Founder and managing partner @collabfund.
United States
Joined April 2008
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- Followers17.3K
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Craig Shapiro ⚽️ retweeted
We laughed, we learned, we decided it's time to get some new artwork for the office.
Craig Shapiro ⚽️ retweeted
We just wrapped up our ~40th onsite at Collaborative Fund. Some of the topics covered:
- How we would invest $100 million into a single company (most popular answer: SpaceX)
- Fundraising strategy for portfolio companies and our own funds
- The shocking amount of value in durable consumer brands (did you know Crocs outperformed NVIDIA 3x+ this year?)
- Portfolio construction: where to stay disciplined and where to bend the constraints in this environment
- Market broadly: interest rates, debt, security, frothiness. What is the investment backdrop going to look like a year from now?
- Multiple thesis deep dives into consumer robotics, agentic infrastructure, fusion, and more!
This feature seems small. It isn’t.
In consumer AI, models will increasingly commoditize. The winners will be determined by everything around the model: context, taste, memory, and user experience.
Tomo Selective Context
Tomo is in 50,000+ group chats, and it knows what you've told it in your DMs.
So we built selective context: Tomo keeps two versions of you. One has the context of everything you tell it in your DMs. The other in group chats includes only selective context deemed valuable and safe to share.
Your job, your hobbies and how much you love karaoke make the cut. Your health, your love life and anything you said in confidence don't:
Love this quote from Dylan and very much agree!
"And there's other things where designers, with lateral thinking and context and past experience, just have these skills that models do not have, and are able to make associations with real-world inputs that are moments in culture, or the feeling that you're trying to evoke."
"The old-school, slow way, the long way, the stupid way... it may not be the most profitable... But it will always be the best way."
—Anthony Bourdain
Craig Shapiro ⚽️ retweeted
Thanks for the kind words, Craig! Already a fan and customer of several of these companies. Excited to support what’s next with you and the Collab Fund team!
I’m proud to announce that Washington Capitals forward, Tom Wilson, has invested in Collaborative Fund.
Our team spends a lot of time thinking about the companies we back, but we’re also deliberate about who backs us. In the same way a successful startup can be choosy about what checks to accept, we think our limited partners say as much about us, and what we care about, as our investments do. The source of capital matters.
One of the things I am most proud of is the eclectic group of backers we’ve attracted over the years – including the likes of Nicholas Negroponte, Chad Hurley, Pharrell Williams, Shepard Fairey, and even Sesame Street. Technologists, entrepreneurs, artists, and people who see the world differently. I look at that group and feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude that they’ve trusted us.
Today, I’m excited to officially welcome Tom as an investor in our fund.
If you didn’t grow up going to Caps games with your dad like I did, allow me a brief primer on why for 13 brilliant seasons I’ve been watching Tom establish himself as one of the best hockey players in the world.
Tom came into the league at age 19 as a first-round pick who mostly hit people, a job he was extremely good at. Plenty of players make a fine career out of it. Instead, somewhere in his twenties, he decided to become a different kind of player, so he put in the work and brought back the receipts: back-to-back 30-goal seasons, a Stanley Cup in 2018, and a spot on the top line of the 2026 Canadian Olympic team.
Our industry likes to write lists about what founders should be: relentless, coachable, obsessed. The lists aren't wrong, they're just not that useful, because no one has ever become relentless by reading about it. You learn it by doing it.
Tom is doing it. He is the definition of grit, hardwork, and resilience. Those are qualities I value in entrepreneurs and in anyone I want to build something with.
Tom is already a fan and customer of several of our portfolio companies. I’m excited to build on that connection as we continue backing companies pushing the world forward, especially in sports, health, and wellness (and dogs!).
Let’s go, #43!
"Anthropic spends more on tokens (at list price) than on payroll"
Wild stat 🤯
Also wonder if that will be the norm for most businesses in the not too distant future
A list of stats from the Anthropic S-1:
- NDR is ~900%
- Revenue per employee is over $6.6M, up from about $1.4M a year earlier
- Revenue went from $41M three years ago to $16.3B in the first six months of 2026
- Quarterly revenue went from $4.7B in Q1 to $11.6B in Q2
- Q2 2026 was the first profitable quarter: $974M in operating income ($1.7B operating loss the quarter before)
- Adjusted operating income was $1.6B in the first half of 2026, up from a $1.8B adjusted loss a year earlier
- Revenue grew 1,368% year over year in Q2, while compute and infrastructure costs grew 300%
- Compute went from 251% of revenue to 48% in five quarters
- The value of Anthropic’s own internal Claude usage grew 250x from January to September 2026
- Anthropic spends more on tokens (at list price) than on payroll
- Over 1,900 customers pay $1M+ a year, and about 250 pay $10M+
- Customers paying $100K+ went from 950 to over 11,900 in a year
- Over half of the Fortune 500 pays $100K+ a year
- Those Fortune 500 customers still spend less than 0.1% of their total expenses with Anthropic
- The top 5% of Claude Code users spend roughly 20x what non-users on Claude Enterprise do
- About 40 million smaller customers
- $72.4B of the $80.7B first-half net loss is an accounting charge on convertible notes (not operating losses)
- Nearly $800B in compute commitments over 10 years
$141.1B raised in total, with over $130B in cash and short-term investments
- Nearly half of revenue comes through Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s cloud marketplaces, all of which also compete with Claude
- A single share held by the seven co-founders carries 50.1% of the vote
- That share is redeemed for nothing if fewer than three founders remain
The company is Loyal and the drug is called LOY-002, which is a daily pill aimed at extending healthy lifespan in senior dogs. 😊
I’m proud to announce that Washington Capitals forward, Tom Wilson, has invested in Collaborative Fund.
Our team spends a lot of time thinking about the companies we back, but we’re also deliberate about who backs us. In the same way a successful startup can be choosy about what checks to accept, we think our limited partners say as much about us, and what we care about, as our investments do. The source of capital matters.
One of the things I am most proud of is the eclectic group of backers we’ve attracted over the years – including the likes of Nicholas Negroponte, Chad Hurley, Pharrell Williams, Shepard Fairey, and even Sesame Street. Technologists, entrepreneurs, artists, and people who see the world differently. I look at that group and feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude that they’ve trusted us.
Today, I’m excited to officially welcome Tom as an investor in our fund.
If you didn’t grow up going to Caps games with your dad like I did, allow me a brief primer on why for 13 brilliant seasons I’ve been watching Tom establish himself as one of the best hockey players in the world.
Tom came into the league at age 19 as a first-round pick who mostly hit people, a job he was extremely good at. Plenty of players make a fine career out of it. Instead, somewhere in his twenties, he decided to become a different kind of player, so he put in the work and brought back the receipts: back-to-back 30-goal seasons, a Stanley Cup in 2018, and a spot on the top line of the 2026 Canadian Olympic team.
Our industry likes to write lists about what founders should be: relentless, coachable, obsessed. The lists aren't wrong, they're just not that useful, because no one has ever become relentless by reading about it. You learn it by doing it.
Tom is doing it. He is the definition of grit, hardwork, and resilience. Those are qualities I value in entrepreneurs and in anyone I want to build something with.
Tom is already a fan and customer of several of our portfolio companies. I’m excited to build on that connection as we continue backing companies pushing the world forward, especially in sports, health, and wellness (and dogs!).
Let’s go, #43!
Craig Shapiro ⚽️ retweeted
Our CEO @dillonrolnick sat down with @eastdakota, CEO of @Cloudflare, for a wide-ranging conversation about agents, the future of the internet, and the fight for digital sovereignty.
Thanks to the @usv team for hosting!
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
A real loss for the graffiti community, especially in London.
Mysterious graffiti artist 'Helch' behind numerous iconic murals has died thesun.co.uk/news/40218333/m…
John spoke at a Collab Fund summit.
This quote from him is such a good articulation of our worldview.
"Business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity."
"Capitalism created the possibility of the win win win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost.
The biggest mistake people make they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that @JeffBezos and @elonmusk somehow stole the money from the people.
They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound.
All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are.
Where does all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well.
This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world."
— @iamjohnmackey
Craig Shapiro ⚽️ retweeted
In addition to everything you mentioned @dens, please factor in that you inspired a whole generation of entrepreneurs (including me) by showing them that:
- you can build a cool startup from NYC
- you can build something fun and that you care about
- you can persevere & stick to trying to build what you're excited about no matter what (it's the journey, not the destination!)
Thank you Dennis & team!
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Craig Shapiro ⚽️ retweeted
Standing in line for the first gold object made via alchemy
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
Collab Fund: proud investors since June 2023 -- before any of this existed.
Congrats Kyle and the @MarathonFusion team. Just getting started. 🚀
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.