matt levine for ai -- ball knower
- Tweets 2,180
- Following 533
- Followers 1,263
- Likes 1,138
Blocked by flexport founder for telling him to 3x his company back to its 2022 8b valuation
too harsh?
I would imagine they are one of the greatest beneficiaries of AI -- paperwork heavy ops business that historically ran on email and spreadsheets that can be automated by purpose-built AI agents + competition that will likely lag on adoption
1
2
627
This is I think critically important to understand for building AI applications:
an ai application is just the following things:
1. context
2. memory
3. prompts/agent loops
4. tool calls
5. surrounding human-facing software
Christina says, "look, I cant in good faith resell you a token. my tokens are just claude tokens, and you should just get them from claude"
For many many companies this is true because, mapping to the above:
1. they don't own the context, so claude can fetch the context (in slack or notion or whatever)
2. they dont own the memory (same as above)
3. their agents are just claude/oai
4. they may have proprietary tool calls, but tools are mostly softwre these can be rebuilt in many cases.
5. they have proprietary software, but again, this can be rebuilt or is less useful in agentic world
I think some companies that have staying power here are the following:
1. apollo - they *do* have proprietary tool calls that are hard to replicate
2. rippling/palantir - they *do* have proprietary softare thats been painstakingly built via research about the real world. in the worst case, these become proprietary tool calls, in the best case its a foundation to compete as a standalone agent.
3. i initially had mixpanel on this list. I think it sort of is for similar reasons
4. stripe
You effectively have to rigorously encode so much business logic that an agent would look at your tool call API and say, "well yeah i aint doing that myself", and then uses its agentic credit card to subscribe to your service instead of building in house
hard to do, but I do think its time to bet the farm on it. not much time left
With respect, this is terrible advice. You need to prove -- to yourself more so than to investors -- that intelligence is more valuable inside your product, than on top.
If tokens *aren't* worth 4X inside your product, what are you even doing? You're just reselling the labs. 1/
113
did he.... honeypot the israelis into detaining newyorkers so he could legitimately involve himself in the issue
Today, Brad Lander, rabbis, and other New Yorkers accompanied Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest. For that, they were detained by the Israeli government.
Harvesting olives is not illegal. The occupation is.
I am thankful that Brad has been released. But other New Yorkers remain detained, and they must be released immediately.
The same Israeli government detaining them has committed a horrific genocide against Palestinians, killing more than 74,000 people over the last few years alone.
The detention of these New Yorkers must end. The occupation must end. The genocide must end.
2
258
This is why I am so bearish on the terminal value of saas
Yes, there are forces that make saas sticky.
But in 15 years, the entire workforce will be claude native ie mcp native ie they wont want to click on your dashboards and buttons
Like how google lost 50% of search volume... not to bing, not to yahoo, but 20 years later to tiktok
Met with a young founder today. Whole team is in undergrad. 7 fig ARR.
With just one technical cofounder, they:
-built their own internal tooling for ops and inventory management.
-they don’t use quickbooks: just Plaid and Stripe API with Claude, run on a sql database
-they do use an AI native comms platform to handle the complexity of email, SMS, and customer system of record
Preview of where things are headed. Be mission critical and have APIs or become irrelevant.
4
29
3,758
broadglow retweeted
Kimberly Guilfoyle out here begging for $100k to set up meetings while Alina Habba cashing $50M checks nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/po…
SCOOP: Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan billionaire, really wanted a pardon. He got it not long after his daughter hired Alina Habba, a lawyer close to Trump, in a deal worth more than $50 million. Habba was also working at DOJ at the time.
nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/po…
9
62
697
36,588
someone get this guy a mercor contract stat
3D artist and developer Pablo Dobarro shared updates on CozyBlanket, a dedicated retopology application built from the ground up for the iPad.
Equipped with a custom CPU viewport capable of handling millions of polygons from ZBrush sculpts or unprocessed photoscans, the tool lets artists draw clean, quad-based edge flows directly on high-density meshes using just their fingers or an Apple Pencil.
Do you prefer doing manual retopology on a desktop monitor, or would you take your character clean-up mobile on an iPad?
#retopo #retopology #3dartist #iPadApps #DigitalArt #CGI #MobileTools
2
106
This is happening right now throughout America
Pavel Durov says he once told Jack Dorsey that Twitter could be run with 20 people. Dorsey's response, as Durov tells it:
"I agree with you. But if we start firing so many people, it will make the Wall Street scared. They will think something's very wrong with the company, and we don't want to do that, and that's why we keep all these employees around."
4
720
broadglow retweeted
Christina Cacioppo's personal site has a list of 30+ products she built that failed before starting Vanta (worth $4B+).
"The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars."
My second conversation with Christina Cacioppo (@christinacaci), Vanta's cofounder and CEO.
Charlie Songhurst says the best returns come from companies that are highly boring and highly complex, because fewer founders want to build them.
Vanta is one of those companies.
When we first talked five years ago, Christina told me about building the first version of Vanta in Excel.
Since then she has turned it into the category leader in security compliance. Now she is rebuilding it around AI.
We discuss:
- Why great software businesses got cheap
- Why Vanta eats the cost of AI instead of marking it up
- Why comp for top people is up 10X in five years
- What is over/under hyped in AI
- How AI attackers are changing security
- Vanta marketing + billboards
- Building trust in an era of low trust
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
4:17 Surviving the SaaSpocalypse
9:40 The AI Pricing Trap
16:17 Rebuilding Software for AI
22:43 Silicon Valley's Talent Wars
31:57 What's Overhyped in AI
38:39 Security at Machine Speed
47:16 Reinventing Software
55:37 The Billboard War
60:38 Rebuilding Trust in Technology
3
29
314
19,503
he does this to crush levered AI funds and then buy them on the cheap to flip for a quick $1b
BREAKING: Citadel founder Ken Griffin says AI is "almost certainly" a bubble, noting that companies are struggling to turn AI spending into productivity gains.
However, Griffin says he is bullish on AI's long-term potential.
7
446
You're not ready for mid 2027 when drug discovery envs & data companies have fully scaled and the twitter demos will be like
"Last night, I generated a cure for male baldness, and I asked claude to make the enzyme is shaped like handsome squidward hahahaha"
Drug discovery, new disease cures, advancements in pharma and biomedicine. Along with direct dividends or shares - as is currently being discussed - these are the only viable ways to turn public sentiment around. The big push will start to happen in 2027.
6
367
its exceedingly clear that the CEO of Hogan likes being taken on golf trips by the GTM teams of both Harvey and Legora
I've seen a bunch of posts about Harvey and Legora announcing essentially the same intake product on the same day last week. Pretty funny, but I haven't seen anyone point out that they also both proudly announced firm-wide adoption by Hogan Lovells Cadwalader on the same day.
Hogan CEO on Legora: "Legora has been supporting our lawyers across a range of legal work and helping us explore new ways to deliver high-quality service to clients, while maintaining the professional judgment that remains at the heart of what we do."
Hogan CEO on Harvey: "Through Harvey, we’re perfecting the ways to capture and apply the expertise that exists across our firm on a variety of legal work. That has helped our lawyers work more effectively and strengthens the support and advice we provide to clients."
Things are getting weird in legal tech.
4
379
hey man, yup lets hang soon. Can I um put you a chat with my town? oh you only have tolan. maybe we can have our wabis talk? hm ok what if um i sync your muse to my instinct in imessage?
1
136
broadglow retweeted
well done @MonacoGTM
excited to see what trend this kicks off in sf
53
24
941
151,747
broadglow retweeted
Being non-technical in San Francisco must feel like divine retribution
At least Fitness SF knows their customer base
108
265
6,945
443,978
people might say this feels dystopian but its 1000x an improvement over what people currently do:
go to reddit and seek the advice of chronically online weirdo redditors (where literally every comment tells you to break up with your so, quit your job, block your family etc.)
this might not be perfect but it is a MASSIVE improvement
Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you.
Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet.
The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations.
This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year.
Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m.
To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)
1
1
13
1,155