Neil Ahlsten

@Willob Congrats, Will!!!

Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism. We are building The Ocean Company. The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told. It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that powers our world. And the key to the health of our planet. This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it. We are building it. And we need more builders Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers

@jakobdiepen @DiscipulusVent @PalmerLuckey @isaiah_p_taylor @ADoricko Great cohort and event @jakobdiepen !!!

The @DiscipulusVent Spring Cohort just wrapped up in the 'Gundo. 🇺🇸 Joined by @PalmerLuckey, @isaiah_p_taylor, @ADoricko & more throughout the week. 10 hardtech founders building for the American Interest. Companies below 🧵👇

@traestephens @bchelf @solreader @bchelf great journey, sorry to see it wind down.

Earlier this year, @bchelf and I made the difficult decision to wind down @solreader, the next-gen e-reader company we founded. I couldn’t be prouder of what we built. The product completely sold out, lots of people have said that it completely changed their lives, and it's an honor to know that many of our users will continue to use the Sol Reader long after the company has wound down. Thanks to the whole Sol team and those who helped make this crazy idea a reality. We learned so many lessons, and if you'd like to hear how the last days went down, check out the Sol Reader blog.

Most enterprises are embedding AI into existing workflows rather than reinventing their orgs. This SafeAI Trap will create massive roadkill.

Tim Draper shared with me why he went big on Bitcoin in 2014. An incredible contrarian bet. youtube.com/shorts/caVWGMS…

@jamescham It’s more powerful than ever to design great experiments and evaluate the results well. Nice read. @jamescham your old-school reading the whole article!

I read this the slow, traditional way and it was very good!

@jamescham Whoever ask the best questions wins.

“The shelf life of being right”

@kevin2kelly This is so true for most successful founders. I went through this season with an exception team and build an impactful product with a great exit.

To start your own successful business you should expect to be under-appreciated, overworked and broke for at least 1000 days. For more advice see my book Excellent Advice for Living amzn.to/3mQL4c4 #excellentadvice

@trq212 Been waiting for this!

We've rolled out a new auto-memory feature. Claude now remembers what it learns across sessions — your project context, debugging patterns, preferred approaches — and recalls it later without you having to write anything down.

@bencera I love where you’re heading with this. DM me if you’re looking for investors.

@nahlsten Mostly software businesses for now. Once i introduce ways for Polsia to hire humans, it will be more broad

Google: click a button, get relevant websites Uber: click a button, get a ride Shopify: click a button, get an online store ChatGPT: click a button, get an answer Polsia: click a button, get an AI autonomous business

@bencera Awesome work! Any clarity on what types of businesses are most active and how?

@jamescham @trychroma @HammadTime @jeffreyhuber @jeffreyhuber and the Chroma team are awesome

Thanks to the @trychroma team for letting me hang out in their office this afternoon. Fun to see @HammadTime and @jeffreyhuber...

@andrew__reed @sequoia How do you think frugality impacts the mega seed rounds of 2025?

ELEMENTS OF
SUSTAINABLE COMPANIES Start-ups with these characteristics often foretells the success of a business and the likelihood of it becoming a sustainable, enduring company. We like to partner with companies that have: CLARITY OF PURPOSE Summarize the company's business on the back of a business card. LARGE MARKETS Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop. RICH CUSTOMERS Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering. FOCUS Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition. PAIN KILLERS Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution. THINK DIFFERENTLY Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition. TEAM DNA A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. "A" level founders attract an "A" level team. AGILITY Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies. FRUGALITY Focus spending on what's critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability. INFERNO Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

@jamescham @roybahat Great comments. My deepest friendships came from sharing deeply in the messy, hard parts of life. Hiding just fuels loneliness.

The problem is not that men are lonely. It is that most of us don’t know ways to be deeper friends. That is part of what makes Josh Steiner and Michael Lynton's new book From Mistakes to Meaning interesting. (Thanks to @roybahat I had a chance to get an early look.) Mostly, it is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of mistakes. But it is also a step-by-step guide for how two friends become deep friends. Steiner took the first step by asking Lynton to work on a project that meant examining their most painful failures. Lynton said yes. His willingness to engage, their adventures researching and talking to others, and the trust between them produced a painfully honest look into their biggest mistakes, lessons learned, and the failures of the fabulously successful. I am most interested in the meta lesson of the book. It doubles as a how to guide for deepening friendships: have an insight; reach out and take a risk; work on something that requires time, commitment, and reflection; hang out a bit as a result. The book’s very existence is a testament to the kind of friendship most people long for. From Mistakes to Meaning by Josh Steiner and Michael Lynton: recommended for people who have made mistakes, people who want deeper friendships, and the people who love those who need deeper friends.

@kevin2kelly Totally agree.

When you think of someone easy to despise—a tyrant, a murderer, a torturer—don’t wish them harm. Wish that they welcome orphans into their home, and share their food with the hungry. Wish them goodness, and by this compassion you will increase your own happiness. For more advice see my book Excellent Advice for Living amzn.to/3mQL4c4 #excellentadvice

@wildmindai @IlirAliu_ If true, this supports how powerful edge AI can become in 3+ years.

17,000 tokens per second!! Read that again! LLM is hard-wired directly into silicon. no HBM, no liquid cooling, just raw specialized hardware. 10x faster and 20x cheaper than a B200. the "waiting for the LLM to think" era is dead. Code generates at the speed of human thought. Transition from brute-force GPU clusters to actual AI appliances. taalas.com/the-path-to-ub…

@jefielding Both are likely true, but for different sets of stakeholders.

Half the people I know are freaking out about AI and the downfall of society and the other half see incredible opportunity and prosperity. They work at the same companies, socialize together and are generally aligned on issues. So strange to experience this level of divide / disconnect on a single issue.

@jefielding @N_Sportelli Agreed.

@N_Sportelli But perhaps the best time buckle down and ride the storm? Venture will always be an extreme sport so gotta thrive in this uncertainty or get out early.

if i told you how many DMs i've gotten from people wanting to leave venture to operate you would not believe me

@gjain @AforeVC @HightouchData @GammaApp Agreed.

When I was at Google, the equity portion of my comp was fairly liquid. If you are helping build the next Google, why should those employees be treated differently? Kudos to @AforeVC companies @HightouchData and @GammaApp for giving employees liquidity via tenders!

@JasonrShuman This helps filter but still mail be weak on selection. Each VC should weight it with their own POV of what matters most for this moment in time, direction of that technology and market, etc.

Is a more specialized version of Granola for VCs the future? Pulls pitch meetings from your calendar Trained on millions of hours of top founder communications, backgrounds, business books, case studies and expert call transcripts Analyzes the founders background, previous company performance, online writing, github, etc. Does deep research on their deck ahead of the meetings to come up with key question areas Grades responses in real-time against elite founder responses and communication styles