Mircea Pașoi

Hope everyone is enjoying their Thanksgiving weekend. Feeling extremely blessed and grateful for family and friends, and for Xu Talent’s clients ($1B+ AUM funds) and supporters. As we head into the final month of the year, I’m hearing from many who are starting to pick up their heads. Terrific time in the market to explore something new! I’m currently working with several VC firms primarily Seed through Series B+ on Investor and Partner/GP searches across SF and NYC. The most common profiles include: - Founders who have exited or are winding down, and exploring potentially a transition into Venture. - Technical operators with strong business instincts who enjoy building relationships with founders and the broader ecosystem. - Current investors (Venture & Growth), or current/former scouts for a VC firm. If this sounds like you, I’d love to chat (link below).

Elad Gil and Jared Kushner (Co-founders, Brain Co.) joined @saranormous on @NoPriorsPod to share the vision for Brain Co.: "The goal was to create a frontier AI implementation company working with top clients in the most impactful institutions and companies in the world." "We couldn't find great solution providers for our portfolio. Elad in the way he does, says, well, let's start a company to do it." "Brain Co. has a common platform underlying it with a common set of things provided to every customer, with incremental solutions built on top of it that can be cross-sold into different verticals." Brain Co. is building an AI platform and products for the world’s most important large institutions. @eladgil @jaredkushner

If that sounds exciting to you, come work with us! We’re growing fast and hiring across many roles at brain.co

Excited to announce @BrainCo_AI coming out of stealth! Honored to co-found this with the best team I’ve ever worked with, including @ClemensMewald @d_ashton_ @revant_kapoor @moh and many other talented folks. AGI may get the headlines, but deploying AI across healthcare, energy, retail & governmental services is what changes lives.

Asset gains over the last 10 years: Gold: 201% S&P 500: 207% BTC: 49,000% ETH: 350,000% Happy financial awareness day.

"kids are hard" sure, maybe a little you know what's harder though? having a large gaping hole in the middle of your chest living with a lack of meaning so deep that you read a small library worth of words searching for it

anti-capitalism is just code for "i don't know how anything works"

@htormey Congrats Harry! 🥳🇺🇸

Officially a US citizen today. Very happy to be a citizen of this amazing country which has given me so many opportunities.

@soupsranjan Congrats @soupsranjan and team 👏

Today we're announcing Sardine's $70M Series C 🚀 Money moves at the speed of light. Crime moves at the speed of AI. Between these forces, trust is eroding faster than ever. We built Sardine to move faster than the threat - and it's working.

One of the most destructive memes of the last generation was that your 20s don’t matter. Extended adolescence robbed many of their agency during their highest-energy years, encouraging therapeutic self-discovery, waiting one’s turn, experimentation with identity. Uselessness. The next generation is having none of that. The gerontocracy is dead. Go all in early.

Kids are awesome. Nothing will make you happier.

How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at @Meta. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators. By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch. We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed. Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over. One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow. The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions. We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin. And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at @Lightspark. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!

For my British and European friends who are "shocked" and "surprised", here are 10 reasons you didn't see this coming. Read this short post and then read the replies from our American friends who will confirm what I'm saying. 1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage. 2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don't have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it. 3. Prices for most basic goods in the US have increased rapidly and are sky high. What the official statistics say about inflation and the reality of people's lives are not the same. 4. Unlike you, Americans do not believe in socialism. They believe in meritocracy. They don't care about the super rich being super rich because they know that they live in a country where being super rich is available to anyone with the talent and drive to make it. They don't resent success, they celebrate it. 5. Americans are the most pro-immigration people in the world. Read that again. Seriously, read it again. Americans love an immigrant success story. They want more talented immigrants to come to America. But they refuse to accept people coming illegally. They believe in having a border. 6. Americans are sensitive about racial issues and their country's imperfect history. They believe that those who are disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth should be given the opportunity to succeed. What they reject, however, is the idea that in order to address the errors of the past new errors must be made. DEI is racist. They know it and they reject it precisely because they are not racist. 7. Americans are the most philosemitic nation on earth. October 7 and the pro-Hamas left's reaction shocked them to their very core because, among other things, they remember what 9/11 was like and they know jihad when they see it. 8. Americans are extremely practical people. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we produce great writers and intellectuals. In America they produce (and attract) great engineers, businessmen and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump's rhetoric than you do and more about his policies than you do. 9. Americans are deeply optimistic people. They hate negativity. The woke view of American history as a series of evils for which they must eternally apologise is utterly abhorrent to them. They believe in moving forward together, not endlessly obsessing about the past. 10. America is a country whose founding story is one of resistance to government overreach. They loathe unnecessary restrictions, regulations and control. They understand that freedom comes with the price of self-reliance and they pay it gladly.

So true.

Happy Independence Day to the best country in the world 🥳 🇺🇸

Happy Father’s Day to the man that raised us. The man that taught us everything we know, was always there for us. The man who knew everything, had seemingly unlimited information. Who let us be whoever we wanted to be. Thank you for everything. We love you, computer.

@RachaelRad @coinbase 🙋‍♂️

I don't really share personal stories, but a few months ago I found out I’m on the autism spectrum. If you're curious about my journey learning about autism, I shared some thoughts here: mirceap.com/blog/how-i-dis…

It’s unbelievably good to be a dad