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@hthieblot dm'd mr. thieblot

The next great founder isn't who you expect. They're building something weird in their home right now. No fancy degree. No connections. Little followers count. Just pure obsession with an idea that keeps them up at night. I'm looking for them.

This is the best thing I have ever seen.

@Tocelot @speedrun Jon, what happens when you guys select the first 70? Do you guys stop parsing through the applicants? Just wondering if you make it through everyone

a few tips for @speedrun applicants: 1) brag about your team. what's the most impressive thing you've done? we look for a history of excellence - professional, academic, personal achievements, side hustles, weekend projects etc 2) founder market fit. what's your earned insight into your problem space? what gives you an unfair advantage? why will your team win vs the competition / frontier labs? 3) product validation. what have you already built? there are so many ways to quickly prototype these days. what tests have you run to validate that people want what you've built - revenue, users, waitlists etc? 4) network your way to a warm referral. this bumps you for priority review. we have >600 Speedrun founders and many more in the broader a16z network. the networking you do here reflects the work you do every day as a founder - recruiting, sales, fundraising, etc you may have noticed >50% of these tips are about the team. the most common mistake we see in apps / interviews is that founders spend most of their time talking about the product idea and not enough time on the team. whereas we base our investment process primarily on the team

@_CallMeMacy @speedrun this is crazy, got me pumped. i'd love to work with you all!

Need more reasons to apply for @speedrun 007? How about access to enterprise buyers and hands-on sales training? Sound too good to be true? It's not.

simple adjustments can result in significant value creation, the world doesn't need to be changed overnight. gradually, then all at once when the time comes

deferring judgment gives you an interestingly unique set of outcomes you wouldn't have otherwise found. its an amazing thing.

@zeeg say you're a country builder, your country has fkd up governance, a lot of systems set in motion corrupted it. now you need to fix it. do you restart? what has history shown? did those slow down the change? lee kuan is a great example of this were talking about code...

@zeeg the speed at which you produce code outweighs the systems and architectural decisions at some point, if it's absolutely messed up a good engineer w/ ai can will it to be fixed, prolonging velocity gains at some point, this validates code better than us infinitely

im fully convinced that LLMs are not an actual net productivity boost (today) they remove the barrier to get started, but they create increasingly complex software which does not appear to be maintainable so far, in my situations, they appear to slow down long term velocity

@nachunja good.

$XYZ AFTER HUNDREDS OF workers were laid off in early February from Jack Dorsey’s Block, some of the people remaining at the company say the internal culture has devolved to a point where performance anxiety is running rampant, using generative AI is required, and overall morale is rapidly deteriorating. Block is the parent company behind the merchant payment processor Square and the payment app Cash App. Dorsey cofounded the company in 2009 after previously cofounding Twitter. “Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years,” reads an employee complaint submitted to Dorsey in a recent all-hands meeting, a transcript of which was seen by WIRED. “The overarching culture at Block is crumbling.” WIRED spoke with seven current and former Block employees, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal operations at the company. A Block spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. The layoffs at Block started this month and could eventually impact up to 10 percent of the company's workforce, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Before the headcount reductions began, Block had around 11,000 people on staff. Rather than a one-off event, management has slowly enacted the firings over the course of weeks and told employees that the process will continue through the end of this month, sources tell WIRED   “We don't yet know if our livelihoods will be affected, and this makes it incredibly hard to make major life choices without knowing if we still have a job next week,” reads another employee complaint from the same meeting with Dorsey. Multiple sources who spoke with WIRED say they were appalled when Arnaud Weber, Block’s engineering lead, sent out an email after the initial wave of layoffs characterizing them as being performance-related rather than a cost-saving measure. The sources say they disagree with management’s internal messaging about the firings being merit-based. “As part of our 2025 performance cycle, we have parted ways with teammates who weren't meeting the expectations of their role,” wrote Weber in the email, which was viewed by WIRED. “These departures were based on clear performance gaps, role expectations, and alignment coming out of calibrations on the bar for each level.” Block employees are currently expected to send an update email to Dorsey every week, who then uses generative AI to summarize the thousands of messages. In the same all-hands meeting, which took place after hundreds of staff had already been fired, Dorsey said that frequent topics cited by workers in their latest messages included “widespread concerns about layoffs,” “performance anxiety,” and “the tension between accelerating delivery through AI adoption versus maintaining code quality and engineering rigor.” During the meeting, Dorsey reiterated that the layoffs were made for performance reasons, saying that there was “a sizable portion of our population that have been phoning it in.” He also stressed that the remaining workers should be using generative AI tools to maximize productivity, or else Block would risk being outpaced by its competitors. “Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” says one current Block employee. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

@vikramskr @TShirtnJeans2 maybe @jukan05 might be able to make it happen? 🤔

@TShirtnJeans2 I want to talk to him on podcast

Really? HBF?

@vikramskr didn't Weka mention something along this too?

@nachunja we came across their products in '19 and got multiple businesses to use it, its gotten better since but priced the same. i became a shareholder(bag) then. insane to believe. still adding. @jack please pay one of your largest retail believers back through performance!

am all for dancing until the music stops but warsh and bessent better have sound contingency plans, fr.

@pitdesi open up US investments to their market another angle but yea super confused... my tin-foil hat theory, could also be a corrupt favor to Brandon being part of Macquarie Group and these two being buddies youtu.be/q1JlX_I7f4Q?si…

@pitdesi agree, i feel like the "intl footprint expansion" comment was more to wow/please investors, true intent is bring to SE. poor comms, i hope.

I can't figure out the logic here Grab (SE Asia ride-hailing superapp) buys Stash (US investing platform) for $425M (1/2 up front, rest over 3 years) No customer/geo overlap Stash had raised ~$700M+ (Goodwater, USV, Coatue), has 1M active users, $5B AUM, claims $60M in adj EBITDA in 2028(!) Stated logic: Grab wants to expand its intl footprint and bring Stash's AI investing tech and "fintech knowhow" to SE Asia. Stash will continue to operate independently in the US with same brand and leadership.

@signulll what made u realize?

this is going to sound dramatic as hell but the world you knew is pretty much over. very recently i think we crossed a one way bridge as a species & most people on earth haven’t realized that fact yet. imho there are now non trivial odds the economy gets drastically disrupted in the next 24 - 36 months via a giant supply shock followed by a demand shock.

@nachunja cursed. everytime i nibble it goes down 15% same with block lmao. wall street believes customers are going to be in poverty forever and delinquent (probable, not likely)

Long $KLAR • Klarna's Enterprise Value is now $1.2B 😂 (Masa Son invested at $45B) • Expected revenue next year: $4.5B • They have $8.3B in cash These numbers do not make sense.

@WallStreetMav congratulations. next, figure out how much of that debt is held by private equity, then how much SaaS BDC and data center funding they have. if the latter goes to the dump, gg

So if Ai is going to disrupt lots of white collar jobs, does that mean all of the office buildings in the downtown core of cities will become mostly empty? And all of the restaurants and bars that cater to downtown officer workers are affected? And all of the valuations of those buildings will drop? So all of the debt payments will go into default?

@rwang07 ridiculous! looks undervalued after guidance don't you think? once apple's LTA ends and HBF standardizes, this thing just chugs along lol. it should just sell directly to SDK customers 🤣

Kioxia galaxy earnings. Basket play 🫡