Avantika Daing

I spent the last week in San Francisco meeting founders, CEOs, and people at the frontier of AI. Some observations I thought were worth sharing: 1. There’s a massive AI gold rush, and everyone knows. I met founders from London, Berlin, Croatia, and a dozen other countries who flew in to raise money and find customers. 2. Founders are raising venture capital to build personal brands on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. If the product fails, they can promote other products or become full-time creators. Career insurance. 3. AI influencers are PRINTING money. I heard of creators with 100,000 followers making $1M a year. AI companies have more cash than channels, and nearly every tech and career influencer I know has pivoted to AI. 4. AI companies are sponsoring billboards, buses, cafes, and crazy parties. AI marketing spend is insane right now. 5. But standing out has never been harder. There are 100 CRMs, 100 event planning tools, and 100 AI SDRs. When anyone can build the product, branding and storytelling decide the winner. 6. B2A (business to agents) is the new B2B. Marketers now create content and design products to sell to agents. Have you ever read a blog post meant for agents? It’s a little dystopian. 7. Many founders have a doomer AI mindset: pessimistic about the future, optimistic about their company. The people closest to the technology are often the most paranoid. 8. Company “aura” is a hot topic. CEOs are obsessed with making their companies sexy enough to attract top talent. With more missionaries than mercenaries, the founder’s vision matters more than ever. 9. I met so many people stuck in the abyss: wealthy enough to be choosy about their careers, not wealthy enough to stop working. Most are figuring out what’s next in the AI world. 10. Everyone is selling data. It’s not unusual to hear of a founder selling their company’s Slack data for half a million dollars. 11. Startup creation is becoming a factory: Y Combinator, HF0, Founders Inc. I visited a Founders Inc demo day that felt like a high school science fair, but with companies instead of volcanoes. Some founders were 16 and had already raised venture money. 12. Hacker houses are booming because founders want to compress time. At one, founders gave themselves six months to hit product-market fit. They eat, sleep, and work in the same house. 13. The gap between SF and everywhere else keeps widening. People here are more AI-pilled than ever, yet most people outside tech hubs have never heard of Instinct. 14. SF might be the only place where saying you work at Google makes people question your judgment. As in, why aren’t you building something? 15. The new flex is tiny teams. Gamma does $100M+ in revenue with 50 employees ($2M per employee). Five years ago, headcount was the flex. I love my trips to SF. Thank you to everyone who welcomed me and showed me around. Happy to be back home. See you soon!

The creator of Claude Code teaches in 1h 27min how to work with AI agents like they do at Anthropic Subtitled in Spanish. He hasn't written a single line of code by hand since November of last year. This is how he works: > He starts 80% of his tasks in plan mode > He always uses the best model, because in the end it spends fewer tokens > He has 5 agents working at once and pulls up to 30 pull requests a day > He doesn't give his agents rigid steps: he gives them tools and a goal On his team, everyone programs. The product manager, the designer, and even the finance guy. Tonight, instead of a series, watch this. Save it 🔖

This is the best video of the week! 🎤😂 In a music scene that has been producing next to nothing for years I’d rather listen to an old banger with today’s real “rock stars”, made by SI

Advances in longevity and robotics are urgent & necessary to counter the decline in human births. Even if a country’s rate goes to 2.1 tomorrow & its population would keep shrinking for 50 yrs. Workers who would be paying taxes in 2045 have already been born or not born

🤯 我靠，这太疯狂了 FDA 批准了首个人类年龄逆转试验 一位哈佛教授证明：可以在 6 周内将小鼠的衰老逆转 75%，治愈了失明，逆转了阿尔茨海默病、多发性硬化症、肌萎缩侧索硬化症、肾脏和肝脏疾病，然后证实它在猴子身上也有效 现在轮到人类了 Life Biosciences 筹集了 8000 万美元来实现这一目标 用他的话说：“眼睛只是开始，我们相信我们可以治疗每一种组织，全身都能重置。”

Zuck including Palmer in the new VR launch is legendary.

YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever. In this episode of the Lightcone, @garrytan, @snowmaker, @sdianahu, and @harjtaggar dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it. 01:06 — Startups Are Moving From Bits to Atoms 03:29 — Why AI Is Making Hard Tech Easier 05:21 — Defense, Manufacturing, and the Return of Hard Tech 09:48 — AI Compute Is Becoming a Physical Infrastructure Problem 12:34 — Robotics Is Approaching Its ChatGPT Moment 15:40 — Software Isn’t Dead. It’s Becoming the Harness 17:59 — Why AI Startups Are Growing Faster 22:52 — The Hidden Boom in Data and RL Environments 27:08 — Why Robotics Will Need Specialized Models 29:38 — The Rise of the Solo Founder 32:54 — Why Experienced Founders Are Back 34:59 — What Founders Should Do Right Now

Countdown to the future Elon's robots are coming Optimus 🚀🌔🪐💫🦾 $TSLA

A woman lived to 117 without cancer, cardiovascular disease, or neurodegenerative disease. What does her biology look like? Her telomeres were exceptionally short, and her blood and immune cells showed clear signs of aging. Yet her epigenetic age was approximately 23 years younger than her chronological age. She also had very low inflammation, protective genetic variants, and a diverse gut microbiome. She followed a Mediterranean diet, ate plenty of yogurt, walked, gardened, read, played piano, slept well, and remained socially active too. We can’t derive a longevity formula from one exceptional person, but I think her biology offers a fascinating glimpse of how aging and disease may become uncoupled.

44% of students scoring below 1000 on the SAT say they get all or mostly A’s in school

Arguing humans can’t live much longer is like arguing about the limits to the speed of a transatlantic trip before air travel is invented — Leon Peshkin 👏

Over a decade ago, we led @embracemobile's seed round at @EniacVC, back when it was just an idea and a small team betting on a better way to understand real user experience. Today, @PaloAltoNtwks announced their successful acquisition of the company. @efutoran is the definition of a Human Unicorn. Before Embrace, he co-founded @Scopely and helped build it into one of the largest mobile games publishers in the world, a company that later sold for $4.9 *BILLION*. Most founders would call that a career. Eric called it a starting point, and went on to build Embrace from scratch, solving a problem he'd lived firsthand as an operator. Huge congratulations to Eric and the entire Embrace team on this milestone. Proud to have been on this journey with you since the very beginning!!!

“If you give an additional year of life to everyone on the planet, you generate ~8.3B life-yrs, over 100M lifetimes That’s more than humanity has lost in all wars ever fought I hope there’s a hell for those who intentionally slow [longevity medicines] down” @biogerontology 👏