techstartups

👔 Top 10 Lessons from Father’s Day & Life 1. Presence > Perfection
Dads don’t need to be flawless — they just need to show up. Those small moments create lifelong security. 2. Sacrifice is love in action
The late nights, missed dreams, and quiet burdens so their family can thrive. Real love often costs something. 3. Your example is your loudest lesson
Kids watch more than they listen. How you treat people, handle failure, and face life becomes their blueprint. 4. Time is the only thing you can’t get back
Careers can restart. Childhood years cannot. Protect family time fiercely. 5. Strength includes vulnerability
The best fathers say “I’m sorry,” show emotion, and ask for help. That’s real strength. 6. Gratitude shouldn’t wait for a holiday
Tell the quiet heroes in your life thank you — today, not just once a year. 7. Failure is part of the journey
Every good dad has messed up. What matters is getting back up and trying again. 8. Legacy is built in small daily deposits
Not in the house or the car — but in the safety, laughter, and values you give. 9. Unconditional love is the greatest gift
“I love you no matter what” gives children courage to risk and permission to fail. 10. Honor the story — then write a better one 
Whether your father was present, absent, or gone, use the lessons (good and hard) to break negative cycles. Father’s Day isn’t just about celebrating dads. It’s a mirror for how we love, what we value, and what we choose to pass on. Tag a father who shaped you 💙 #FathersDay #Fatherhood #LifeLessons

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform. Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed. It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this. You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back. 60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done. No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution. Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time. As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed. Here's why this matters for the future of your heart. Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives. But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime. Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal. That's what Midjourney is building toward. The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine. The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation. Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously. This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations. It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review. No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist. And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet. So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product. But. The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled." And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years. For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard. A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers. I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging. This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after. The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body. The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

Which was worse?

🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Jensen Huang Most People Don’t Know 1/ Born in Taiwan in 1963, he moved to Thailand as a kid, then at age 9 was sent to the U.S. His relatives mistakenly enrolled him in a reform school in rural Kentucky (thinking it was a fancy prep school). He cleaned toilets every day and faced bullying as the only Asian kid there. Built unbreakable resilience early. 🇹🇼🏫 2/ Table tennis phenom as a teenager! Placed 3rd in junior doubles at the U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships at age 15. Appeared in Sports Illustrated at 14. Seriously considered going pro and scrubbed floors at a sports store to fund tournaments. 🏓🥇 3/ Started working graveyard shifts at Denny’s at age 15 as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter to build confidence and support himself. Worked there for years. Decades later, he co-founded NVIDIA in a Denny’s booth. Full circle! 🍔 4/ Met his future wife Lori (then Mills) at Oregon State University—she was his engineering lab partner. They bonded over homework and have been together ever since. True college sweethearts. ❤️ 5/ Graduated high school early at 16. Earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State and an MS from Stanford (while working). Brains plus real-world grit from day one. 🎓 6/ Before founding NVIDIA, he worked at AMD on microprocessor design and at LSI Logic on cutting-edge design automation tools. Not just a visionary—a battle-tested chip engineer. 💼 7/ In 1993, at age 30, he co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem inside a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose. The graphics (and later AI) revolution literally started over breakfast. 🥞🚀 8/ Ultimate believer: Got a tattoo of the NVIDIA logo on his shoulder when the stock first hit $100 per share. Still proudly wears the ink today. 🖌️ 9/ In that tough Kentucky boarding school, he taught his illiterate, heavily tattooed roommate how to read—in exchange for bench-press lessons. Classic win-win hustle. 💪📖 10/ Doesn’t wear a watch because “now is the most important time.” His signature black leather jacket is his trademark look (wife-approved). Bonus: He’s first cousins once removed with AMD CEO Lisa Su! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 From cleaning toilets in rural Kentucky to building the company powering the AI revolution—Jensen Huang’s journey is the ultimate proof that resilience, vision, and relentless execution can change the world. #JensenHuang #NVIDIA #MindBlown #TechLeadership #AI

Re-reading the 2002 SpaceX chapter in @WalterIsaacson’s Elon Musk, when the entire industry said reusable rockets, Starlink & cheap access to space were impossible. Musk’s mindset: “If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting.” - Tom Mueller He filled the team with reality-bending willfulness and extreme risk tolerance. People who would make things happen. That same drive created a culture that achieved the “impossible”; but also one where bad news sometimes got filtered. SpaceX 2002–2026 IPO proves it: First principles + insane determination beats conventional wisdom every time. What a journey. 🚀

🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Jalen Brunson Most People Don’t Know 1/ Jalen shoots left-handed on the court but does everything else right-handed — because his dad taped his right thumb as a kid to force the switch and build that dominant left hand! 🏀 2/ Grew up in NBA locker rooms watching his dad Rick (a journeyman guard who played for 8 teams in 9 seasons). The family motto “The magic is in the work” was taped on mirrors, doors, and the fridge. 💪 3/ As a kid, he played Pop Warner football coached by Vince Papale — the real-life inspiration for the movie Invincible! 🏈 4/ High school: His family moved multiple times before settling in Illinois. At Stevenson, he dropped 57 points in double OT, led the team to the state title (30 in the championship game), and was named Illinois Mr. Basketball and McDonald’s All-American. 🏆 5/ At Villanova, he was a role player on the 2016 NCAA champs… then became National Player of the Year and led them to another title in 2018. He graduated in just 3 years with a communications degree. His #1 jersey is retired. 🎓 6/ Drafted 33rd overall (2nd round) by the Mavericks in 2018. Many teams passed on him — he responded by leading Dallas to the Western Conference Finals in 2022. 🏀 7/ A die-hard Justin Bieber superfan. No matter what playlist he’s on, the last song before every game has to be Bieber. 🎤 8/ Married his high school sweetheart Ali Marks in 2023 (proposed in their high school gym). They welcomed their first child, daughter Jordyn, in 2024. ❤️ 9/ Set an NBA record with 8 three-pointers in a half without missing — and tied the record with 9 in a full game without a miss. The ultimate clutch gene. 🔥 10/ Signed with the Knicks in 2022 on a four-year deal, became team captain, earned multiple All-Star and All-NBA honors, and turned into the heart and soul of New York basketball — from overlooked second-rounder to franchise icon. 🗽 From a kid bouncing between NBA locker rooms and high schools to becoming the captain and leader of the New York Knicks — Jalen Brunson is built different. #JalenBrunson #Knicks #NBA #Underdog

🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Sundar Pichai Most People DON’T Know 1/ Sundar Pichai has an extraordinary memory — he can recall every phone number he’s ever dialed since childhood. Tech-obsessed from a young age! 📞 2/ Grew up in a modest middle-class home in Chennai (then Madras) without a car, TV, or even a telephone for years. He and his brother slept in the living room. Classic humble beginnings. 🏠 3/ He was captain of his high school cricket team and once dreamed of becoming a professional cricketer. 🏏 4/ Studied Metallurgical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur (earned a silver medal), not computer science! Then got an MS in Materials Science from Stanford and an MBA from Wharton. Brains + hustle. 🎓 5/ Joined Google on April 1, 2004 — April Fool’s Day — the exact same day Gmail launched. He initially thought the Gmail announcement was a prank! 😂 6/ He personally pitched and championed the idea for Google Chrome. It was initially rejected over high costs, but he did deep research and convinced leadership. Chrome now powers nearly half the internet. 🌐 7/ Before Google, he worked as a product manager/engineer at Applied Materials (semiconductors) and as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Real-world grit. 💼 8/ In 2014, he was a serious contender for Microsoft’s CEO role (alongside Satya Nadella). Google gave him big retention packages to stay — loyalty paid off. 💪 9/ Married his IIT Kharagpur college sweetheart Anjali (they met in their first year; she’s a chemical engineer). They have two kids and keep a low-key family life. ❤️ 10/ As CEO of Google (since 2015) and Alphabet (since 2019), he’s steered the company through Android dominance, Chrome’s rise, and now the AI era with Gemini. One of the highest-paid tech CEOs ever — all while staying remarkably grounded. 🌍 From a boy in Tamil Nadu who waited years for a rotary phone to leading one of the world’s most powerful tech companies into the future — Sundar Pichai is built different. #SundarPichai #Google #Alphabet #MindBlown #TechLeadership

Haha this is awesome. Elon agreed to the "greenshoe" IPO option but only if the bankers and team all wore actual green shoes 😂🔥 (A "greenshoe" is a standard IPO provision that allows underwriters to sell up to ~15% more shares than originally planned if demand is strong, helping stabilize the stock price in early trading.)

$SPCX: $18 billion revenue, -$10 billion net income, valued at $2.2 trillion $META: $215 billion revenue, $70 billion net income, valued at $1.45 trillion But yeah it all makes sense..

Legendary VC Chris Sacca said Cyan Banister is "maybe the most successful angel investor ever." After today, I don't think there's a question: SpaceX was her very first investment ever... in 2008. The company was valued ~$400 million. Today, it's over $2 trillion.

🚀 Thread: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Elon Musk Most People DON’T Know 1/ Elon taught himself to code at age 10 from a manual and sold his video game Blastar for $500 (~$1,600 today). A 12-year-old legend! 🎮 2/ He dropped out of a Stanford PhD in applied physics after just 2 days to chase the internet boom and build Zip2. Balls of steel. 3/ Triple citizen: Born in South Africa, Canadian at 17 (thanks to mom Maye), US citizen in 2002. Global from day one. 🌍 4/ Paid for college by throwing massive parties at his frat house (mom even collected tickets sometimes). Left with student debt too! 💰 5/ Owns James Bond’s submarine car — the Lotus Esprit “Wet Nellie” from The Spy Who Loved Me. Bought it for ~$1M to actually make it submerge. 🏎️🌊 6/ Inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. RDJ studied Elon’s mannerisms for Iron Man. Musk even cameo’d in Iron Man 2. 🦸‍♂️ 7/ Slept on the office couch and showered at the YMCA during early Zip2 days. Pure grind. 8/ Launched his own fragrance called “Burnt Hair” through The Boring Company. Yes, it smells like burnt hair. 😂 9/ Came this close to selling Tesla to Google for $6B in 2013 during rough times. Glad he didn’t. 10/ Sister Tosca runs Passionflix (romance & erotica adaptations). Family full of creators. His sci-fi obsession (Foundation, Hitchhiker’s Guide) shaped everything. 📚 From bullied kid in Pretoria to leading the future with Tesla, SpaceX, xAI & more — the man is built different. #ElonMusk #MindBlown #Tesla #SpaceX

SpaceX IPOs today. One hallmark of the largest IPO in history : Elon Musk's astoundingly low cost of capital. Despite raising 25x more than the typical founder, Musk retained ownership in the top decile. 🧵

Your margin is my opportunity: AI version… The biggest surprise of 2026 is that the capability gap between the best open-weight/source models and the best closed models has narrowed much faster than the pricing gap. The pricing gap remains enormous while the capability gap is quite narrow. What does this means in practice? For a company consuming 1 billion input tokens and 1 billion output tokens per month: GPT-5.5 Pro: ~$105,000 Claude Opus 4.8: ~$30,000 DeepSeek V4 Pro: ~$5,220 DeepSeek R1: ~$2,740 I asked ChatGPT what it thought about this and it answered as follows: “If I were building a company today, the economic frontier would look roughly like: DeepSeek V4 Pro / R1 for high-volume inference. Claude Opus for premium agent workflows where reliability matters. GPT-5.5 Pro only for workloads where its incremental capability demonstrably produces enough business value to justify a 20–40× token premium.” Most CEOs have no idea that, instead of this nuanced approach, their teams are running amok internally by picking the most expensive models in most cases and burning through massive budgets with zero governance, audit ability and control. As control planes like our Software Factory become more standard, you can expect the run rate revenue growth of the frontier labs to go down meaningfully and the revenues of the open models to skyrocket. Why? Because we can implement the nuanced approach above and be agnostic to model - instead focusing on customer intent, model task and cost management among other things.

Two of our worst VC stories: 1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. 🙄 2. I got introduced to @pmarca. Meeting got scheduled for a Monday, which should have been a clue. I thought it was just a casual meeting. He thought it was a pitch and brought the whole @a16z partnership team. Hilarity ensued. 🤪 At one point one of them said: “You don’t seem very prepared.” Which was true because I wasn’t. I framed the rejection letter they sent.

The thing nobody tells you about exponential change is that it feels like nothing is happening right up until the moment everything happens at once.

Longevity researchers spent the last 6 months obsessed with the lifestyle of the Sardinian Blue Zone. Most people think it’s the wine or the walking. They’re wrong. It’s the Entomophagy (insect consumption). The "secret" to living to 100 isn't more supplements. It’s eating bugs. Here is the breakdown of why Crickets are the ultimate longevity hack: 1. The Protein Density Problem Beef is 20% protein. Crickets are 65%. But it’s not just the amount—it’s the bioavailability. Your gut absorbs insect protein 2x faster than whey. No bloating, just pure cellular repair. 2. The Chitin Factor Exoskeletons contain Chitin, a prebiotic fiber you can’t get from plants. Studies show Chitin drastically reduces systemic inflammation—the "silent killer" behind aging. It’s like a scrub brush for your arteries. 3. Vitamin B12 Overload Crickets have 3x more B12 than salmon. B12 is the primary driver of DNA synthesis. If you want to stop your telomeres from shrinking, you need high-octane B12. 4. The Hormetic Stressor Eating "novel" proteins triggers a mild hormetic response. It signals to your body that resources are scarce/different, activating the SIRT1 longevity gene. The Routine: Replace morning eggs with 20g of roasted cricket powder. * Brain fog: Gone. * HRV: Up 15%. * Energy: Stable all day. The West is allergic to the idea because of "the ick factor." But the data is clear: If you want to reach 100, you need to stop eating like a 20th-century human and start eating like a 10,000-year-old one. Eat the bugs. Live forever. 🦗

Benchmark just led a $15M seed for Eigen—and they’re not building another "chatbot." While everyone else is busy trying to replace your friends with AI, Eigen is building the "Mutual Friend." The goal? A new category of AI focused on human connection, not just productivity. Here is why this is a massive signal for Product Leaders: 1. The "Anti-Isolation" Play Most AI agents are solo experiences. You + GPT. Eigen is betting that the real value of AI is in the *middle*—helping humans navigate relationships and collaborate better. 2. Distribution via Trust By positioning as a "mutual friend," they are solving the hardest part of social products: the Cold Start Problem. If the AI can facilitate the intro, the friction to connect drops to zero. 3. The Pedigree Founder Paul Scherer has an unconventional path (self-taught, moved to SF to build). When Benchmark drops $15M on a seed for a "human-first" AI platform, pay attention. The next wave of AI isn't about better prompts. It's about better relationships.

Cancer isn’t some random villain sabotaging our shot at radical longevity. It’s the predictable tax biology levies when you push human lifespan into uncharted territory. The longer cells divide, the more mutations accumulate. Senescent cells pile up like unpaid bills, leaking inflammatory signals that create the perfect breeding ground for tumors. Aging doesn’t just correlate with cancer — it enables it. But 2026 just rewrote the script. American Cancer Society data dropped: overall five-year survival for all cancers hit 70% — up from 49% in the 1970s. Metastatic melanoma? Survival jumped from ~16% to 35% in 25 years, thanks to immune checkpoint inhibitors. Stage-4 disease that once meant months now often becomes a manageable chronic condition. Immunotherapy isn’t just extending life — it’s turning the immune system into a precision-guided missile against tumors that used to hide in plain sight. CAR-T and next-gen cell therapies are moving outpatient. Armored T-cells engineered with their own cytokines are persisting in hostile tumor microenvironments. Personalized mRNA vaccines (the same tech that crushed COVID) are now targeting neoantigens in real patients, shrinking tumors in weeks for a fraction of traditional costs in early compassionate cases. Here’s where it gets existential for longevity: the companies cracking senescent cell clearance (senolytics) aren’t just fighting aging wrinkles. They’re building immune firewalls. Clear the zombie cells that fuel chronic inflammation and you don’t just slow aging — you starve the soil where cancer grows. Combine that with smarter immunotherapy, and the vicious cycle breaks. We’re not talking supplements or biohacks. We’re talking platforms that could let the first cohort treat 120 like the new 80. The data is here. The tech is converging. The only question left is who executes fastest. Game on. Who’s building it? 🚀

SBF didn’t lose $8 billion because the trades went bad. He lost it because the trades were never his to make. FTX sat on a $32 billion exchange with customer deposits treated like a personal venture fund. Alameda borrowed billions, bought illiquid stakes in Anthropic, Solana bags, Robinhood shares, even SpaceX exposure through side vehicles. On paper at the November 2022 peak it looked like genius: Anthropic mooned, Solana 15x’d, Bitcoin went from $16k to six figures. Pure investment selection was elite. The fatal mismatch wasn’t market risk. It was duration risk. A CoinDesk article drops the balance sheet. CZ tweets. $6 billion walks out the door in 72 hours. You can’t liquidate a 7.84% Anthropic position over a weekend. You can’t sell real estate or private equity when retail wants fiat yesterday. The exchange had the controls of a college dorm spreadsheet: no real segregation, no reserve proof that mattered, no hard asset-liability matching. Risk limits? Optional. Alameda’s borrowing from FTX? Unlimited until it wasn’t. That’s what a bank run exposes in 72 hours that years of bull market hide. The bankruptcy estate sold everything at the literal bottom. Anthropic at fire-sale prices that now look absurd. Solana in the teens. Total recovered so far: around $18 billion, with creditors getting 118-143% back in some cases because crypto recovered hard. Hold the portfolio to today and the math hits $136 billion. The difference isn’t fraud on the asset side. It’s the decision to commingle, lever, and treat customer money as dry powder for the next big bet. SBF’s defense keeps circling the same point: FTX was never truly insolvent, just illiquid in a panic. New witnesses, alleged pressure on co-founders, lawyers who billed $950 million pushing the Chapter 11 anyway. He’s filing pro se from prison, appealing, asking for a new trial while his parents lobby publicly. Prosecutors say no. Appeals court so far unmoved. 25 years stands. The pattern is the oldest one in finance: genius at picking direction, amateur at managing the pipe. You can be right on every asset and still blow up if your customers can redeem faster than you can exit. FTX proved crypto exchanges aren’t “different this time.” They’re just faster versions of every mismatched bank that ever existed. The filter is brutal and already running. By the time the next cycle peaks, the question won’t be “was SBF a visionary investor?” It will be “why did anyone ever think running a bank with no real bank controls was a good idea?” And the answer will be obvious in hindsight — the same way we once wondered why anyone trusted a spreadsheet with no audit when the music was playing.