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Joined March 2019
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Console has been acquired by Palo Alto Networks.
We started Console with the belief that AI would fundamentally change enterprise operations. Today, some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies use Console to automate their business.
Joining Palo Alto Networks will give us more resources and scale to accelerate our vision and bring AI agents to security workflows across Palo Alto Networks’ platforms.
Thank you to our customers, employees and investors who put their trust in us. I’m excited for this next chapter.
paloaltonetworks.com/company…
Andrei Serban retweeted
Applied Compute update:
- crossed $100M annualized revenue run rate up from zero 18 months ago
- raised $350M at $3.25B led by Elad Gil
- 40% of customers use AC for both custom model training + production inference
- inference serving 1T tokens a day after launching 12 weeks ago
- 2X enterprise customers since last raise
- 3X team since January, 85% are researchers and engineers
- Working with customers like Microsoft, Shopify, Harvey, DoorDash, Cognition, Clay, Decagon and others
To move even faster we need people who are extremely technical AND extremely practical. If this is you, please reach out.
Andrei Serban retweeted
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
Spent the last year writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Commanding-Heights.com
Andrei Serban retweeted
@sequoia is leading our Series C at a $1B valuation.
We started Blacksmith in 2024 to make CI faster and less painful. In January we ran 5 million CI jobs a week. Today it's over 90 million and growing, and we’re still early.
ALT Line chart of weekly CI jobs run on Blacksmith, growing from 5.4M in January to 90.5M in October 2026.
Umesh is one of the best. If you're in talent (or looking for a career change), strongly recommend working with him. DM me happy to make an intro
I'm hiring for our Talent Engineering team at @spacexai!
Looking for people who love working with exceptional humans as much as (or more than) building product. A few things that we look for:
1) You’re an engineer who can build things to get the job done, being able to 80/20 most things.
2) You care about people and you've been making intros, supporting founders, and bringing great people together for years, without calling it a job. Your skillset aligns with that of a VC (and you might be one someday!)
3) You’re naturally magnetic in communities. People take your calls because you genuinely love to help and care about them!
4) You don’t wait to be told what to do, you've been a go-getter and can get shit done.
If any of these resonate and you want to be a critical part to the inner workings of a frontier lab, then I'd love to meet!
👋 Warm intros through a mutual otherwise feel free to email me at [email protected]!
Andrei Serban retweeted
Console has joined @PaloAltoNtwks.
Read the press release here:
paloaltonetworks.com/company…
Andrei Serban retweeted
We raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV in March, valuing @useblacksmith at $550M. We somehow never got around to announcing it until now; this year has been pretty busy.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is how we were both right and wrong about what was coming. When we raised our Series A in April 2025, we believed AI was going to lead to a lot more code being written, and that all of that code would still need to be built, tested, and validated before it could be merged. That part was right, but what we underestimated was how fast it would happen.
I have a suspicion that something changed over the holidays. Opus 4.5 came out in November; a lot of developers had time to really use Claude Code over the holidays. I think a lot of people who were still skeptical went back to work in January having fully embraced it.
Since the start of the year, the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith has grown more than 7x. We see customers adopt coding agents, produce way more PRs, and then run into the next problem: how do you actually validate all of this code and get it merged?
There are a lot of people working on making code easier to produce. What I find strange is how little attention goes into everything that has to happen after the code is written and before it can be merged. The labs and hyperscalers are mostly focused elsewhere, yet developers and agents spend an enormous fraction of their time here.
A lot of companies touch parts of this problem. For us, it’s *the* problem. We started Blacksmith by building a much better CI cloud, but ultimately what we care about is helping developers and agents validate and merge code faster. I sometimes tell candidates that if we don’t solve the whole thing, I’m not sure who will.
I don’t think we fully appreciate yet how much more software is going to be produced. The infrastructure we have today wasn’t designed for that volume. There’s a lot we need to rethink from first principles, and I think we’re barely scratching the surface.
If you’re extremely good at what you do and this is a problem you want to spend the next several years working on, we’re hiring in SF and NYC: blacksmith.sh/careers
Andrei Serban retweeted
Introducing Assert (assert.dev): the command center for reviewing engineering work
Watch me review a new feature with Assert's product diff: a UI generated by our agent using mock data. It has completely changed how we work
Andrei Serban retweeted
life update: finally graduated college
i spent my last semester working in person at @console__ in SF while taking class every Thursday in person at Cornell in Ithaca
so for a semester, Thursdays were basically SF → DC → Syracuse, cab to Ithaca, class, then the whole thing in reverse so I could be back in office Friday
very normal plan
somewhere in there I was doing homework, studying for exams, and trying to ship useful code
objectively absurd way to finish college, but I’m really glad I did it
Cornell meant a lot to me. Console means a lot to me. grateful to @andreiserban and @ChandraNeal for letting me attempt this deeply unreasonable commute
officially done with school now, back to creating shareholder value
Andrei Serban retweeted
"I cannot tell you the level of stress that came out of my body the minute I saw that."
That's Daniel Macias, Head of IT at @cursor_ai, describing the Monday morning he woke up to find Console had already resolved five access requests before he touched his phone.
Cursor has grown from 80 to 750+ employees in under a year. Danny's team is four people.
Console handles the majority of Tier 1 and Tier 2 requests automatically. Finance uses it to route credit card approvals. Recruiting uses it to provision interview environments. Office operations is up next.
Danny's first hire after bringing Console in wasn't a support person. It was a Staff IT Systems Engineer hired to build.
"The only reason we were able to do that was because of the value Console provided on day one."
Link to the full case study here! bit.ly/49e5rF9
Andrei Serban retweeted
🔊 Proactive Playbooks are live
Instead of waiting for a user request, Console can act on events and schedules automatically:
→ Onboarding kicks off the moment a new hire appears in your HRIS
→ Offboarding runs as soon as a departure is logged
→Access gets reviewed before it becomes a problem
Agents don’t wait. Neither should your team.
Proactive Playbooks are live in @console__ .
Console can act on events and schedules automatically: no ticket or request necessary. A new hire appears in your HRIS and onboarding is already running. A departure gets logged and access is already gone.
Agentic proactivity is the way forward. This makes it real.
IT work doesn’t stop with basic Tier 1 requests.
Tier 2 is more complex: building new automations, investigating and resolving multi-system issues, figuring out what to automate next, and handling one-off incidents and escalations. Console Assistant lets you tackle all of it, start to finish, from a single UI.
This is how people expect to work today. The teams that will get the most out of AI aren't waiting for better tools. They're building with platforms that can reason and improve alongside the models.
Our early access customers are using it hundreds of times per week to do the work of multiple IT engineers. This is truly a new way of doing IT.
I learned more in 3 months at @Rippling than I did in 3 years building Fuzzbuzz.
At Fuzzbuzz, we spent 3 years figuring everything out from first principles. How to build product. How to structure a team. How to sell to enterprise. How to organize reporting structures. A lot of it didn’t work, so we’d go back to the drawing board and try again.
And we thought we were doing well. We thought we had good processes and we thought we were moving fast enough.
Then I joined Rippling and it was 100x better. It just didn’t even occur to me that it could be that good.
That’s the thing about not working at a company that’s winning…you have no idea what it actually takes to win because you’ve never won before. You literally don’t know what’s possible.
But at Rippling, I could see what made them fast. The pods structure: a founder and an engineer working together like a mini startup - it was small and ad hoc; there was no formal process, so you could just ship.
I saw how their execs operated. How their marketing team moved.
You don’t have to guess at what works when you can watch it work.
And when we started Console, we didn’t copy everything Rippling did. It’s a much larger company, and they have a different process and different product.
But seeing the bar changed what I thought was possible.
We’re too small to do full pods right now, but as we grow, we’ll probably hire founders and run that playbook. The point isn’t to replicate everything - it’s to know what good looks like.
When you’ve seen teams win, you can build like you know how to win too.
Welcoming Laura to the @console__ team as our first SDR!
Laura was the #1 performer at @AlphaSights in 2025. Not your typical place to hire an SDR from. She wasn't selling tech software.
But she was doing exactly what we needed: deep research on the right people at the right companies, then getting them on calls.
She had a strong grasp of how the world actually works - the kind of thing most SDR training focuses on teaching. She already had it.
When I told her this role would involve a lot of cold calling, she said, "Perfect, I'm in."
High energy. All-American and team captain in Track & Field. Holds the school record in the 1500m at Claremont McKenna.
It doesn't get much better than that for a first SDR.
Welcome to Console, Laura!
There is no gap between what Thrive says and what they do. Every firm talks about being founder-first, going deep with their founders, etc., but I've never quite seen a firm do it the way they do.
They partner with us in a way that has set an unreasonably high bar for other firms. They have always been our first call when something is going wrong, and I don't expect that to change.
We are pleased to announce the close of Thrive X. Exceeding $10 billion, Thrive X comprises $1 billion designated for early-stage investments and $9 billion designated for growth-stage investments. We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead.
We view Thrive as a company. Our product is partnership - the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders, and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work, and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive.
We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back. In this moment, exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments.
Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life.
We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support.
We are grateful for the trust our Limited Partners place in us, and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage.
thrivecap.com/thrive-x
NYC IT leaders: join us for good drinks, great conversation, and a live magician (to keep things interesting) on Feb 19th.
We won't have any panels or pitches - just a chance to hang out with fellow IT operators.
We've done these before with leaders from @cursor_ai , @webflow , and @intapp , and it's always a strong group and a good time.
If you're in the area next week, we'd love to have you.
Link to register in comments 👇
Spots are limited and they usually fill up pretty fast, so register early if you want to come → luma.com/o6t5lr2z
