Tony Xu

Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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Many founders and tech professionals are starting to explore the O-1 visa, often assuming that building a strong O-1 profile can be done quickly. However, based on my conversations with Jason Cheung about EB-1A and O-1 profile-building, this is not the case. Even O-1 profile-building can take months or even several years. If you want to start building an O-1 profile, begin by: - Getting involved in activities relevant to the criteria you want to target. - Speaking to reporters if you are already connected to them through your network or company. - Attending conferences to speak, which can help demonstrate your expertise in your field. To be notified first-hand about all our future opportunities like these, subscribe to our calendar of events: https://lu.ma/ventureminer Additionally, if you're interested in learning more about EB-1A and O-1 profile-building, check out Jason's profile-building opportunities database, private group, and other resources through his newsletter (only $12 per month): https://lnkd.in/deqhfpRs #eb1a #o1visa #greencard #swe #tech

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Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation

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Honored to have been invited to fal and Henry Shi’s Lean AI Leaderboard Celebration Dinner, celebrating some of the leanest and fastest-growing startups in SF. Here are some of the most overwhelming trends that were discussed among high-growth companies working with small, high-output teams: 1/ Headcount is no longer used as a success metric. As Henry Ward said, “Hiring means we failed to execute and need help.” Headcount is not a flex measure anymore. People aren’t asking “How big is your team?” anymore. They’re asking “How many customers do you have?” 2/ They're finding ways to leverage AI across every function. Every engineer uses Cursor or Windsurf. Every GTM leader is in Clay. The most efficient teams are built AI-first across the board. Thank you to Henry Shi, Burkay Gur, and Gorkem Yurtseven for putting this all together!

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"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

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This a seductive idea; that organization's context fragments, decision logic gets lost, and an organization is prone to tackle collective amnesia. BUT this comes with a lot of caveats!! - MONOCULTURE: When one system becomes the authoritative interpreter of "why things are the way they are", it will collapse pluralism. An organization actually benefits from various "contested memories". An engineer and sales guy remember different things from a discussion and that helps. Employees can stop arguing with the system not because its correct but its "coherent". - OBSERVER's EFFECT: When people know that the reasoning within systems is being captured, they will change what gets recorded. The negotiations will become "safer" and will contaminate raw signals. - CENTRALIZATION: Interpretation gets centralized upwards. It may appear leadership or executives are gaining synthesis and becoming closer to the ground. But there is no comparison to living through the frictions, not even eclectic summaries. LEADERSHIP MUSCLE NEEDS TO PRACTICE LIVING THROUGH FRICTION OTHERWISE IT WILL TURN SENILE. - BIAS AMPLIFICATION: Model's inbuilt biases can combine with company's cultural quirks resulting in misinterpretations and distortions, worse they get reinforced over time. System will learn how the company thinks and then will optimize for continuity. AMNESIA IS SOMETIME A FEATURE. - SEMANTIC TRUTHS: Unlike objective truths this system will play on subjectivity and will build "causal" relationships that are based on semantics. This over time can form mythical decision norms with no external validity. The real question isn't "CAN IT BE BUILT?". Of course it can be. But "HOW IT SHOULD BE POSITIONSED". #llms #leadership #ai

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Episode 11 of the Summer Coworking Chronicles takes us to MassRobotics, Part 1.. We caught up with... -The Co-Founder of MassRobotics, Joyce Sidopoulos -Brian Hart, Co-Founder & CEO at Black-I Robotics, Inc. -Xinyu Wang, Co-Founder & CTO at Mito Robotics -Colleen Cronin Anderson from MassRobotics on this segment… Joyce Sidopoulos Sidopoulous, Co-Founder & Chief of Operations at MassRobotics shares.. MassRobotics is building the world’s largest innovation center for robotics. It's THE hub that people from all over the world come to because it’s where innovation in robotics happens Joyce loves the community! It’s filled with innovators, mentors who want to give back, and successful robotics companies & CEOs who return to collaborate. 👀 What should we be watching? 👀 Joyce is seeing startups in the warehouse & logistics space. There's also been a surge in healthtech, agriculture, and construction. Brian Hart, Co-Founder & CEO at Black-I Robotics, Inc. shares.. His team is building a robot worker that can move around a warehouse, pick up heavy boxes, and create a mixed case palette in real time. Their robot can put together a full mixed palette of 100 items and get it to a loading dock in ~18 minutes. Brian has built robotics companies in the Boston area for almost 20 years and leverages its ecosystem. At MassRobotics he’s been able to share information with companies using similar technology (but non-competitive) like vision systems, custom grippers, etc. 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 On the consumer side, look at Nutra Spin. It’s a smoothie in a can without the mess In robotics, check out Luminous Robotics, which is picking up solar voltaic rays and building solar farms with robots. Xinyu Wang, Co-Founder & CTO at Mito Robotics shares.. They're building an AI-powered intelligent robot for lab automation, focusing on cell culture. Cell culture is a manual task that's repetitive and takes up a lot of scientists times, freeing them up to focus on discovery work. Boston is the heart of both robotics and biotech, which the Mito Robotics team loves! What startups should we be watching? ReviMo is building an autonomous wheelchair. Elderly care and human support is a great use case for robotics and Aleksandr's work is worth people’s attention! Colleen Cronin Anderson at MassRobotics shares.. Colleen is responsible for building the community together and putting on events to make more connections. Their biggest event is coming up September 27th…The Robot Block Party in the Seaport. There will be tons of robots, interactive exhibits, and a robot parade! Be there!! 👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀 1.) Luminous Robotics recently was awarded a huge contract with the Australian government. 2.) Cleo Robotics just announced their new DD1 drone. Two exciting announcements (and startups) to share! The summer tour continues with MGMT Boston. Thanks to Rho and Will Panarello for supporting this series!

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🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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I’ve known David Meister for years and backed him at Sydecar, so I’ve seen his ability to build through complexity. Axiom Trust is taking on one of the most outdated parts of wealth infrastructure, trust administration, by pairing a regulated trust company with AI-native workflows. We're proud to invest again and congrats to the team on the launch!

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Last week, Derek Xiao (Menlo Ventures) and I hosted a GenAI Infra dinner featuring fireside chats with Adam Wolff (Anthropic) and Lukas Biewald (Weights & Biases) for a room full of technical leaders. The conversation was 🔥💯 and here are my key takeaways: 1.) Code isn’t just a use case of LLMs, it’s a primitive. ➡️ LLMs don’t just generate code—they think in code. 💡 Will the future belong to chatbots or to programmable, composable agents running commands / operating like scripts in your stack? 2. Evals > Vibes. ➡️ Everyone’s building with vibes. Vibes, though, don’t scale. Both Adam and Lukas stressed the importance of rigorous evals as the backbone of production-ready agents. 💡No evals = no real progress. Without them, you’ll get stuck in a loop. 3. Developer workflows are about to change. ➡️If agents write and deploy code autonomously, what happens to PRs, CI/CD pipelines, sprint planning, and other traditional dev processes? 💡 Claude Code shifts the unit of work from “developer time” -> “agent time,” and that breaks down the workflows that our industry has spent decades refining. 4. The biggest moat here is speed. ➡️ In a world of OSS models and shrinking IP moats, velocity is key. 💡 “Everything needs to accelerate. Or you’ll be left behind.” The fastest teams will win, and that’s all that matters. Thanks again to everyone who joined us! CC: Sapphire Ventures Casber Wang Jai Das Anders Ranum David Carter Tim Tully Rama Sekhar Joff Redfern

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