Ryan

privacy is for everyone privacy is for your identity privacy is for your pii privacy is for your financials privacy is for your transactions privacy is for your health privacy is for your data privacy is YOUR choice privacy is for _____ ?

@partiful 👀

we may or may not be throwing a party next week… drop a reply if you want an invite 👀

@cory would love to join @cory

co hosting a builder event in NYC next week a high school dropout who started a billion+ dollar company will be speaking @ reply or DM if u want to join

@gregisenberg Great takeaways! Love seeing the opportunities & energy of SF being highlighted. There’s been a major shift the last 12-18 months and all you have to do is open your eyes & ears to be part of an incredible experience … feels like the electric energy is back!

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead. 8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one. 9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders. 10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time. 11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now. 12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly. 13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS. 14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here.... 15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all. 16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol. 17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet. It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED. But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building. We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real. What an incredible time to be building.

@noir_wallet @Zcash 👀

Noir brings @Zcash shielded privacy to any network — transact privately, anywhere. 🛡️ Public mainnet launches in 24 hours Will be available on the Chrome Web Store.

@EliBenSasson I’m here for it! So good to see key projects & teams leading the privacy charge!

Privacy szn is on. Starknet is ready. Privacy + UX + Composability.

@EliBenSasson being early is tough, as is being patient

Been in crypto long enough to know: The best tech often looks irrelevant before it looks inevitable. First it is too hard. Then it is too early. Then everyone explains why it was obvious. Never bet against best tech and patient builders.

@uttam_singhk tell your story in a sentence or two … anything more is justification not explanation

if you need 40 slides to explain why you'll win you probably won't

@akashneelesh @0xNairolf Starknet have been on an absolute tear in delivering privacy, particularly the last year’s focus!

@0xNairolf u have no idea what Starknet is cooking

bullish on plug and play privacy simple tools for builders to make parts of their apps private fast easy and modular privacy-as-a-service in a way

@0xNairolf interesting take … which layers do you see PnP modules fitting into?

@RoundtableSpace let’s. get. after. it. 🫶

GM CT ☕️ HOPE ALL OF YOU GUYS HAVE A GREAT DAY☀️

@VitalikButerin @HelloTelos @lex_node YES!

@lex_node We've accelerated narratives enough. Let's accelerate the cypherpunk privacy reality 🙂

insanely bullish on kohaku accelerating Ethereum's cypherpunk privacy narrative

@0xNairolf crypto rails have been a major unlock for ai/agents … it’s the infra that truly delivers

the evolution of the crypto x AI narrative is pretty interesting went from: - decentralized AI - datasets - agentic payments - tokenized compute to: - crypto as the native currency to use AI and compute wonder what’s next

@andyyy solid ingredients for a killer recipe of success

Revenue, growth, proper tokenomics, transparency, and a damn good story. That's what you need in this new era. If you can check those boxes, we will find you and we will send it. RETURN TO FUNDAMENTALS.

@mert facts right there! those beyond-imagination goals are the ones that make you grow, push yourself, test yourself, and give you that determination to win!

not having delusionally grand goals is the biggest risk of all

@DegenerateNews terrible news! much love to his family

Ondo Finance announces that its founder, Nathan Allman, has passed away.

@mikashi smart house keeping move right there

you have pages of apps on your phone all made by third parties all running in the background all data mining you taking up space.. battery life.. holding your sensitive/personally identifiable information.. audit yourself purge accounts/delete apps you dont use will you?

@cypherpunk @noir_wallet love to see all the development here!

BREAKING: @noir_wallet, a Chrome extension Zcash wallet introducing ZEC lending as a feature, launches publicly tomorrow.

@yoshi_v1 @lookatprivacy Way to go!

to be 100% transparent with you, here's the latest updates for @lookatprivacy the profile picture has been changed: the new eyes belong to my Lil Pudgy. the blue checkmark has appeared: it will reappear in a few hours because i edited the profile. the banner has been updated. we’ve surpassed 1,600 members (together, we did it). i’ll announce the winner of the ZEC giveaway in a few hours. total expenses: - $97 for the blue check. - time spent on the profile (and writing posts). - and 0.05 ZEC for the giveaway. a big thank you to everyone for your support 🩶

@BarrySilbert been around for for a real long time but finally people are catching on! looooove to see this transformation!!

The "privacy" era in crypto has officially begun

day one of a mostly positive timeline and I’m so here for it! positivity >>>