Monica L

Excited to share that I moved to SF & joined the investment team at @M12vc, Microsoft's VC Fund! Thrilled to continue supporting founders who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI. Grateful to be working with some of the most humble, intellectually curious, and thoughtful investors in the game. M12 has been investing in AI since the inception of the fund in 2016 - we focus on early stage AI infrastructure & application layer companies. A personal goal of mine is to open as many doors as possible for founders to tap into the MSFT ecosystem. Founders & builders - please reach out if I can be a sounding board as you think about your next thing or are looking for a partner to scale your business. Big shout out to the @EniacVC team for taking a bet on me for the last 2.5 years & for helping me build a strong foundation as an investor. Will always hold onto Eniac's founder-first mentality no matter where I go. And most importantly, thank you to all the founders who I've had a chance to support & learn from - looking forward to the next chapter of our story :D

@khushkhushkhush love this hack. I’d need two of my favorites too but I only really rotate btwn a handful of items daily! makes you more cognizant of the things you can’t live without

@mon__lim two of all my favorite things, yes. but i dress way more casually in sf so just left the bottom quartile of my favorite jeans, sweaters, etc there. hair products + makeup sucked it duplicate btw

flying to sf on a whim with just a purse is literally the best feeling in the world. i don't care about your opinions on bicoastal. it rocks

@fareehasala cute!!

breaking: horse jacket on horse

.@mlevchin spent "zero minutes" introspecting on his failed companies: "I kept going because I realized I liked the journey as much, if not more than the destination." "The day my co-founders and I declared our first company dead, I found myself thinking, 'What will be the next one?'" "I took exactly zero hours or minutes contemplating, 'Is this the right thing for me to do?'"

@sporadica @_nontechnical stunning couple!!

there will be some days in life you wish you could live over and over and over again be sure to cherish those days with all you got

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing: • Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many. • It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest. • The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take. • Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions. • AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider. • Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested. • There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

@paularambles not Miami too??

tastigo kitchen, miami, florida

@andruyeung this really puts Zara Larsson’s midnight sun into context!!

I’m currently in Lofoten, Norway. I’ve never been anywhere like this before. It’s the most bizarre place I’ve ever been. For one, during the summer the sun does not set. 24 hours of daylight every day. The locals call it the Midnight Sun. It’s currently 12 AM and people are still hiking. Kids are still playing outside. After five days of consistent daylight I’m in a euphoric, trance-like dream state. Everyone should experience this at least once.

you are what you eat, devour art

@iamgingertrash really no inbtwn. all or nothing, for better or worse

@mon__lim They appear like they are either going to end up in prison, dead, or wildly successful Nothing else

“You are evaluating the strength and intensity of a flame Not the shadow it casts on a wall” 🫳 🎤

@iamgingertrash another poetic banger. what are the qualities you have seen in true outliers?

Put me in a room with 10 people I can point to the outliers None of you have seen true outliers You assume you have Outliers are strange, magnificent people who may end up in prison, or change the fate of the world There is no other

@Jack_Raines tuff

So good

When starting OpenAI, we thought hard about what job titles to use—didn't want to bucket people into researchers & engineers. Alan Kay advised that they used "Member of Technical Staff" at Xerox Parc, we loved & adopted it. Recently have seen many companies doing same—very cool!

@adamshi0 brilliant!! makes for a much more interesting convo than the typical B2B SaaS spiel

@mon__lim I tell these people I’m a cruise line performer just for reactions

mfw ppl at SFO use “so what do you do?” as icebreakers lol. going straight in for the kill

@nikhilville #blessed

@mon__lim getting asked this right after 16 dollars for 2 pieces of ham and a bread and calling it a sandwich

@paularambles @andrewqu omg you’re insane

@mon__lim @andrewqu x.com/paularambles/s…

this post was inspired while sipping on the best matcha I’ve ever had in SF but I’m gatekeeping because the line is long enough already 😇

i just want to shake people awake. this is it! the computers are speaking! they solve Erdos problems! they think for hours! code is no longer hand-written! wake up! gradient descent on deep neural networks shows no sign of plateau! this is it!