Lucky husband of @ntduke and father of two amazing girls. Cofounder of NextView. Built some product at Ebay and learned some investing at Spark Capital

Boston, MA
The biggest mistake of any decent VC's career is usually a sin of omission, not a sin of commission. In other words, it's always the investment you did not make or the follow-on you failed to invest enough into. It's almost never the investment that didn't work out.
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But the takeaway is not that you should always say yes. Don't forget that the cost of being right once is the many times you used the same mental model and ended up being wrong. If the wins always made up for those losses, VC's would perform much better overall.
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Super ambitious and amazing early results. Congrats @spisallyouneed and team!
Introducing SKY-001, the first Engineering World Model. On CAD and BIM tasks, it beats GPT-6 Astra and every frontier model we tested: -> 51-125x faster - > 150-210x cheaper -> Higher IOU than all frontier models SKY-001 lets you dream a physical object before you build it. 18 months of work. Built by the team out of Maluuba's deep learning lab (acq. by @MSRResearch). The first ‘AI General Engineer’ will be the backbone for Autonomous Manufacturing.
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Most VCs are aiming at a bullseye on a target they can barely see. Last year the venture industry did about 15,000 deals. A typical early-stage firm backed twelve of them. The one that cost it most is the one it never saw.
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Congrats to the team at @Ultraroboticsco on their series A from terrific investors! We've been investing in physical AI for several years now, and it's a joy to be working with this team for the second time.
Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework. We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics. It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again. So that’s what we’re focusing on.
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Wrote a blog post to expand on this post from a few days ago. nextview.vc/blog/the-three-p…
There are basically three approaches to venture. And one is dominating the attention, headlines, and capital. 1. Fighting for diamonds in the middle of the fairway 2. Searching for diamonds in the rough 3. Mining for silver
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I directionally agree with. I think if you have 10%+ of your fund in a company, it's probably not an option. Also, if you never write a follow-on check and never do an SPV, then it's not really an option because you never exercise it.
If you’re a VC dunking on this, you better have a grand total of one investment. Otherwise, you are, definitionally, buying yourself options.
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But I've worked with many dozens of lead seed investors. Every single one of them at some point do follow ons. And many have done SPVs
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One misconception of this is that lower price does not = diamond in the rough. The market is actually quite efficient. A diamond in the rough can still be priced at $60M pre, if it would have otherwise been priced at $120M pre with a more consensus fact pattern.
There are basically three approaches to venture. And one is dominating the attention, headlines, and capital. 1. Fighting for diamonds in the middle of the fairway 2. Searching for diamonds in the rough 3. Mining for silver
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There are basically three approaches to venture. And one is dominating the attention, headlines, and capital. 1. Fighting for diamonds in the middle of the fairway 2. Searching for diamonds in the rough 3. Mining for silver
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#1 has been dominating for many reasons. Lots written here. #3 is funding companies on a non-traditional venture path. A worthy effort, but the question (as in silver) is whether you can really do this profitably.
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The most promising returns are in #2. But this is harder than ever given extreme downstream funding risk, elevated entry prices, and limited exits outside of consensus winners. Funds pursuing this need to consider revamping their approach entirely. The old model won't work.
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Great overview of how to think about security risk for Muse. Hilarious last post on instinct at the bottom of the thread. YOLO!
As part of testing @Muse, I quizzed it to explain to me a few things I think about when using these agents and deciding how much connections and context to give - the struggle of the Trust-Utility Curve (the more you give, the more useful it can be). nitter.siddz.com/melodykoh/status/20262… TLDR - there continues to be limitations around how LLMs fundamentally work and the probabilistic nature of things, and there really isn't a way to get around on context leakage or prompt injection-like attacks. However, I found Muse/Meta's willingness to be transparent in its mechanics reassuring. A few highlights on my Q&A with Muse - see more details on the screenshots of my questions and its responses. 🧵 Q1 - you say that you will ask for my permission for actions, but how do I know this can be enforced deterministically (vs instructions in files, which are just vibes for these models)? Most reassuring part of the answer: "When I invoke a send tool, the runtime intercepts the call and blocks execution until you've approved it. I can't trigger the approval myself, can't see it, can't override it — the approval card is invisible to me and your decision is final. So even a compromised or injected version of me, actively trying to send without asking, hits the same wall: there is no code path where the send executes without the runtime obtaining your decision first." Translate to non-developer speak: there's a mechanical gate that forces the model to serve up approval to the user when the action is a list of predefined "must get user approval". No vibes-bsed (good!)
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Had an awesome time hanging out with @yifanz at the AI House in Seattle. They are building something really special there. Really excited for demo day - good luck!
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I had a thought. Curious what LPs think. cc @endowment_eddie Do LP's actually want DPI? If a manager is one you love, you like the remaining investments and you believe their performance will persist, aren't you more than happy to have value compound?
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You'd rather have DPI only if a) you believe that the forward looking IRR for the fund is below your targets, b) you worry that TVPI is above actual value, and you want certainty or c) you need liquidity (for actual cash needs or to match some asset allocation model)
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Or maybe it's just a healthy check and balance. In a perfect world, compounding illiquid investments is not a problem. But there is so much asymmetric info and misaligned incentives that pushing for DPI alleviates some of this.
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