GP @a16z @speedrun 🌱 | former PM @RiotGames @TencentGlobal | dark souls fan & dad to 3 zerglings
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2008
- Tweets7.7K
- Following2.8K
- Followers44.8K
- Likes17.4K
Jon Lai retweeted
Excited to share that we've raised $11M in pre-seed funding to bring Lume to more homes.
Our lamp that does your chores, was also recently named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2026!
Grateful to everyone who believed in @bySyncere early. Back to shipping.
Jon Lai retweeted
Ben Horowitz's message to early-stage founders on betting on yourself, the doubts that do the most damage, and why fear means you're doing it right:
"Your job is to make your bet pay off. You believed in yourself enough to do it. There are gonna be many times when you question that bet and you question that belief, but that gets you nothing."
"The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you. It's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them."
"I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22 years old and he had a tremendous doubt about whether he was gonna make it."
"It's not what you feel. It's what you do. You're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen
Jon Lai retweeted
~1 in 3 teams we accept for speedrun are reapplicants
they use the 3-6 months between applications to:
- narrow in on a stronger idea
- find a cofounder
- get to traction
a "no" is temporary
keep building - that's all that matters
Jon Lai retweeted
Ben Horowitz on the two skills that will matter more than ever before in an AI world: creativity and relationships.
"I think those are things that are hard to get out of today's AI in a very good way. So if you don't have instincts around those things, I don't know if all the AI in the world could help you. Whereas the grind-them-out tasks, AI is already really good at."
"Do you have original ideas? Can you establish and maintain very high quality, high fidelity relationships with people off the rip? I think people don't think about that enough."
"One big advantage I think that we have is we really look for that. Many just ignore that whole thing, like it's not a thing... It's a thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @Tocelot
SR008 APPS ARE OPEN. Up to $1M + $10M+ in credits. 12 weeks in SF, Feb through April. Built to help you land capital, customers and talent. Apply by Nov 1: speedrun.a16z.com/apply
Jon Lai retweeted
Highly recommend @speedrun! Had an amazing experience
Applications for @speedrun are now open! If you’re an ambitious, high agency founder - we want to meet you
We’ll bring the capital, customers, & talent - you bring yourself and your wildest ideas
Speedrun is an inception fund. We are your first believers - writing the first check and growing with you as your startup scales
Speedrun founders get up to $1M in funding and over $10M in startup credits across compute, cloud, marketing, and more
Speedrun is for founders with big ideas. We have teams creating new forms of datacenters, constructing orbital space platforms, disrupting 50yo vertical software incumbents, building novel AI doctors, and more
In a world where AI has made building easier than ever, the only cap on what a startup can achieve is the limit of their ambition. So we write the first check precisely on the ideas that sound a little crazy
apply at the link below before apps close on Nov 1st
Jon Lai retweeted
I’m very fortunate to work with the team at a16z for my entire entrepreneurial career, and can confidently say their team creates an unfair advantage to turn your vision into reality! Great partners and great ppl
Applications for @speedrun are now open! If you’re an ambitious, high agency founder - we want to meet you
We’ll bring the capital, customers, & talent - you bring yourself and your wildest ideas
Speedrun is an inception fund. We are your first believers - writing the first check and growing with you as your startup scales
Speedrun founders get up to $1M in funding and over $10M in startup credits across compute, cloud, marketing, and more
Speedrun is for founders with big ideas. We have teams creating new forms of datacenters, constructing orbital space platforms, disrupting 50yo vertical software incumbents, building novel AI doctors, and more
In a world where AI has made building easier than ever, the only cap on what a startup can achieve is the limit of their ambition. So we write the first check precisely on the ideas that sound a little crazy
apply at the link below before apps close on Nov 1st
Jon Lai retweeted
Introducing Codos: The first virtual Chief AI Officer.
AI is crushing all benchmarks but real companies still struggle to see P&L impact.
Codos interviews employees, deploys automations across all functions and gets smarter over time while running on your own servers.
Our NASDAQ-listed and PE-backed customers are adding millions to their bottom line months ahead of schedule and we are proud of the first results we deliver.
It’s time to turn the 500BN AI-transformation market into software and unlock the impact for the real economy.
Jon Lai retweeted
Today we’re launching Keythorn.
AI isn’t just thinking anymore. It’s moving money, talking to customers, and taking action. Every new agent brings new risk.
The future runs on AI. We’re building the insurance for it.
Meet @TryKeythorn ↓
Jon Lai retweeted
Day 45 of 70 to hit $1m by a16z @speedrun demo day.
We've grown $0->860k in 8 wks...
With 1m in our sights, the bottleneck is shifting.
Proof of demand was the most important early signal for our business.
It helped sharpem our thesis, market, and ICP
Growing fast forced us out of our comfort zone and helped us maximized learnings
We now have a playbook that works. We know how to acquire at a very fast clip.
Now we're focused on scale.
So that our 100th customer has the same experience as our 10th.
Sometimes the key to growth is growth itself.
Time to scale.
Jon Lai retweeted
"There is a finite number of good ideas."
One of them is sharing our 25 minute talk with @thejessezhang, CEO & Co-founder of @DecagonAI. Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 - First Startup & Lessons From Loki
1:51 - How Do You Find Product-Market Fit?
2:54 - How Do You Find the Right Problem to Solve?
5:10 - Choosing the Right Co-Founder
5:57 - Competing in a Crowded Market
7:27 - Why Zheng Chose Against Forward Deployed Services
9:16 - When Should You Say No to a Deal?
10:07 - How To Close Your First 10 Customers
11:27 - Should Startups Target SMEs or Enterprise?
12:18 - How Should Startups Price Their First Customers?
14:37 - Building a Defensible AI Company
18:32 - How Should a Startup CEO Spend Their Time?
20:02 - What Should You Look for When Hiring?
22:17 - What Do You Look for as an Angel Investor?
22:49 - What Would You Build Today if Not for Decagon?
Jon Lai retweeted
Today we're announcing @metalraise $4.5M Seed Round, led by @a16z @speedrun / @ycombinator.
With participation from @pioneer_fund, Rebel Fund, @gaingelsvc, @indusvalleycap, @teamignitevc, @PhazeVentures and others.
In less than a year of launch, and with six consecutive quarters of 30-80% q/q growth, Metal is tracking for multi-million annual revenue run rate by the end of FY2026.
The core missing infrastructure in private markets has been an investor memory layer, an effort that we've been working on for three years. Today, for the first time, we are publishing our thesis on how private markets will evolve in the years ahead. See press release in comments below!
Jon Lai retweeted
Excited to announce that @OneWillAI is backed by a16z @speedrun, @EssenceVenture, Tall VC, and amazing angels!
After a decade of working on machine learning for databases, @lmwnshn and I graduated with our PhDs this year from @andy_pavlo's @CMUDB. We got sufficiently annoyed with how AI agents worked that we decided to start a company to fix that.
OneWill’s core mission is to revive 50 years of database ideas for the AI era. This investment also allows us to give back a little to our roots in databases and open-source education. Stay tuned! We’re also open to more ideas, just join our Discord server (link below) or catch us at VLDB 2026 this week (Wed to Fri).
Jon Lai retweeted
only moving this fast b/c of the incredible team at @speedrun
Shout out to @andrewchen @tkexpress11 @Tocelot for believing in a crazy vision; helping us protect human autonomy with machine autonomy
Congrats @efectual and @mara_defense (SR004) who are building the future of anti-drone defense systems!
Jon Lai retweeted
Announcing Primateria, an AI-native scientific lab.
We’re starting with one of the hardest problems in quantum mechanics: the electronic Schrödinger equation.
Our first model tackles it in transition metals, a notoriously difficult regime.
Try it: app.primateria.com/
Jon Lai retweeted
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 ↓
Jon Lai retweeted
excited to share that we’re backed by @speedrun!
@michael_wu8 and i started truli after bringing our own supplement to market and running into the challenges of regulatory compliance. what should have been a straightforward process turned into hours of digging through FDA regulations, guidance documents, and evolving requirements.
as we spoke with more brands, we realized this wasn't just our problem. functional ingredients, peptides, GLP-1 products, retailer policies, and increasing scrutiny around product claims are making compliance more complex every year, yet most teams still rely on manual reviews, disconnected tools, and expensive consultants.
that's why we're building truli: AI-native compliance for food, beverage, and supplement companies across the entire product lifecycle. we’re working with leading global cpg brands to modernize compliance and enable innovation, not slow it down.
huge thank you to the entire speedrun team for believing in our vision, and to every customer, advisor, and regulatory expert who's helped shape what we're building.
if you're navigating compliance in food, beverage, or supplements, we'd love to chat.
back to building.
Jon Lai retweeted
Today, we're introducing Mach-1 Additive, a 35 billion parameter model that can inference without ever multiplying by a weight. At 1.7 bits per weight, Mach-1 recovers 95% of the performance of the original full precision model, Qwen 3.6 35b, across 12 agentic and reasoning benchmarks, while being 10x smaller.
At 7GB, Mach-1 comfortably fits on consumer laptops with speeds of up to 120 tokens per second, making local inference not just feasible but useful.
Unlike algorithms like BitNet, our approach requires minimal retraining, under 15 GPU hours, making it scalable to massive LLMs. Over the coming weeks, we will be announcing and serving models of up to 3 trillion parameters compressed using our algorithm. For now, you can visit our website to play with Mach-1 directly in your browser, or download our desktop app.
We couldn't be more excited to launch Mach-1. We're looking forward to an energy efficient future for AI, powered by scaled intelligence density.
Jon Lai retweeted
Design ∞ code loop, but 10x better.
Introducing the browser agent in @pendev.
Import HTML/React to fully editable canvas, make edits/variations, export back to code.
Build with the browser & the canvas at the same time, the ultimate combo. Download today.