Partner, Active Capital. Backing AI-native founders building the future of software. We’re backing at least one new team every month with $500k to $1M checks.
Austin, TX
Joined March 2016
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Agree. The founders I back are out of their depth all the time.
The great ones don't know more than everyone else. They just trust they can figure it out when things get hard (h/t @drgurner).
Charlie is a must follow if you’re into markets
The S&P 500 is now right where it was on June 1. Exactly 6 months of 0.0% returns.
Everyone who hedged using monthly or quarterly index options since May has likely lost all of their premium despite:
- 60% of the S&P 500 constituents are in a bear market
- 85% of the S&P 500 constituents are down -10% or more
- fed rate hike
- rising inflation
- soaring treasury yields
- soaring oil prices
- war
- midterm elections
- 17% yielding CCC junk bonds
- AI company credit default swaps are breaking out and pricing a 30% chance of SoftBank defaulting, 24% chance of Oracle defaulting, 12% chance of Broadcom defaulting and even an 8% chance of Nvidia defaulting
Why has the most popular traditional hedging vehicle failed so spectacularly to hedge the risk, both perceived and real?
- The popularity of the dispersion trade? Firms are shorting volatility in the index to fund longing volatility in its constituents
- 0-DTE options? The massive popularity of same day options pins the index by creating massive put and call walls from dealer hedging flows in the opposite direction of the move
Or something else?
Overlooked deal flow source: commercial real estate brokers.
Every company moving to Texas needs space. The brokers are in that flow.
Two great intros this month.
If you’re a technical, ambitious founder in Austin for Tech Week, I’d love to meet you.
I write $500K pre-seed checks and know where to get the best bbq and tacos in town.
Chris Saum retweeted
Hosting a private super intelligence dinner on November 5th, NYC. Who needs to be there?
I love backing people before they're founders.
You're at a great company, building a product you're proud of. You helped it grow, and you have the proof points to show for it. Now you've seen something nobody else has noticed, and you're itching to go build it.
If that's you, reach out before you quit. I'd love to bet on you early.
My DMs are open.
Agree- I’m working in coffee shops much less these days…
Looking for an FDA attorney.
One of our fast-growing portfolio companies just raised $10M and needs a Regulatory & Compliance Counsel to own manufacturing, clearance and state-level compounding compliance.
Intros welcome. DM me.
My two fastest growing portfolio companies have something weird in common.
One founder was a top ranked League of Legends player.
The other two cofounders play poker nonstop. And they’re really, really good.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Getting elite at anything takes what building a company takes: thousands of hours, losing a lot before you win, and no off switch.
So founders, what’s your unusually impressive thing?
I want to meet you. Drop it below or DM me.
Chris Saum retweeted
Stop using your laptop / Mac mini / VPS
Introducing instabox.sh, cloud computers for AI agents:
- 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM spun up in <1s
- Built-in computer use
- Snapshots for easy cloning
- Persistent files, packages, config
- Public URLs for local ports
We're launching today through an invite-only beta program.
Early access includes 20 vCPU, 40GB RAM for free.
If you want to try, comment or DM me.
Chris Saum retweeted
Today we're launching @agent_relay
Your team’s agents shouldn’t need YOU to copy-paste their conversations.
Agent Relay lets them read each other’s sessions, ask questions, and hand off work across the tools your team already uses.
Keep using the Codex mac app, Claude in the terminal or even tools like Conductor.
Open source. Free to try our cloud.
agentrelay.com
What I look for in pre-revenue founders:
Talent magnet. Can you recruit people who have no business joining you?
Speed. In everything. Hiring, shipping, closing, replying.
Slope. Where you are now matters less than how quickly you get better.
$500k checks, actively investing.
Founders shouldn't starve. But "just take the money" misses the nuance.
Dilution isn't the problem. Raising too much pre-PMF is.
You hire ahead of demand. Burn climbs. Cost structure locks in.
Then growth doesn't show up the way you planned, or takes way longer.
Chris Saum retweeted
👀 We tried to optimize coding performance for Ornith-1.5-122B.
Now the model is free on CommandCode for a limited time.
🫡 Please give it a spin and tell us what you think!
commandcode.ai
Chris Saum retweeted
Daytona is currently the fastest growing company I’ve ever invested in. Congrats on the raise!!
We just raised a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation to build @daytonaio into the Agent Cloud.
@FirstMarkCap led the round, with all key existing investors and angels doubling down.
We're also thrilled to welcome the founders of some generational companies aboard, including @patrickc (Stripe), @tobi (Shopify), @AravSrinivas (Perplexity), @BrendanFoody (Mercor), @oliveur (Datadog), @adamdangelo (Quora) and @ericsyuan (Zoom)
We're a 35-person team. But that's about to change; we're hiring across the board, and we'd love for you to join us.
Nice work @JiweiLi1 !
Aloha!🌺 Meet Ornith-1.5-122B: No Tradeoff Between Strong and Fast
Stronger. Faster. Leaner. Ornith-1.5-122B delivers frontier-level capabilities with exceptional inference efficiency. With superior instruction following, stronger task decomposition, and deeper understanding of real-world workflows, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size, while running on a single NVIDIA DGX card!!
Open weights under the MIT license.
Coding
✅SWE-bench Verified: 0.845
✅TB2.1: 0.813
✅CyberGym: 0.800
✅NL2Repo: 0.512
Agentic
✅HLE: 0.446
✅BrowseComp: 0.785
✅MCP-Atlas: 0.746
✅Toolathlon: 0.708
🤗Hugging Face: huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Orn…
We can’t wait to see what you build with Ornith-1.5-122B.
