Rishi Taparia

I’m excited to announce the @brickxbrickpod! @arpanpunyani and I will be sitting down with early employees, founders and investors to talk about the (often untold) crazy stories that help lay the foundation for future startup success 🧱

Mirai Tech is now Mirai Labs (@trymirai) A full-stack frontier lab for on-device AI. Models, inference engine, quantization, and application layer, all co-designed from the hardware constraint up. Interactive AI is a continuous loop: parsing, validating, tool calls, rendering. That only works when latency disappears. Cloud models can't get you there as they're built for large batches, abundant memory, throughput as the metric. On-device inverts every assumption, requiring the architecture that was built from the hardware constraint up. The silicon is shipped. The software stack to match the chip doesn't exist yet. That's ours to build.

@ilyaf @Rivian @Mind_Robotics Boom! Excited to partner with you my friend 💪🏽

RJ Scaringe has already done something extraordinarily hard: built @Rivian into one of the most ambitious vertically integrated manufacturing companies in the world. That matters for @Mind_Robotics. RJ has lived the complexity industrial robotics requires across hardware, software, supply chain, manufacturing, reliability, and real-world deployment. Excited to lead Mind’s latest round and partner with @RJScaringe and the team as they build the AI-native robotics platform for manufacturing. kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/m…

@nikunj What about IC meetings? 😅

I'm so glad I can finally say this without being canceled (I think).. Weekly 1:1s are generally a psy-op by mid tier empire-building managers who simply want to micromanage versus trusting their reports to pursue excellence and flourish. It’s to steer you so that you don’t fall out of line. If you are still in a job where you are being coddled every day, I urge you to find a place that truly pushes your boundaries. At least for a little bit you’ll know what excellence demands and what it feels like being in high performance teams.

@nabeel @ItzSuds East Bay FTW! 💪🏽

@ItzSuds love it. also love the #1 high school in the U.S. - in the bay area - doesn't get a whiff because the Easy Bay is to bay area as Gen-X is to generations. Chronically overloooked, and happy to be.

*Taps Sign* reposting my best tweet ever. A definitive guide to Bay Area High Schools and the people they produce

“@arenaphysica’s bet is that the same idea works as a foundation model rather than a one-off demo: faster inference, trained on roughly 10 million geometries plus decades of simulation data, with lab measurements added as a third data leg to help close the sim-to-reality gap.” Thanks to the @hardwarefyi team for highlighting @m__frei’s CDFAM talk in this week’s newsletter. Read the full piece here: hardwarefyi.substack.com/p/rf-engineeri….

@david_perell Amazing! Can't wait to listen

Anne Lamott is the queen of writing teachers. Ask 100 writers for their favorite book about the craft, and her book, Bird by Bird, will top the list. Everybody who's tried to make a work of art knows how loud the inner critic can be. When struggle comes, most people try harder. But Anne says: "The point is not to try harder; it's to resist life less." Improving as a writer is about becoming more aware and paying closer attention to what's already around you, and this conversation is about how to do that. It centers around her famous writing advice: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Timestamps: 0:39 Bird by Bird 2:17 Why writer's block isn't real 3:36 The problem with trying harder 9:06 Every book has three drafts 14:24 Learning to observe the world 15:58 Facing your inner critic 27:59 "Help, thanks, wow" 31:16 You get three pages 35:51 Revenge = fuel 38:26 Anne's #1 writing prompt 48:53 Finding writing ideas 54:57 Writing lessons from movies 1:02:08 The ABDCE storytelling formula 1:05:37 What makes for a good ending? 1:10:57 Dealing with criticism 1:16:28 Writing to be fully alive I've shared the full conversation with Anne Lamott below. If you'd prefer to watch it, I've published it on YouTube, and you also can listen to it on Apple / Spotify. I've shared those links in the reply tweets. This is one of those bucket list interviews I've wanted to do ever since I started How I Write, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

@JayKapoorNYC Orrrrrr they will work great? 🤔

Business names that would never work in India 😂

Welcome to Episode 1 of The New Feynman Lectures. No one better to kick off this series than Shaun Donovan, Head of Electrical and Mechnical Engineering at @anduriltech. Ever wonder about Triplex Redundancies in Autonomous Aircraft? Watch the full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=_AIoes… Next up: @JLopas with @basepowerco!

Man, the @Lakers 😮‍💨

@banglani That judgement happens behind closed doors and outside of the public eye 😅

PSA to founders: if one partner at a VC firm has declined an investment in your round, it is quite futile to approach another partner. We aren't here to second guess each other's investment judgment.

@Katie_Roof Need to get that RSM grade book to really scout early talent 😅

Why wait until high school? Any VCs hanging around 8th grade algebra classes looking for whiz kids (CEOs) ? 🙃

@danielcberk @Spotify That and a “Kids Around” mode so it auto plays the non explicit version of the songs I want to listen to in the car!

Spotify needs to release a “kids” setting so I can play all the songs my kids listen to without it affecting my own Discovery algorithm. Insane that I can’t do this already. My Discover Weekly is just nursery songs and Moana. @Spotify please fix this.

@peterthekid @davemorin @gregisenberg Path was the best. And an amazing team @mvanhorn @dtrinh @mattmatt @cynthiafwrtgerg and so many more. An amazingly fun era of tech

@gregisenberg @davemorin did this. Path was the best

It feels pretty obvious at this point that someone’s going to make billions building a social app that’s just for friends, no AI slop, no brainrot, calm design, chronological feed and no concept of followers

@Trace_Cohen There will be a day that OpenAI and Claude both go down at the same time and the global economy will come to a screeching halt...

@taps Hitting your limits real fast

How it feels to run a startup

@braveben Californios

A friend is on a tremendous heater and I want to take him to a fancy dinner in SF Monday. What ideas do we have?

@RonConway @garrytan Wishing you a speedy recovery Ron!

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.

@GamewithDave Carmen Sandiego, Doom, Command and Conquer: Red Alert

For anyone who used a computer between 1990 & 2005… what’s the one game you still think about?

@skbjml @AliBHamed @SavneetS Excited for you my brother! 💪🏽

Being an early member of Crossbeam (now Gallery Ventures) became my identity. For the last 5 years, I had the privilege of working with and learning from @AliBHamed, @SavneetS, Chris Ryan, and briefly, Michael Ovitz. As I reflect on my time here -- the first few years were absolutely brutal, but also some of the best memories of my life. As a former banking analyst, I developed a habit of staying up late. Ali was an early riser, and his lightning-fast response times inspired me to keep up. So for the first ~2 years of Crossbeam, we quite literally had instant 24/7 coverage with a 2-person team - I'd stay up until 4 AM, and then Ali would pick it up at 6 AM. Then the last few years were all about leveling up: getting in the room, increasing my tolerance for pain, and building trust with stakeholders. The job forced me to unlearn and update my priors constantly, and I grew to love that. I’m so proud of what we built, and the people we’ve been able to work with along the way. So it's bittersweet to announce I'm leaving my full-time role at Crossbeam/Gallery (will remain an advisor/email still works) to build a new firm with some friends. We have been talking about a new approach to early-stage investing, and it feels like the right time to test it in the market. In the meantime, I’m moving to San Francisco for the rest of 2026 to explore and spar with some amazing investors and founders in the pre-seed/formation stages. It’s always Day 1, but some days are more Day 1 than others!

@harris @Alfred_Lin @pmarca @tmzier is the man 🙂

I'd like to buy a beer for whoever cleared @Alfred_Lin's calendar enough that he could write this often. The man is producing the best series of essays on startups I've read since @pmarca