Z Fellows / The Cannon Project | interviewing people I’m curious about...
- Tweets 7,999
- Following 279
- Followers 18,202
- Likes 16,482
Pinned Tweet
Someone stopped me on the street earlier to say how much they liked this episode.
I didn’t catch your name, but thank you & glad you enjoyed !
Here's my conversation with @JTLonsdale
We explore:
- immigrant roots, philosophy, and warfare
- chess & investing billions with Peter Thiel
- founding stories behind Palantir and 8VC
Plus, US & Japanese bond markets, what drives him, the University of Austin, and much more.
YouTube link below and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:24 Poor Irish Immigrants and Holocaust Survivors
6:44 A 20-Year Chess Dynasty
9:37 Why Great Men Quit Chess
13:15 Stanford Nerds, Protests & Palantir Recruiting
14:25 Rejected from PayPal and Arguing with Max Levchin
23:23 Investing Billions With Peter Thiel
30:25 A Year of Loss and Failure
33:54 The Painful Beginnings of Palantir
39:15 The Palantir CIA Conspiracy Theory
41:18 Losing a $300M Military Contest
46:44 Raising the Largest VC Fund Since 2000
55:57 Most People are Cowards
8
1
68
47,875
Sonith retweeted
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
122
82
837
204,984
Sonith retweeted
Every single result on this search is a @wander powered unit, either the direct booking site, or the marketplace.
The AI moment for travel is here, and we are powering it.
4
9
48
5,807
Sonith retweeted
We (@PantheonInc) have been working on a robotics data quality pipeline that uncovered a series of major problems in public robotics datasets, especially for world modeling.
To improve the quality of data available to open-source robotics, we're publishing annotations for four of the most popular datasets. Some examples of issues, and our report 🧵
136
109
619
159,454
Sonith retweeted
We started @column with the insane idea to rebuild every component of the financial system from scratch. Today, I think we've finally completed that build.
We're releasing four new products, so any technology company can build at the frontier of financial services.
82
103
1,501
627,572
Sonith retweeted
"everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you" - Steve Jobs
new z fellows cohort starting soon. interviewing now for it.
zfellows.com
78
66
902
539,640
Sonith retweeted
One of the most important things to know about this AI cycle is that no one knows what they're talking and even very smart and plugged in people are continually reversing their opinions and then re-reversing them three months later.
233
268
3,199
612,393
Sonith retweeted
I knew when I first met @adamguild that he and @deanbloembergen and the Owner team were building something special
🚀🚀
Owner has raised $240M, reached a $2.3B valuation, and crossed $100M ARR.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman.
The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite:
3
2
35
4,827
Sonith retweeted
Owner has raised $240M, reached a $2.3B valuation, and crossed $100M ARR.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman.
The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite:
222
141
2,293
1,211,078
JM is the best !
This past spring I built a personal trading platform to solve a problem I kept running into when investing: I wanted to invest with thematic conviction (more than I could get from an ETF), but be able to do so passively.
I’ve long gotten excited about ways to democratize access to information, particularly in public markets, where valuable insights often require expensive tools or significant time to uncover.
With many institutional holdings publicly available through 13F filings and fractional shares making it possible to replicate portfolios at virtually any investment size, I built a tool for myself that lets me follow investors I admire, understand how they allocate capital, generate personally-targeted insights on each stock and portfolio make-up, and use those insights to inform my own investment decisions.
While I recognize there is inherent risk in copy-trading, curious to understand better how people view this dynamic (both pros and cons) as it grows in popularity.
3
1,623
David & co are killing it :)
Some of the earliest money in Cursor (the largest vc-backed acquisition ever) turned a $750,000 investment into a ~$1 billion return. @davidtisch and his midas touch at Box Group strike again! Great profile here of one of the best early stage investors who wins while going against the grain @agarfinks fortune.com/2026/08/26/david…
10
4,102