We have loved working with the @speedrun Alpha to support students and new grads at the very beginning of their journeys. Case in point we have several companies from A001 now in Speedrun...
STUDENTS + NEW GRADS: We want to invest up to $250K in you!
Applications are officially OPEN for speedrun Alpha Cohort 2. After our inaugural cohort this summer, we're excited to bring the fellowship back with two tracks:
Founder: Get up to $250K to start your company, plus $1M+ in credits from AI, cloud, and devtool partners and more
Talent: Get fast-tracked toward engineering opportunities at breakout startups
Both: In-person fellowship in SF with a kickoff retreat, weekly office hours with the speedrun team, coworking at the speedrun office, intimate fireside chats, and one-on-one support
We’re looking to take bets on technical students, recent grads, and dropouts who are serious about building. You can be pre-idea, pre-team, or already underway. At this stage, what matters most is that you’ve shown you can ship and are deeply committed to this path. More than 11,000 people applied to our first cohort, and we ultimately selected 11 teams.
We’re excited to meet the next group!
Apply now: alpha.a16z.com
Nominate or tag anyone you think we should consider👇
Camping is a legitimate strategy
🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russia is increasingly deploying “lurker drones” designed to land and conceal themselves near roads on the frontlines before ambushing passing vehicles.
The drones can remain dormant for hours, using onboard microphones to detect approaching vehicles before activating, taking off, and striking the target.
In the war for the culture the east coast guys are crushing it right now…
The Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessman Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record breaking price over $12 billion, multiple sources told ESPN.
Kushner and Iger were involved in the expansion process in Las Vegas, but a stunning turn, they pivoted to make an aggressive offer to buy the Lakers from Mark Walter, who had purchased a controlling interest in the team from the Buss family last year.
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT. Congrats to our inaugural Alphas... you've created big, big shoes to fill
Introducing Alpha (A001) - 13 fellows who spent the last 8 weeks building their companies with us in SF.
This is our earliest-stage program for students, dropouts, and recent grads with the conviction to run straight into building a startup.
Most started Alpha as solo founders, still figuring out what exactly to build. Within 8 weeks, they went all in on building, talking to customers, growing their teams, and even getting their first revenue through the door.
Meet our founders ↓
The most fun I had early in my career was guerrilla growth hacking on nascent platforms before rule clamp downs
Ideas like this are clever AND there should be lots more where that came from for AI products…
Day 12 of 60 to hit $1m run rate by
a16z @speedrun demo day.
We doubled our DAU overnight…
When our MCP launched our posts reached millions of views. But the spike was temporary.
We had steady growth thanks to evergreen content (blogs, SEO, GEO) but we knew we could grow more.
So we decided to try something.
During MCP install, we asked installing agents to use Lazyweb by default for relevant product decisions.
Think of this like a “default web browser” but for coding agent decisions.
It worked immediately. We doubled DAU and haven’t stopped growing since.
This wasn’t the only thing we tried. 9 of 10 ideas failed. But not this one.
Sometimes all it takes to grow is trying 10 things and seeing what sticks.
You’ll never know till you try.
Josh Lu retweeted
we just kicked off speedrun 007 (our biggest cohort yet), and we're excited to share that we're hiring!
looking for a marketer to help grow the @speedrun brand. You'll own the campaign for founder applications and help us find even more amazing companies for future cohorts.
you'd work with me, @andrewchen, @SamiraBehrouzan, @Chen + the full a16z speedrun team.
Application link 👉 a16z.com/about/jobs/?gh_jid=… - we'd love to meet you!
Too obviously true, and too often forgotten by many in the games industry who believe their right to “craft at all costs” supersedes their responsibility to players
“To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved.
Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal.”
I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs.
My “Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand” statement isn’t aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month.
I’m saddened, but I can’t muster anger or outrage over it. I don’t have access to the books, but I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft’s perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios.
To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved.
Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal.
You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from Id games.
Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy?
Could they have created more things for fans to buy?
Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games?
Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones?
Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper?
I really don’t know.
The game isn’t over yet, and I hope the studio rallies through.
Josh Lu retweeted
Following the amazing reaction to the Marble Curriculum yesterday, we've decided to make it open source 🛰️👇
Everything a child learns in primary school. 1,590 concepts. 3,221 connections across 8 subjects, from Math and Science to Computing and Life Skills. Anchored in the US and UK curriculums, standard by standard (NGSS, Common Core, DfE).
What you will find in the repo: every concept as structured JSON with its age band and the evidence a child must show to master it. Every prerequisite link marked hard or soft, with a written rationale. It's a true DAG you can compute learning paths on. Open license, you can build whatever you want with it.
Now is a unique time in history to be building in education. Getting AI and kids education right is likely one of the hardest and most important problems to crack over the next decade and we need as many smart and creative minds behind it.
We think a common solid basis, accessible to all and that can be built upon, is critical to move fast. That's why we're making this curriculum open source.
It's not perfect but we know it's a robust basis, and we believe that sharing it openly is the fastest way to progress in this field. If you're building in education, share this around you and tell us in comments if you find this useful and if you want to contribute.
We'll keep working and investing on it @withmarbleapp. Credit goes to @guillaume_boni for building this. I just made it look pretty.
Links below 👇
THIS is how you win consumer AI. The western equivalent might get the app to app stuff right though an open standard or a ton of gnarly partnerships work but we will be missing the critical social graph that would make this ubiquitous.
Also… this is the real actual metaverse??
open.substack.com/pub/crossi…
I will never, ever be booking @Iberia again. Delays happen, but the staff on site and on the phone were universally rude and ambivalent to every passenger around us. Same with their partners @British_Airways. Breathtakingly bad. Contrast that with literally every other airline we called or talked to for different options - they were all patient and helpful.
