Caitlin Morse

@jayyeh @Mark_DarkStarAi A lot of investors who used to say “no hardware” have realized they need a moat and been open to robotics + data + Physical AI, so all the robotics companies are shooting their shot to a broader audience.

@Mark_DarkStarAi yeah not even close. but it's like once everyone heard VCs don't like software, they all just flipped to robotics

is absolutely everyone running a robotics company now?

@jayyeh @MaciejDominiak5 Yep, you have to start by treating it like a very smart new grad: give it tasks that build, provide frequent feedback, expect there is some early inefficiencies with payback once it learns.

@MaciejDominiak5 you have to guide it. you have to debug. you have to work with it not assume it's perfect

i keep overestimating how many people actually use agentic AI even tech people. even VCs. if they say they're "heavy AI user" it's a joke. it usually means chatting with claude and using lovable for websites. that's it. if you're actually building with agents and automation, you have an edge right now. not sure how long it lasts but it's real. SPRINT with it.

@hpierrejacques Tents were great for our boys. We had a small ikea tent and little light & books. Crib mattress on the floor so climbing wasn’t dangerous and then he could “get up” at 5am and go look at books safely while we still slept a little longer. Sometimes he even fell back asleep…

Son started climbing out of the crib this weekend and now we are doing bed sleep training, this might be worst than baby training. Would love any tips, send sleep!

@jayyeh I think this tension of relationships built slowly and momentum dying fast is one of the biggest challenges in fundraising. Also, is a relationship really being built if you just have a check-in? Seems like investors need to get to know you in a previous capacity + new deal opp.

the investor who was excited about your deal three months ago just passed... because time killed it 50 new deals. a board crisis. a shinier round. your window closed while you were "nurturing the relationship" relationships are built slowly. momentum dies fast. knowing which one you're in is everything.

@juliarturc @XXfounder 👋 Physical AI is the place to be. Legit teams going after hard problems with real human benefit & tremendous untapped opportunity. We’re automating ICU nursing tasks to address staffing shortages, personalize care, and build world’s largest contextualized brain data pipeline.

Why so many of us feel career-homeless in tech: >Startups full of fraud, grifters and short-term thinking >FAANG full of politics and slightly behind >Frontier labs in a race with no morals >Academia full of title collectors >Content creation ridden by AI fakes and sensationalism Who is starting the renaissance and how do I get in touch with them?

@jayyeh This is only part of the equation. You really need to model out the next few milestones and then look at who is writing checks/round size expectations & the type of investor you want for your next two rounds.

"how much should I raise?" wrong starting point: what sounds right, what a friend raised, what you saw on techcrunch right starting point: what does it cost to make this company worth significantly more? work backwards from the goal. that's your number.

@jayyeh I’ve found even specialist VCs may not be familiar enough with a specific use case, especially depending on who is in the first meeting. If you are a specialist VC wanting to go deep earlier, hopefully you are asking nuanced/acronym-riddled questions that signal that familiarity.

pitching a generalist VC the same way you pitch a specialist VC is leaving money on the table... generalist → simple, undeniable, no context required. lose them in 2 minutes and it's over. specialist → go deep fast or lose credibility immediately. one gear doesn't work for both.

@chrissyfarr @DermaSensor is delivering on #3

Is healthcare actually a market? According to Chris Klomp, RFK's No. 2 at HHS, the answer is: Not yet. I sat down with Chris and Jon Gordon to discuss how we turn technology into a "deflationary force" instead of a cost-adder. The Vision: * End Data Blocking: Million-dollar penalties for gatekeepers. * Reward Outcomes: Move past the "industrial complex" of coding. * Tour of Duty: Recruiting tech talent into government for 6–24 months. Full interview linked below. "Not everyone is going to win as we modernize healthcare," says Chris. "But we have to start wrestling with this."

@dunkhippo33 @ericbahn Is #8, leaving them hanging so they lean in? 😉 I started learning from you via Twitter during the pandemic before I even started my company. Thanks for continuing to share.

Asking for money is one of the hardest things about running a startup. Most people were never taught how to do it. Here are 8 tips the Hustle Fund team actually uses: 🧵

@chrismichel @KarlDeisseroth @michelle_monje @Stanford Michelle’s office and PhD notebook, but Karl the one sitting at the desk “working”? I find the composition incongruent with the text.

I photographed @KarlDeisseroth and @michelle_monje in Michelle’s office at @Stanford. Between them on the table is her PhD notebook, opened to a page from the period when they were actively collaborating on her doctoral research. It is an artifact in the truest sense. A working record of ideas taking shape. Handwritten equations, sketches, annotations. The physical residue of long hours spent thinking together, testing assumptions, and pushing at the edges of what was known at the time. Karl is widely known for inventing optogenetics, a breakthrough that made it possible to control specific neurons with light and permanently altered the trajectory of neuroscience and psychiatry. Michelle is a neuro oncologist whose work revealed that neurons do not merely coexist with cancer but can actively drive the growth of brain tumors, especially in children. Her research reshaped how scientists understand the relationship between the nervous system and cancer, opening entirely new therapeutic directions. What struck me in this moment was how naturally their scientific lives intertwine. The notebook is not just symbolic. It marks a real period of shared intellectual labor, when their collaboration was formative rather than retrospective. Before prizes, before widespread recognition, before entire fields reorganized around their ideas. This is what scientific partnership looks like at its most honest. Not just co authorship or proximity, but sustained curiosity carried across years. The notebook holds the memory of that time. The photograph holds the present. Together they tell a story about how deep science is often built. Slowly. Carefully. In conversation. And sometimes, with the person you choose to build a life with. @theNASEM #NewHeroes

@realdocspeaks @IsaacYangMD @OmarMKhateeb

One thing I tell every physician: get on social media. We all have downtime — waiting for a delivery, waiting for an OR to open, waiting for rounds. Use that time to put something honest and useful into the world. No one is coming to save our profession. We have to do it ourselves. #realdocspeaks

@AlexanderJoh10 @MartinGTobias This is what we’re building for the brain. What are you working on, Alexander?

@MartinGTobias One of the best thing is hw medtech +vertical AI in a very specific segment + data that is yours very own preferably collected over a relatively long time. Super moat imo.

This email from a VC friend sums up the VC dilemma today: “Try to find more unique ideas/bold bets. We're seeing 10+ AI sw things for most categories, makes it very hard.” We have capital to deploy but when everyone is building the same thing it is very hard to get excited and want to fund a war of attrition. One way through is to build in a vertical you know well (your unique edge) that few are building for. Vertical market software. We love vertical markets. If building that DMs open.

@waleedd322 @DeryaTR_ My kids would say the answer is correct. 5 fingers and a thumb.

@DeryaTR_ Can someone explain that why ONLY chatGPT-4o gets this right ?

I’m excited to share the first part of an absolutely stunning analysis from the GPT-5 thinking model! I uploaded a huge spreadsheet, nearly 1,300 metabolites (lipids, carbohydrates, microbiome-derived compounds, and much more) measured in 150 ME/CFS patients and 100 healthy controls. In the first run, I didn’t even tell GPT-5 these samples were from ME/CFS patients, I wanted to see what it could find blind, purely from the metabolomics data. Next, I’ll share the version where I revealed these were from our patient cohort, tied to our recently published paper and what GPT-5 uncovered there is yet on another level! We had analyzed this same dataset over two years ago, and it took us more than a month to fully work through it. ✅GPT-5 did a better job in under five minutes. ✅It not only replicated almost everything we had concluded back then, including finding all the significant differences, creating multiple spreadsheets on different pathways and so on, but also uncovered several discoveries we completely missed. ✅GPT-5 even highlighted actionable targets and potential treatments for patients (which I’ll share soon). This isn’t an “incremental improvement.” This is a revolution! What once took months now takes hours. As I mentioned before the rules of scientific research aren’t just shifting, they’re being rewritten! Sharing a portion of output from GPT-5 as an example, and executive summary is also included as a screenshot. Unified mechanistic theory with causal diagram Observed pattern •Lipid remodeling with increased DAG, PC, SM, and specific ceramides in patients. •Cofactor pattern with decreased carotenoids and increased alpha-tocopherol. Mechanistic links •De novo ceramide synthesis via serine palmitoyltransferase and ceramide synthases increases ceramide pools that influence stress and signaling. •The Kennedy (CDP-choline) pathway couples DAG and PC metabolism; CHKA → PCYT1A → CHPT1 convert choline to PC using DAG as the acceptor. •DAG activates PKCε and related isoforms, which can shift receptor signaling fidelity. •Alpha-tocopherol is a lipid-phase peroxyl radical scavenger and is regenerated by ascorbate; reduced carotenoids are consistent with antioxidant consumption. Ranked, actionable targets 1.SPTLC1/2 or CERS (enzymes) - decrease de novo ceramide synthesis. Low feasibility at present but highly causal if lipid drivers are primary. Risks include effects on myelin. 2.DGAT1/2 modulation - reduce toxic DAG signaling by shunting to neutral storage or titrating flux. Medium feasibility, GI tolerability is the key risk. 3.PKCε inhibition - block DAG-to-signaling step. Currently low feasibility, but mechanistically precise. 4.Dietary carotenoids and vitamin C support - replete antioxidant capacity and aid tocopherol recycling. High feasibility, monitor F2-isoprostanes and carotenoid panel. 5.Trial L-carnitine only if deficiency is confirmed - small signal in carnitine pathway; low-confidence, pilot dosing with monitoring. Proposed validation experiments and minimal clinical biomarker panel Validation experiments •Targeted lipidomics focusing on DAG species, ceramides (chain-length resolved), sphingomyelins, PCs. •PKCε activity proxies in accessible cells if feasible. •Antioxidant panel: alpha-tocopherol, carotenoids, vitamin C, plus F2-isoprostanes for lipid peroxidation readout. •If pilot L-carnitine is considered, measure free and acyl-carnitines and the acyl/free ratio pre-post. Minimal monitoring panel •Ceramides: d18:1/16:0, d18:1/18:0, and dihydroceramides. •DAG class panel with positional isomers if available; report as molar % of total lipids. •PC class and LPC/PC ratio; choline and phosphocholine to infer Kennedy pathway flux. •Alpha-tocopherol, beta-cryptoxanthin, carotene diols, vitamin C, and F2-isoprostanes.

@FFairing @jefielding @matvogels Is it possible he just didn’t want to tell you about the failed attempts as a new acquaintance? Or he is doing things in philanthropy he didn’t think you’d consider important?

@jefielding @matvogels Nothing you know about*

This weekend I met a guy who exited his company around 2010, made $200M and retired (mid 30s). 15 years later, he’s still retired and happy doing nothing. Total head scratcher to me and goes against all the patterns and beliefs I have about founders 🤷🏼‍♀️

@jayyeh Still better than making me click through 4 pages to see appetizers, salads, mains and lunch specials…

why do so many restaurant websites still display their menus as PDFs? 🤮

@jefielding I agree as a founder if: 1) scheduled to allow for prompt arrival and context switching. If investor arrives 5-10min late, doesn’t work to be 15 total. 2) schedule allows for follow-up 60min call within week if interested (before data room) 3) parties not coming in totally blind

Let’s normalize the 15 min founder / investor intro Zoom: - 1 min pleasantries - 1 min overview on our fund - 5 min overview by the founder - 5 min QA - 2 min demo - 1 min next steps It’s plenty of time actually 🚀🚀🚀

@Farshchi In most cases, the university holds the IP and is doing the accelerator to increase its value through spinout. For an equity investor, being all about team makes sense, but if all you own is IP, tech success = $$.

Top university accelerator asks: “How do we choose the TECH that have the greatest chance of success?” Answer: It’s all about the TEAM that can set goalposts, hire the greatest kernel of a team to hit them, and share a narrative that makes investors jump at writing checks.

@WifeOfCombatVet @robbystarbuck Does your son have a passport? The last time we went through passport control coming back into the US they had our kids’ passport pictures without scanning our passports.

That’s what we thought. My husband went to one TSA agent and I was with the other. He finished first and saw a image of our son and it compared him with the present. So it would seem that he was in the system. It is definitely worrisome. Thank you for your time and response 🇺🇸

I decline the photo every time I’m at TSA and the agent always acts personally aggrieved by me declining it. It’s so bizarre that it makes them so upset to have a citizen exercise their rights. Another thing: No one in front of me has ever declined but people after me often do. I’m not sure if that says that TSA doesn’t properly inform flyers that the new photo thing is a choice, if most people just need to see leadership before asserting their rights or (I suspect) both? I’d love to hear from a TSA employee why it’s so triggering to agents when I decline it though?

@nickmmark Any other good practices you would recommend? I’ve been thinking a lot about how to optimize data visualization and basically come to the conclusion there needs to be “consumer” mode with all the good practice baked in and “researcher” mode with bells and whistles/settings…

@MorseCodeMed Agree it’s useful. But setting a minimum is good practice imo

This is the problem with autoscaling in data viz: for a second this looked like a lot of UOP, but it turned out to be just 5 ml.