people @a16z, building @speedrun | ex-@riotgames, @birdride, @ohiostate always
sea / sf
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30 of the 70 companies in our last @speedrun batch had founders born outside the US
and if we keep doing our job – and we will – that number is only going up:
* founders building products + teams internationally
* builders stuck in an H-1B job ready to accelerate their slope
* students here on F-1 who are ready to take a shot at their startup idea
Speedrun Global Founders is our answer >> our end-to-end approach to guiding founders through visas, customs, housing, banking, and building local SF community, while enabling founders from all over the globe to participate in Speedrun
we also have the coolest hat in venture - maybe thats a lame flex, but i honestly challenge you to show me better vc drip
you might catch a few of our founders wearing them today. come through Global Founders and I’ll bring you one 🫡
-apply below my friends-
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
Years ago, Gagan (@gaganbiyani) tried to hire me as an intern. It was a full-circle moment to interview him about Horowitz Andreessen Academy (@theacademysf).
Some backstory: I studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Waterloo is famous for its co-op program - you can't get a Bachelor's until you complete 5 internships.
Two co-ops in, I knew ChemEng wasn't my path. So I taught myself to code and set my sights on working in Silicon Valley.
A surprising number of companies were willing to interview someone with no CS degree. One of them was Sprig, with Gagan as its founder.
Once I got an offer, he got on the phone with me multiple times. He was trying to convince me to join, but what he actually did was convince me I belonged in tech.
I ended up picking a more established company (might have been my loss). But I never forgot how confident and capable he made me feel.
That's what @theacademysf is about: learning by building, and betting on capable students before they have the credentials.
Gagan spent his entire career challenging the education system. I’m so excited for him to make this bet a reality!
Interview dropping soon!
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Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg with Nas, Steve Stoute, and Grandmaster Caz on the Paid in Full Foundation
Caz penned rhymes that became Rapper's Delight. Even with his name in them, he got nothing.
The Paid in Full foundation honors the people who created hip-hop by making sure they're "paid in full," financially, spiritually, and culturally.
As Nas points out, money alone reads as a handout. So the grant comes attached to the honor. Each year at the foundation's Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards, pioneers are celebrated by the artists they inspired.
Caz ultimately received a five-year grant, bought a house, and left the projects. In his words: "The thing is the honor. The thing is putting you in the light that you deserve to be in."
Ben says he bought Paid in Full (the album) for $10 and got at least $5 million worth of value out of the record, with no way to pay it back.
The vision is paying the debt. Felicia Horowitz runs the foundation. She and Ben are matching donations 2.5 to 1, and every dollar goes to the artists.
paidinfullfoundation.org
0:00 Intro
1:40 The $10 album that was worth $5M to Ben
3:10 Nas: in hip-hop, you can't just give money
5:05 Why artists thought it was a scam
9:30 Caz wrote Rapper's Delight and got nothing
11:40 Roxanne Shanté: "I wanted the right award"
16:35 Dr. Dre asks to meet Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick
18:50 Why the industry never did this
26:05 Ben: start with what's right, not what's possible
29:10 Inside the room: Grand Puba, George Clinton
32:15 The Quincy Jones Award
37:00 Scarface and Rakim talk writing for the first time
38:45 Caz: the grant got me out of the projects
43:45 What hip-hop did for Adidas, Hilfiger and Sprite
48:00 How Felicia saved Scarface's life
52:10 Quincy Jones stories, and Nas's jazz legend dad
@Nas @SteveStoute @GrandmasterCaz @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
Today, we're announcing @thatch_ai raised a $108M Series C at a $1B valuation from @thegp, @IndexVentures, @generalcatalyst, @a16z.
The idea we're betting on: healthcare serves whoever controls the dollar. For 80 years that's been the employer. We think it should be you.
Employers typically choose one health plan for everyone. We think there's a better model: give people a health budget and let them choose the insurance and care that fits their life. That is the idea behind Thatch.
ARR has grown nearly 7x in the last twelve months, and more than 5,000 employers now use Thatch. None of this happens without our team, or without the employers who believe that their people know what their families need better than they ever could.
We're building a healthcare system people love by changing how we fund it.
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
Today we’re launching Keythorn.
AI isn’t just thinking anymore. It’s moving money, talking to customers, and taking action. Every new agent brings new risk.
The future runs on AI. We’re building the insurance for it.
Meet @TryKeythorn ↓
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when you don’t have a lot of confidence in yourself, you blame other people
when you gain confidence in yourself, you start pointing the finger at yourself
Tom Brady says his career turned around when a sports psychologist told him to stop complaining about what he wasn’t getting and start stewarding what he had the right way
“Greg said to me, ‘Why don’t you quit bitching about all the things you’re not getting, and how about you do the best with whatever opportunities you get?’, ‘Stop worrying about what the other quarterback’s getting. Stop worrying about what the coach is saying to you.’”
“‘Every time you get in there, you bring the juice. You bring the energy. You bring the enthusiasm. You treat practice like a game.’ Because if you just decide to go out there and you’re blaming everybody else, where does that get you? So I started to change my attitude.”
“I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself. And when you don’t have a lot of confidence in yourself, you blame other people. When you gain confidence in yourself, you start pointing the finger at yourself.”
“I would encourage every athlete to look in the mirror after every day of practice or a game and say, ‘What can I do better to help the team? What can I do better?’”
“Not, ‘What does the coach need to do better?’ Not, ‘What do my teammates need to do better?’, ‘What do I need to do better?’ If every player does that, you’re going to have an incredible team.”
“You can’t have a false confidence. You don’t only gain your confidence because of your physical ability. You gain your confidence because you’re prepared, because you’re competitive. I couldn’t just show up and be better than everybody.”
“I had to show up prepared. I had to show up with energy. I had to show up with my body feeling right. I had to show up like I was on a mission.”
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"My biggest worry about AI is that it lets us go faster, and therefore just cram everything in. We talk about “AI slop” in content; this is what AI slop means for product. I’ve seen it happen in a few places already, and I think we’re all a bit worried about it. When anyone can build anything, deciding what to build is the whole job. And that’s a story problem. What story do you want to tell? What story do you want your customers to understand? What story do you want living in their heads?"
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
hey all- for folks who are in town (SF) Oct 5-11, we're hosting a ton of events, including at our new offices in Jackson Square.
details below.
--
the SF/LA Tech Week calendar is LIVE
2,300+ events across the two weeks. more than a 50% increase from last year.
some other cool stats:
- 1,580 events in SF, 762 in LA
- 14 tracks - fundraising, deep tech, AI agents, infra, devtools, hackathons, media, fintech and more
- 883 events on fundraising & investing. more than all of LA Tech Week in 2024.
- 80+ a16z and portcos hosting: deel, stripe, elevenlabs, pinecone, databricks, carta, fal, exa
- spacex, erebor, anthropic, google, aws, ibm, fenwick, hsbc, fireworks, vercel, pwc, fin, adobe, atlassian, cloudflare, hyperagent all showing up
congrats @roseajohnson @TracyMassaro_ @KatiaAmeri @filgran_ @johnsonjanellea and the whole Tech Week team for the awesome launch
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im hosting my third startup culture brunch during LA #techweek_ this October, with a new twist:
this time, STARTUP OPERATORS are the target audience >> specifically, those who are interested in advising a16z @speedrun founders in their domain of expertise
this'll be a private, chatham house-style discussion of the unglamorous realities of building startup teams, with some very accomplished LA founders I'll announce soon 😊
all current and aspiring startup advisors (and angel investors) invited to RSVP: partiful.com/e/DRRSAxuu7tPWp…
BREAKING NEWS: SF and LA Tech Week calendars are LIVE!
You can now register for events: tech-week.com/calendar
2,300+ event submissions across San Francisco and Los Angeles
📍SF: October 5-11
📍LA: October 12-18
People always ask about the data, so a few stats:
-SF once again takes the crown for “biggest tech week ever” with 1,500+ events
-1 in 7 SF events is about agentic AI: 213 events in SF and 53 in LA are explicitly about agents (in the title or description). In 2024 there were only about a dozen!
-There are 124 hackathons across the two weeks, and the variety is huge: everything from hardware to defense, media/creative, fintech, civic/social good, etc. Everyone is a builder now.
- LA, the OG Tech Week (now in its fifth year!), has seriously doubled down on deep tech with 100+ events and lots of El Segundo activity.
Last year, Tech Week saw attendees from over 100 countries. It’s going to be a party.
See you there! 🥳
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
honestly, i keep thinking about this result and it's just absurd.
in the 2022 PISA, el salvador scored 343 in math, 365 in reading, and 373 in science
near the bottom of PISA, close to guatemala and dominican republic
now the country has developed a program for education modernization in a pilot group of public schools with 1:1 AI tutoring and personalized learning
after the pilot had been running for BARELY OVER A YEAR, students got results comparable to germany and sweden.
that's more than an entire standard deviation
that is fucking insane
we should be talking about absolutely nothing else
if you actually care about poor children and equality of opportunity, the possibility of giving every child on earth an individualized tutor for a fraction of the cost of human 1:1 tutoring should be one of the most exciting developments in human history.
"it's all in the environment tards" should be drooling at the news
every government on earth should be running massive randomized trials of this right now, and if the effect survives, scaling it as fast as physically and humanly possible for every child on earth
the funniest part is that while the supposed "fascists" are celebrating poor kids learning, the people supposedly obsessed with inequality are barely talking about it, and if anything are banning AI in schools
revealed priorities are funny like that
“Results in reading, mathematics and science were above the national average and comparable to the average results in Germany and Sweden.”
These are the results of our pilot program, which includes AI tutors and has been running in 171 public schools for just over a year.
It was evaluated by PISA for Schools in June of this year. Since then, it has already expanded to more than 1,000 schools, and within 18 months, it will be in every public school in our country.
In a few years, El Salvador will inspire the world.
Security was just the beginning 🇸🇻
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
“Results in reading, mathematics and science were above the national average and comparable to the average results in Germany and Sweden.”
These are the results of our pilot program, which includes AI tutors and has been running in 171 public schools for just over a year.
It was evaluated by PISA for Schools in June of this year. Since then, it has already expanded to more than 1,000 schools, and within 18 months, it will be in every public school in our country.
In a few years, El Salvador will inspire the world.
Security was just the beginning 🇸🇻
The highly promising results from El Salvador’s first PISA for Schools assessment show what education reform can achieve when student learning is placed at the center—and change reaches the classroom.
What is at stake is more than a score. It is a generation’s future and its prospects in the labor market.
These preliminary findings, drawn from a group of schools, point to a path worth pursuing. The World Bank Group is proud to support El Salvador’s efforts to strengthen education and expand opportunities for generations to come.
More on the assessment:
bit.ly/4x7q1zQ
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Tom Hammer 🔨 retweeted
Did you know that humanity has never launched a spacecraft to another star? That is about to change! We have created a non-profit to attempt to send humanity’s 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿… and we need your help!
We have formed non-profit The @FermiExplorer Mission with the goal of launching a minimum viable spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, leaving in 3 years and arriving in around 80,000 years. We hope it will be both the first spacecraft to leave Earth for another star, and the last to arrive, as per this concept video!
The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet: "Where is everybody?" (the Fermi Paradox)
The mission has four high-level objectives:
- Aim: To launch the first spacecraft to another star. It should get at least 99% of the way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, within 80,000 years.
- Payload: It should have at least a 1kg, 10x10x10 cm payload.
- Schedule: It should launch before the end of 2029
- Cost: It should cost less than $15M to design, build, launch, and operate.
The mission was planned with the help of the folks at @astrodigitalgeo, @MattGialich and the folks at @AstroForge, and @alexwg+@matthew_pines physical AI lab PSI, who devised the final mission profile. The mission will be executed by full-time program manager @GarrettJameson, who joins us after 10 years as a US Air Force Officer, in collaboration with a US bus manufacturing partner that will be selected over the coming months.
We will need your help to complete the mission, so if the idea of the mission excites you, please check out the Fermi Explorer website in the comments to find out more about why we are doing the mission and how to get involved!
Thanks to London Studio @ZeroOneCreative and @ashkan01C for producing the concept video 🙏🙏
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