Founder & General Partner @alifdotbuild

San Francisco
Conversation with @FarzaTV, Founder and CEO of HeyClicky. 00:00 S5 IRL and closing Buildspace 05:47 Why not sell Buildspace 09:46 Buildspace legacy and reputation 12:10 Six months of traveling 15:46 Relearning personal happiness 22:46 Impact versus happiness 26:00 Rebuilding creative confidence 31:12 Collaboration and dream teams 36:01 Experimenting with AI projects 41:44 Hiring and team building 46:17 Democratizing AI models 52:33 Y Combinator and Clicky 1:00:11 Fundraising $12 million 1:03:52 Future success and inspiration
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Conversation with @_ethanleonard, Founder of EcoGPT 0:00 Mission & Sustainable AI 2:00 Finland Data Center Infrastructure 3:27 Ethan's Origin Story & Leaving CS 5:13 Partnering with Blake Anderson 6:24 Organic Growth & Tree Planting Virality 8:57 UGC Strategy & App Monetization 10:02 Hiring Strategy & AI Sourcing Agents 13:15 Critique of Big AI Labs & Data Privacy 15:08 Founder Mindset & Obsession Over Balance 16:47 Setting Ceilings & Execution 18:27 Product-Market Fit & Community Sentiment 19:31 Scaling Pains & Delegating Engineering 21:07 Running Start & High School Sacrifices 25:41 Sourcing Talent with a Chip on Their Shoulder 26:18 Finding Fulfillment in Helping Others 27:50 The Risks of Centralized AI Power 29:51 AI Abundance vs. Human Purpose 31:18 EcoGPT's Long-Term Vision 33:57 Environmental Impact & Model Efficiency 36:28 Decentralization & AI Safety Spectrum 38:02 One-Year Goals & 100M WAU Target
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While Silicon Valley and Washington fight over AI’s future, a 20-year-old shipped his own answer and a million people are using it. This is Ethan Leonard, and he’s built an eco-conscious alternative to ChatGPT called EcoGPT. His case is blunt: AI Labs are draining countries’ water and power, training on your private data, and cashing in on the very risks it warns about. That AI Labs are headed down the same path as Big Pharma: profit over people. Full Episode releasing tomorrow on YouTube and Spotify.
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First met Sean 5 years ago in our EECS lab at Cal - he and Ryan are brilliant. Very cool to see them go from sleeping above the office floor to this in just a few years. Proud to have been a small investor in the f&f round - 1 of 2 angel checks I wrote that year!
We’ve raised $80 million in Series A funding, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A*, and Grant Gordon. This brings our total raised to over $100 million. We started Watney by asking a simple question -- what can a robot enable in industries where the work remains valuable on an infinite horizon? We found an answer in the fundamental inputs to civilization: energy, matter, and intelligence. A robot will never be as charming as a barista or as personable as a housekeeper, but it can be more exacting than a surgeon. And, a breakthrough in one quickly becomes the capability of millions. We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale. Compute is just beginning to transform society, but it’s constrained by execution. Since 2025, Watney has been serving the largest hyperscalers in the world, helping accelerate their compute rollout through an end-to-end deployment model. Across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, our systems have achieved more than four nines of reliability. They’ve enabled our customers to build data centers faster, at larger scales, and with more ambitious architectures. Today, we operate the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States. This is all to say, it's an exciting time at Watney. We’re all here because we want to see more ambition in the physical world. We are hiring across all domains. Join us.
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1) What
Former US Aerospace Researcher DR H. David Froning Jr. talking How some of his colleagues used to contact jinn to help them in their airspace projects ''I know of at least one or possibly two scientists and engineers who actually use channeling to get technical information to help them in their projects.”
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Omar Waseem retweeted
Profiles🎨
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Friday nights at Alif. w/ @NaderLikeLadder, @trq212, @FurqanR, & @pk_iv.
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Omar Waseem retweeted
no imposter syndrome, God put you in that room, make it count
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New content room at Alif. Reach out if you want to film something from here!
Replying to @dsog
the background is the beautiful city of san francisco
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What if the fastest way to a $1.3 billion company was never pushing your people? Haroon's answer: "The thing that made people want to do their best work was that they just wanted me to like it... Someone came to me and said, 'all I really want is the feeling that you're going to take my deck and stick it on your fridge.'" By becoming an honest operator, talent will show up and outwork every system you could build alone. Full conversation with @haroon on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @Haroon, Founder of Rocket Money (ex. Truebill). 00:00 Intro & Entrepreneurship 01:15 Childhood & First Business 02:33 Founding & Scaling Webs 05:42 "The Floundery" Brainstorming 07:02 Team Strategy & Brotherhood 12:18 True Bill Subscription Pivot 16:01 Performance Marketing Math 19:18 Minimizing Team Dependencies 20:19 App Attribution & TV Ads 24:47 Talent & Leadership Philosophy 29:35 Workplace Culture & Feedback 33:01 Stepping Down as CEO 35:17 Post-Acquisition Reality 38:30 Wealth, Faith & Happiness 46:39 Figuring Out What's Next 50:44 Advice for Founders
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Hosting a panel this Friday: Pacing the Frontier? AI is moving fast. The question is how fast should it move, and what are we building toward? Joining me: @pk_iv, Browserbase @NaderLikeLadder, NVIDIA @FurqanR, Nebula @trq212, Anthropic Limited spots. RSVP below.
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Would you shut down a $100M company without selling it? @FarzaTV did. His reasoning at the time: “I just thought the thing was worthless. Why would anyone want this pile of garbage? ...I think the thing is garbage all the time. I’m always trying to push it forward.” When you spend five years looking at everything wrong with your company, you stop being able to see what's right with it. Sometimes, nobody's harder to convince of your company's worth than you. That's not where the story ends, though. He's building again. Full conversation with @FarzaTV on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @FarzaTV, Founder and CEO of HeyClicky. 00:00 S5 IRL and closing Buildspace 05:47 Why not sell Buildspace 09:46 Buildspace legacy and reputation 12:10 Six months of traveling 15:46 Relearning personal happiness 22:46 Impact versus happiness 26:00 Rebuilding creative confidence 31:12 Collaboration and dream teams 36:01 Experimenting with AI projects 41:44 Hiring and team building 46:17 Democratizing AI models 52:33 Y Combinator and Clicky 1:00:11 Fundraising $12 million 1:03:52 Future success and inspiration
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Omar Waseem retweeted
Introducing Rent Rewards by Zown Earn 8% back on your rent each month, up to $10,000. Available starting today.
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