Sam Wholley

@RonConway Wishing you the best in this fight, 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.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

@gradypb @dougleone Facts

closest thing to a victory lap you’re going to get out of @dougleone

@lennysan Love it, @lennysan

Here are the full transcripts from all 320 of my podcast episodes. It's been super fun for me to play with AI to extract insights from this data. Now you can to. My only ask is that if you do something cool with it, just let me know. I'll keep this folder updated with as each new episode comes out. Have fun. dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w…

@lil_dill @jameygannon Womp womp

@jameygannon Even as a Dill I am struggling with it.

why would you call this pickle

“Of course, it mean something to me to be the son of immigrants. How could it not? How the hell could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at—what? five? six?—I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea. You know, like I didn't have a fucking name. That's why years later, when Harry [James] wanted me to change my name, I said no way, baby. The name is Sinatra. Frank fucking Sinatra.” -Frank Sinatra

Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids. Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.

We have raised a $61M Series A to automate customer operations. The world’s leading companies like DoorDash trust Giga to supercharge customer experience with AI.

We just led the Epiminds round @lightspeedvp! I’ve spent $100M+ on performance marketing as a founder. Agencies are essential and AI changes everything. Excited for Epiminds to power the world’s top performance agencies.

@anneleeskates Congrats @anneleeskates!

Today I’m debuting Parable. Successful companies make the impossible, inevitable. Their stories live long enough to become parables that inspire generations.

CREDENTIALS DON’T MATTER Over the last few months, I’ve seen several A+ execs and operators flounder and fail at AI startups, while young “inexperienced” builders have crushed execution and performed superbly. It’s the biggest discontinuity in talent evaluation I’ve seen in my 25+ years in technology. All of one’s prior experiences, credentials, and traditional markers of success have become nearly irrelevant when the fundamental rules of the game have changed so dramatically. The shift to AI represents such a paradigm break that institutional knowledge often becomes institutional baggage. The executive who masterfully navigated enterprise sales cycles finds themselves lost when the product builds itself. The operator who optimized for predictable growth metrics struggles when the core capability improves exponentially overnight. Meanwhile, the 22-year-old who’s been fine-tuning models in their dorm room intuitively understands token economics, reasoning patterns, and capability scaling in ways that no MBA program ever taught. These “inexperienced” builders don’t carry the weight of how things “should” work. They don’t waste time trying to force AI capabilities into traditional product frameworks or business models. And so, they win. If you’re an executive wanting to find a role at an AI company, be humble. Put in the work. Use the tools and create a personal AI stack. Train yourself to think differently - probabilistically, not deterministically. Be open to an IC role if needed. It’s not magic, but it will take real work. If you’re an AI company founder, ensure your hiring process is not blinded by credentials. What matters is raw building ability (in EVERY role, not just Eng/Product/Design), comfort with uncertainty, and the ability to iterate and experiment exceptionally fast. It’s a new era.

@yanda @merci Congrats @yanda and @merci!

So @merci & I made a tiny human. Friends, please meet Viktor. 🥰

Proud to co-lead @reflection_ai Series A as they emerge from stealth with $130M in funding. Huge congrats to Co-Founders @MishaLaskin and @real_ioannis, and the incredible team they’ve built—one of the strongest Reinforcement Learning (RL) research teams in the world. Misha and Ioannis bring unparalleled expertise from their time at @GoogleDeepMind, where they contributed to groundbreaking advancements in AI, particularly in reinforcement learning and decision-making. AI-driven code generation is far more than just copilots—it’s about building autonomous systems that can truly reason, iterate, and debug like a software engineer. Reflection AI is tackling this challenge head-on, applying RL to train AI models capable of solving complex programming tasks end-to-end. Their system is designed to write, optimize, and debug code autonomously, changing how software development is approached. Excited for what’s ahead! Read more: lsvp.com/stories/toward… Cc: @lightspeedvp @JamesAlcorn94

@FitFounder Deleted Twitter?

What's one thing you've done to your health that you wish you did sooner?

@JoshuaSchriver if you care about Michigan, try focusing on things that actually affect your constituents instead of whatever those who buy you want. Why do you want to disrupt thriving families?

Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) is the CPO of @AnthropicAI ($10B+ raised) and the co-founder of Instagram, which he sold to Meta for $1B. Here's the full video of my recent conversation with him. Mike has one of the AI industry's most interesting jobs. He shared with me how he and his team craft product strategy for the company that's leading the charge on AI in the enterprise. Specifically, we discussed how frontier model innovations both drive product and vice versa (how product ideas inform AI research). We also talk about the long term defensibility of models (inspired by the emergence of DeepSeek), and how Mike believes that not only will individual models have specific strengths over others (such as in areas like coding, science, etc), but that a model's "vibes" will also be a major factor for driving customers' choice. Mike also shared his view on how AI will reinvent media and the business model of advertising on the internet, drawn heavily from his work building one of the most successful ad products ever built (Instagram) and his work on Artifact, an AI news product he also co-founded. Lastly, Mike dove deep into what it's like building for the Enterprise for the first time in his career, and how lessons from Instagram and Meta inform not only product development, but how Anthropic thinks about scaling its team in this period of hypergrowth. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:54 Mike Krieger's Journey to Anthropic 03:17 Building Product Strategy at Anthropic 07:43 Rapid Iteration and Safety 10:58 Differentiating AI Models and User Experience 17:57 Impact of AI on Consumer Products and Business Models 24:39 Enterprise vs. Consumer Product Strategy 29:19 AI in Personal Life Management 30:15 Open Source and Claude Integrations 33:09 AI-Assisted Product Development 37:13 Scaling Teams and Processes at Anthropic 42:17 Reflections on AI and Future Prospects

A lot of legitimately awesome science happening at @arcinstitute. (Including some coming later this month.)

@FitFounder I’ve been taking it for about two years and (at 48) I feel like it’s retained muscular vigor in recovery. It’s not a hammer, more like a velvet glove

People who have taken creatine: What has been your experience with it? Any benefits? Drawbacks?

@chamath Who, the Jan 6th people?

If you weren’t sure who the Deep State were, they all got pardoned today.

Not that @hubermanlab needs me to validate that he doesn’t get paid to endorse anyone, but I have been following (and…literally following, the advice of, that is) @FitFounder for a long time and his advice is accessible, concise and effective. It has helped me personally and others I send it to

It doesn't matter if you're 25 or 75, but if you are 45+ just DO IT. Makes a huge difference. Mobility matters. #themoreyouknow