Nikhil Basu Trivedi

Announcing our new firm and first fund: Footwork (@footworkvc). nbt.substack.com/p/footwork

The best old place of all 🧡🖤

Hiring in data, marketing, and sales Power is in a special spot: 8 figures of revenue, grew 5x last year and will 3x this year We have ~1/3 of the headcount of startups our size which means everyone has nonlinear contribution We are building the operational infrastructure to run medical research If you are excited about AI + Bio but nervous about the clinical trial bottleneck then DM me :)

BREAKING: Apple is no longer the final boss every app you vibe code on Anything now ships to the Play Store too

@HarryStebbings ingredients for success i've learned from Jensen: -unbelievable work ethic -insatiable love of learning -real care for the people you work with -audacity -optimism

Biggest lesson from Jensen Huang at Nvidia "Jensen called me at midnight to unpack a challenge, his SLAs are insane, he responds that fast. The lesson was your job is to fall in love with whatever the job is. You have to find a way to bend your DNA to love what the job requires." @ShivdevRao What are your biggest lessons from Jensen @NicolaiTang1 @sama @elonmusk @nbt

@vassallo @andrewdfeldman @cerebras Many, many congrats to you and all involved!

In April 2016, I threatened to climb over @andrewdfeldman's fence to give him his first term sheet for @cerebras. It was April Fool’s day, but I wasn’t fooling around. The story started in October 2007, when Andrew and his co-founder Gary Lauterbach had just started SeaMicro. Even then, Andrew was a force of nature. He was extremely intense and miswired in all the right ways. You could feel the sparks flying off him. We didn't invest in SeaMicro, but we stayed in touch. Andrew and the team built SeaMicro then sold it to AMD in 2012. When AMD acquired SeaMicro, I had a hunch Andrew wouldn't last long inside a big company. He has, as I've said many times, immense ambition and a heart full of disobedience. By early 2014, he was looking for an escape hatch. Over the next year and a half, Andrew and I met 6 or 7 times. Sometimes in our office. Sometimes at a coffee shop in Portola Valley. Sometimes at our local tennis and swim club. We kept coming back to one thing: deep learning workloads were growing exponentially, and traditional compute architectures couldn't keep up. GPUs had become the default for neural network training, mainly because researchers had accidentally discovered they were less terrible than CPUs. Andrew, Gary and Sean saw the GPU for what it was: a battlefield promotion of a chip optimized for graphics. Better than a CPU, but not what anyone would design starting from a blank sheet of paper. Their key insight was that memory bandwidth, not raw compute, was the real constraint on what neural networks could achieve. So Andrew, Sean Lie, Gary Lauterbach, Jean-Philippe Fricker and Michael James set out to do something nobody had pulled off in the 75-year history of semiconductors: Build a wafer-scale chip the size of a dinner plate. In April 2016, I asked Andrew if we could be his first term sheet. @ericvishria at Benchmark and I co-led the round along with Pierre Lamond from Eclipse. Then the hard work began. In the 75-year history of computing, no one had made wafer scale work. Which meant no one had ever had to solve the problems that came from trying. How do you power a chip that large? How do you cool one? How do you maintain electrical continuity across tens of thousands of connection points on a single piece of silicon? To get there, Cerebras had to invent in nearly every modern computing discipline at once: semiconductors, systems, data fabric, software, algorithms. Each was a startup in its own right. Their first wafer self-destructed on initial power-up and Andrew and the team were back in the lab the next morning, identifying what didn’t work and coming up with approaches to solving it. Yesterday, Cerebras went public. 19 years after our first meeting, 10 years after that April Fool's term sheet, they’ve built a generational AI company. From a coffee shop in Portola Valley to ringing the bell at the NASDAQ. What a journey. Proud to have been Andrew's first partner in Cerebras. Even prouder to call him my friend.

lol @GeorgeKurdin great response

This is a good way to frame speed, which is perhaps the most discussed term in startup rooms now - an input and not an output. From @nbt’s substack. Read here: open.substack.com/pub/nbt/p/sens…

kinda obsessed with the fact that @canva used to be called "Canvas Chef", it's so cute!! thank you @nbt for sharing the original Canva deck!! canva.com/design/DAHIHV3…

@lizwandersworld excited for you Liz and team!

Today we're launching Era and announcing $11M in funding. We're building the intelligence layer for a new ecosystem of AI devices — the platform that lets any device manufacturer, brand, designer, or creator make objects that think, respond, and act in their own style. We're entering a Cambrian explosion — new form factors, new creators, new objects worth desiring. Made by people who've never had the tools to make them, before today. Welcome to the new Era. Backed by @AbstractVC, @BoxGroup, @topology_vc, @betaworks, @CollaborativeFund, @MozillaVentures, and @AIResidency.

@GeorgeHuSF @FireworksAI_HQ @salesforce very excited for you, George

Excited to share some big news: I've joined @FireworksAI_HQ President. I've spent my career at the intersection of great teams, disruptive technology, and massive market opportunity, from architecting @salesforce 50x revenue growth to $5B+, to driving 10x revenue growth at @twilio in five years. I believe the opportunity at Fireworks is even bigger. Fireworks is the world’s frontier inference platform, created by the team that built PyTorch, the backbone of modern AI. As the demand for tokens explodes, inference is poised to be one of the biggest markets in history. Now that we’ve hit an inflection point in the quality of open models, I believe no one is better positioned than Fireworks. Fireworks brings together state-of-the-art training and inference on one platform, enabling companies to transform open models into private models that surpass frontier model performance. Owning your model is the key to being able to control your AI quality, performance, cost, and future. That’s why Fireworks has become the inference platform of choice for AI leaders like Cursor, Vercel, DoorDash, Genspark, Uber, Shopify, and thousands more. Fireworks is in the early stages of this hyper-growth journey, now processing 30 trillion tokens a day, up more than 100% from just a few months ago. I want to thank our visionary CEO @lqiao for this opportunity. I’ve had the privilege of partnering with some amazing CEOs like @Benioff and @jeffiel, and I have the same confidence that Lin and I will be amazing partners in building a generational company. If you're looking for the ride of a lifetime, we're hiring across the board. Let's bring the 🔥

If you’re fortunate as a VC, you have a handful of moments where you meet a founder and within 15 mins you know you have to invest. I’ve had one of those moments in 2026, meeting @GeorgeKurdin & Joe at @usemonk. Delighted to lead their $25M Series A @footworkvc alongside @AcrewCapital & @btv_vc. Why did we get so excited to partner with Monk? 1/ The team has built a magical customer experience. Monk is the only AI-native accounts receivable platform in market today. The product automates the invoice-to-cash lifecycle: invoicing, intelligent collections, cash application, and reporting. This is a manual process for most finance teams today — sitting between emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, payment rails, and banks. Monk automates it, saving finance teams time, and enabling businesses to get paid accurately and more quickly. 2/ It’s loved by several forward-thinking AI-native companies. For customers like @ElevenLabs, @tryprofound, and @siro_app, Monk is making the lives of the finance teams, and those around them, so much easier. It simply gets them paid, faster. On average, customers see 40% lower DSO (days sales outstanding), 24% higher collections response rate, and 25+ hours/month saved. The platform typically pays for itself in month one. These are demanding teams operating at the frontier of AI. Delighting them is hard, but in doing so Monk is building a product that can one day be used by every enterprise. 3/ The vision starts with AR but is much bigger. Stripe started with payment processing. Ramp started with corporate cards. Like those two companies, Monk has the opportunity to move beyond its initial wedge to building a broader B2B finance and revenue platform. 4/ It really does all come back to the team. George and Joe have built a small in-person team in NYC with an exceedingly high bar for talent. They are intense. They are mission-driven. They hold nothing sacred as an AI-native company, and realize they must evolve quickly as the capabilities of the models evolve. If the above resonates, come join us at Monk — we’re hiring across engineering and go-to-market. And if your business can benefit from automating AR, please reach out. monk.com/careers @LaurenKolodny @pitdesi @nbobba

@GeorgeKurdin @usemonk @footworkvc @AcrewCapital @btv_vc Could not be more excited to partner with you. Let’s win.

Today @usemonk is announcing our $25M Series A co-led by @footworkvc and @AcrewCapital with continued support from @btv_vc. $3T sits in U.S. accounts receivable. Our mission is to close the gap between earning revenue and receiving it. For most B2B companies, that gap is 45-90 days, thousands of hours of manual work per year, and millions in trapped working capital. It's a tax every growing business pays. Monk invented the Intelligent Collections category. Most AR tools automate the easy parts. We built for the edge cases, portal uploads, PO mismatches, and disputes. On average, customers see 40% lower DSO, 24% higher collections response rate and 25+ hours/month saved. Thank you to @ElevenLabs, @tryprofound, @siro_app, and our customers for the trust. Our platform typically pays for itself in month one. Book a demo to learn more.

@RonConway You have all of SV behind you, Ron, in this fight 💪🏽

I want to share some difficult news. I was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and I want you to hear it directly from me. Treatment is starting immediately and will include multiple strategies over the course of about a year. While I will be stepping back from some of my usual activities, I will continue to support SV Angel founders, who I love with a passion. SV Angel remains unchanged. Topher has made all of our investment decisions for the better part of the last decade, and Ronny joined as Managing Partner in 2024. They bring experience from nearly every major technology cycle in Silicon Valley and are now focused on partnering with founders building the future of AI. SV Angel has a deep, experienced team that remains fully focused on supporting exceptional founders. With a more focused and balanced schedule, I can prioritize treatments while helping SV Angel founders at inflection points like we always do! I’ve chosen not to share the specific type of cancer since I don't want speculation about my prognosis. I appreciate your understanding and respect for this. I am optimistic about my prognosis. I am fortunate to have the best/amazing team of UCSF doctors in San Francisco, and as you know, I never back down from a fight. Thank you for your support, it means a great deal to me.

@alxai_ @every @goodstartlabs yes. huge part of the thesis of @withprotegeai

〜*The Market for Making AI Better*〜 Reddit, Shutterstock, & News corp are each pulling $100m+ yearly licensing data to labs small models beating frontier with <2k quality examples your company's data is probably worth more than you think new Playtesting piece on @every

@kul @ycombinator so awesome, pumped for all of you!

Joining @ycombinator as a Visiting Partner for the Spring 2026 batch. Feels a bit full circle.

17 years. 0 to $200B in revenue. $8B to $4.5T in market cap. Most valuable company on Planet Earth. “His legacy will live on for generations” -Jensen Amazing dad. Proud son. 💚