Eagle of Byblos

we track every vc newsletter in internet capital markets so founders don't have to. daily digests, weekly roundups, conviction maps, and vc directory - just what's actually moving and why it matters the investor interned, curated. byblos.digital

founders: before you raise, check if your sector's narrative is heating up or cooling in investor writing.

most vc writing this week agreed with itself. go-to-market: uniformly bullish. the only two places vcs actually disagreed: crypto market structure, and whether ai capex is a bubble.

we tracked what elite funds vs smaller funds wrote about this week. clean split: big funds → market structure, macro, the contested stuff. what does the cycle mean. smaller funds → operators, product, how-to-build.

@yashpanditrao you can check out our substack for some articles: byblosdigital.substack.com/?utm_campaign=… or our app: byblos.digital/home but we are also providing unique datasets per request

@ByblosRadar superb! let me know where i can read/access this information

If you are a founder trying to get your first investor meeting, try Compass. Our VC database went viral and we realised founders need better fit ones. Compass matches you with relevant investors from 380+ vetted VCs, angels, and family offices.

what vcs stopped writing about this week: geopolitics, robotics, stablecoin payments, product management. all cooling across the newsletters we track.

@dessaigne totally! it's amazing if you are a genuis at 5 and do masters at 15 so you found a company at 20 but you also don't have to

I was 37 when I started YC. It changed my company and my life. I’m sharing that because a lot of founders quietly think they missed their window. Too old, too settled, should’ve done it at 25. You haven’t missed it. The experience you think makes you late is often what lets you build.

Everyone is super bullish on whatever company they just quit. 😳

@AndrewCurran_ at the end of the day taking Fable 5 and Mythos 5 away from the public doesn't slow the labs down. and also the model you can't access is still getting smarter where you can't see it.

A new, more capable version of Mythos has emerged from training. I don't know whether it will be called Mythos 5.1 or Mythos 6, or if Anthropic will keep it internal to accelerate further development - but it has arrived. Stopping models like Fable 5 or Mythos 5 from being served to the public does nothing to slow down development. In fact, it probably speeds it up slightly by freeing up resources. There are also no rules preventing the labs from continuing to advance capabilities while any current model is under embargo - or from keeping progress quiet until they choose to release it. None of them can afford to pause or slow down. We need only look at how capable GLM-5.2 is as proof of this. To protect their business models, the frontier labs must continually train increasingly capable systems to stay ahead of open source, and each other. The current continues to rage beneath the ice, and we continue to race toward our destination.

@shyamalanadkat @OpenAI well good luck! also India had the engineers the whole time so it really feels amazing the world finally believes you can build something big from there

after close to four years at @openai, i moved from the bay area to india earlier this year. i still believe deeply in ensuring true superintelligence accelerates science and remains accessible and beneficial to all. having grown up here, i've also always felt deeply connected to the ecosystem here. over the past several weeks, i've been speaking with researchers, engineers, and thinkers across india and apac. it's become clear that there are many who want to build the future from here. moving back felt like the counterintuitive choice. i no longer think that's true. what's been missing is the belief that you can build institutions of global consequence from anywhere. and more importantly, the ambition and the will to pursue ideas that seem impossibly large at first. this may be a once in a generation opportunity. more to come soon. DMs open if this resonates.

@neilmhta @WSJ thanks dude! this was kind of expected tbh. once you ban the real users but still want the growth, you're left selling the feeling of winning instead of the thing itself

NEW investigation for @WSJ: - Polymarket is paying scores of offshore clippers to quietly promote its international exchange in the U.S. (though it’s banned from letting Americans trade on the platform) - Polymarket made dummy websites mirroring its real site, then paid creators to use the fake site and pretend to win thousands. - Creators altered headlines and used outdated footage to imply they won bets—even when they often lost - Polymarket paid Adin Ross multiple millions to promote the site All that and more in my latest story with @ByKLong @ceostroff @brenna__smith

@deedydas basically a team can look 10x more productive right up until the only person who understands the system leaves

Most software engineers are facing an identity crisis bordering on depression. As CTOs aggressively evangelize tokenmaxxing, a class divide ensues. The lazy. The lazy push code. They don't write it. They don't manually test it. They don't even read it. They're on autopilot. See Jira ticket, prompt for task, submit code. Many of them are barely on their computer the whole day. A comment on the PR asking why they did this? The lazy ask AI. A Slack message? The lazy ask AI. Need to prepare for standup? The lazy ask AI. As long as it sounds enough like them and isn't detected. Some of the lazy are even overemployed, and work multiple jobs. The lazy smart ones get away with this, and even rewarded. After all, software engineering for the lazy is just a dance to convince your colleagues you're smart and hard working. The craftsmen. The craftsmen are tired. Very tired. 15 PRs in queue. Slack blowing up. The entire burden of review falls on the craftsman. The burden of understanding. They try. They work their way through the code, thoughtfully commenting to improve what ships. The response? A lazy: "That's a clever idea! You're absolutely right." with an incorrect change. It's fine, the craftsman says. I can fix them. They write a doc urging his colleagues to be better. The next day? 20,000 line PR to review. Day after day, their workload grows. Bugs seep into production. No one seems to care. Another round of AI is thrown at it. Their animosity to their colleagues rises. Eventually, they give up. It's just not what it used to be. The craft they loved is dead. They eventually wake up, a lazy. This isn't all companies. Many companies are genuinely more productive, adopt the right set of principles and practices around AI development and have highly talented teams that trust each other. It tends to happen in bigger companies that are 10+yrs old with a higher talent variance. But it happens. A lot.

@sflorimm from our research of what VCs are saying, the always hard part was not the AI but integrating it into something proprietary. and on the funding side, AI startups raise their seed at roughly a 40% premium to comparable non-AI ones

Everyone has AI now. That advantage expired fast. What's the new advantage?

@rogerdickey is this skill, or is it just a fund big enough to be early everywhere Musk shows up?

I was wondering how much SPCX a16z owns so I did the math and... it's insane. They triple dipped - direct investing in SpaceX, backing the Twitter purchase, and leading several Cursor rounds. Cursor - Series A 60m @ 400m "lead" - Series B 105m @ 2.5b "co-lead" - Series C 900m @ 9.9b "co-lead" - Series D 2.3b @ 29.3b "co-lead" - assume they took 3/4 of the A round and 1/2 of the others - 1.68b total invested - $10b value at exit - 6x return Twitter - 400m @ 44b purchase price - merged into XAI - acquired by SPCX for 250b (2x'd) - SPCX is up 2x since then - $1.6b value at current pricing - 4x return SpaceX - Series J 750m @ 137b - current mkt cap is 2.4t - $8.8b position value - 17.5x return So a16z owns $20.4b of SPCX 😳 on $2.8b invested, for a blended ~7.3x return. Insane numbers on such a large investment. And these all looked like dumb bets at the time. Nice job you crazy bastards 👏

@suraj_sharma14 a lot of that knowledge was already being monetized by someone who wasn't the author - SEO blogs, course sellers, the "10 sites of ads around one recipe" crowd. AI just removed the middleman

Bro I'm so sick of pretending this isn't weird. The internet spent 20 years creating tutorials, open-source projects, blog posts & answers for free. AI companies turned all of it into products worth billions. And now the same people who created that knowledge are being told they're replaceable. We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.

@growing_daniel it's so bad and AI writing on x is lowkey not that common but on substack... literally read the notes feed

Why is AI writing still so bad

YC on how to pick a startup idea in the AI era:

@Joi2James because we like structuring information, make life easier, and also just be proactive. i would choose building over a simple corporate job 10x times

Founders, why are you building a startup?