I meet a lot of founders who are worried by the rapid rate of technological change. They shouldn't be. It may feel uncomfortable, but techno-turbulence is net good for startups. They're much more likely to adapt successfully to some big change than incumbents are.
For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.
Congrats to @encord_team on their $60M Series C! Encord is building the AI-native data layer powering physical AI, helping 300+ teams manage and align massive volumes of multimodal data as robots and autonomous systems move into real-world deployment.
NVIDIA Earnings, Howard Marks Live on Market Cycles, DJI Vacuum Hacker Joins, Baby Keem is Vibecoding https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yKAPMPNaZqxb
after seeing many many AI data rooms while also being in the middle of the hype vortex (like many of you) -- here's an observation: The AI hype/real debate summed up: bulls point to $150B in funding, frontier model breakthroughs, and amazing AI products. Bears point to retention curves and revenue gaps and "GPT wrappers." Both are right. The tech is real AND most companies building on it will fail. These things aren't contradictory -- but for sure our world is being reinvented.
Probably trickiest spot in last few years to be in cash vs assets Warsh coming in and now the future is unsolved Will he be a hawk and not cut rates? Well that’s what his track record says. But if you listen to his recent speeches he’s a complete AI bull. He says things like “yeah by end of this year everyone will have 40 agents in their pocket” As long as AI keeps pace of growth high, which it should be able to since models are starting to writing the updates themselves. So for those reasons, I think he cuts rates and runs it hot.
JUST IN: Amazon $AMZN fires 16,000 employees.
Ben Horowitz on the infrastructure behind the AI economy: "Crypto is the natural money for AI because it’s internet-native money." "AI is global. Crypto is global." "There needs to be not just a ledger of money, but probably a ledger of truth for AI to really fulfill its potential." "I think people are probably underestimating how crypto and AI work together to form the AI economy." "Networks and computers tend to grow together, and I think that AI is obviously a new kind of computer and crypto is a new kind of network." @bhorowitz on Moonshots with @PeterDiamandis
i asked my openclaw what I should be focused on rn in the zoomed out view, and here's what it said: Figuring out what VCs even do in an AI world — if AI agents can source deals, write memos, do diligence... what's the irreducible human core of investing? You're living that question with me sitting here. lol
We are rolling out more detection for automation & spam (and a lot more to come). If a human is not tapping on the screen, the account and all associated accounts will likely be suspended—even if you’re just experimenting. While we aim to support legitimate use-cases of agents, this will take some time to do properly. For now, we recommend holding off on plugging in your bots. If it’s critical, you can use the official API.
hey @sibeleth @KookCapitalLLC i’ll make a bet with you. if you have a single piece of proof for this retarded engagement farm, i’ll wire you each $100k. if you don’t, both of you delete your accounts.
here is a list of all startup accelerators you can apply to right now: - a16z Speedrun ($750k–$1M for ~7–10%) - Y Combinator ($500k for ~7%) - Pioneer ($20k for 1%) - LAUNCH ($125k for 6–7%) - The Mint ($500k for 10%) - AngelPad ($120k for 7%) - Techstars ($220k for ~5–7%) - 500 Global ($112.5k for 6%) - Entrepreneur First ($250k for ~9%) - South Park Commons ($400k for 7% + $600k guaranteed follow-on) - HFO Residency ($1M uncapped for 5% or $500k uncapped + 3%) - NEO ($600k via uncapped SAFE with $10M floor valuation) - Sequoia Arc ($1M) - PearX ($250k–$2M) - Betaworks AI Camp ($500k) - Greylock Edge (SAFE note + $500k+ in credits) - Conviction Embed ($150k uncapped MFN SAFE) - OpenAI Converge ($1M equity investment) - Startup Wise Guys (up to €65k for equity) - APX (up to €500k, typically €50k for 5%) - Founders Fellowship ($150k for 5–10%) - Seedcamp (€100k–€200k for 7–7.5%) - Antler (€100k for 10% + stipend) - Google for Startups (up to $100k)Accel Atoms (up to $500k–$1M) - AI Grant ($250k uncapped) - AI2 Incubator ($50k–$150k)Afore Capital ($100k–$500k) - Berkeley SkyDeck ($200k) - Soma Capital ($100k) - Founder Institute (equity-based program with undisclosed funding) - Boost VC (up to $500k for 15%) - Antler ($200k–$250k for 8–9%)
every VC eventually starts a substack and a podcast and every substacker and podcaster eventually becomes a VC 😂
2026 has been a generational year for us at Menlo already. — Anthropic is the fastest growing company of all time adding $4.5B run rate in 42 days after the $380B round. We put ~$1B into it starting from the Series C — Suno reaches 100M users and $300M ARR — Lovable is the 5th most adopted and 2nd fastest growing AI vendor, going 0 to $200M in a yr — OpenRouter grew 2.5x in 1.5 months. On track to 1 quadrillion token annual run rate. — Higgsfield hits $200M run rate with creative tools and a $1B+ valuation. — Wispr Flow continues to grow 40% MoM with a 70% 1 year retention and wins some massive enterprise contracts — Clerk becomes #4 fastest growing vendor in the league of Google, Atlassian and Replit — Inception launches the first and best reasoning diffusion model that is the fastest for its intelligence at 1000tokens/s — Goodfire, Anthropic's first direct investment, hits $1B+ val and discovers novel biomarkers for Alzheimer's Most VCs don't believe in this model of being picky, low volume investors. We do very few investments (up to 2/partner/yr) and we go early. 5 of these were partnerships since the Seed. It's been working for us so far (even though we've missed a lot too!) It's an privilege to work with founders who run through walls and take on so much risk to bring new things into the world. And we're very lucky to play a small part in that! Still a lot of work to do.
Trace (@trace_so) has raised $3M to build the context layer between AI agents and how companies actually operate. They help teams turn AI pilots into real workflows that actually stick. Congrats to the team on the raise! https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/26/trace-…
Trace raises $3M to solve the AI agent adoption problem in enterprise | TechCrunch
Paramount is launching a hostile takeover bid to buy Warner Bros. They are going directly to shareholders with a bid valued at $108.4 billion (Source: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramou……)
