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There is now an *advantage* to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley has always run on the magic of paying it forward. Everyone here has been helped by someone, at a critical moment - for no reason other than just to be helpful.
ion of this pay-it-forward culture for international founders: “Borderless Founders.”
* You can get early customers from large companies at home that give you big proof points early.
* You can build an outsized brand at home that can get global attention earlier.
* You know the strongest engineers in your home country before the rest of the market catches on.
Most of the fastest growing companies have int'l founding teams.
Your background is your moat. Our job is to help you widen it. If you’re a Borderless Founder, we’d love to meet you 👇
Silicon Valley has always run on the magic of paying it forward. Everyone here has been helped by someone, at a critical moment - for no reason other than just to be helpful.
ion of this pay-it-forward culture for international founders: “Borderless Founders.”
* You can get early customers from large companies at home that give you big proof points early.
* You can build an outsized brand at home that can get global attention earlier.
* You know the strongest engineers in your home country before the rest of the market catches on.
Most of the fastest growing companies have int'l founding teams.
Your background is your moat. Our job is to help you widen it. If you’re a Borderless Founder, we’d love to meet you 👇
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angela strange retweeted
🚨 Excited to share Sardine's latest product suite on AI Token fraud: sardine.ai/token
AI Token is the new gold bar that fraudsters and nation-states steal and launder to distill their own models. Here's how Sardine helps:
1. Bank-grade "Know Your Business" (KYB) and "Know Your Consumer (KYC), so you are not onboarding shell companies set up to distill frontier models
Sardine offers KYC and KYB globally. The same bank-grade technology that protects financial institutions globally from illicit activities is what you get.
2. Signup fraud: We want you to offer free trials and Token credits without losing all those credits to fraud.
The same fraud prevention technology that helps the top fintechs, top crypto companies, top prediction markets and top social media companies, is what you get to protect your credits.
3. Account takeovers that lead to Token theft: We protect API keys to your models or to your 3rd party frontier labs with the same security posture as we protect crypto assets at top crypto exchanges.
We have a two-tiered approach. Detect if a new IP was used to query an API key. Challenge such requests by having the user do a login (where we run our device fingerprinting). We have the fastest growing fraud device consortium (6B+ devices profiled globally).
Fraud and money laundering rings have a nexus - the same rings that steal crypto, gift cards, cars, fintech wallets are the ones going after AI Tokens.
4. Card fraud: Fraudsters use stolen cards to buy AI Tokens, that they can then quickly resell.
The same technology that protects the top retailers from Card fraud is what you get!
Fraudsters method don't change, only what they steal changes:
2005-10: Smart TVs and physical goods
2010-15: Gift cards
2015-25: Crypto
2025: AI Tokens
AI Token fraud has proliferated across the AI supply chain and impacting AI inference companies, neoclouds, AI gateways. In the last weeks alone, OpenCode, Railway, LiteLLM and many others have been impacted.
We are here to protect you and to help you win back trust from your customers. Reach out. DMs open!
AI Token is the new gold bar that fraudsters and nation-states steal and launder to distill their own models. Here's how Sardine helps:
1. Bank-grade "Know Your Business" (KYB) and "Know Your Consumer (KYC), so you are not onboarding shell companies set up to distill frontier models
Sardine offers KYC and KYB globally. The same bank-grade technology that protects financial institutions globally from illicit activities is what you get.
2. Signup fraud: We want you to offer free trials and Token credits without losing all those credits to fraud.
The same fraud prevention technology that helps the top fintechs, top crypto companies, top prediction markets and top social media companies, is what you get to protect your credits.
3. Account takeovers that lead to Token theft: We protect API keys to your models or to your 3rd party frontier labs with the same security posture as we protect crypto assets at top crypto exchanges.
We have a two-tiered approach. Detect if a new IP was used to query an API key. Challenge such requests by having the user do a login (where we run our device fingerprinting). We have the fastest growing fraud device consortium (6B+ devices profiled globally).
Fraud and money laundering rings have a nexus - the same rings that steal crypto, gift cards, cars, fintech wallets are the ones going after AI Tokens.
4. Card fraud: Fraudsters use stolen cards to buy AI Tokens, that they can then quickly resell.
The same technology that protects the top retailers from Card fraud is what you get!
Fraudsters method don't change, only what they steal changes:
2005-10: Smart TVs and physical goods
2010-15: Gift cards
2015-25: Crypto
2025: AI Tokens
AI Token fraud has proliferated across the AI supply chain and impacting AI inference companies, neoclouds, AI gateways. In the last weeks alone, OpenCode, Railway, LiteLLM and many others have been impacted.
We are here to protect you and to help you win back trust from your customers. Reach out. DMs open!
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I used to buy on Amazon bc it was so much easier. But now that Amazon (infamously) blocks agents like Muse -- it's not. 👉 Opportunity for smaller merchants: be extra discoverable to agents +allow agents to complete the end to end purchase.
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@michael_yu Can I get a job in the Vesta marketing department? Everything will be Star Wars themed chosen by my 6 year old 🤪
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@astrange How can it be more easy to buy , than from a site where it’s one click ?
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@tomfgoodwin Hmmm try out all the agents (with voice mode) and then we can debate?
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angela strange retweeted
More background on how this happened and why Silicon Valley is so magical:
-I had the privilege of working with Jean-Denis (@jgreze) at Plaid for many years
-After running in the SF Marathon in 2024, I "ran" into him at In-N-Out in Daly City and we talked about what he was doing next...
-SMB tax...!
-Meanwhile, my partner Justine Moore (@venturetwins) was off trying every single consumer and enterprise productivity agent...and Town had pivoted
-She concluded Town was the best, which caused @bhorowitz to start using Town
-I then re-heard of Town and was like...the SMB Tax tool? :)
-I reached back out to Jean-Denis and told him about his mega fan and suggested having dinner with Ben and me
This also shows why venture is a team sport. This investment would have never happened without Justine, and probably without Ben as well! And maybe without the SF Marathon! And likely not without Plaid / @zachperret!
-I had the privilege of working with Jean-Denis (@jgreze) at Plaid for many years
-After running in the SF Marathon in 2024, I "ran" into him at In-N-Out in Daly City and we talked about what he was doing next...
-SMB tax...!
-Meanwhile, my partner Justine Moore (@venturetwins) was off trying every single consumer and enterprise productivity agent...and Town had pivoted
-She concluded Town was the best, which caused @bhorowitz to start using Town
-I then re-heard of Town and was like...the SMB Tax tool? :)
-I reached back out to Jean-Denis and told him about his mega fan and suggested having dinner with Ben and me
This also shows why venture is a team sport. This investment would have never happened without Justine, and probably without Ben as well! And maybe without the SF Marathon! And likely not without Plaid / @zachperret!
Jean-Denis Greze was CTO of Plaid. His next startup, an AI tax product for small businesses, brought in nearly $1M in revenue its first year, and he projected $2.5 to $3M the next. He shut it down anyway.
The reason: in the age of AI, it was never going to be venture scale. e same technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than a startup could win market share. Tax is also sold once a year, so he had about a one-month window to pivot before the door closed.
The pivot became Town, an AI assistant that works from your email and calendar. It found product-market fit fast enough that Ben Horowitz messaged a16z's Alex Rampell to say it "changed my life."
In this conversation, Alex and Jean-Denis cover:
- How to know when to kill a business that's working on paper
- Why Town competes with OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies it buys its tokens from
- Why the "forward deployed engineer" model gets worse as AI gets better
- How a $1/month AI routine can save a restaurant thousands
- What agents mean for Amazon, advertising and the future of shopping
0:57 How Ben Horowitz discovered Town
2:20 Why Town started with AI tax prep
3:55 Why tax couldn't be venture scale
6:30 Shutting down a working business
10:24 The customer ask that became Town
13:35 Why Town built for users before IT
16:18 AI's iPhone moment at work
21:28 Jevons paradox for executive assistants
23:13 Town as a "token allocation machine"
28:00 How Town tailors itself to each job
34:03 Competing with your token suppliers
42:24 Staying off the AI labs' radar
44:42 Why AI isn't spreading evenly yet
52:32 How agents break the ad model
55:35 The friction humans actually enjoy
57:05 Why supply aggregators lose to agents
YouTube: youtu.be/o_5f4N6Nq80
@jgreze @TownAI @arampell
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Soon nearly all product discovery will be through agents. Every brand across *all* categories should be doing this👇 especially those that will likely do it last (👀financial & insurance products)
If I was a brand or retailer, AI discoverability / agentic commerce would be my top priority right now.
And, there's an extremely easy and free way to get a sense of how you "show up" to agents. 👇
First, create a dummy account on all the agent platforms (Muse, Instinct, Dots, esh email that does not have context on your real identity, or even use a VPN to "go" to where your average user is!
Then, ask the agent to perform a search that you'd want your product / platform to show up in. As an example, I prompted: "find me a winter coat for SF." Watch the agent go through the evaluation process (you can literally view the browser), and at each stage ask it questions like:
- How did you identify the initial set of options for this search? What were your sources?
- Were there any failures / blocks you encountered that eliminated any options?
- What were the exact variables that your ultimate ranking or recommendation was driven by?
Follow the process all the way through to the point of purchase. You will very quickly start to get a sense of how an agent thinks, edge case issues it runs into, etc. As an example, during my winter coat search via Muse I learned the following:
- Patagonia bot blocked my agent - so Muse then went to / recommended other retailers that carried the jacket to make my purchase
- The agent first searched options from its training data, largely informed by Wirecutter-style roundups, Reddit, and enthusiast forums. Then, it looked at connected merchants via the Meta Catalog. Then, it did live browser searches. It dropped any websites with SEO spam or fake reviews
- REI was the ultimate winner as it didn't throw up any bot challenges or traffic blocks, and my agent prioritized verifiable inventory and same-day pickup (which I didn't ask it to!). It found a discount on REI vs. the original retailer so prioritized that as well
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What if you could ingest the sum of all the productivity gains across your team? Now you can.
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other.
Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work.
Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I player. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get.
What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
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angela strange retweeted
. @opencode, the popular open-source AI coding harness got hacked. Developers’ API keys to frontier labs - OpenAI and Anthropic - were exposed as they were apparently being stored in cleartext.
Here's a rundown of AI Token theft, one of the fastest growing fraud vectors and how afe
Trust is very fragile: takes years to earn and one mistake, in one second and you lose it.
An AI company which takes trust seriously, always wins in the long run
Here's a rundown of AI Token theft, one of the fastest growing fraud vectors and how afe
Trust is very fragile: takes years to earn and one mistake, in one second and you lose it.
An AI company which takes trust seriously, always wins in the long run
We had a security breach last night related to a large scale distillation attack that impacted 1.4% of OpenCode Console users
We have notified them all this morning via email. If you did not get an email you were not impacted, it was a subset of users who had external providers linked
The incident is ongoing so we cannot share more details at this point but we are working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to remediate
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As tech moats diminish, human ones increase. CEO integrity is an under-appreciated moat. In the short term, being the smartest can attract the best talent. In the long term, being someone ppl trust will sustain it 👇
* @luke10ferrari (Bending Spoons) gets the first call from companies who want to sell. He has the reputation of telling the truth+never omitting what someone should here (a value learned the hard way by cheating on his partner in his 20s and feeling so ashamed)
* @alighodsi describes this as never being conflict averse
Many more examples here - would love to hear yours...
h/t Long Strange trip pod @bhalligan
* @luke10ferrari (Bending Spoons) gets the first call from companies who want to sell. He has the reputation of telling the truth+never omitting what someone should here (a value learned the hard way by cheating on his partner in his 20s and feeling so ashamed)
* @alighodsi describes this as never being conflict averse
Many more examples here - would love to hear yours...
h/t Long Strange trip pod @bhalligan
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
• Proprietary data
• Network effects
• A physical component
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@astrange @luke10ferrari I’d add that human moats lead to technical moats over time! You won’t build that killer feature until you build enough trust to discover it from your customers
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@zkevinbai @luke10ferrari 🎯 also why the next biggest category is "implementations" and they will all look like services at the beginning. The key to go from services --> software may lie more in your human skills than your tech skills.
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Getting hacked at age 12 inspired his career in security. @zanelackey has the best OG stories - “craziest hack you’ve seen” (ask him!) best done over tacos w @jamdac @dhaber
At this point @LosTacosNo1 is the official catering brand of @a16z NYC.
Oh and @zanelackey also gave a great chat on all things angel investing to our scout community. 🌮🌮🌮
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Why does it take $11k & 45 days to originate a mortgage? It doesn’t anymore. Vesta brings agent swarms to the largest (and most antiquated) area of financial services to the benefit of homeowners everywhere!
our agents are going to originate a trillion dollars of mortgages in the next 5 years.
today, we're announcing the latest step towards that goal, our $30m series b led by conversion capital, with a16z and three of our customers participating. revenue is up 12x this year, and on vesta are already automated.
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Everything is servicing! Seriously. It’s where the persistent customer relationship lives, the money movement, the regulatory compliance. @xlindadu @wangandrewd
a16z's Angela Strange sits down with @Valon's Andrew Wang and Linda Du to unpack what it takes to rebuild the infrastructure underneath a $13 trillion mortgage market that still relies heavily on systems designed before the internet.
Linda and Andrew explain why Valon chose the a regulated mortgage servicer, translating decades of federal and state regulation into software, and proving the platform on its own loans before selling it to the industry. That foundation made Valon roughly 3x as efficient as traditional servicing and created the system of record it is now using to bring AI into complex mortgage workflows.
They also discuss what AI makes possible on top of that infrastructure, from agents handling long-tail servicing tasks to voice interfaces and more personalized customer experiences. And they explain why deploying the technology into large regulated enterprises is ultimately as much a change-management challenge as a technical one.
01:02 From Soros to mortgage math
03:00 $13 trillion still on 1960s systems
09:38 Why build the whole stack from scratch
11:47 The 3-5 year licensing gauntlet
15:50 Turning 50 states of regulation into code
18:00 Winning the first customers
22:34 What AI unlocks now
29:47 Everything is servicing
32:52 $200M in deals within six months
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ZBDGuT…
@wangandrewd @xlindadu @astrange
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Turns out "saving the world from mainframes, legacy systems, and outdated infrastructure" attracts the smartest people to work on some of the most interesting problems
Thrilled to announce Valon’s $150M Series D at $2.3B. Welcome @RibbitCapital to the Valon family and thanks to @a16z and others for the continued support. If you’re energized by solving the hardest problems, moving fast without breaking trust, and finding joy in cracking what others will not touch, come build with us.
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Paraphrasing Jensen: "It's not AI that's your competition, it's your competitors adopting AI faster than you". For those who thought mortgage would never modernize -- Valon has now contracted 1 in 6 mortgages in this $13T industry onto ValonOS.
So excited to announce that @valon has raised a Series D, doubling our valuation to $2.3B 📷
I’m incredibly proud of our team and grateful to our customers and partners. Huge thank you to @RibbitCapital @a16z and everyone who continue to support us!
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Sell to the incumbent? Or build the incumbent, then sell them your OS? @valon chose the latter and quietly took over US mortgages ($13T, 70% of consumer debt). 1 in 6 are now contracted onto their platform👇
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Are customers really going to rip/replace a critical legacy system? ValonOS is now available to the whole mortgage market and already at $200M contracted revenue in < 6mo.
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Looking for a wicked smart team to work with on "saving the world from mainframes, legacy systems, and outdated infrastructure" -- Valon is hiring across all roles and mortgage is just the start! @BrianJMcGrath, @jakemintz @hongxia_zhong
forbes.com/sites/zoyahasa…
forbes.com/sites/zoyahasa…
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