Markie Wagner

History is defined by top players pursuing good quests. Today, we are in a crisis. Silicon Valley's best — our top operators, exited founders, and investors — are almost all on bad quests. @traestephens and I write about quests in @PirateWires piratewires.com/p/choose-good-…

@ValthosTech Biowarfare is one of humanity’s most terrifying threats. Grateful to the Valthos team for working to make our species less fragile

Valthos builds next-generation biodefense. Of all AI applications, biotechnology has the highest upside and most catastrophic downside. Heroes at the frontlines of biodefense are working every day to protect the world against the worst case. But the pace of biotech is against them: more powerful methods to design biological systems, with near-universal access, open up an increasing surface area of threats. In this new world, the only way forward is to be faster. So we set out to build the tech stack for biodefense. Our team of computational biologists and software engineers applies frontier AI to identify biological threats and update medical countermeasures in real-time. We are backed by $30M from @OpenAI, @Lux_Capital, @foundersfund and others including @Definition_Cap. We are actively hiring engineers to join in the mission - if that sounds like you, get in touch.

@juliechentweets congratulations!

After a year of quietly powering some of the best restaurants, we’re finally introducing Magic — the personalization engine for real world experiences. Our first product, Loyalist, is live in hundreds of restaurants in 40+ cities like CARBONE, Momofuku, Le Bernardin, and COTE.

@silasalberti this is sick

super excited to release SWE-grep and SWE-grep-mini! SWE-grep-mini achieves extreme inference speeds of >2,800 TPS: 20x faster than Haiku 4.5 while beating Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1 & GPT-5 on our CodeSearch eval our vision: make agentic search as fast as embedding search. the SWE-grep models can perform multi-turn agentic search in <3 seconds compared to 20-60 seconds for other frontier models. x.com/cognition/stat…

We should choose good quests.  Ones that lead to prosperity for the American worker and a stronger nation.    AI shouldn’t be about frivolous pursuits that further fracture our attention and connection to humanity.  We are a great nation with serious challenges, amongst them the CCP waging a war to supplant and subjugate us and the legitimacy/capacity of our institutions, public and private.  To win we must reindustrialize, produce more energy, empower the American worker – and use our asymmetric advantage in AI to do it.  Frivolous applications of AI do nothing to address the greatest challenges of our time and adds more weight to the growing anti-AI movement which sees America’s AI companies as disinterested in their fate, exploitative, and craven.  What are the outcomes? Whose life is being improved?  What are you delivering to the American people and the nation?  These are the essential questions that all of us working on AI must answer.

@annarmonaco the spreadsheet was one of the most important ideas in computer science - very happy to see you bringing the sheet to it's next phase of evolution

Paradigm is the AI-native spreadsheet to eliminate menial work. Thousands of users have saved 10,000+ hours with Paradigm, and you can be next. Get your first month free today, then plans start at just $20/month.

@TinaJiang20 @p0 lets go tina

very excited to share what we’ve been up to at @p0! today we’re releasing state of the art benchmarks for our deep research api. our vision is to build a new programmatic web for web’s second user - AIs. go check it out!

@markscianna @forward_deploy congratulations mark!

I’m thrilled to share that @forward_deploy has raised a $45M Fund 2 for mission-critical startups! We’re backed by the Palantir Mafia: a motley crew of 150+ operators, hackers, designers, spies, machine learning scientists, classification experts, government contracting officers, nuclear engineers, and founders. Also participating: AngelList Systematic Fund, @BainCapVC, Dauntless Ventures, @garrytan, GREE LP Fund, @invariantes, @MultipleCapital, Norton Holdings, and two undisclosed large institutions 🏦🏦. We invest in startups modernizing critical American industries including defense, energy, and manufacturing — the core infrastructure that underpins our national prosperity. It’s true that “software is eating the world”, but these trillion dollar markets have had relatively little innovation. It’s time. 🇺🇸 We invest in talent mafias such as Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX where we have strong relationships and high conviction in the people and culture. We've seen what extreme talent, velocity, and determination can achieve. Born from Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineering culture, we back hardcore founders that move fast and run through walls to achieve their missions. We run with them and accelerate their momentum. Huge thanks to the founders and LPs who’ve given us their time, trust, and partnership. We’re fired up to build the future with you. 🔊 Turn your headphones up, this hits hard! Let’s go! 🚀

@ROWGHANI Forge simply wouldn’t be where it is today without Ali - forever grateful we crossed paths. He's one of the most thoughtful and genuinely good people I’ve met - there’s a reason he’s the first call for so many founders

I’m excited to announce the public launch of First Harmonic. We are a small team of former operators who invest in early-stage companies and run what I believe is the world’s best go-to-market program for seed-stage founders. We have run six cohorts of the program to date with an NPS of 100 across the nearly 50 founders who have participated. Over a long career in tech, I’ve had the privilege of working with Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull at Pixar, of taking Twitter from $0 in revenue through IPO as the CFO and COO, and of mentoring hundreds of founders at all stages in 10 years as a YC partner. I’ve also been fortunate to invest as an early angel in several breakout AI companies, including Mercor, Decagon, and Cursor. I’ve seen the arc from inception to IPO many times and recognize what separates winning startups from the pack. It's this multi-stage experience as an operator and investor that is uniquely valuable to the founders in our program. What’s this program about? A common challenge that all founders face in the early days is defining their ideal initial customer. Great go-to-market strategy begins with narrow customer selection. Every important decision is downstream of customer definition: roadmap priorities, customer acquisition strategy, sales model, pricing, etc. If you don’t define your customer well, everything else becomes extra hard. In our program, we help founders nail early customer definition through intensive 1:1 work. It’s the point of highest leverage. Our cohorts are small (10 to 12 companies), and we don’t accept applications. Instead, we select founders who have been nominated by people we trust, increasingly by alumni of our program. The program requires a 3–4 hour weekly time commitment over 8 weeks and sets startups on the right go-to-market path for life. The program will always be free and non-dilutive to founders. In order to make this possible, we’ve raised an early-stage fund that covers the costs of running the program. But there are no investment expectations or strings attached to participating. If you’re an early-stage founder, you can read more about what we believe in the link in comments. If you’re a seed investor, we hope to collaborate with you.

@m_franceschetti @eightsleep @hubermanlab Can't wait to try the blanket, pod just gets better and better

BREAKING NEWS: We just launched our newest products @eightsleep ✅Pod 5 ✅Hydro-powered Blanket for 2x thermal coverage ✅Base with zero-gravity elevation & surround-sound w/ @hubermanlab content ✅AI that monitors your health while you sleep Get yours👉eightsleep.com

We asked @traestephens about his "Good Quests" essay with @markiewagner. "Lots of super talented former entrepreneurs took the route of Big Head in Silicon Valley (HBO show) to rest and vest." "That feels like a moral failure of tech. Founders operating on God Mode should focus on the hardest and most important quests, like rebuilding semiconductor manufacturing in the US."

A little over two years ago, @markiewagner and I published an essay in @PirateWires entitled "Choose Good Quests" that blew up way more than I was expecting. I was also surprised that more than a few readers were able to read between the lines to see the theological underpinnings of the central argument. I'll be giving a talk hosted by ACTS 17 + @garrytan on the evening of March 6th in San Francisco in which I'll draw out the explicit theological message and it's implications on how we think about our quests in tech. Invite link in thread below. Should be fun!

Choose Good Quests @markiewagner

@vam_saladi Go Contour 🔥

An early Christmas present 🚀🎁

@caseykcaruso @topology_vc congrats casey!

I’m launching Topology, an early-stage venture firm dedicated to frontier technology. We've raised an oversubscribed $75M Fund 1. Topology backs founders who put everything on the line to bend the arc of human progress. Meet us at the edge. @topology_vc

A manifesto for founders in tech: Choose Good Quests, by @traestephens and @markiewagner "There are certainly bad quests that are hard, and (a few) good quests that are easy." Read it here 👇🏻

This message has been approved by me + @markiewagner.

@elonmusk @paulg Agreed 100% @markiewagner @micsolana @PirateWires piratewires.com/p/choose-good-…

This is a poetic post by @traestephens and the @PirateWires team This one is personal for me as Trae and Peter backed my last company @Expanseinc I feel like I can’t post this without calling out the obvious, that I became a VC Now the least I can do is back hard, good quests

If ChatGPT is Pong for LLM, this is at least Space Invaders level🤯 - Facts extraction - Automated "Database" creation and population for quantitative questions - Recursive Q&A for qualitative questions 👏@markiewagner @yasyf

@socialtippers @yasyf With Summ you only generate one query — GPT then generates relevant sub-questions, summarizing the results into a final answer!

@markiewagner @yasyf The problem, however, is that I don't know anybody who has the time/energy to manually create prompt questions for every single paragraph in transcripts of hundreds of hour-long conversations. We need an AI to break all those sentences down like the Knowledge Graph people do

@yasyf and I built Summ, an open-source tool that provides intelligent search and question-answering across large sets of transcripts. ⚡️ We turn your unstructured transcripts into queryable SQL and JSON! Try it out and read how we did it here: markiewagner.com/summ