Scale Venture Partners

Happy Thursday. On today's show: - @mcuban (Cost Plus Drugs) - @carl_eschenbach (Sequoia) - @gradypb (Sequoia) - @jamesncantrell (Phantom Space) - @thulme (GV) - @0xjohnkim (Paraform) - @EugenAlpeza (Edra AI) - @adversariel (RunSybil) - @alexrkonrad (Upstarts) See you there 🦈

We’re excited to lead @paraformtalent's $40M Series B as they scale to solve one of the hardest problems for companies: recruiting. Proud to back @0xjohnkim & @lijeffrey39 youtube.com/watch?v=eXj3dt…

The land grab is on. Everyone is focused on building more data centers. But Aurelia Han and @siddharthvader_ make the case that the more interesting opportunity is getting more compute out of the ones we already have: scalevp.com/blog/the-big-d…

851 roles open across 64 companies. If you’ve been waiting for a sign to make a move, this is it 👇 @usebland | #content" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">jobs.scalevp.com/companies/blan… Technical Account Manager @tavus | #content" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">jobs.scalevp.com/companies/tavu… Product Manager …and many more: jobs.scalevp.com/companies

Construction is ~5% of the economy, yet software captures maybe ~10 bps of that. That’s about to change with vision-language models (VLMs). @jonasciplickas explains how in his latest blog post: scalevp.com/blog/vlms-are-…

AI can now generate infinite content. What's left that matters? Your human moat. Scale CMO @BeccaHasADHD joined VC Comms Con this week to talk about why your lived experiences and point of view are what make a personal brand compound in VC over time.

Scale Partner @ericmander joined Trevor Neff (Headline), @EthanChoi7 (@khoslaventures) & Ashton Grewal (Dorsal) at Utah Tech Week to talk growth investing in the age of AI. Thanks to the team at Utah Tech Week for hosting!

@BusinessInsider asked 13 rising-star VCs how they use AI. Here's what Scale Partner @MaxwellAbram shared about the ways he uses ChatGPT to learn new markets. Read more from Max & the other VCs: businessinsider.com/how-venture-ca…

Every week, @HarryStebbings says that we’ve had the biggest news week on the pod. This week, it might actually be true. Elon merged SpaceX and xAI in a $1.25 trillion deal, the SaaSacre blows up the best business model of the past decade, Nvidia still loves OpenAI but just not at the $100B level, and Moltbook lets the bots come alive.

Everyone’s talking about Claude Code. Scale Partner @maggie_basta shared her investor perspective with @haydenfield on what this moment means for AI. Read the full piece in @verge: theverge.com/report/874308/…

Compute is growing, but high-quality training data is the bottleneck. For the next phase of AI, we need a more “renewable” resource. Reinforcement learning and agent-style post-training can generate their own data, argues Scale partner @ericmander: scalevp.com/insights/how-r…

Congrats to Scale Partner @MaxwellAbram for being named to @BusinessInsider's 2026 Rising Stars of Venture Capital list! The list highlights investors in VC showing up in new ways for their firms and portcos they partner with. Read about all the winners: businessinsider.com/venture-capita…

For the past decade, the legal market has lagged in tech adoption. Now it's one of the first verticals to see significant AI breakthroughs. What's happening here? Scale Partner Alexander Niehenke wrote about the industries poised to explode with AI: scalevp.com/insights/which…

20 episodes in with Office Drop Ins. Lots of conversations and laughs with some great startup teams. Tons of fun to be making these, thanks to everyone feature for the opportunity.

No one changes the world alone. That belief sits at the center of @humansand, and it’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in this human-centric frontier AI lab. scalevp.com/insights/annou…

The latest from the Scale team: @siddharthvader_ and @MaxwellAbram explore the future of ads and what the new ad stack looks like. Read more below! scalevp.com/insights/the-a…

“2026 will be the breakout year for visual agents” - Jeremy Kaufmann in @WSJ. More predictions on what's ahead for the new year here: wsj.com/articles/ventu…

Which AI verticals will have the next unicorn? 🦄 Partner Alexander Niehenke has invested in AI verticals for a decade. Here’s his framework for predicting which industries adopt AI fastest, and where the next vertical winners may come from: scalevp.com/insights/which…

Today we’re excited to lead the $20M Series A for Prime Security, the company behind the first Agentic Security Architect - autonomous AI that performs design-stage security reviews and scales security with engineering! Read more here: axios.com/pro/enterprise…

We've been hearing about tariffs for a while now, but the numbers are hard to ignore: $215B in tariff and excise tax revenue in FY2025, more than double the prior two years! The first mile is where AI can deliver massive ROI. Read more here: scalevp.com/insights/tarif…