It's a little hard to internalize that the list of things one person can achieve is rapidly growing. You must think big to match what you're truly capable of now

The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company has raised $55M to audit and insure frontier AI models. Insurance produces audits the public can trust and understand. The mechanism is simple: insurers need audits to price the risk. They pick auditors they believe will help them price the risk most accurately. Insurers then turn the audits into a price signal that cuts through political debates. Insurers are aligned with the public: if they get the audits wrong, they go out of business. That’s different from today, where labs pick their own auditors, creating public distrust. Insurance only works if we scale up auditing, and we are building the infrastructure to do that. Millions of agents are being deployed; they leave terabytes of traces and will create thousands of incidents across dozens of risk categories. To scale auditing, we need reliable agents to surface evidence traces for human review. History guides us. Take cars: auto insurers funded crash tests to price risks; crash tests led us to airbags, lowering the risk. Take electricity: home insurers funded lightbulb tests to price fire risks; today, every lightbulb carries a safety mark. Nuclear safety works similarly. We’ve been learning by doing.. In the last 6 months, we’ve audited and insured frontier agent builders like Cursor, ElevenLabs, Lovable and Harvey. For ElevenLabs to get the world’s first agent insurance coverage, a Lloyd’s of London insurer required quarterly technical audits by an auditor of the insurer’s choice. We’ve built infrastructure for quarterly technical audits of any agent, working alongside firms like Gray Swan (technical evaluations) and Schellman (audit). In the coming weeks, we’ll share our vision for how an insurance ecosystem can work for the frontier, and open source the world’s first actuarial model for frontier AI catastrophic risk. We’re hiring across all roles in San Francisco. Come do your life’s work with us. Rune & Rajiv

Terrain Office, New York City 2026

This is a fine take, but it has also become a surface-level way to signal taste: saying things were better then and the old masters had it “right” and modernity messed up. It’s like MAGA for aesthetics. Of course, the past gives us incredible examples of beauty and craft, but it isn’t some final answer to never challenge. If we want more beautiful things, we need to do one of two things: 1) make what we want to see ourselves, or 2) support the people who can… which means giving them the time, resources and freedom to do the work, accept that it may cost more and take longer, and then recognize and reward them for doing it.

Ugly is a choice. @lulumeservey on why we should put effort into making beautiful things again: “People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things. We had the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic, relativistic view that everything is beautiful in someone eyes. That this piece of art that is clearly trash is just as beautiful as one made by the great masters. Or somebody who is clearly unhealthy is just as beautiful as someone who takes really good care of themselves. People are allowed to say a beautiful building is worth creating and a beautiful website is worth creating. This is what Joe Gebbia and the National Design Studio team are doing. They’re saying, "We believe that a more beautiful experience on the internet reflect the dignity of being an American citizen, and that is what we want. So we're going to put in effort and talent to go make that for you because it's worth something. We're not going to pretend that a website has to be ugly." Anything big or small or glamorous or pedestrian, like a simple government website, can (and should) be made more beautiful. And when it is, people appreciate it so much more because we do have this inherent yearning for beauty.“

incredible how prescient the mar 2024 terrain letter was The Lean Startup is a commodity - strong beliefs weakly held; backtracking when things don’t work is literally what ai does. There is no edge. the only thing left to do is to feel and believe deeply in a Better World

Base told me they save people money on their electricity bills, keep the lights on during power outages and strengthen the overall power grid. I couldn’t understand how that was possible or why everyone wouldn’t switch to Base, so I wanted to find out for myself. I’m now a customer, investor & endorser. I toured the factory, met the team, visited a home install and asked a whole bunch of questions. I went on the Base website and typed in my address to see how much they could save me on my electricity bill and it said 35%. I switched right there on the spot. No special VIP pricing, no endorsement trick, I literally logged on and did it myself on the regular website right from my phone. The one question I kept coming back to was “Save money, protect your home during outages, help support the power grid. Why wouldn’t everyone want to get Base?” I still haven’t found an answer to that yet. Today they're launching Base Core, a new home battery fully designed by Base and built right here in Texas. Check it out here: basepowercompany.com/watt @basepowerco

Today, we're launching Base Core, our own battery designed & built in Texas, and announcing our $1B Series D to bring it to homes across the country. Three years ago, we started Base with a belief that batteries were the unlock to energy abundance. We saw battery storage as the foundation of a modern energy system, and believed we could win the market with vertical integration, technology, and relentless execution (what we now call Base Pace). So we set out to build a network of distributed batteries to deliver affordable, reliable electricity to homeowners and utilities. While the job is far from finished, the launch of Base Core is the most meaningful step in that plan. We’ve spent the last few years learning hard lessons about building a distributed battery fleet, going from 1 install per day in June of ‘24 to 100 installs per day in June of ‘26. These lessons - how the battery is shipped, installed, used, and monitored - informed the design of Core. Now, Core will be the foundation of the company's next phase of growth. Base Core is a first-of-its-kind home battery. At ~40 kWh it is 3x the size of most home batteries, providing up to 36 hours of backup for the average home. In the event of multi-day outage, Core is equipped with a (first of its kind) generator port - pull out a small portable generator and charge the battery back up to keep your home running as long as you need. When an outage does happen, the backup is seamless - most members won't even notice the grid went down. It's built to withstand Texas summers, Chicago Winters, and everything in between. And finally, it’s manufactured by our team in Austin, at Base Factory 1, right across the street from our HQ. This new capital will bring Core to more homes and to accelerate our ambition beyond batteries. The round is co-led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor, and JP Morgan, with participation from new major investors D1, Sands, Coatue, Layer Global, and Energy Impact Partners. All of Base’s major existing investors are re-investing, including Thrive, Altimeter, Lightspeed, a16z, CapitalG, Trust, and more. This brings our valuation to $13B. As we enter the most important growth period in the history of the electricity industry, our mission has not changed - advance human prosperity by delivering the world's most affordable and reliable electricity. Our strategy has not changed - technology, plus vertical integration, plus relentless execution, leads to a compounding cost advantage. What has changed is the scope of our ambition - this new capital, along with the team and capabilities we've built over the last three years, positions us to build technology across the electric stack, including what it takes to serve surging demand from AI, and to deepen our partnerships with utilities as they work to meet rising demands. Electricity is the largest and most essential industry in the world, and it does not have a defining technology company. The company that delivers the most affordable, reliable power will be one of the largest and most impactful companies in the world. We intend to build it. If you'd like to join us, reach out. Onwards. basepowercompany.com/core.

Turbo is in a new class of cost and latency: 5-14x cheaper than alternatives, blazing fast, and at consistently high accuracy. - 200ms median latency - $1 per 1,000 requests

Still can't believe the greatest living filmmaker today is a massive fan of THE FAST & THE FURIOUS franchise lol

Excited to announce that @naturalpay has raised a $30M Series A led by @ForerunnerVC to build payments infrastructure for AI agents. To celebrate, we gave our agent $100K to give to you. Just sign up and our agent will send you between $5 and $10,000 on natural.com ¹

Excited to announce that @naturalpay has raised a $30M Series A led by @ForerunnerVC to build payments infrastructure for AI agents. To celebrate, we gave our agent $100K to give to you. Just sign up and our agent will send you between $5 and $10,000 on natural.com ¹