We’re often asked by entrepreneurs, VCs, and others in the entrepreneurial community, “What kinds of companies do you invest in?” The short answer is – almost anything. We’ve backed startups developing solutions in industries ranging from AdTech to Zoological DNA tests. /🧵

Been fun to share crossing our $100M revenue run rate milestone on @TBPN last month - who doesn't love a celebratory gong.

Introducing WHOOP Pace Setters for the Class of 2027 This is a new careers program designed to find exceptional young people at the very beginning of their careers and give them the opportunity to make an extraordinary impact. At a time when many companies are cutting jobs and pulling back on early-career hiring, WHOOP is going in the opposite direction and now looking to actively hire graduating seniors. Conventional wisdom is that AI is going to eliminate entry level jobs and young people are now less valuable. I believe the opposite is more true: AI is a great equalizer and young graduates stand to benefit the most. I started WHOOP when I was a 22 year old senior in college. It wasn’t just the first company I started, it was my first full-time job. I know firsthand that young people have remarkable potential if they're willing to work hard and learn. Our new Pace Setters program is all about finding the next generation of exceptional talent. In July 2027, we’ll welcome our first class of Pace Setters into full-time roles across teams at WHOOP. We’re looking for exceptional graduating students who are ambitious, intellectually curious, competitive, AI ready, and willing to work incredibly hard. Come join us.

Fired up about what Aranya is building. Christian is one of the few deeply technical engineers that know how to build great distributed GPU infrastructure. Him and the team (Aryamika and Sasivarnan) are so well positioned for this moment. Keep an eye out! Bare metal to production in under 48 hours ✊

10 years ago I wouldn't shut up about how important distributed GPU infrastructure would become. 7 years ago, I joined Crusoe as their third engineer. A year ago, I co-founded @AranyaInc. Today we operate $500M+ of compute, and we've raised $11M to date to go much further. $9M seed led by @firstround, $2M pre-seed led by @asylumventures. Blog post link: aranya.tech/blog/the-missing…

The AI Bubble will create Roadkill @DaFrankel (David Frankel), Managing Partner, @fcollective (Founder Collective), interviewed by @HarryStebbings (@20VC) Summary: David Frankel has written seed checks into Uber, Coupang, PillPack, SeatGeek, Whoop, Shield AI and Suno across 18 years at Founder Collective, and he expects this AI wave to leave more wreckage behind it than any wave he has seen. The money at the top of the market is competing for a handful of trillion-dollar names while the returns math sits far below that, in companies nobody is bidding on yet. His case is for getting in early, staying patient, and holding your frameworks loosely enough that they don't cost you the deal of the decade. 1. The $2.6 Billion Median. Fewer than 100 companies created in the last 25 years are sustainably worth over $10 billion. The median of the top 500 companies from that period is $2.6 billion, and owning 5% of one of those returns a seed fund. Frankel says venture has narrowed into a pyramid because Cambridge Associates and the funds of funds are selling access, and a fund that misses the $3 trillion names gets hard to sell. The returns math works at a fraction of that scale, which is why he says you don't have to be in the one. 2. Hollywood Odds. 95% of the companies riding this wave will not be there. Frankel believes OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are the Metas and Googles of this era, and that the wreckage around them will be enormous. He has heard "this time is different" from Harry Stebbings and everyone else for 11 years, across the internet, SaaS and mobile waves that produced fewer than 100 companies over $10 billion between them. Asked whether another crash is coming, his answer is definitely, and nobody knows when. 3. Everyone Is AI Now. Saying you're not an AI company today is like saying you don't use the internet. Frankel's live example: a founder who spent 20 years in SAP consulting, built a platform, knew which part of it was still bad, started playing with Claude Code alongside his CTO, and came back raising at a $20 million cap. Founder Collective does those deals all day long. The AI label stopped carrying information, so what matters is what the founder knows that nobody else does. 4. The Insurance Policy. Founders are inviting small seed funds into $8 to $9 million rounds for $500K to $1 million as protection against being abandoned. The junior partner who championed you at the big fund leaves, starts their own fund, or moves, and your mandate goes with them. Nobody is left to argue for turning over another card, and the partnership goes back to its real winners. Frankel hates thinking of Founder Collective that way, and says the last 20 deals looked exactly like it. 5. Fewer Entrepreneurs. There are more founders than ever and fewer entrepreneurs. YC professionalized company founding into a norm for people leaving certain colleges, and Frankel thinks many of them lack the fortitude for the learning curve that follows. He watches the trajectories of CEO and CTO split: a good co-founding CTO stays useful in different roles up to 50 people, while the CEO has to learn to manage and to put bums on seats. Mikey Shulman told him 30% to 40% of his time at Suno is recruiting, and Jeff Bezos told a lunch table decades ago that it was 50% of his. 6. CEO-CTO Alchemy. Frankel wants the CTO to be a magician and the CEO to be a good salesperson. In 18 years he has seen that alchemy 4 or 5 times, and it comes from the interplay between 2 specific people rather than from either resume. He prefers co-founders who are different from each other, aligned on direction, and confident in each other's competence. He has said no more often than yes when the second founder looked weak, and he regrets some of those. 7. Ownership Cost Hundreds Of Millions. Founder Collective passed on ElevenLabs, Granola, StarCloud and Fractile purely because the ownership would have been 1% to 2%. Frankel calls it hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of lost returns, and it is the mistake he names first. He has never turned a founder down over percentage when he was all in: with Shulman he took the dilution the founder was willing to give, wrote every cent of the first round, and showed the deal to other people. His rule now is that when you meet the right people, you get what you get. 8. I Love It Because. Every Founder Collective team meeting starts with someone completing the sentence "I love it because." If you can't finish it, you can't invest. Valuation comes last in the sequence, after opportunity, market and founders, and Frankel says the price is rarely comfortable. The endings that work sound like insight into a vertical, or an edge nobody else can match in a commoditized business. 9. Vertical Nepo Babies. Frankel is writing a piece on why he loves funding nepo babies, and his definition is founders who grew up inside a vertical. TJ Parker was working in his father's pharmacy at 14, years before PillPack. Evan at Rebar worked for his uncle's HVAC company, one of 10 rolled up by private equity, was told to go find the AI for blueprint quoting, found none existed, and started the company. Over 100,000 US mechanical engineers make at least $100K a year doing that quoting by hand. 10. The Theme Before The Theme. Founder Collective's second fund reads as an applied AI fund today, and applied AI was not a theme when those checks were written. Shield AI was already called Shield AI in 2016. Drones, video cameras and the rest of that hardware are commoditized now, some of it down to $20, and the value came from putting AI around commoditized platforms. Frankel's job is to be in the next theme 5 or 10 years early, and he points out those companies are never the expensive ones. 11. The Last 5%. The SaaS apocalypse is overdone for embedded software and real for everything else. Frankel's test is what runs inside your system: billions of orders in real time, or mission-critical biotech research. Veeva and Olo are much harder to rip out than a horizontal tool a customer can rebuild in Claude over a weekend, which is why he thinks the market threw the baby out with the bathwater. The contrarian trade he does not run would be buying a basket of top SaaS stocks that have lost most of their market cap. 12. Disruption Comes From China. OpenAI and Anthropic will be disrupted, and Frankel thinks there is an excellent chance it comes from China. He is watching the strength of the Chinese open models and notes those labs have not had time to establish incumbency before being taken down. Underneath that, he expects photonic computing to come for Nvidia, because every connectivity piece in a data center that can be fiber already is, and the chip is the last piece that isn't. His broader worry is that the US has cut DARPA and university R&D, which is the money that produced all of this in the first place.

Imagine walking down a street and seeing a string of $20 bills on the sidewalk, stretching as far as you can see. You'd be tempted to start scooping them up. But perhaps no one else has touched them because they're spilling from a local gangster's suitcase, and everyone knows he takes revenge on anyone who does. Or imagine walking a beach and spotting strange foreign coins glittering in the sand. Tempting to grab, until you realize they're heavy, precious, covered in unfamiliar script. You'd need secure storage, and it'll cost you dearly just to learn what they're worth and how to convert them. Talented entrepreneurs have a knack for spotting currency on the ground that others walk past. The rarer skill is knowing which bills are worth the trouble. It's not that they aren't real money, it's that they may not be yours to pick up. Folks in complex enterprise sales understand this well. The difference between the statement of the bounty and what it takes to move the opportunity through the pipeline. Founders who've worked in healthcare know the gangster well. Crypto founders know all about the alien coins. Some beat both games anyway, but they're the exception, not the rule. Boom times breed this temptation. We saw it in the dot-com bust, group buying, the scooter wars, crypto, NFTs, and now AI too. Don't walk past real opportunities. Just be honest with yourself about whether it's actually yours to pick up. This parable was inspired by one of my mentors, André Perold.

To put this in perspective, since 2000: - 100,000+ startups have been funded. - Only ~450 have had billion-dollar exits.

“I’m convinced that technology and art go together – and always have, for centuries.” @ArtistHockney Amazing! 👇

Our co-founder @brandontseng2 was recently recognized on the cover of @Forbes as one of the people who helped pioneer defense tech starting in 2015. The best part: the Shield AI team made a special edition cover. Brandon loves it, and Google's algorithm does too. Which is better, Le Tigre or Blue Steel?

Amazing documentary about North Korea trying to infiltrate US companies by applying for (and getting!) remote jobs by @emmatscott @skesslr @bobmcmillan Our portfolio company @hiretofu prevents this via AI resume screening and deepfake detection. wsj.com/business/media/insid…

We exist to help the @DeptofWar and allied militaries deter conflict, and if necessary, fight and win it. "I've been to war. I never want to see my kids have to go to war. I thought there was a better way to help deter conflict: autonomous systems and the proliferation of drones." For @Forbes, @mhunterhart tells the story of our founder @brandontseng2, alongside other veteran entrepreneurs, in celebration of America's 250th. Full article below. Autonomy for the world. The greatest victory requires no war.

Exclusive: Clair, which offers early wage access to U.S. workers, has reached a $100M run rate in less than 2 years. I spoke to CEO @nicosimko about why he believes his fintech, which partners with Gusto and TriNet, is the "fairest" option in market. upstartsmedia.com/p/fintech-…

Gonna need a bigger wall

Thank you again @HarryStebbings and the phenomenal team @twentyminutevc Spotify 👉 open.spotify.com/episode/2G1… Youtube 📷 piped.video/watch?v=PDaGwInq… Apple Podcasts 👉 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Multi-stage investors can be powerful allies...provided you have traction right out of the gate. If you don’t, the odds of being abandoned by your investors rise dramatically. @dafrankel makes the case for dedicated seed funds, in conversation with @HarryStebbings on 20VC.

After 11 years of admiration and friendship, I relished the live studio session in London, together with the legendary @HarryStebbings @twentyminutevc!! We covered the gamut! Including why you need to really love each investment, how "the right kind" of nepo baby can make an exceptional founder and why photonic computing may be the next great computing platform ... piped.video/watch?v=PDaGwInq…