Vaporware Ventures
570 posts
Vaporware Ventures
@vaporwarevc
I do tech by day. Connector. Vibe coding hater. Private markets dabbler by night - fueled by doppio
Katılım Haziran 2026
224 Takip Edilen33 Takipçiler
wow, inbound over the last 48h has been insane.
pumped to help more companies raise the aesthetic bar of their models and agents. bear with us as we work through requests :)
and, we're hiring (even more now)!
research, design, eng, ml, product, ops, and more! apply below.
English
@thaiscbranco_ who decided it was a good idea to dress everyone in black?
English
wow this went big 😅
one thing is for sure: no one wants a world with more slop
we'll keep working hard on that mission!
Thais Castello Branco@thaiscbranco_
We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs. Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste. And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design. There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer: - We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments. - We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs. We want a future where AI feels right. If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!
English
English
prediction: @bendingspoons acquires them post-ipo
GREG ISENBERG@gregisenberg
The thesis for someone acquiring $SNAP, fixing 4 things, and making billions. The whole company trades at a $7.8B market cap. They did $5.9B in revenue last year, they have $2.9B in cash, they just turned free cash flow positive, and 474 million people open the app every single day. The market values a Snap daily user at roughly $16. Meta values its users at around $130. That's an 8x gap on the most coveted young audience in the world. Pretty crazy. It smells like an opportunity but do your own research Here's how I'd turn it around: 1. Pivot from ads to live shopping. The way it already prints billions in Asia. This alone might be bigger than their entire ad business one day. 2. Turn Snap into an app studio. Spin up standalone AI apps, a dating app, a photo app, an AI companion, a creator tool, and hire world-class GMs to run each one. Bending Spoons meets IAC, except every app launches with an audience already inside it. 3. Build the teen money layer. Every fintech (Cash App, Chime, Step) burns hundreds of dollars per user chasing the under-25 audience. Snap already has them. Peer-to-peer payments, a teen debit card, splitting costs with friends you're already chatting with. A fintech with zero acquisition cost. 4. Unlock the gaming network hiding in plain sight. Hundreds of millions already play Lens games and AR experiences. That's a console-sized audience treated like a side feature. Add payments and creator tools and you have a mobile games platform that never had to acquire a single player. I already know the replies. "Evan will never sell." Probably true today. He controls the voting shares and he's attached. But every founder has a number, and my guess is the board might be frustrated with a stock price that's been hurt so bad. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying the asset is mispriced whether or not he picks up the phone. "He's pouring money into Specs." This is a symptom of a bigger issue. While building VR is extremely cool/interesting, point that capital at the existing audience through software, and my thesis is you'd see way better return. "Snap users don't have money." Neither did Instagram's in 2012. Young audiences age into spending power, and the platform that owns them at 18 owns them at 30. You're not buying their wallet today. You're buying it for the next decade. "It's a declining business." It grew revenue 11% last year and turned free cash flow positive. That's not a dying company. That's a profitable one trading like a dead one because Wall Street can only picture it losing to Meta at ads. TLDR; I think $SNAP may be mispriced relative to its audience, cash flow, and optionality. Maybe they turn it around themselves, or maybe someone reading this helps them. Tell me why acquiring Snap is a bad idea. Am I wrong? (Quick flag since it's a real ticker: this is a thesis for fun, not investment advice. Real risks exist, shrinking North American users and regulatory pressure on teen usage chief among them. Do your own research.)
English
I applaud the gumption it took to stage a shoot wearing gum sole black sambas, black soft ruched loafers, blackout CP lows, tobacco roughout service boots and color 8 horsebit loafers whilst donning that self-anointed name.
Taste Labs@taste_ai_
tasteful team. join us
English
My newest obsession i didn’t know the office needed: a matcha machine.
English
I would feel better if it were clear anyone on the west coast had read Derrida but it’s clear no one has so now we’re forced to rediscover how disorienting and annoying
- Taste: Différance as a Service
is as a theory of signification
Thais Castello Branco@thaiscbranco_
We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs. Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste. And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design. There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer: - We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments. - We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs. We want a future where AI feels right. If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!
English
@darrenrovell this is why it should have been all down park ave
English
NYPD says no more space along parade route. Fans must now stay in pen areas for the next two hours before parade is scheduled to start.
NYPD NEWS@NYPDnews
KNICKS PARADE UPDATE: All viewing pens are full. No one else will be allowed in the viewing area. As a reminder, if you leave the viewing pens, you will not be allowed reentry. There are no trains stopping south of Canal St in Manhattan.
English
I don’t know how Mercury does it, but somehow everything I see from them is extremely professional and clean, would recommend
English
Knicks Parade Day
Fulton / Nassau - closed off 6:03am
Can’t get to Zuccotti Park, roads closed off
#AlwaysKnicks
English
@viemccoy maybe some of that taste could have bought them a stylist
English
enough people have dunked on these guys, but I want to point something out. the thing they are offering is ostensibly out-of-distribution high-taste data or data curation.
and yet, everything they are wearing is extremely in-distribution. these are normalcore outfits, every single one of them. there is nothing unique about the way a single one of them are dressed, nothing interesting, nothing to inspire or delight.
and sure, maybe that is fine. maybe what they actually want is to sell "high-taste" in-distribution data to make the models a bit better but not unlike they already are - constraining to the upper bound of what is already possible without making possible anything new.
maybe that's enough for 18.5 million and a small team. I'm not sure. but I am sad! I think a company like this should dream bigger. all I see is the same uniqlo-shaped beige slop. they are yelling at you that they are high taste and you should trust them but there is no evidence for this.
also, their logo is really bad. unforced error. though it does look cool on the website
Taste Labs@taste_ai_
tasteful team. join us
English
Midjourney is opening a health spa in downtown San Francisco with hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and a new form of medical imaging that they have created, the full body ultrasound.
They can do a scan in 60 seconds. They want to deploy 50,000 of them over the next 6 years.
Midjourney@midjourney
Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"
English