ben barren

One of the great startup scoops from Sebastian Mallaby's book on Deepmind (10/10 recommend) was that after leading the seed and the A, Founders Fund pulled a term sheet in 2014 and broke Demis' trust such that he took Google's acquisition offer soon after. Luke was the lead on the investment and portrayed as the super bull on the company and Peter Thiel a great sceptic. Three and a half years later, he left to form his own fund. Founders Fund owned nearly half of Deepmind at the time of the sale. Imagine if they had held for another decade and went public in 2026 for a trillion+ like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing? Now that would have been the 🐐 fund

Today we're launching Index: a platform for content owners to understand how AI agents use their work, and earn revenue when they do. Our first partners include @TheAtlantic, @FortuneMagazine, @PRNewswire, @PitchBook, @ZoomInfo, @Tracxn, @RocketReachCo, @enigma_data, @fiscal_ai, plus creators @alexeheath, @mariogabriele @azeem, @every, and @packyM.

Hiring in Sydney, Australia 🇦🇺 for my Startups Applied AI team at @OpenAI. Apply below to help shape the future of AI 🤖 Current team is full of ex-founder/CTOs, some have AI PHDs, others have been research engineers, data scientists & ML Engineers. Combined with working with frontier startups, it's a pretty incredible role. As a founder I saw first-hand the incredible Australian startup ecosystem, from world class startups & talent to incredible investors, and I’m excited to be working with the ecosystem again. (Also because it means I’ll get to take a trip over some point soon… perhaps mysteriously coinciding with British winter...)

Apollo: $100 buys you 5,000 contact lookups Serper(.dev): $100 buys you 100,000 searches identical output but 92–94% cheaper. almost every "standard" outbound tool has a 10x cheaper twin. Here’s how to build an outbound stack for $102/month that others spend $5k/mo for: LEAD LIST BUILDING → Serper ($10): this is your scaled URL builder for your large initial list. $10 covers 10K queries. → theorg (free): org charts with an API on top. surfaces reporting structure, promotions, exits. none of which LinkedIn exposes. barely anyone runs this → Phantombuster (free, then $59/mo) scraping of people who reacted and commented to your Linkedin posts to build warm lead lists for targeting SIGNALS → Google News RSS (free, unlimited, live). run your search on Google News, append /rss to the URL, you've got a streaming signal feed. better than a well known $500/mo monitoring subscription → f5bot (free): Reddit keyword alerts via email. prospects vent their actual problems on Reddit in ways they'd never admit on a sales call → visualping ($14/mo): page-change monitoring, hourly cadence. load up 200 competitor URLs and let it run OUTREACH → Origami(.chat) ($29/mo): you can do cold email sequencing through it + automated Linkedin DMs that runs while your laptop is off. Unlimited sending + accounts included. whole stack: $102/month Took me 18 months to build out this stack, I wish someone had handed it to me before.

Global outrage at Israel’s brutal mistreatment of the western Flotilla activists. Deafening silence when Israeli so-called ‘settlers’ attack Palestinians in the West Bank, killing families, seizing their homes and farms, bulldozing their olive trees. The. hypocrisy is disgusting

"I think we'll be hiring more AI people and quite less bankers in certain categories, and they'll make them more productive." Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan "So when you get up in the morning and you want to interview someone, it'll lay out what I've said in 14 different places, it'll give you questions. Your job will be the same. You'll just be much smarter in how you execute that job" --- From "Bloomberg Podcasts" YT channel

So the list of humanitarian institutions who accuse Israel of genocide now includes: 1. The UN 2. International Association of Genocide Scholars 3. B'Tselem (Israeli) 4. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (Israeli) 5. Amnesty International 6. Doctors Without Borders 7. European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights 8. Human Rights Watch 9. International Federation for Human Rights 10. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention The list of humanitarian institutions who say Israel is NOT committing genocide in Gaza includes: 1. Nobody 2. No one 3. Zero 4. Nothing 5. Nada 6. Zilch 7. Fuck all 8. A complete absence 9. Diddly squat 10. Bupkis

*** Update Today’s mediation - the second - has again failed to bring vexatious legal action against me to a close. This is not a fight I’ll shy away from as there is far too much at stake. As an Australian and as a journalist I have a responsibility to stand up for our right to criticise a govt engaged in what the UN, most major human rights organisations around the world including in Israel & most genocide scholars, have deemed is a genocide. Strong criticism of a country being investigated by the ICJ for plausible genocide, whose leaders are wanted by the ICC, is not only warranted, it is necessary. I have been cognisant of the complexity of geopolitical issues my entire life and cannot resile from the very thing that propels my enquiry - wanting to understand both what is happening and why, including the historical context. No one should presume they are entitled to hijack our deliberations and conclusions made in good faith, to the best of our ability, and after taking into account the views of all parties to a conflict and stakeholders.  I will not be told what to think, and whether you agree or not with conclusions I have reached on specific issues, I’m sure you wouldn’t stand for it either.  Our government should stand on the right side of history and impose sanctions on Israel, as we did against South Africa. Israel should not be held to a different standard.

Real estate leads are hiding in messy group posts. PropSignal monitors real estate communities, extracts listings and buyer intent, and alerts you when something matches your market.

@DrCameronMurray maybe the au property vs ai equity ratio? (or the comparative opportunity cost between asset classes)

I am on a mission to make it embarrassing to use the price-to-income ratio as a measure of the affordability of housing. Please stop using it.

Some findings from across our Varick customers that might shape how you think about AI adoption going forward: 1. Customers are getting wiser about spend. A few months ago, most were willing to spend an unlimited amount on tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic. Today they're asking us to diligence their AI spend and to match the right model to the right work. That means more work for us and meaningful savings for them. They want to know AI is actually cheaper than just adding headcount, and they want the math to back it up. 2. Customers are accepting that this isn't instant. A few months ago, customers expected to become AI-native over the course of a week and a few software adoptions. Now they're accepting the reality: becoming AI-native means rethinking the architecture of your entire company. I don't mean that in a corny sense. It literally means changing the org charts, the work, and the handoffs in every crevice of the company. 3. Customers are done with the big shops. Microsoft, IBM, McKinsey, Deloitte, and the rest are all pitching AI transformations, and our customers are fed up with paying eight figures for a slide deck. This is the whole reason we have a business: we sit at the bleeding edge of AI while having the business sense to identify the root of a problem and then build the agents to solve it. This used to be something I had to convince customers of before the first sales call. Now they're the ones telling me, "we're never working with McKinsey again." This past month we had the highest inbound volume we've ever seen. Between April 1 and May 1, 56 companies doing between $500M and $25B in revenue reached out to us. Some of these companies are direct competitors with one another. It's fascinating to watch the race for enterprise AI-nativity unfold in real time. I like to imagine that we change the course of history for our clients. AI transformations are now the consensus path to realizing AI ROI. AI SaaS doesn't get you there, and giving every employee a Claude or Cowork subscription doesn't move the needle either. The only way to get to hundreds of millions in annual ROI is to combine a team that can learn your business processes on the ground with the engineering capacity to automate every manual process worth automating. We bet on this thesis a year ago, and we're vindicated more every single day. If you're interested in transforming your company with AI, or interested in joining the company that's leading the AI transformation wave, visit our website. Cheers.

Damn，Garry Tan刚放出来的这个东西,直接把个人AI的天花板捅破了🤯 这意味着所有AI Agent一直以来都有的致命缺陷,现在终于被解决了。 Garry Tan昨天发布的GBrain,不是又一个RAG玩具，我们可以认为它是一个完整的个人知识操作系统。 给你的OpenClaw 或者Hermes 或者Claude Code装上它,就能一直记得你的人际关系,你的决策轨迹,你的长期认知演化。 大多数人以为RAG只有4层， GBrain直接把它干到了8层， 前4层是基础检索的全面升级， 真正的杀手级差异在后面4层， 相当于把个人AI从每次对话从零开始,升级成终身记忆加自我进化。 Garry自己的生产环境已经跑了17888页,4383人,723家公司。 而且现在就能用: 1. 把安装链接直接丢给你的Agent，它会自动搞定一切。 2. 命令行版按GitHub上的步骤走,30分钟搞定。 3. 永远先改Markdown再同步,这是最高优先级数据源。 #GBrain #AI代理 #个人AI

PwC just deployed Claude across 30,000 staff. Not as a chatbot. Not as a search tool. As an agent that builds technology, executes deals, and reinvents enterprise functions. 30,000 consultants just got an AI partner that does the work they used to bill $500/hour for. The consulting industry will never look the same.

👀 New "AI Is Eating The World" 79-slide deck from @benedictevans ben-evans.com/presentations

post 9 malaise, pre-podcast largesse, stefanovic got da ai agents running an angus drip drip drip #auspol spread

@heygurisingh humans may be dead

Websites are dead in 2026. SEO is dead. Blogs are dead. "Build it and they will come" is dead. But 99% of people are still doing it. Here's where attention actually moved and the playbook to follow it:

@van00sa alp trolling coalish c if they commit to opposing CGT policies dat won't appeal to educated-women-young-chinese-indian-young blokes in NSW-VIC then '28 election alp drop income tax cuts, milk one nation prefs again & win like ka ying rising. all while cali x chynna ai wins it all

Less than a week after the budget and 52% of Australians already know they’ve been screwed. Newspoll just ranked it the worst budget for the economy since 1993; worse than the 2014 austerity budget. 47% of voters say it’s pitting young against old. They campaigned on not touching negative gearing or capital gains tax. They won a landslide on that promise and then less than 12 months later they changed both. and now they’re telling you the backlash was expected, the suffering is necessary, and you’ll thank them later.

What is GBrain? My open source project is a knowledge system, not RAG in a box. It gives agents 8 layers that work together to improve memory in a way that makes your already smart OpenClaw or Hermes Agent feel clairvoyant about who you are. Personal AI becomes possible.

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI: “Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.” This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.