Co-founder and GP @coalitionvc, investing in pre-seed/seed startups. Co-host of @greatchatpod. Former comms pro @Glossier, @SocialCapital, @Box.
Brooklyn, NY
- Tweets 19,854
- Following 3,248
- Followers 63,432
- Likes 61,796
Pinned Tweet
The most visible tech companies are increasingly casting themselves as the hero in their own story, and in doing so, risk becoming the villain in everyone else’s.
Apple was never the hero - the creative misfit was.
Nike was never the hero - the everyday athlete was.
Youtube was never the hero - the creator was.
Airbnb was never the hero - the host was.
Stripe was never the hero - the developer was.
Figma was never the hero - the designer was.
The best brands make someone else the protagonist.
When you cast yourself as the hero, you turn your users into NPCs. The relationship becomes transactional, or worse: predatory (we’ll replace you, just give us time).
This is why we (individual companies, and the tech industry at large) need better stories about the future. Stories that aren’t centered on ARR, record-breaking valuations, circular dealmaking. Stories that are anchored in people, potential and a vision for the future that goes beyond numbers.
Right now tech is mostly talking to tech, so we’re getting away with a lot. But that’s not sustainable. It’s time to think a few steps ahead.
64
64
593
107,140
We're baaaack with a new season of @greatchatpod!
@TaylorLorenz joins the chat to break down the players and incentives behind the various AI narratives with me and @helen_min. Is humanity doomed? Do young people actually hate AI?
3
6
22
4,331
This is the million (billion? trillion??) dollar question!
I think there are two main buckets:
1) How you tell the story. The industry has converged on a default playbook for startup launches in terms of content, channels, etc. Even the tone and visuals often feel the same across launches. I think this is largely because the priority audience for most launches these days is investors (or more broadly: super online tech people), and there's a certain vibe that resonates with this group. It makes sense that startups (and the people/agencies supporting them) would emulate what seems to be working.
2) How people respond. We’ve gotten really good at front-running engagement, unpaid and paid. Which is entirely logical - it’s really hard to break through the noise without a heroic effort. The challenge is that the better you are at this, the more coordinated the response to your launch will feel. And the effects are widespread: engagement has become decoupled from enthusiasm, and we’re all increasingly skeptical of virality. Engagement-maxxing is not necessarily excitement-maxxing. Genuine delight is still scarce.
The first is more controllable. The second is challenging. And while it's hard to parse how indicative instant, widespread engagement (views, reposts, comments, etc) is of enthusiasm, when something truly breaks through, you can just tell. An exceptional product will do this regardless of the storytelling (Instinct being a great recent example), but departing from storytelling norms for a launch (especially if you’re pre-product) is also a way to surprise, delight and win our increasingly cynical hearts and minds.
Last thought: we went through this same progression back when most startup storytelling was done through media (versus direct). We transitioned from tech bloggers and reporters discovering talented people and unique products and feeling inspired to tell those stories, to a world where pre-briefing tens of reporters for a carefully messaged, embargoed launch became the norm. I might be oversimplifying, but it's directionally true (I lived it!). So I think this is all a natural byproduct of maturity - both of the industry, and its preferred channels.
3
20
2,660
Hot/weird take: I think we’re getting a little *too good* at startup launches. Everything feels manufactured.
61
9
288
35,856
Ashley Mayer retweeted
"The plan? Create a lore so complicated and bewildering that the Western Massachusetts lesbian bar currently hemorrhaging money recoups its losses by becoming an attraction for disbelieving tourists."
74
2,915
59,676
776,712
My “list” with the benefit of hindsight is quite simple:
1) Someone who makes you laugh (especially in hard times)
2) Someone you enjoy talking to (you find how they see the world interesting - from daily experiences to world events)
3) Someone who doesn’t mind doing the things you hate doing that make your lives together work - and vice versa (being matched in this way is such a life hack)
It also helps a lot if you’re on the same page re: spending/lifestyle, and career risk tolerance.
Boring but pretty amazing in practice!
5
3
186
14,417
Love how all baby products have super conspicuous, permanent labels declaring “WARNING: THIS PRODUCT KILLS BABIES.”
5
1
24
3,196
This is a great primer on iron deficiency: why it matters, how widespread it is (especially among women), causes, symptoms, and how to address.
And for all of you wondering why your low ferritin score was never flagged by your doctor: the methodology for determining what’s normal is fundamentally, egregiously flawed.
From the essay:
Generally, a lab reference range is determined based on the central 95 percent of results from an “apparently healthy” sampled population: a description of what is common, not a clinical definition derived from who functions optimally. For most tests, that works well, but for ferritin in women it fails, because the “healthy” reference population itself has widespread deficiency. Defining “low” as the bottom 2.5 percent of an already-depleted population means deficiency can fall into the “normal” range.
(Establishing healthy/optimal benchmarks versus “normal” ones is such a no-brainer for any emerging health assessment platforms.)
From @alysoncogene: alysoncogene.substack.com/p/…
PSA: you should get your ferritin (iron stores) tested. Especially women!! And especially if you get (or want to be) pregnant.
I didn’t realize this was an issue for me, because my CBC (complete blood test: measures red and white blood cells, platelets, hemoglobin and hematocrit) results have always good, so doctors have always been happy.
Roughly two years ago, I was feeling a lot of fatigue (and just generally felt off - like my nervous system was out of whack) and went down a health rabbit hole. My ferritin was in the 20s (below 30 ng/mL, you’re considered iron deficient). Doctors were dismissive, but I started taking oral supplements and felt noticeably, shockingly better (physically and mentally) as I gradually reached the 40s.
That’s where I was when I got pregnant late last year.
I started to feel pretty tired in the back half of my second trimester. Maybe this is just what pregnancy feels like? But thanks to DrGPT, I knew that pregnancy is an incredibly iron intensive process, so I asked my OB to check my ferritin. She did a CBC instead, and said everything was fine. I insisted on having my ferritin checked. She finally agreed, and my ferritin was 33 ng/ML, and obviously trending downward.
I’ll spare you the drama, but after a lot of back and forth (and encouragement from a doctor friend that I wasn’t being unreasonable), I got a referral to a hematologist, who agreed we should try to bring my iron stores up. Not only is it important for the pregnancy, but also for breastfeeding and postpartum recovery (which in my experience, no one in healthcare focuses on beyond the six week checkup).
I started doing weekly iron infusions in my third trimester. It took a week or two to kick in, but holy shit! I had my energy back. I felt fantastic during the stretch that’s supposed to be the most draining, all the way up until delivery at 40 weeks. When we last tested, my ferritin was at 122.
In the hospital, multiple doctors and nurses marveled at my excellent CBC results post-delivery. Depleted iron stores can eventually show up in these other results, and some degree of anemia after giving birth seems to be treated as routine, especially given the blood loss.
And while there are a ton of other factors, along with a lot of luck and randomness, I’ve felt pretty great in my first 3.5 weeks postpartum.
Obviously this is just my experience, and health is incredibly personal. But I’ve seen people (majority female - we’re especially susceptible because we lose iron through menstruation) post on reddit and social media about single digit (!!!) ferritin scores and doctors who don’t seem curious or concerned. There's also early evidence linking low ferritin to fertility challenges, and suggesting that addressing iron deficiency may reduce miscarriage rates (there's also speculation that it could improve egg quality).
This has been both a radicalizing and empowering experience for me, and I’ve been spreading the word 1:1…it’s shocking how many friends are dealing with a similar issue. Now that I’m on the other side of the pregnancy, I’m going to spend more time understanding the root cause for my low ferritin (Bryan Johnson seems to be on a similar journey).
Happy to chat if helpful! Get your ferritin checked!
8
1
41
8,391
Theory: Neko Health is actually a psyop to get prominent people to post photos of themselves in bathrobes.
8
1
56
7,505
Carefully building my brand as the recently pregnant iron deficient venture capitalist.
Marc Andreessen could never.
12
2
147
4,688
Big breakthrough and launch from the @inductive_bio team!! We are proud investors at @coalitionvc.
Today @inductive_bio is launching Beacon-2, which can predict human dose directly from chemical structure.
A dirty secret of AI for drug discovery is that most systems optimize the wrong reward, making them near useless in practice. Human dose is the right reward – it’s what every drug program is already optimizing. Making it computable will unlock the real-world impact of agentic drug discovery.
Beacon-2 builds on our Beacon-1 models that beat 750+ competitors to win all three OpenADMET blind challenges. Whereas Beacon-1 provided a suite of models for individual molecular properties, Beacon-2 is a single system that predicts human dose end-to-end.
It has three configurable modules: an ADMET-PK foundation model, a potency module that can use our fine-tunable co-folding affinity model or physics-based methods like FEP, and a PK/PD model with physiologically-informed mechanistic models of pharmacokinetics.
We share validation results from Beacon-2 in a blog we are releasing today. We show that across 20 real-world drug programs running through Inductive, dose predictions from Beacon-2 agree with those from experimental data with a Spearman’s ρ of 0.61. And in a similar study on 325 publicly available compounds from the ExpansionRx OpenADMET competition, we show a Spearman ρ of 0.79.
As a proof-of-concept, we gave Beacon-2 to Indy, our medicinal chemistry agent, which used it over 5 autonomous design cycles on a recently disclosed SARS-CoV-2 program to cut predicted human dose 17x, which can be the difference between a drug program that gets killed and that makes it to clinical trials.
We compared the compounds that Indy designed using Beacon-2 against compounds from an optimization loop that used a potency-only reward function. The Beacon-2 compounds were favorable across three independent measures: they were preferred by chemists in blinded comparisons 87% of the time; were more druglike according to QED; and had a lower projected dose when computed by alternate methods relying on in vivo rat models and allometric scaling. Based on these encouraging results, we are now running prospective studies where compounds optimized by Beacon-2 will be validated in the lab.
Read the full post here: inductive.bio/news/beacon-2
At Inductive, our long-term goal is to build superhuman chemical intelligence, and by completing the reward function for autonomous drug discovery, Beacon-2 is an exciting step toward that goal.
Reach out if you’d like to get involved.
4
16
3,382
PSA: you should get your ferritin (iron stores) tested. Especially women!! And especially if you get (or want to be) pregnant.
I didn’t realize this was an issue for me, because my CBC (complete blood test: measures red and white blood cells, platelets, hemoglobin and hematocrit) results have always good, so doctors have always been happy.
Roughly two years ago, I was feeling a lot of fatigue (and just generally felt off - like my nervous system was out of whack) and went down a health rabbit hole. My ferritin was in the 20s (below 30 ng/mL, you’re considered iron deficient). Doctors were dismissive, but I started taking oral supplements and felt noticeably, shockingly better (physically and mentally) as I gradually reached the 40s.
That’s where I was when I got pregnant late last year.
I started to feel pretty tired in the back half of my second trimester. Maybe this is just what pregnancy feels like? But thanks to DrGPT, I knew that pregnancy is an incredibly iron intensive process, so I asked my OB to check my ferritin. She did a CBC instead, and said everything was fine. I insisted on having my ferritin checked. She finally agreed, and my ferritin was 33 ng/ML, and obviously trending downward.
I’ll spare you the drama, but after a lot of back and forth (and encouragement from a doctor friend that I wasn’t being unreasonable), I got a referral to a hematologist, who agreed we should try to bring my iron stores up. Not only is it important for the pregnancy, but also for breastfeeding and postpartum recovery (which in my experience, no one in healthcare focuses on beyond the six week checkup).
I started doing weekly iron infusions in my third trimester. It took a week or two to kick in, but holy shit! I had my energy back. I felt fantastic during the stretch that’s supposed to be the most draining, all the way up until delivery at 40 weeks. When we last tested, my ferritin was at 122.
In the hospital, multiple doctors and nurses marveled at my excellent CBC results post-delivery. Depleted iron stores can eventually show up in these other results, and some degree of anemia after giving birth seems to be treated as routine, especially given the blood loss.
And while there are a ton of other factors, along with a lot of luck and randomness, I’ve felt pretty great in my first 3.5 weeks postpartum.
Obviously this is just my experience, and health is incredibly personal. But I’ve seen people (majority female - we’re especially susceptible because we lose iron through menstruation) post on reddit and social media about single digit (!!!) ferritin scores and doctors who don’t seem curious or concerned. There's also early evidence linking low ferritin to fertility challenges, and suggesting that addressing iron deficiency may reduce miscarriage rates (there's also speculation that it could improve egg quality).
This has been both a radicalizing and empowering experience for me, and I’ve been spreading the word 1:1…it’s shocking how many friends are dealing with a similar issue. Now that I’m on the other side of the pregnancy, I’m going to spend more time understanding the root cause for my low ferritin (Bryan Johnson seems to be on a similar journey).
Happy to chat if helpful! Get your ferritin checked!
52
11
307
42,429
Ashley Mayer retweeted
When we started Loyal there was no FDA pathway for a any lifespan extension drug.
Today the FDA accepted our third one!
LOY-003, our daily pill for helping large dogs live longer (and healthier) lives, has earned RXE efficacy approval.
88
96
1,044
177,636
I’m so excited for Casey and Kevin (love when talented friends bet on themselves!!) and holy shit Machine Gods is an excellent pod name.
My new show with @CaseyNewton is called Machine Gods, and we’re partnering with NPR!
It’s a twice-a-week, video-first podcast about AI, and it will be available next month on YouTube and other podcast apps (and on radio soon!)
It’s a really critical time for public engagement with AI, and we’re thrilled to bring our AI coverage (and jokes!) to NPR’s massive audience, while building an independent media company in San Francisco. We’re also thrilled that @RachelCohnnn, our incredible Hard Fork producer, is coming with us to make the new show.
More to say soon!
npr.org/2026/09/16/g-s1-1434…
4
21
2,763
This is why I always assume Sam Altman is personally reading and answering every question I ask ChatGPT (he’s been great on baby stuff btw).
New from 404 Media: humans are reading ChatGPT conversations
OpenAI has hired an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users' chats. I've seen internal docs, the review system, and real user prompts. Can contain very personal/sensitive information 404media.co/inside-project-l…
5
1
34
8,965
Wow! A truly legendary run through many eras of Microsoft and tech. I was pretty nervous the first time I met @fxshaw, since in the early Box days we loved taking shots at Microsoft (our Goliath). But he was gracious and good-humored. Watching him over the years, I don’t think there’s any comms leader who handles conflict better, who sees the bigger picture even in the most dramatic of moments.
Congrats, Frank! Excited to see what comes next, whether it’s doubling down on sourdough or back into the trenches. There are a lot of companies that need you right now.
Microsoft's comms chief @fxshaw is leaving the company after almost 20 years. Shaw has been at the heart of Microsoft’s comms since 1997, helping the company navigate CEO transitions, the all-important bet on cloud, and huge acquisitions. Details here 👇theverge.com/news/993791/mic…
3
2
43
5,166
I'm not an AI doomer, but it's still wild to be reading predictions about the end of humanity while holding a three-week-old baby!
54
5
280
31,135
"There’s a new generation of tech wealth held by people who came up hearing that tech hollowed out the city, and who actively want to be part of the answer rather than the problem. My hot take: They’re more design-savvy and cultured than my nerd generation of tech folks."
sfstandard.com/2026/09/08/li…
2
3
20
3,474
Ashley Mayer retweeted
If you genuinely believe the technology you are building has a greater than 10% chance of going catastrophically out of control, but not enough risk to stop building it (which is strange because that is a huge percentage), then you owe the public mature, disciplined communication. Make the case for the societal benefits, be clear about the risks, and advocate for safety, cooperation and serious governance.
What you do not get to do is alternate between building the technology for profit and issuing ad hoc apocalyptic warnings about it. Those outbursts create the impression that you sincerely believe the danger is real, your leadership does not share your concern but you have decided to keep participating anyway.
7
6
82
5,355