JUST IN: Report shows OpenAI needs to raise at least $207 billion by 2030 to stay in business, but they will still be losing money if they do so.

Which accelerators should every pre-seed founder consider first these days?

Today, Ramp raised another $300M at a $32B valuation. In the past year our revenue has doubled to over $1B, growing 10x faster than the median public SaaS. We all know money talks — we're teaching it to think. Getting big no longer means getting slow.

Startup revenue by founder’s 𝕏 follower count: - 0 - 1K followers: $864 - 1K - 10K followers: $5,268 - 10K - 100K followers: $100,373 - 100K - 1M followers: $750,337

I prefer cash in the bank versus valuation on paper.

JUST MADE MY 2ND STARTUP EXIT @Blogbuster_so has officially been acquired for ~90k USD I'll still been delivering roadmap, improving product and take care of support for the next 6 months Will share the details soon! Now back to work Thanks @agazdecki @acquiredotcom

As a young founder, I learned a $50 million lesson about the sanctity of a handshake. I’m ashamed to say that I played a morally questionable role in this story. Fortunately, the experience changed my path....

It’s official — we’ve secured a $75 billion company valuation. This (still) makes us Europe’s most valuable private company and in the top 10 of the world's most valuable private companies.

A thing often in common among great startup investors, founders, and researchers: Trading making a lot of small mistakes in exchange for getting a few giant wins. (Surprisingly many people seem to prefer a few big mistakes in exchange for a lot of small wins.)

The problem with vibe-coding is that it opened the floodgates to a certain kind of person (myself included) who now pushes the idea that you can vibe-code an app in a few days and start printing life changing amounts of money. It’s turning into the same fake and lame energy of the info-guru world where the lifestyle becomes the product by setting unrealistic expectations to lazy people who want to get rich quick. In case I misled people: my belief is you can vibe-code an MVP. You can get interest, a waitlist, even early revenue. If the product is simple or you have basic engineering instincts, sometimes you really can build and scale something meaningful fast. It happens. But most of the time building real software still takes months. It needs iteration, debugging, new features, and actual users so you can test and fix. Non-engineers often misunderstand that software is a living, breathing organism. It needs maintenance, it needs oxygen (distribution and growth), and none of that is instant or finitely required. Anyone claiming you can fully automate marketing is lying. Anyone promising thousands of paying users overnight is selling an edge case. These outcomes happen, but they’re rare and treating them as the standard is how people end up disillusioned and angry. A lot of the “software fell off” narrative comes from comparing today to the 2000s/2010s, when (I believe) companies were built with decades in mind. Too many founders now (again, myself included) fantasize about quick wealth instead of lasting impact, largely due to social media and very largely due to every VC jamming the Cursor, Lovable, etc narrative down our throats (see: the fastest company to 100M ARR charts). I’m not saying you shouldn’t want to get rich, even quickly. That’s actually exactly what I want to do. I’m saying you may see more success by aiming to build something enduring because the opposite is a very unlikely-to-hit gamble where survivorship bias the only thing you see on your feed. To be completely clear (and TLDR): for selfish reasons alone, you should want to build for long-term impact. Do not let social media convince you that you can no-code a $10M ARR SaaS or raising $50M at 22 and exiting in 2 years are normal.

NEW: Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab is in early talks to raise a new round of funding at a valuation of roughly $50 billion, more than 4x valuation from a few months ago. w/ @EdLudlow

Top 10 large established funds rn Lux a16z Ribbit Thrive Insight Sequoia Greenoaks Lightspeed Benchmark Founders Fund What did I get wrong?

i logged off for a minute and all these things happened: > google is so back with a new gemini & Antigravity IDE (renamed windsurf) > Humanoid companies are going crazy, I'm on a waitlist for a teleoperated robo-wife > Cloudflare crashed 80% of the internet, users posted 1 trillion tweets and it brought X down too > Jeff Bezos is a startup founder again, with his new Prometheus > after those servers, the markets dropped down too, both the stock & crpt0 > Mega rounds: Cursor: $2.3B, Cohere: $450M, Ramp: $300M, Apptronik: $400M, d-Matrix: $275M, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines: $50B valuation > Warren Buffett declared the winner of the AI Race, and it's google > Yann LeCun is (almost) fired from Meta cuz he doesn't believe in LLMs > Jeff Bezos landed his rocket, too > Satya Nadella actually uses X and follows Pieter Levels > openAI, xAI & anthropic launched their new best models too > John Carmack thinks we're entering an era of Solo Makers leveraged by AI > Marc launched TrustMRR and killed buildInPublic fantasy mrr world > Indie hacker world has lost another soldier, after Dago, it's Alex Isora > Replit coding agent went from producing the ugliest UI to the prettiest(it's so good) > Manus launched their Chrome extension so that you could generate more ai slop on the internet > Apple is trying to sunset Tim Cook, who would be the new CEO? > EU softens the AI Act > France plans to tax citizens globally, like the US. > Most YC startups use Chinese LLMs (just like all hardware companies been doing for decades) > There is more funding into building datacenters than housing in the US > Big investors sold their NVidia stake, maybe because AMD and others are catching up > Saudi Arabia Invests $1 Trillion in the U.S > Alex Karp flexed his sword skills on an interview with Molly > GTA6 Release Delayed Yet Again > Nikita Bier plans to dox everyone's location on their public X profiles > Bill Ackman fixed low fertility rates by introducing "may I meet you" > Bonus: I'm about to "John Rush Bundle" - all my products (SEObot, Unicorn Platform, ListingBott, IndexRusher, SocialBott, TinyAdz & More).

A founder recently asked: "If you were starting or joining a startup today in AI what segments would you look at?" My reply:

This weekend, a Medium article called "I Reverse-Engineered 200 AI Startups. 146 Are Selling You Repackaged ChatGPT and Claude with New UI" made it to the front page of Hacker News. The author found that out of 200 AI startups, "73% are running third-party APIs with extra steps." The author also found that at least one company was putting a 1000x markup on model API costs. We discuss at length:

Side A: Splitting equally is the sign of a weak CEO Side B: Splitting unequally means you don't value your cofounders Which side are you on, no nuance allowed.

Most AI startups will go bankrupt within 18-24 months. After reviewing hundreds of AI startups' financials at Hustle Fund, I'm seeing a sustainability crisis that nobody's talking about. The numbers are brutal.

This was my @ycombinator application video from 2011 with @mattjackrob and @hirokitakeuchi We were all in suits because we'd just come back from a meeting with RBS to agree a banking deal that would power @gocardless for the next 10 years.

Ramp is now valued at more than 100x what it was when I wrote my first Deep Dive on the company in 2020. From $300M to $32B. My meme dealer gets stronger with each billion. Here's to the next 100x.

re: product vs distribution argument “If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.” - @peterthiel in addition, if @naval @elonmusk are also on the same page, wtf are people still arguing for?