Investors imagine the future. Builders create it. Operators scale it. maplevc.com/talent-arbitrage

I’ve spent the last decade thinking about what makes an exceptional founder — especially the ones who are easy to misread early. Really enjoyed unpacking what I’ve learned with @amritcat. Thanks Amrit and @villageglobal for having me!

Great insights from a company that does brand well. "Brand starts at the top and has to be authentic to the founders" and "Brand is how much you put in today so that when you spend a dollar on performance marketing two years from now, you get more out of it" are both particularly useful. Because it was founder-led, it's embedded in their culture that the brand should be delightful and creative, just like they and their users are.

Proud to have backed @clay from day 1. What most people missed: it all started with the data network effect. We drew this flywheel two years ago. Today, I’d draw essentially the same one — except replace users with agents. Same flywheel. Spinning much faster. @MapleVCFund's ~$145M gain today could become $1B in the not-too-distant future. Clay’s best growth days are ahead. 🚀 Congrats @kareemamin 💪

+1

This is a great interview. Lots of takeaways, but the one that stuck with me: “Pick the customer that helps you live in the future.” I think about @clay when I hear this. From the very beginning, Kareem maniacally focused on serving the top 1% of growth companies—and they continue to do so today. To @milesgrimshaw’s point, I think Clay would be a very different company if they hadn’t.

The bull case for Clay being a $100 billion company “The bull case is that agentic GTM has just started. We thought the TAM was the same as it was. It turns out when agents can run these GTM motions, they will consume 10 to 100 times more usage than humans ever could. They can run GTM around the clock. The usage is just going to explode, and Clay is a clear breakout winner. That is the bull case for Clay being a $100BN company.” @jasonlk Love to hear your thoughts. What is your bull case @NicolaeRusan @edsim @acharoo @joshk @andrew__reed @scottbelsky @lennysan @shishirmehrotra

If you want your company to be gritty: create a gritty culture, hire gritty people, and celebrate gritty achievements.

Top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play - it ranges from 55% to 53%. It seems surprising that such a slight edge differentiates world champions from irrelevance, but the same is true in investing. From the beginning of 1928 through August 14, 2026, $SPX has returned 441x (not including dividends). The index traded up from the prior trading day only 52.4% of the time. What makes a great trader or public investor is that they get up daily to produce a slight edge for an extended period. There are about 250 trading days in a year. For the S&P 500 to eke out a 10.5% annual return, it must compound just 4 basis points per trading day. For those trying to generate more than a 20% return per annum, you want to compound 7 basis points or more every trading day. Take every decision seriously and make the best decision, but after that, we want to move on to the next important decision. Any of these decisions is only a point, but the stringing together of our best efforts on many ordinary points over a long period produces the arc of a champion.

There is now an *advantage* to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has always run on the magic of paying it forward. Everyone here has been helped by someone, at a critical moment - for no reason other than just to be helpful. There’s a special version of this pay-it-forward culture for international founders: “Borderless Founders.” * You can get early customers from large companies at home that give you big proof points early. * You can build an outsized brand at home that can get global attention earlier. * You know the strongest engineers in your home country before the rest of the market catches on. Most of the fastest growing companies have int'l founding teams. Your background is your moat. Our job is to help you widen it. If you’re a Borderless Founder, we’d love to meet you 👇

Love the non-consensus bet @davefontenot! 💪🏽👏🏼

After a decade of investing, I noticed the best founding teams all share the same pattern. I call it The Talent Arbitrage—a framework for understanding why some teams build enduring companies. Take the quiz to find your archetype: maplevc.com/talent-quiz

This is the reason that Clay has dominated their category. Kareem doesn’t waste time protecting the current moat. He obsesses over inventing the next one before anyone else catches up. Code is cheap now. Whatever edge you had last quarter is already degrading. Keep shipping faster than the market can copy. 👇Full episode in the comments

We were honored to have Aalo CEO @MattLoszak at the White House with @POTUS to celebrate our criticality milestone and commercialization roadmap. Aalo is proud to build under the leadership of the President, DOE, and NRC. American sodium-cooled, mass-manufactured reactors have a bright future enabling electrification and strengthening the grid. 🇺🇸

This is cool!

This is a very good analogy!

Not sure why I was so out of breath (it was probably all the screaming) but here is my speech from after we achieved criticality. To the second atomic age!!

The best conversations at #ICML2026 happen not just in hallways but sometimes outside the conference center. Just had a great chat with @jedgar on everything from embodied intelligence to solving the loneliness epidemic via human alignment. He’s a preseed VC looking for crazy ideas to fund so if you’re building something and don’t want the pressure of IPO definitely hit him up outside Hall A at the conference center!

AALO ATOMICS ACHIEVES CRITICALITY MILESTONE; MEETS EXECUTIVE ORDER GOAL From Founding to Fission in Less than Three Years, Aalo on Track to Become the Preeminent Nuclear Power Source for Modern AI Data Centers. AUSTIN, Texas, July 6, 2026 – Aalo Atomics, the company building fully modular nuclear plants to power modern AI data centers, demonstrated criticality for its Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor in the early morning hours of July 4, 2026 at Idaho National Labs (INL), meeting President Trump’s July 4th goal for companies in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program. Criticality, which marks the first self-sustaining chain reaction within a nuclear fission reactor, was achieved under Department of Energy (DOE) authorization. “Reaching criticality is our most significant milestone to date, as it paves the way for the deployment of the Aalo Pod to power commercial data centers once it receives authorization from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” said Matt Loszak, CEO, Aalo Atomics. “More importantly, the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor has the same full-scale core components as our commercial reactors. The Aalo-X’s 10 MWe reactor design positions it as the premier power provider for the modern data center.” “Last month I toured the Aalo facility at Idaho National Laboratory and was impressed by the company’s determination to successfully demonstrate their technology by the Fourth of July,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. “President Trump asked for three advanced reactors to be authorized and achieve criticality before the 250th anniversary of our great country. I’m pleased to share that through the dedication and hard work of Aalo, INL and DOE, we have surpassed that ask and delivered four!” Underscoring Aalo’s commitment to meeting the power needs of today’s data centers, the company has already begun work on its second nuclear reactor (located next to the Aalo-X test reactor at INL) for Project Ascension, testing acommercial-scale system that will produce electricity and power for an on-site data center in the coming months. In addition, Aalo recently announced a collaboration with Microsoft and Nvidia to lay the groundwork for an automated co-piloting system that could transform how a fleet of nuclear reactors operates safely. “Aalo has demonstrated unprecedented speed, as well as a commitment to quality and safety, in bringing its first nuclear reactor to life, but now is not the time for rest,” said Yasir Arafat, President & CTO, Aalo Atomics. “Criticality is just the beginning. In the coming months we will continue building and testing multiple reactors, including the commercial Aalo Pod design which in the next 18 months will provide a scalable and affordable power option to data centers and enterprises.” Fuel rods for the Critical Test Reactor were fabricated by GE Vernova’s nuclear fuel business, Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF), and delivered to the site in early April. Once Aalo completed its Readiness Assessment and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright signed the final approval to load fuel, Aalo was able to “flip the switch” and achieve criticality. Aalo’s celebration was intentionally reminiscent of Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction that occurred 84 years ago on December 2, 1942. CP-1 represents the birth of nuclear reactors, and today INL is the leading U.S. site for developing and testing them. Aalo will be holding a commemorative event to celebrate its criticality milestone in Idaho Falls on July 30, 2026.