Cool! Nice one james 👊

Strong agree, been thinking about this a lot lately too. Many firms will be left trying to figure out the hard work of what it really means to build/nurture a brand

Reminder that you can pay a frontier model to solve a problem, then let a far cheaper model reuse what it learned.

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff to help build the next chapter of @AICouncilConf & @ZeroPrimeVC. Most of your time will go toward running and growing AI Council. You’ll also work closely with me across both orgs to get important work done. This is for an unusually capable generalist. The scope is intentionally broad and expected to grow. The right person will earn ownership quickly and can develop toward broader operating leadership over time. Full time, in person in San Francisco (office near Jackson Square). Base salary of $150,000–$180,000, based on experience. Role and application details: zeroprime.notion.site/Chief-… If someone comes to mind, send this their way.

3 months ago, an anonymous account commented "Y'all are sleeping on the most important talk of this conference". The speaker was @CompleteSkeptic and his talk was on RLHF's deal with the devil, and the argument behind Jev. Diogo argued that training AI to produce answers people prefer comes with a trade-off. You get polished, coherent responses. You lose the unusual alternatives through mode collapse. The problem is that the unusual alternative can be the correct one. Three months later, @typesafeai's Jev, a model designed for decisions, is now generally available to everyone. If Jev has caught your attention over the weekend (the internet is on fire with it after all!), Diogo’s @AICouncilConf talk is worth watching. It lays out the argument behind what his team is building and why they chose this direction. Diogo's talk: piped.video/watch?v=o-y1HJ6b…

In January, humans still ran most of the queries on @motherduck. Last month, agents ran 29× more than people did. MotherDuck looked at their own query history (UI = human, MCP = agent) and discovered - perhaps not surprisingly - that agents are now the dominant consumers of the data platform. The average org has twice as many agents as human users. The workload shape is different too: ➔ Median gap between agent queries: 4 seconds. Humans: 60. ➔ Median agent query scans ~7,000 rows. Humans: ~200,000. ➔ Agents fire bursty, small, experimental queries then go quiet. Every assumption baked into warehouse design (latency budgets, concurrency, pricing, warm caches) was made for a user who thinks for a minute between queries. The new user thinks for four seconds and then probes with ten more small queries and loops again. It isn't just MotherDuck who is seeing agent activity skyrocket. OpenAI published a report this week showing a huge climb in internal coding agent usage over the past few months. Cursor cloud agents went from ~10% of merged PRs in December to 56% by July, and Cursor now says it’s more than 60%. Internal agents are exploding and the primary user of data infra has flipped. MotherDuck's report is a useful view into what that feels like for a data platform: motherduck.com/blog/agents-d…

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff to help run @ZeroPrimeVC & @AICouncilConf. It's a mini-COO role for an unusually capable generalist. Most of your time will go to operating and growing AI Council. The rest goes to increasing my leverage across both AI Council and Zero Prime: turning priorities into action, preparing decisions, protecting focus, and making sure important threads don't drop. The right person is a high-agency generalist - comfortable owning a P&L, fully AI-pilled in how you work, and low ego about the job. You should move comfortably between commercial work, marketing, events, finance, executive communication, and operational detail. The scope is intentionally broad and expected to grow. The right person will earn ownership quickly and can develop toward broader operating leadership over time. Evidence of ownership matters more to me than a matched resume. $150–180K base, bonus, carry eligibility. Full time, in person, San Francisco. To apply, send resume and LinkedIn profile to community@zeroprime.vc, with short answers to two questions: 1. What's the most ambiguous cross-functional problem you've personally owned through execution? 2. Why does building both an AI community business and a day-zero venture platform appeal to you? Specific examples beat a polished cover letter. If a name came to mind while reading this, please tag them. A repost also helps this find them.

.@AgnoHQ just showed you can pay a frontier model to solve a problem, then let a far cheaper model reuse what it learned and nearly match its score. ARC-AGI-3 drops an agent into a game it has never seen, without instructions or goal. The agent has to experiment its way towards understanding the game, and it's scored on how efficiently it learns. GPT-5.6 + Agno's Learning Machines scored 100 on the public set (183 levels across 25 games). As it played, it saved what it learned into a per-game manual. Then Agno handed those manuals to Gemini-3.7-Flash, which had scored 37.33 starting cold. With the manuals it scored 96.42, above the 95.4 human baseline. And because nothing was retrained and no weights changed, the whole gain came from the smaller model reading what the bigger one had learned. The learning transfer made the much cheaper, small model viable for a task you'd normally trust only to the frontier. Significant, because agents burn a lot of tokens rediscovering lessons an earlier run already paid for. Pay frontier prices for discovery once, and the repeat work runs on cheaper models. Full write-up: agno.com/articles/learning-m…

Building a company in Europe is hard mode. Which is why we spend a lot of time across the pond hunting for startups! By the time a European founder has product in front of customers, they've already cleared obstacles a Delaware C-corp founder never meets. 2 of my early European deals were co-investments alongside @YTR4N_, then at the European seed fund Speedinvest. Yang built his career in Europe, and when I asked him to join me as partner at @ZeroPrimeVC, his European roots were part of the plan. Some of the European companies we've backed: ➔ @cusp_ai (Cambridge): AI-powered materials breakthroughs ➔ @pydantic (London): the end-to-end AI engineering stack ➔ @runware (London): screaming fast inference for video & image gen ➔ DataLinks (Zurich): your data, ready for agents in minutes ➔ @sodadata (Brussels): data contracts at scale ➔ QontextAI (Berlin): a brain for the AI-native company And our conference @AICouncilConf puts European teams on stage every year, like: @duckdb (Amsterdam), @UnikraftCloud (Heidelberg), LogicStar AI (Zurich), @Doubleword_ (London), Datalinks (Zurich, from our own portfolio). Then there's companies like n8n (Berlin), @Spotify (Stockholm), Mistral (Paris), @Lovable (Stockholm), Klarna (Stockholm), and DeepMind (London, now part of Google). We'll keep making the trip.

Running a technical conference is a strange thing for a venture fund to do. Every year, we sell sponsorships, tickets and welcome a mass of attendees and AI/infra thought leaders for a week's worth of events where mistakes are very visible. The ops are pUnIsHiNg. For over a decade I've built the community behind @AICouncilConf, formerly Data Council, and it remains one of our strongest sources of deal flow for @ZeroPrimeVC. Here's the recipe: speakers turn into -> founders -> and then we back them. We invest at the earliest stage in companies like Modal, Runware, Hex, Pydantic and Higgsfield. It's time for the next stage of growth - so I'm hiring a Chief of Staff in San Francisco to help me run it all. → Own the AI Council operating plan and the numbers under it. Sponsorship and ticket sales, marketing, programming, event production, budgets, P&L. → Direct the teammates and partners who already run those functions, our event agency included. You won't be building it solo. → Take some off my plate across both businesses, which mostly means turning priorities into action and keeping threads from dropping. → Occasional special projects on the Zero Prime side, usually portfolio support or fund ops. You'll build a sponsorship forecast in the morning, then spend the afternoon figuring out whether the boat for the evening happy hour community cruise has power. It's full-time and in person in SF. You should have an MBA and want to put it to use. VC, PE, consulting, or fast-growing startup experience helps. Send me an email w/ the most ambiguous cross-functional problem you've personally owned through execution, and why running a community business and a day-zero fund at once appeals to you. Know someone you'd bet on? Send them my way. Details here: zeroprime.notion.site/Chief-…

Higgsfield, Modal, Lightning AI, MotherDuck, and 6 other @ZeroPrimeVC portcos are actively hiring for technical roles across AI/infra right now. Here's a list of the freshest technical roles from our portfolio: @higgsfield_ai | AI creative studio for video & image generation ➔ ML Engineer, Data Engine (Kazakhstan) ➔ ML Systems Performance Engineer, MFU (Kazakhstan) ➔ ML Engineer, Ads (SF Bay Area) @modal | serverless compute for AI ➔ Detection and Response Engineer (NYC) @cusp_ai | AI for materials discovery ➔ Applied AI/ML Engineer, Agents (Amsterdam) @startreedata | real-time analytics database ➔ Software Engineer, SRE (India) ➔ Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform (India, remote) @LightningAI | full-stack AI infrastructure platform ➔ Data Scientist (NYC) ➔ Senior Research Engineer, LLM Training & Post-Training (NYC / SF / Seattle / remote) ➔ Senior Software Engineer, Agents (London / NYC / SF) @sodadata | AI-native, fully automated data quality platform ➔ Senior Backend + Infrastructure Engineer, Platform (Europe, remote) ➔ Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Backend + Frontend (Europe, remote) @runware | unified AI inference API ➔ Engineering Manager (London, remote) @motherduck | data warehouse for agents powered by DuckDB ➔ Customer Engineer (NYC) ➔ Software Engineer, Database (Amsterdam / remote) @lancedb | multimodal lakehouse for AI ➔ Senior Product Security Engineer (Americas or APAC) @HightouchAI | customer data and AI platform for marketers ➔ Forward Deployed Analytics Engineer (North America, remote) Direct links to every role in the comments.

The ducks are doing deals. @motherduck acquired Tower.dev, and today Amazon announced it's acquiring Duck Labs, the team behind the @duckdb engine MotherDuck runs on. MotherDuck is a @ZeroPrimeVC portco, so I have ducks in this race. Many of the data infra pitches I read still assume the user is an engineer at a keyboard w/ a connector catalog on one side and a workflow UI on the other. That assumption is aging quickly. A model writes the pipeline on demand now, and the harder problem has become giving that code a sandboxed place to run on a schedule, with enough control and visibility for a human to review what happened. The runtime became the product. Earlier this year @jrdntgn predicted that data engineering becomes an agent supervision problem, agents writing and running the pipelines while engineers review the work. MotherDuck had gone shopping for a connector tool before changing its mind about the category. "We didn't need canned connectors; Claude can write the code to move data from one place to another." Flights, MotherDuck's feature that hosts and schedules those LLM-written pipelines, was built on Tower's runtime and shipped in a matter of weeks. There’s a good backstory here too. Jordan has known Tower founder @datancoffee since their Google days. He was disappointed when Serhii teamed up with a Snowflake colleague, Brad Heller, to start Tower, since it meant losing his shot at hiring him for MotherDuck. Looks like Jordan found a workaround. Then there’s Amazon. Under the deal, the DuckDB Foundation keeps control of the DuckDB IP and the license remains permissively open. Jordan wrote today that Amazon picking up an open source project brings "distribution, awareness, and standardization." If DuckDB becomes more deeply established as a standard engine, there’s less room to differentiate on the engine itself. The interesting product surface moves above the engine, to where workloads run and how humans supervise the agents doing the work. MotherDuck just bought into that layer. Jordan's sign-off: "MotherDuck, true to our name, is both proud of the moment and a little bit nervous about what they'll get up to next." Congrats to Jordan Tigani, @ryguyrg and the MotherDuck team, and to Serhii Sokolenko and Brad Heller. And to my friend Hannes Mühleisen, who created DuckDB with @mraasveldt, congrats on the start of DuckDB's next chapter.

Can computer-use agents use complicated graphical software? You’re watching GPT-5.6 Sol operate Autodesk Fusion for 250 turns as it attempts a real mechanical-design task. The run is part of a benchmark aimed at the question "how good are agents at CAD?" @seldon_tech's CADBench contains 105 mechanical-design tasks tested across 10 frontier models, and the results show how early reliable, autonomous CAD work remains: More than two-thirds of the tasks are still unsolved. That gap matters as agents make their way into the professional tools used to design the physical world. Getting around Autodesk Fusion is one thing, but producing a correct, editable model an engineer can pick up and use is much harder. CADBench gives us a way to see and measure that frontier. Great work from the Seldon team! Explore CADBench: seldon.global/blog/cadbench

.@higgsfield_ai's first product turned a selfie into a video. Today Higgsfield raised a $400M Series B at a $5.4B valuation, led by DST Global. Annualized revenue is $700M, up from about $20M a year ago. In January, business customers were under a quarter of revenue. Today enterprise dominates with 390 of the Fortune 500 running visual production through Higgsfield. @ZeroPrimeVC wrote a check into the $8M seed in 2024 and, looking back on my earlier conversations with @alexmashrabov, what’s remarkable is how closely the company’s trajectory has followed the plan Alex described back then: “We started with consumer use cases to be first in the market and learn what users want, because the largest risk for any startup is building something nobody needs.” Alex was already thinking about what came next: “We’re going to start partnering with enterprise teams and make the model part of their workflows.” Underneath that strategy was another advantage: Higgsfield’s speed of experimentation. The team built its own training framework so researchers could run experiments without getting slowed down by MLOps and GPU orchestration. Alex said they had achieved a speed of experimentation he had never seen at Snap or Yandex, even while managing clusters of up to 1,000 GPUs. The product evolved, but the thesis was there from the start: learn faster than anyone else, then bring that advantage to the enterprise. Congratulations to Alex, Yerzat, and the entire Higgsfield team!

.@ZeroPrimeVC is one of 101 GPs invited to the 11th Annual @raiseconference Summit alongside 330+ LPs. We're honored to be included in this year's cohort, and I'm excited to present our perspective on where AI and data infrastructure are headed. Looking forward to connecting with everyone in October. events.raiseglobal.co/event/…

Between the OpenAI sandbox escape, rogue Anthropic models, and the return of Shai-Hulud, cyber security seems stuck in an infinite loop of bad headlines. Some optimism from @feross, CEO of @SocketSecurity: "There is not an infinite number of software vulnerabilities." "Every vulnerability that is discovered does get patched, and then it can never be exploited again. That is permanent progress." "Yes, new code is written and there will be new bugs introduced, but I think there's this compounding effect where the models that write exploits can also review pull requests, flag unsafe patterns, catch bugs." "I think as they integrate into more and more development workflows, we're we're not just going to find these old bugs, we're going to write fewer new ones. And so I think it's going to converge into a much better place." "And I think for the first time defenders have this infinitely scalable army of AI agents that can do continuous security analysis." "And they can do work that would have been too expensive or too impractical for humans to do before." "So the trajectory is toward a fundamentally more secure software world than than we've ever had before." From his talk at @AICouncilConf '26: "The Agent Attack Surface: Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It" piped.video/watch?v=XnP3td72…

.@andy_pavlo, one of the research rockstars of modern databases, joined @ClickHouseDB this week. Seeing his name on the front page of Hacker News reminded me of a story: A decade ago when I was running DataEngConf in NY, Andy gave a talk called "Peloton: The Self-Driving Database Management System." It previewed a paper his CMU research group would publish a few months later, in January 2017. The pitch sounded crazy at the time. A database that could configure, tune, and optimize itself the way a human DBA would, with people only making the calls a machine can't. The system Andy sketched, a neural net forecasting what a live database will need and a planner deciding what to do about it, sounds a lot like what we now call an AI agent today. He was building one to manage a database before the transformer paper existed. One of the research questions Andy lists for ClickHouse Labs is "determining how agents can improve and automate the development of DBMSs themselves." Same question he was asking on our stage a decade ago. Congrats Andy. Lucky ClickHouse! Andy's 2016 talk: piped.video/watch?v=mzMnyYdO…

One of our portcos just put a data center in a 20-foot shipping container. Demand for AI inference is growing faster than data centers can be built and it bites harder when a fixed site takes months or years to build. @runware's new Sonic Inference Pod compresses deployment from months to days. Inside the container are more than 1,200 GPUs, liquid-cooled and powered by roughly 1 MW of infrastructure. The pods operate as part of one network, routing inference requests to available capacity. If one pod goes offline, the rest keep serving traffic. 10 pods are live across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with Wix and Higgsfield AI among the customers. The target Runware set for this year is 10,000 GPU nodes online, one container at a time. I've been backing engineer-founders in AI infra for a long time because hard physical constraints tend to look like design problems to people who've spent their careers close to the metal. This answer arrived on a flatbed. Congrats to @FlaviuRadulescu, Ioana Hreninciuc and team on the launch.

A few months back, we signed a term sheet with a London AI startup. Then one of the founders quit to join a big AI lab and the deal was dead before any money went out. "That was a big disappointment" is what I told @ychernova at the @WSJ. That's the printable version. I get it, I spent my career as a founder before I started writing checks and a much larger, very hot, tech co dangling life-changing money is hard to say no to, but this poaching of founding teams is happening at every stage. PitchBook counted 322 US AI startup acquisitions with undisclosed values last year, up from 181 the year before (undisclosed usually means "we wanted the team"). 2026 is running hotter. Venture only works if founders play the long game - this means a growing chunk of our @ZeroPrimeVC diligence is me sitting across from a founder trying to figure out if they'll still be at the wheel in year 3 when a lab comes calling. Their story ran this morning and the headline made me laugh: "VCs Are Asking Founders: Will You Quit on Me?" If you're a founder raising right now, expect a version of that question. If you're building AI infra and don't have to think before answering it, I'd love to speak with you. Worth a quick read. I'm the guy in the first paragraph who got left at the altar 🤓 wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…

When you stop to think about it - one could say that agentic AI runs on two kinds of compute: inference and execution. Inference capacity is expanding all the time through techniques like MoE, quantization, continuous batching, PagedAttention, and FlashAttention. But the biggest long-term lever frontier labs are pulling is more GPUs and the power to run them. Execution is different because the world is awash in CPUs. Hyperscalers sit on oceans of idle cores at any given moment and rent them out, spot and preemptive at steep discounts. The execution bottleneck gets solved by how cleverly we can write software and orchestrate those idle cores into hundreds of thousands of isolated, disposable computers for agent work. It's important work. A single RL rollout bursts sandboxes by the hundred thousand, and coding agents burn through them all day. Security agents detonate untrusted code inside disposable sandboxes to observe behavior without risking the host machine. Sandboxes are well on their way to cementing their role as a foundational piece of the agent stack, and this is a notable accomplishment from @modal. Proud to be backing this team! linkedin.com/posts/erikbern_…