Startup Grind

The agenda is live! And @aplusk is joining us on the Mainstage at the Startup Grind Conference. This year's agenda is a full-stack exploration of how the AI economy is being built, from infrastructure to applications to the operators making it real. View the agenda, pick your sessions, and grab your ticket. Link in replies.

My @Divotdotorg chat this week is with @MayfieldFund Managing Partner @NavinChaddha, one of the most thoughtful AI people I know. We talk about the AI infrastructure gold rush, OpenClaw, the Claude ecosystem, and the rise of personalized software. 01:14 — Why AI Is a “100x Force” for Humanity 02:27 — Where the Biggest Value in AI Is Being Created 04:19 — Nvidia, Infrastructure & the AI Gold Rush 06:02 — The Next Massive Opportunities Beyond Compute 08:03 — Why Claude Changed Software Engineering 10:05 — Claude as the “New Browser for Work” 12:31 — AI Agents & the End of Traditional SaaS 15:08 — The Rise of Headless Software Explained 18:12 — Why Everyone Can Now Become a Builder 21:05 — Human + AI Teams Will Replace Old Workflows 23:16 — Navin Chaddha’s Biggest Advice for Founders #aiagents #claudeai #artificialintelligence #futureofwork #openai #anthropic #saas #navinchaddha #nvidia #machinelearning #futureofsoftware #startupfounders #techpodcast #airevolution #siliconvalley #automation #founderjourney #venturecapital #aiinnovation #divotpodcast

This is Startup Grind, baby. 😜 If you were there, you know. And if you weren’t, make sure to join us next year as we make the Startup Grind Conference anniversary the biggest one yet, together. Early interest list is open now. Link in reply.

My @Divotdotorg interview with @shardul_shah from @IndexVentures. Shardul is one of the best venture investors in the world backing Datadog, Wiz, and others. We talk about engineers being measured by token usage, when you should never sell, the trait all great founders share. Timestamps: 02:43 — How a Random Encounter Changed His Entire Life 05:16 — Why Great Startup Founders Can Come From Anywhere 08:06 — Why Shardul Refuses to Invest Over Zoom 13:32 — Why Engineers Are Being Measured By Token Usage 14:39 — The Trait Every Billion Dollar Founder Shares 20:09 — The Brutal Truth About Boardroom Disagreements 24:03 — How Building Communities Led To Billion Dollar Companies 27:11 — Why Datadog Looked Like a Terrible Investment 29:03 — The Mindset Required To Invest Before Everyone Else 33:29 — Inside Wiz’s Historic $32 Billion Acquisition 35:40 — The 2 Questions Every Founder Must Answer 36:24 — If You Can 10X Your Company, Never Sell 40:17 — The Difference Between Your Heart & Your Mind 42:00 — The Ancient Philosophy That Changed How He Thinks 49:34 — Why Michael Jordan Obsessed Him With Competition 52:23 — Dave Chappelle, Nas & The Best Night of His Life 54:00 — The Truth About Intuition & Great Decisions

Hosted one of the biggest tech conferences in Silicon Valley @StartupGrind and also the world’s largest Community conference @CMX this week. Building community with people in person is still highly underrated!

Every chapter has a heartbeat. And behind it, a person who shows up. Month after month, city after city, opening the door so no founder ever has to walk this path alone. With over 600 chapters around the world, Startup Grind is only as strong as the people leading them. This year's Directors of the Year. 🌟 Alexandra Poelstra, Carlos Zarate, David Stengle, Rajiv Nathan, Corey Hart, Daniel Gomez, Michael Thaney, James Gee, Sid Khaitan, Reuben Levinsohn, Emma Loedel and Jason Kraus. Thank you for everything you give to this community. 🫶

"Long term, autonomous mobility is going to become a trusted part of infrastructure—a foundation society can build on top of. That’s going to be a phenomenal shift." – @dfergusonnz, co-founder & co-CEO of Nuro, on stage with @stevejang of @KindredVentures at @StartupGrind 2026.

Thanks @aplusk for being at Startup Grind this year.

Eoghan McCabe (@eoghan) said what everyone thinks but nobody says out loud. He hates the "I have a great team" speech. Calls it false humility. But then admits he genuinely has people around him who were closer to the AI shift than he was, and they were the ones who woke him up. That kind of honesty is rare on a mainstage. Thank you for bringing it to ours, Eoghan!

@Chicostart530 😄🙌🏻

@StartupGrind this week! 👍👍👍

Safe to say @ayushswrites and @aplusk were the most anticipated panel at @StartupGrind conference. Standing room only!

"Beyond autoregressive: why diffusion is the future of language models" @StefanoErmon's keynote at @startupgrind yesterday. Fully packed Fox Theatre. Mercury 2 is hitting >1,000 tok/sec on standard GPUs at a fraction of the cost, comparable quality to frontier speed-optimized models. Diffusion. Parallel token generation. His closing line: the question isn't which model is smartest, it's which model is most efficient, without sacrificing quality, on the highest-volume tasks. When agents make 50 LLM calls per task, latency is the product. @_inception_ai

Really enjoyed hearing from @gabepereyra, President & Co-Founder @harvey, at the @StartupGrind conference. A couple of standout takeaways: 1) He said that the most compelling startups may seem obvious at first (e.g., AI for legal), but the real innovation is in how AI and agents are applied i.e. unlocking entirely new categories that don’t resemble anything before. 2) His Big AI Prediction: models will improve faster than most expect. By year-end, their capabilities may feel surprisingly (even uncomfortably) advanced.

From, Dude where’s my car? to “Dude, where’s the moat?” — @aplusk From Hollywood to investor. Loved the conversation at @StartupGrind Conf 2026. #startupgrindconference #sgconf

Great to speak about SaaS & Productivity @StartupGrind conference yesterday with @kjiangvc and Keshia Theobald-van Gent from @BDevVentures. A few takeaways: • AI SaaS ≠ company by default. Today, there are too many “feature wrappers” without real foundations • “AI-first” is sometimes cheap talk. What matters is impact on unit economics • Capital is abundant, but can hide weak PMF • Distribution > product as a moat in many cases • The best founders build from technical inflections, not just customer feedback Big thanks to Wael Jabir @HustleFundVC for hosting and pushing the conversation.

Most companies calling themselves AI-native added an AI feature. That is not the same thing. Talked about this with @chetanp at @StartupGrind yesterday. Being AI-native shows up in three places: how you operate, what you build, and how you make money. Thanks to SG for having us!

Today I’m headlining @StartupGrind with Ashton Kutcher. We will be discussing what AI-native actually means inside a regulated category, and why we built Warp that way from day one. Why being AI-native is a deep architectural buildout, not a feature you bolt on. Why the durable moats live in heavily regulated spaces like payroll, where compliance and money movement have to work right every time. Why the next great AI-native companies, Warp included, will remove work entirely instead of optimizing it and adding more tools. 10:55 AM, mainstage. See you in 30min on stage.

My @Divotdotorg interview today is with best selling author @SahilBloom. We talk about the 5 Types of Wealth, how most people always want more money, why certain success feels empty, winning the wrong game in life, and why humans need a quest. Timestamps: 01:05 — The 5 Types of Wealth That Actually Matter 02:09 — Why Chasing Money Leads You Off a Cliff 05:16 — Why Success Feels Empty After You Achieve It 07:16 — You’ll Always Want More Money (Here’s Why) 11:40 — Humans Need a Quest to Feel Alive 16:19 — Ambition Without Direction Is Miserable 18:21 — Direction not Speed (The Life Rule That Matters) 20:15 — Why People Stay Stuck in “Good Enough” Lives 27:27 — How to Actually Change Your Life 28:25 — The Danger of Winning the Wrong Game 50:16 — What Real Confidence Actually Means 58:35 — The Best Advice for Doing Hard Things

"Do not build in a space that everyone's building, if you're starting today, start a brain interface company" - @justinkan (Cofounder of @Twitch) "In the AI era, everyone becomes a builder" - @amasad (Founder of @Replit) Just wrapped up an absolutely electric Day 1 at @StartupGrind Silicon Valley Conference 2026 - and it was everything I hoped for and more. The energy at the Fox Theatre was unreal: 5,000+ founders, builders, and investors all locked in on the future of the AI economy. The sessions I caught today were pure fire. Stood out especially: - How VCs Actually Decide at Seed in 2026 - @illscience (General Partner, @a16z), Puneet Agarwal (Managing Partner, @trueventures), @fffabulous (General Partner, @GVteam), and @MTemkin (Senior Reporter, @TechCrunch) breaking down exactly what’s moving the needle right now - Narrative, Product, and Trust: The New GTM Stack - @NairiHourdaj (Chief Communications Officer, @figma ), @scottiholden (CMO, @vanta), @krithix (Marketing/EIR, @ThriveCapital), and @ElisaSchreiber (Chief Marketing Officer, @felicis) redefining how the best companies go to market in the AI era - What It Really Takes : @tvmjames (Co-founder, @hardknocksedu) & @DerekjAndersen (Cofounder @BevyHQ & @StartupGrind ) - “You earn attention in the first 3 seconds” - raw, no-BS wisdom that hit different Huge thank you to every speaker who showed up at @StartupGrind and delivered - the insights were next-level. If you’re in the Bay Area and haven’t grabbed your ticket yet… this is the one event you don’t want to miss. Day 2 is going to be even bigger. Grateful to be in the room with the people actually building the future. #StartupGrind2026 #AI #Startups #SiliconValley #Founders #VentureCapital #GTM

For those who weren't there, @ericries and I talked at @StartupGrind about what happens after the AI builds your prototype. The hard parts of software — scale, security, maintainability — are still hard, and most founders find that out later than they'd like. Look out for his upcoming episode on The New Build.