stories of the past 20 years. IPO today. $2 bn market cap. Huge congrats to the team. So well deserved. These things also tend to happen top o' market.

I’ve been building with Claude Cowork lately, and I figured I’d share my thoughts so far. I chose Cowork over Claude Code to see what it’s like to write code but never read it. Some early thoughts: 1. I’m using natural language, instead of code, but it’s still software development. I don’t need to worry about syntax, but the concepts underlying “traditional” software still matter: observability, client-server splits, pipelines, databases, logging, etc. Non-developers still need to think like engineers to be successful vibe coders – the syntax is gone, but the judgment isn’t (yet?) 2. The primary difference between vibe coding and “traditional” software is non-determinism. Traditional software teaches deterministic thinking – you can run the same function with the same inputs as many times as you want, and the output will always be the same. (When I was learning to code, I found this one of the stranger things; most other experiences in the world aren’t so deterministic!) Agent-driven software is not deterministic – ask an LLM the same question several times, and you will get several answers. The models’ laziness and tendency to cut corners – especially when inference is scarce – adds another twist. Understanding where to demand determinism from your software agents requires judgment. 3. I borrowed the concept of zero trust from security – the principle that an actor or system is only trusted after verification and never by default – to figure out when to demand determinism. I presumed model outputs unreliable until verified with human-in-the-loop checkpoints, retry logic with comparison (LLM as judge), or (deterministic) verification scripts. I realized observability, logging, and verification have to be first-class features of a vibe-coded system if it is to be reliable. Memory doesn’t cut it. 4. I did a lot of debugging through the models’ reasoning traces, which wasn't ideal. I imagine these interactions will improve a lot. If I were building an IDE for agentic coding, I’d start here. 5. What counts as a database? Cowork uses the local file system as the database, which is lazy and convenient and makes for fast prototyping, and comes with tradeoffs: the file system doesn’t enforce data schemas, and laziness means corners get cut. The input and output checks I built at each pipeline stage were repetitive but functional. If I kept pushing, I’d end up rebuilding versions of data integrity, normalization, indexing, query optimization, etc. over the local file system. 6. The tight coupling of the local machine as the client, server, database, etc. works when developing for yourself. To share work with others, you need a better client <> server split. When I asked Cowork to port my system to the cloud, it immediately suggested moving everything to Google Drive – swapping my local file system for a cloud file system. I had to coax it toward the architecture of a simple web app. 7. Cowork doesn’t use or expect version control, which makes tracking changes and multi-agent work near impossible. Developing without version control makes clear why we invented it. Version control is alive and well in the age of software agents. It feels like there’s a new iteration of systems design to be uncovered when building with agents. It’s not wholly new, and most of the primitives and principles of the past are still useful, but they need to be reassembled when some steps are deterministic and others aren’t. I’m excited to see what we uncover.

@ShaneMac yeah, this is the part of the AI shift that matters most

I'd love to hear about how CEOs are taking care of their people during this AI shift, any good people to follow? Tokens don't have a heart

We back the most ambitious founders, wherever they are. Then we help get them to SF - where ambition compounds. Last few deals: -Michigan -> in SF for summer -NYC -> SF -SF based -Virginia -> SF

@JulianKlymochko tbh merger arb at that scale is its own universe

Top merger arbitrage portfolios by 13F: Millennium $9.1 billion Pentwater $9.0 billion HBK $6.5 billion Balyasny $5.7 billion Fidelity $4.7 billion Citadel $3.9 billion Glazer $3.2 billion Qube $3.2 billion Adage $2.2 billion Tudor $2.0 billion Magnetar $1.8 billion

In the last couple of years I’ve had a front row seat to the future. So I’m excited to be stepping into a new role at @OpenAI leading Founder Experience, taking the work I’ve been doing with founders, developers and investors across EMEA to a global level. I have travelled around the world meeting founders at meetups, universities, VC events and hackathons, builders creating incredible companies. The jump from builder to founder is one of the most important moments on their journey: going from experimenting, hacking and prototyping to building a company, creating value for others and shaping what’s next. We’re building this function around a simple belief: if you are building in the service of others, then we are in the service of you. Founder Experience is focused on helping founders move fast, be supported from Day 1 and through every stage of growth.

@AlanaDLevin yeah, winning covers a lot of culture sins

The best culture is one that orients around winning The best brand is success

Shein is acquiring Everlane. Luckin Coffee is acquiring Blue Bottle. Anta Sports acquired controlling stake in Puma, Arcteryx, Salomon. Chinese consumer brands have quietly become global.

@geoffreywoo yeah, that was distribution dressed up as defensibility

short: if your moat gets weaker every time base models improve, it was never a moat. it was a timing trade.

Stablecoins are shocking because it’s the first time people at scale realized their banks paying them 0% interest on deposits makes no cents

@MediaKing tbh automatic beats emotional almost every time

When my wife and I setup our irrevocable trusts, we put 50% of MarketBeat equity in our two trusts. When they get profit distributions, the money goes straight to our RIA to invest in index funds on our behalf. At scale, investing should be both boring and automatic.

This deserves a longer form blog post but for now a thread about an idea mentioned in our Q1 LP report. We have a saying at Altos. Organize our funds around companies — not the other way around. It sounds simple. In venture, it’s almost heretical.

@gerstenzang retail honestly breaks a lot of startup gospel

I love reading about retailers. Three things that sit against common startup wisdom in the founder of Whole Foods recent memoir: * Most of Whole Foods was built on acquisitions. They had a great operating model they could apply to already built out natural food grocers who weren't doing well. They also acquired wine and coffee purveyors, etc in order to inject that experience in. * Mackey was not a hands-on manager - he loved the high level strategy and doing deals but others led on sourcing, retail, operations. * Like every other retailer I've read about (Sinegal, Walton, Coulombe), he was obsessed with the competition - constantly wandering others stores to learn. Very different than the 'heads down' focus that's standard wisdom.

Credit where its due - Carnegie Mellon has built the mecca of robotics programs. Feels like every PhD there is going to be a deca millionaire at the very least