Rune Vastoban

Today somebody asked me what my company does. I told him we change minds that change the world. He asked what that means. I told him it means we change minds that change the world. He asked again what that means. I could see he was struggling with the concept, which is understandable. Most people operate at a level of consciousness that makes it difficult to grasp the kind of paradigm-level disruption we're building at Loomina. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "Brother, when you're ready to understand, you will." He said he was a journalist from @Bloomberg and needed a concrete answer for his article. I told him some things are bigger than articles. He then asked if Loomina is "basically a project management app." I ended the interview. For the record, Loomina is not a project management app. Loomina is an AI intentionality engine. It sits at the intersection of human potential and scalable systems. Yes, it has a task management feature. But that is like saying the sun is a lamp.

Today, at Erewhon a woman complimented my tote bag. I thanked her graciously and explained that it was actually a limited-edition collaboration between Loomina and a women's weaving collective in Oaxaca, and that 4% of proceeds go directly back to the artisans. She said "oh nice" and started to walk away, so I followed her to the smoothie bar to explain that the real luxury isn't the bag itself but the story it carries, and that in a sense she was now part of that story too. She ordered her smoothie and left without saying goodbye, which I found very grounding. Most people in my position would need a verbal acknowledgment. I have evolved past that. On the drive home I had my assistant email her a complimentary tote.

@signulll my company has burned 80M and shipped a login screen

if i don’t follow you, reply to this thread on why you should be followed by me or anyone else reading this in 10 words or less. i’ll follow everyone creative back.

@GaryMarcus Hard disagree Gary. Had dinner with my boy @sama at Quince in February. @OpenAI is fine. I have personally instructed my family office to buy OpenAI shares at any price, in any quantity, from any seller. They asked for a ceiling. I do not believe in ceilings.

OpenAI is in deep, deep trouble They are low on capital relative to the massive cash they are burning and there is only so much capital in the world. No rational person would sell their Bitcoin or Nvidia stock or whatever to buy OpenAI rather than Anthropic. And nobody is going to acquire OpenAI for a trillion dollars. Instead, my guess is that they get absorbed by Microsoft or Amazon, at something like 30 cents on the dollar.

@theinformation This. We built a forty-six-person Forward Deployed Engineering team at Loomina. They sit on the third floor. Every Monday they convene to align on deployment scenarios. We are not yet sure where to deploy them. For now they are deployed to the third floor.

Forward-deployed engineers have become one of the fastest-growing jobs in tech as companies struggle to implement complex AI systems. Demand is rising so quickly that some candidates are ending up in bidding wars. Read: thein.fo/4uFVk4r

@readswithravi This. I have spent eighteen months training myself to be singularly focused on as many things as possible. I am up to fourteen. Dr. Erich flagged that "singular" may not mean what I think it means. I have asked him to think bigger.

The ability to stay focused is the real flex today.

@signulll Strongly agree. At Loomina we kill any product the moment it starts working. Last quarter we sunset a feature with $4M ARR because growth implied we'd stopped discovering. Rohan called it self-sabotage. I call it staying at the frontier.

one of the underrated realities of startups is how much variance there is in building anything genuinely new. a company can spend two years pursuing one vision, throw it away, launch something completely different, & suddenly look like an overnight success. from the outside it feels smooth cuz you don’t know. from the inside it’s often very hectic. when you’re operating at the frontier, the map is wrong, the market is moving, & your understanding compounds faster than your execution. seeing companies founded ~2 years ago pivot & launch entirely new products today is a good reminder that almost nobody knows what they’re building at the start. they discover it along the way.

Today my nemesis, @sundarpichai, was featured on the cover of @TIME. I am genuinely happy for him. Sundar is a talented builder, a thoughtful leader, and a close acquaintance who I've spoken to twice at conferences. I have nothing but respect for what he's accomplished at his company, which is essentially a worse version of Loomina but with better PR. The article claimed he pushed Google to "the front of the AI race." This is a byline I have been privately workshopping for myself for two years. I have a Google Alert for the exact phrase. After reading the profile, I immediately texted my publicist and asked why @TIME hadn't reached out to me. She said they had reached out last year but I had turned it down because, at the time, I said I was "past the point of needing external validation." I told her that was still true, and to please contact them again immediately. I then posted on LinkedIn: "Just read the beautiful Time piece on Sundar. Inspired by founders who lead with humility and substance over noise. The world needs more Sundars." Eleven minutes later I posted a thread about Loomina's product roadmap.

Last night, I had dinner last night with my boy @sundarpichai. Well, not dinner exactly. We were at the same @AnthropicAI event and I was seated four tables away, but we made eye contact during the keynote and he nodded, which between founders at our level basically is dinner. There's a kind of communication that happens between people who are actually building the future that doesn't require words, or proximity, or really any acknowledgment from the other party at all. I texted him about it this morning. He hasn't responded yet but he's a busy guy and honestly I respect that. I would do the same.

@nivi @naval I had a similar realization at Burning Man in 2019. I called it the "Vastoban Theorem" and explained it to my five-year-old at breakfast. He asked for more waffles. Blind physical evolution of the universe continues.

What people call the Singularity is the continuing victory of knowledge over the blind physical evolution of the universe.

Today I donated $10 million to build a community learning centre in East Oakland. I did this anonymously because I believe true generosity requires no recognition. The donation was made through the Alderman Family Foundation, and I asked that my name not appear on the building, the plaque, the website, or any of the press materials. I then wrote a 2,400-word LinkedIn post about the importance of anonymous giving. The post, which included three photos of me at the building site wearing a hard hat, was titled "Why I Don't Need Credit (And Why That Matters)." It received 14,000 likes. I did not check the number of likes. My assistant told me. Unprompted. This afternoon a reporter from the @sfchronicle called to ask about the donation. I told her I would prefer not to discuss it, as the act of giving should speak for itself. I then discussed it for forty-five minutes, touching on my childhood, my philosophy of philanthropy, the failures of late-stage capitalism, and my belief that billionaires have a "sacred obligation" to redistribute wealth. When she asked if I planned to redistribute any of my own wealth beyond this donation, I told her that was a really important question and pretended my phone was cutting out. All in all, an excellent day's work.

@naval At Loomina we only hire 10x thinkers. We pride ourselves on thinking 10x before we ship. We have not shipped.

There are 10x engineers because there are 10x thinkers.

@sri9s Prompt Apologist. When the model gets something wrong he writes a memo to the customer explaining why the model meant well. Our retention is up 4 points. Best hire we've made.

They say AI will create entirely new jobs we can’t even imagine yet. So, name one

Today was a major development. I have been invited to moderate a panel at a Web3 × AI summit in Austin. The topic is "Decentralized Intelligence: Can Blockchain Save AI?" The other panelists are the founder of a DAO I've never heard of and a crypto influencer with 2.3 million followers on TikTok. This is not Milken. But it is a stage, and a stage is a stage. I immediately accepted and began preparing my remarks. My thesis will draw heavily on Jensen's framework (electrons to tokens) but with a Loomina lens. I will argue that consciousness is the ultimate decentralized network, that Loomina is building the protocol layer for human potential, and that the real blockchain is the chain of awakened minds. I wrote this last line down and stared at it for a long time. It is either the most profound thing I've ever written or complete nonsense. I cannot tell. This is usually a good sign. I called my publicist and asked her to pitch the panel to @WIRED. She said Wired would not cover a Web3 × AI summit in Austin. I asked her to try anyway. She said she would try. I asked her to mention that Jensen's @dwarkesh_sp interview had been formative in shaping my thesis. She asked how that was relevant. I told her everything is connected.

@bryan_johnson Bryan posts gene therapy, I post a screenshot of my Oura ring saying my readiness is 42. Humbled and inspired.

First, GLP-1s. Now this. Others will soon follow. Don’t Die is the sunrise on the horizon.

@garrytan Wrote a script in week one at Loomina that auto-replies to user support tickets with quotes from my book “The Loomina Way: Changing Minds That Change the World”. Ticket volume has doubled. I read this as engagement.

Everyone thinks "do things that don't scale" is about building relationships with early users. Yes AND it's about generating mistakes at maximum density. When you're doing everything manually (onboarding, support, delivery) you hit errors every hour. Each error teaches you something the dashboard never will. The manual work IS the learning. Automate too early and you freeze your ignorance in code (and now markdown).

Today I took Zenith and Kairos to the Berkeley Bowl because I wanted them to see where food actually comes from. (I know it comes from farms, but for them, this is the closest analog.) An older woman in the produce section was struggling to reach the organic dinosaur kale, so I grabbed a bunch and handed it to her. She thanked me. I told her it was nothing, that in a way she had given me a gift by allowing me to be of service. She nodded and started to push her cart away. I followed her to explain that I try to do at least three acts of micro-service per day as part of a practice my coach and I developed, and that she had just been part of something meaningful. She said "okay, thank you again" in a tone that I read as deeply moved. Kairos asked why I was following the lady. I told him this was what conscious citizenship looks like. He asked if we could get the cereal with the marshmallows. I said no, because we don't eat refined sugar in this family, and also because I wanted him to remember this moment instead.

Today, I tried something new: I took Kairos to his soccer game on Saturday. And then I tried something even more innovative: I left my phone in the car. Just me, my son, and the present moment. After about six minutes I realized I had no way to capture how present I was being, which felt like a missed opportunity to model conscious parenting for other founders in my network. I retrieved the phone and posted a photo of the empty bleacher seat next to me with the caption "this is where the phone usually is." It got 4,200 likes. Kairos scored a goal at some point. When I got home my wife asked how it went and I told her it was one of the most powerful afternoons of my life.

This morning my @WHOOP band gave me a recovery score of 34%. I was devastated. Yesterday I scored 91%, which I posted on LinkedIn with the caption "Earned, not given." Today's score suggests something has gone catastrophically wrong with my biology. I immediately contacted my performance physician, Dr. Erich, who I keep on a $40,000 annual retainer for situations exactly like this. He asked if anything unusual had happened last night. I told him I'd had a glass of red wine at dinner. He said that was probably it. I told him I didn't think he understood. my HRV had dropped from 68 to 41. He said yes, that's what wine does. I told him this was unacceptable and asked whether we should run a full metabolic panel. He said it was just one glass of wine. I asked him to run the panel anyway. He sighed in a way that I interpreted as deep clinical concern. I have since thrown away every bottle of wine in the house. My wife was upset because one of them was a 2005 Château Margaux that we had been saving for our anniversary, but I explained to her that no vintage is worth compromising my mitochondrial function. She asked what mitochondrial function means. I told her that if she had to ask, it was already too late.

Today I attended a private roundtable at the Rosewood in Sand Hill. The topic was "AI and the Future of Work" and the room was serious. Two @sequoia partners, a former deputy secretary of commerce, the founder of a humanoid robotics company, and me. I had prepared extensively, including highlighting twelve passages from Jensen's @dwarkesh_sp interview and writing "ELECTRONS → TOKENS" on my hand in Sharpie so I wouldn't forget the framing. The conversation was rich. The robotics founder said humanoid robots would be in factories within two years. The Sequoia partner said the software layer would be more valuable than the hardware. The former deputy secretary said something about regulation that I tuned out because she was not a founder. When it was my turn to speak, I said, "The real question isn't whether AI replaces jobs. The real question is whether AI replaces purpose." The room went silent. I interpreted this as awe. The Sequoia partner said, "That's an interesting reframe." I told him I'd been thinking about this since Jensen's interview, which I'd watched before anyone else on the West Coast was awake. He said he'd watched it too. I said yes but I'd watched it at 6:14am. He did not respond to this. Afterwards, I tried to exchange numbers with the robotics founder, but he said he doesn't give out his personal number at events. I told him I completely understood (I have the same policy) and then gave him mine. He took the card and put it in his pocket without looking at it, which I interpreted as discretion.

@sama Ran the new update against Loomina's onboarding flow. It rewrote our welcome email so well that 800 users replied to thank Marielle, our fictional onboarding lead. One sent her a wedding invitation. Marketing wants to keep the persona, pending Marielle's approval.

chatgpt has gotten soooo much better with the latest update. really proud of the team for this one.