GP @a16z @speedrun 🌱 | former PM @RiotGames @TencentGlobal | dark souls fan & dad to 3 zerglings
San Francisco, CA
- Tweets 7,465
- Following 2,815
- Followers 44,480
- Likes 17,144
a few tips for @speedrun applicants:
1) brag about your team. what's the most impressive thing you've done? we look for a history of excellence - professional, academic, personal achievements, side hustles, weekend projects etc
2) founder market fit. what's your earned insight into your problem space? what gives you an unfair advantage? why will your team win vs the competition / frontier labs?
3) product validation. what have you already built? there are so many ways to quickly prototype these days. what tests have you run to validate that people want what you've built - revenue, users, waitlists etc?
4) network your way to a warm referral. this bumps you for priority review. we have >600 Speedrun founders and many more in the broader a16z network. the networking you do here reflects the work you do every day as a founder - recruiting, sales, fundraising, etc
you may have noticed >50% of these tips are about the team. the most common mistake we see in apps / interviews is that founders spend most of their time talking about the product idea and not enough time on the team. whereas we base our investment process primarily on the team
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Excited to discuss the future of creativity & interactive media with an amazing cast of storytellers at SF Tech Week!
Featuring Riot Games CEO Dylan, Gamma CEO @thisisgrantlee, IDEO CEO @mikepeng, and creative legends @agnezmo & @HayleyKiyoko
Register 👇 or DM if on waitlist
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Registration here!
partiful.com/e/2i2ezrcDZaa8E…
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a trend we’re seeing right now: more companies want to own and control their models, rather than rent their intelligence from the big labs
Speedrun team Zorbe has gone from 0 to $1.6M cARR in just 6 weeks - building custom distilled models that give companies frontier-like performance while letting them own the models themselves
founders @yash_iyer21 @SadaniPranay are cooking 🔥
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so excited for Fearn - an AI-native patent firm that helps startups & big companies alike discover and file patents in days not months
clients pay for speed & outcomes, not hours. this is the way
Today, we're killing the billable hour for patent work.
Fearn Legal (@fearnlegal ) is a modern patent firm built from the ground up on our own operating system, FearnOS.
What that means:
→ Flat fees, not hourly billing
→ Drafts in days, not months
→ Experienced patent attorneys reviewing every application
→ One platform for your entire portfolio, with permissions you control
If you're building something worth protecting, we'd love to help.
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The next generation of AI-native leaders will be taught differently
AI makes it possible to build anything - learning what to build, who to build with, and why starts in school
So pumped for Horowitz Andreessen Academy! 🙌
Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates.
We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past.
The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley.
The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website.
We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board.
Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university.
We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco:
theacademysf.com/
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Jon Lai retweeted
Introducing Codos: The first virtual Chief AI Officer.
AI is crushing all benchmarks but real companies still struggle to see P&L impact.
Codos interviews employees, deploys automations across all functions and gets smarter over time while running on your own servers.
Our NASDAQ-listed and PE-backed customers are adding millions to their bottom line months ahead of schedule and we are proud of the first results we deliver.
It’s time to turn the 500BN AI-transformation market into software and unlock the impact for the real economy.
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“50% of all knowledge work will be solved in the next 2 years” - @AnthropicAI on the 2027 roadmap
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import any web app, remix with your own ideas, and launch to code. never start from scratch 🦾
Introducing the new pen.dev, an agentic canvas for building bold ideas.
Never start from scratch. Import any website or webapp to the canvas, iterate, and push back to code.
Update or download today.
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Jon Lai retweeted
Today we’re launching Keythorn.
AI isn’t just thinking anymore. It’s moving money, talking to customers, and taking action. Every new agent brings new risk.
The future runs on AI. We’re building the insurance for it.
Meet @TryKeythorn ↓
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the truth for RTS lovers is that we are a dying breed. kids today really only play 1st and 3rd person games, and shooters are the largest genre by far. blizzard is just making what people want
RTS is an elegant genre for a more civilized age
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Jon Lai retweeted
Day 45 of 70 to hit $1m by a16z @speedrun demo day.
We've grown $0->860k in 8 wks...
With 1m in our sights, the bottleneck is shifting.
Proof of demand was the most important early signal for our business.
It helped sharpem our thesis, market, and ICP
Growing fast forced us out of our comfort zone and helped us maximized learnings
We now have a playbook that works. We know how to acquire at a very fast clip.
Now we're focused on scale.
So that our 100th customer has the same experience as our 10th.
Sometimes the key to growth is growth itself.
Time to scale.
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we told our 8 year old he couldn't play Ghost of Tsushima. too violent
over the weekend he used codex + astra to rebuild the game as a Minecraft mod - Japanese castle, samurai armor, assassination mechanic etc
both impressed & dismayed, we let him continue and he's now adding boss battles. GPT deconstructed the bosses for him off the game wiki
what an amazing time to be a kid - "no" is just an engineering problem
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"There is a finite number of good ideas."
One of them is sharing our 25 minute talk with @thejessezhang, CEO & Co-founder of @DecagonAI. Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 - First Startup & Lessons From Loki
1:51 - How Do You Find Product-Market Fit?
2:54 - How Do You Find the Right Problem to Solve?
5:10 - Choosing the Right Co-Founder
5:57 - Competing in a Crowded Market
7:27 - Why Zheng Chose Against Forward Deployed Services
9:16 - When Should You Say No to a Deal?
10:07 - How To Close Your First 10 Customers
11:27 - Should Startups Target SMEs or Enterprise?
12:18 - How Should Startups Price Their First Customers?
14:37 - Building a Defensible AI Company
18:32 - How Should a Startup CEO Spend Their Time?
20:02 - What Should You Look for When Hiring?
22:17 - What Do You Look for as an Angel Investor?
22:49 - What Would You Build Today if Not for Decagon?
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PMs need new tools to figure out what to build first for users in a world where shipping is no longer the bottleneck
Today, we’re introducing Tenera: behavioral simulations for product teams.
Teams are shipping faster than ever, but product decision making hasn’t caught up.
For every big bet, product leaders face the same binary choice: ship on instinct, or wait weeks for validation.
Tenera predicts how users will react to software before it ships.
We train a dedicated model per persona, grounded in customer evidence and behavioral data, so predictions reflect how your specific users behave, not a generic average.
It helps teams prioritize, pressure test, and validate high-stakes product decisions - faster and at scale.
The winners won’t be the teams that build the most. They’ll be the teams that know what to build first.
Book a demo ↓
trytenera.ai
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Today we're announcing @metalraise $4.5M Seed Round, led by @a16z @speedrun / @ycombinator.
With participation from @pioneer_fund, Rebel Fund, @gaingelsvc, @indusvalleycap, @teamignitevc, @PhazeVentures and others.
In less than a year of launch, and with six consecutive quarters of 30-80% q/q growth, Metal is tracking for multi-million annual revenue run rate by the end of FY2026.
The core missing infrastructure in private markets has been an investor memory layer, an effort that we've been working on for three years. Today, for the first time, we are publishing our thesis on how private markets will evolve in the years ahead. See press release in comments below!
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a 20yo stanford student turned SF into a playable open-world GTA using apple maps + codex. i've been playing @cdngdev's "San Francisco: the game" this weekend and am genuinely impressed
climb buildings, steal cars, hang-glide across the SF skyline. players have logged 16k miles and 880+ hours within 24 hours of launch
but what's most impressive is the shipping velocity: Thijs is pushing player-requested features (teleport-to-address, multiplayer, avatar picker) in near real time, straight off replies to his tweets - running it like a full live-service studio of one
a cool glimpse into the future of AI-native game dev. 1 person iterating at the speed of a whole studio
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worth a play below if you're in SF - thank you @cdngdev for building this!
sf.thijs.gg/
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Jon Lai retweeted
Excited to announce that @OneWillAI is backed by a16z @speedrun, @EssenceVenture, Tall VC, and amazing angels!
After a decade of working on machine learning for databases, @lmwnshn and I graduated with our PhDs this year from @andy_pavlo's @CMUDB. We got sufficiently annoyed with how AI agents worked that we decided to start a company to fix that.
OneWill’s core mission is to revive 50 years of database ideas for the AI era. This investment also allows us to give back a little to our roots in databases and open-source education. Stay tuned! We’re also open to more ideas, just join our Discord server (link below) or catch us at VLDB 2026 this week (Wed to Fri).
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