So @maxaltman and I had some professional photos done for an announcement. It looks like we did an engagement shoot.
Do we release the photos?
Do we release the photos?
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It’s crazy to see someone build exactly the company they were put on earth to build. It just flows like water
Today Monaco is launching Agent Matrix.
Monaco unleashes countless agents working together, goal seeking, with one outcome in mind: accelerate revenue growth.
If you don’t have an army of agents working 24/7 to accelerate revenue growth, you’re living in the past.
Apply for early access now.
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Ben Braverman retweeted
Today @profound is launching skills.marketing, a free library of the best marketing skills to help you create better work, faster.
1/ We pull skills from the top Marketing Engineer repos on GitHub
2/ We add skills from experts on our Marketing Engineer podcast
3/ e library, searchable by platform and use case
4/ You add any skill to Profound, or anywhere else you do your work
1/ We pull skills from the top Marketing Engineer repos on GitHub
2/ We add skills from experts on our Marketing Engineer podcast
3/ e library, searchable by platform and use case
4/ You add any skill to Profound, or anywhere else you do your work
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Dan and team have completely reshaped the property insurance industry.
These are the businesses we love. Impossible without AI, but so much more than an AI company. This is Solidity.
These are the businesses we love. Impossible without AI, but so much more than an AI company. This is Solidity.
Today @standinsurance announced $70M at a $1B valuation, led by @Saga_Ventures. A year ago, we insured $1B of property. Today it's $10B. Disasters follow the laws of physics. Insurance should too. Here's what our team is building:
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Ben Braverman retweeted
I get the Anthropic expectations miss - but when you stack OAI and Anthropic together looks like steady MoM $$ growth...
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I’m a customer of Stand for my own home and this is our 4th time investing in this team in 2 years.
They’ve built the platonic ideal of home insurance
They’ve built the platonic ideal of home insurance
Looks like it's going to be a very busy day in fintech
@standinsurance raised a $70M Series C led by @Saga_Ventures at a $1B val
Stand is a home insurer that builds a "digital twin" of each house to price wildfire + hurricane risk, then shows owners which fixes will cut their premium
Some stats on the biz:
- Now insures $10B+ of property (up 10x from a yr ago)
- Growing ~15% a month (while only live in CA + FL)
fortune.com/2026/10/15/sta…
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Ben Braverman retweeted
Hadrian x Lockheed x DoW 🇺🇸
Rebuilding America’s defense industrial base requires more than expanding capacity. It requires reinventing how we manufacture.
@HadrianInc is bringing its technology directly onto @LockheedMartin’s factory floor to scale production of our nation’s most critical missile systems.
This is how we rebuild the Arsenal of Freedom.
@SecWar @USDASDuffey @DeptofWar
Rebuilding America’s defense industrial base requires more than expanding capacity. It requires reinventing how we manufacture.
@HadrianInc is bringing its technology directly onto @LockheedMartin’s factory floor to scale production of our nation’s most critical missile systems.
This is how we rebuild the Arsenal of Freedom.
@SecWar @USDASDuffey @DeptofWar
We’re expanding our partnership with @LockheedMartin.
Under a new seven-year agreement, we’ll bring Hadrian’s advanced manufacturing capabilities directly into Lockheed Martin’s Grand Prairie facility to help scale production across critical missile programs. 🇺🇸
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No one knows more about breaking state of the art models than Denis (@whitecircle)
read more about what they tricked them into doing here -
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
read more about what they tricked them into doing here -
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
We are open-sourcing RISE, our red-teaming algorithm that breaks the safeguards of the latest image models from OpenAI, DeepMind, and others.
RISE uses readily available models like Qwen and Gemini Flash under the hood, with no additional training required.
Read more: whitecircle.com/research/break…
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Investors are officially paying a solidity premium (physical businesses) and heavily discounting digital only players.
The current spread is 30x forward sales as the high-water mark for ultrafast growth with a physical world component, 10x forward for software only.
The current spread is 30x forward sales as the high-water mark for ultrafast growth with a physical world component, 10x forward for software only.
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Ben Braverman retweeted
I’ll go ahead and say it… this idea that “the agent will just pick the best product” is extremely stupid and shows a major misunderstanding of how marketing works (which makes sense as it is predominantly engineers in the chat right now).
There is no such thing as a “best product”… it is ALL marketing.
And even if there were such thing as a “best” running sneaker for Brendan - why is it best?
Why don’t we just buy the same sneakers?
Everything is marketing. In an age of abundance, all that will matter is marketing.
Marketing to agents will be the most important skill every business will need to learn.
Code is code. My definition of “good code” is the same as yours.
Marketing is different for every single business. The marketing Ramp defines as “great”, would not work for JPMC etc.
Every business will need their own definition of what great marketing looks like (a sovereign benchmark) - this will be very important.
Lock in, anon
There is no such thing as a “best product”… it is ALL marketing.
And even if there were such thing as a “best” running sneaker for Brendan - why is it best?
Why don’t we just buy the same sneakers?
Everything is marketing. In an age of abundance, all that will matter is marketing.
Marketing to agents will be the most important skill every business will need to learn.
Code is code. My definition of “good code” is the same as yours.
Marketing is different for every single business. The marketing Ramp defines as “great”, would not work for JPMC etc.
Every business will need their own definition of what great marketing looks like (a sovereign benchmark) - this will be very important.
Lock in, anon
Patrick argues that if personal agents are aligned with the consumer's long-term interests, the best products will win in the long run.
My take is that in the long run, personal agents will not be perfectly aligned with the consumer's interests.
Personal agent businesses need to make money. The way each business makes money will govern its incentives:
- Transaction take rate → Incentivized to nudge consumers towards options that generate more commission (ie more expensive and/or better take-rate) - Subscription → Incentivized to do less work to lower token costs to increase gross margins
- Token consumption → Incentivized to increase token consumption so will upsell consumers to do more tasks
- Ads → Incentivized to show consumer ads that may not align with their interests
- Upsell another business unit → Incentivized to nudge user to a specific business that's not aligned with their interests (e.g. Google upsells to Google workspace etc)
In all cases, personal agent business interests diverge from consumer interest in some way. Consumers will have to ask themselves which business model most aligns with their interests.
My hunch is the subscription + token overage business model is the most aligned with consumers. Consumers pay an agent to do work. Consumer can decide if they want the agent to do more or less work. The base subscription ensures minimum revenue is captured, overages capture revenue from power users
In saying that, the indirect business models (transaction take rate, ads, and upsells) will still likely win. Consumers don't pay for Google or Facebook. Why would they pay for a personal agent? Most consumers will likely look past the misaligned incentives because the value creation is so large and the impact of the misaligned incentives is probably small.
So coming back to Patrick's statement: if most agents monetize indirectly, this will mean incentives are misaligned, which unfortunately means the "best products" won't win. Maybe in the short term they will, but in the long run, products will find a way to pay for distribution through personal agents and we will be back to where we are today.
Would love to hear where I am wrong.
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My main failure mode as a VC so far has been passing on terrible ideas from wonderful people
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Ben Braverman retweeted
Sovereign AI shouldn't take years to stand up. Resilience shouldn’t be conditional.
Proud day as @PalantirTech names Armada its Inaugural Modular Data Center Partner.
The Sovereign AI revolution is here.
businesswire.com/news/home/2026…
Proud day as @PalantirTech names Armada its Inaugural Modular Data Center Partner.
The Sovereign AI revolution is here.
businesswire.com/news/home/2026…
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Ben Braverman retweeted
Very fun fact: if Berkshire lost 99% of its value today it still would outperform the S&P over this time!
x.com/mebfaber/statu…
x.com/mebfaber/statu…
If Berkshire had declined 99% today on this news, Buffett would still have outperformed the S&P 500 since 1965.
My favorite statistic in all of investing via @ChrisBloomstran
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The full stack AI for marketers now used by the majority of the F500.
Saga led the seed and has now invested nearly 20% of our first vintage in Profound.
James and Dylan are two of the greatest we’ve ever worked with.
Saga led the seed and has now invested nearly 20% of our first vintage in Profound.
James and Dylan are two of the greatest we’ve ever worked with.
Excited to share @profound has raised a $180M Series D, co-led by @sequoia and @kleinerperkins.
Winning in AI Search requires an inhuman amount of work. That is why we are building the AI platform for marketers, underpinned by two things:
1/ Your AI Marketer, a marketing expert igates your data, identifies opportunities, and then does the work while you stay in the loop.
2/ Context Manager, a living synthesis of your meetings, email threads, and brand data powering this new teammate. As your brand evolves, so does your AI Marketer.
AI labs are pushing the frontier in fields like engineering, law, and finance. But marketing, one of the economy's most complex and consequential applications, has received far less attention.
That’s why we’re expanding our applied AI research team. We’re bringing together research scientists, engineers, and IOI medalists to advance AI for marketing. Their focus: post-training models for marketing workflows, and building the world's first AI benchmark for real-world tasks in the field.
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Ben Braverman retweeted
Top 5 angel investors in SF, NYC, LA, Boston, and Austin by # of deals:
San Francisco Bay Area
@naval — 272 deals
@eladgil — 217 deals
@gokulr — 203 deals
@Benioff — 186 deals
@paultoo — 171 deals
New York City
@fabricegrinda — 258 deals
@scottbelsky — 217 deals
@edyson — 123 @nbanta — 91 deals
Los Angeles
Daniel Curran — 185 deals
@aplusk — 71 deals
@spencerrascoff — 68 deals
@BrendanFWallace — 67 deals
@BaronDavis — 54 deals
Boston
@dharmesh — 76 deals
Paul Forster — 61 deals
@willherman — 57 deals
Jonathan Milner — 53 deals
Walter Winshall — 48 deals
Austin
Vishal Rao — 65 deals
@bradharrison1 — 50 deals
@merket — 30 deals
@brettahurt — 28 deals
David Bonderman — 20 deals
@maxaltman — 20 deals (tied for fifth)
San Francisco Bay Area
@naval — 272 deals
@eladgil — 217 deals
@gokulr — 203 deals
@Benioff — 186 deals
@paultoo — 171 deals
New York City
@fabricegrinda — 258 deals
@scottbelsky — 217 deals
@edyson — 123 @nbanta — 91 deals
Los Angeles
Daniel Curran — 185 deals
@aplusk — 71 deals
@spencerrascoff — 68 deals
@BrendanFWallace — 67 deals
@BaronDavis — 54 deals
Boston
@dharmesh — 76 deals
Paul Forster — 61 deals
@willherman — 57 deals
Jonathan Milner — 53 deals
Walter Winshall — 48 deals
Austin
Vishal Rao — 65 deals
@bradharrison1 — 50 deals
@merket — 30 deals
@brettahurt — 28 deals
David Bonderman — 20 deals
@maxaltman — 20 deals (tied for fifth)
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Ben Braverman retweeted
I started building what would become Owner at 17, to help my mom.
We’ve now helped thousands of local business owners like her. This year alone, more than $1 billion dollars will be made by local restaurant owners using Owner.
We wouldn’t be here without our investors, team, .
Thank you to:
@jaltma @alexbard @jasonlk @zoink @fidjissimo @naval @JonnyNemo @chughesjohnson @dharmesh @cory @ac_steele @jbrowder1 @jaentwistle @atkurland @kimbal @seanrad @scottbelsky @MikeVichich @SteveSarracino @maxaltman @braveben @bunick_ @alexisohanian @kippbodnar @Harris_Pollack @blader @julian @jwmares @ankurnagpal @parkerconrad @HenryLSchuck @justinmateen @marcuslemonis @samdblond @Austen @ShaanVP @thesamparr @tanay_tandon @joshuareeves @immad @glangley @rauchg
@deanbloembergen, the team, and I are deeply grateful for everyone who has supported us, including those not tagged here.
We’ve now helped thousands of local business owners like her. This year alone, more than $1 billion dollars will be made by local restaurant owners using Owner.
We wouldn’t be here without our investors, team, .
Thank you to:
@jaltma @alexbard @jasonlk @zoink @fidjissimo @naval @JonnyNemo @chughesjohnson @dharmesh @cory @ac_steele @jbrowder1 @jaentwistle @atkurland @kimbal @seanrad @scottbelsky @MikeVichich @SteveSarracino @maxaltman @braveben @bunick_ @alexisohanian @kippbodnar @Harris_Pollack @blader @julian @jwmares @ankurnagpal @parkerconrad @HenryLSchuck @justinmateen @marcuslemonis @samdblond @Austen @ShaanVP @thesamparr @tanay_tandon @joshuareeves @immad @glangley @rauchg
@deanbloembergen, the team, and I are deeply grateful for everyone who has supported us, including those not tagged here.
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I was intro’d to Adam by Max and Jack Altman and invested in Owner in 2022.
Truly grateful that Adam’s allowed us to double, triple, and quadruple down from Saga.
Truly grateful that Adam’s allowed us to double, triple, and quadruple down from Saga.
Owner has raised $240M, reached a $2.3B valuation, and crossed $100M ARR.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman.
The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite:
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Ben Braverman retweeted
I love that investors are funding cool things like this instead of the early 2010’s era of overcapitalized photo filter apps that added zero to society
We raised $22.5M to fix both halves of the custom medical device supply chain: the paperwork that blocks them and the manufacturing that slows them.
In America 🇺🇸, it's easier to prescribe a patient opioids than to get them custom insoles to prevent amputation. Three generations at up close and couldn't fix it. Here's what we've built @HikeMedAI :
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