managing partner at SPRY VC| I help people get liquidity via secondaries| crypto enthusiast | RTs ≠ endorsements
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2009
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The next wave of solo millionaires won’t just use AI for content.
They’ll use it to simulate the team that wealthy people have always used to move faster.
open.substack.com/pub/100cof…
🤖 Made with AI
sequoia taylor retweeted
This is spot on, and why I say a French exec making $130k euros a year has a better quality of life than two overworked undersexed tech couple in Marin making a combined $750k
An interesting theme lately in the American expat community in Western Europe, especially higher earning corporate types (e.g. €200-300K/year), is the feeling of being unable to move back home to the US.
Few reasons...
Many who moved in the years after COVID sold their homes when rates were closer to zero than the rates now. Now that same home is ~20% more expensive while mortgage rates are 2x higher. So the monthly cost of housing like-for-like went up literally 100% in just 3-5 years.
They've gotten used to the European way of life (e.g. no or maybe just one car, easy train and airport access) and its far less intense commercial and career culture... so fewer working hours and more vacations and significant employee protections (i.e. hard to be fired legally).
This is great while living in Europe... a €250K household income is massive even post-tax considering the low relative cost of health care, education, transport, housing, etc...
...but dropping themselves back into US society... especially in a major metro area like NY, SF, Chicago, even Miami now... at age 40-50 with kids... is largely impractical.
Many Europeans would be shocked to learn that ~$250K/year in the US is incomparable to that same level of earnings in a major Western European city like London or Amsterdam or Paris.
I'd estimate the income needed in the US to match the overall quality of life you'd enjoy in one of those European cities... is around $500-750K/year.
Wild.
sequoia taylor retweeted
holy shit, they just killed Siri, Google Assistant, Gemini and the app store
sequoia taylor retweeted
By Tuesday, almost anything Claude helps you write will carry an invisible stamp, down to the wedding toast and the cover letter. Police departments and schools can apply for the scanner that reads it, but if you're the one paying Anthropic $20 a month, you're not allowed to run it on your own writing.
The stamp is hidden in which words Claude picks. Every time it chooses a word, it leans a tiny bit toward certain options based on a secret key, and over enough words that adds up to a pattern a scanner can spot. It survives copy and paste. Anthropic says it can survive some editing too.
It also doesn't care how much of the writing was yours. Anthropic's own help page says a hit means Claude touched the text, so a cover letter you wrote at midnight and asked Claude to tighten up can get flagged right alongside one it wrote from scratch. Anthropic even admits a positive result isn't fully conclusive. So you can be judged by a test you're not allowed to take, using a scanner its own maker says can be wrong.
What gets me is that no law made them do this here.
The EU's AI Act requires the stamp inside Europe and stops at the border. A freelancer in Ohio or a college kid in Texas is nowhere near it. OpenAI read the exact same law and only stamps ChatGPT for users in the EU, and everyone else stays unmarked unless a developer turns it on.
OpenAI also knows exactly what this costs. Back in 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI had a watermark that caught 99.9% of ChatGPT text and kept it on the shelf anyway. An internal survey found nearly 30% of users would use ChatGPT less if it had a watermark and a competitor didn't, and 69% thought detectors would get people falsely accused.
Anthropic looked at those numbers and signed up to be the competitor with the watermark, worldwide, in places where no law asked for it.
The standard excuse is that a public scanner would teach people how to scrub the stamp. I get that, and it's a fair reason to keep it away from random strangers on the internet. Nobody's asking for that. Let a paying customer check their own text from inside their own account, a few times a day. If a school can run your kid's essay through it, your kid should get to see the result first.
anthropic is about to watermark the text claude writes for you, worldwide, starting tuesday. the detector goes to regulators, journalists and big enterprises. everyone except the person who paid for the text.
so your cold email, your linkedin post, the resume you rewrote three times can get flagged as claude by some hr tool or editor, and you can't even run the check yourself to see what they'll see.
openai only does this in the eu. anthropic rolled it out everywhere.
you pay them monthly and they build a snitch layer on top of your work.
sequoia taylor retweeted
i don’t see how these guys go another 60 days without being acquired
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
sequoia taylor retweeted
He’s very much underrated. People barely talk about him. Dude lost his dad Steve Jobs to cancer when he was 20 and ended up building a $1B+ fund focused on fighting cancer, backing biotech, AI drug discovery and cancer research.
Barely does interviews, stays out of the spotlight. Could’ve spent his life doing literally anything with that last name but chose this instead. Pretty fucking cool tbh.
sequoia taylor retweeted
We combine customer demand to negotiate bulk discounts with AI labs and data centers.
500+ models available (including all frontier models)
ZDR available
Try us: CheaperInference.com
sequoia taylor retweeted
My favorite part of the Anthropic S-1 is how they casually list the risk of killing humanity in between interest rate and customer concentration risks
sequoia taylor retweeted
A ONE-PERSON BIOTECH ACQUI-HIRE! BIG PHARMA LOOK OUT!
sequoia taylor retweeted
For non-lawyers: This is a HUGE story! Weil is legal royalty.
Founded in 1931. $2.1 billion in revenue last year. One of the most powerful law firms on Wall Street.
Lehman Brothers. General Motors. Enron. Weil handled their bankruptcies.
These are the lawyers you call when your company’s collapse is going to end up in a history book.
Now they reportedly need restructuring counsel themselves.
A wind-down would be a stunning end to a 95-year-old institution.
How does this happen?
NEW: Brian Resnick from Davis Polk restructuring team now on scene at Weil and wind-down now being actively discussed among options:
ft.com/content/69ccfcb0-3f5e…
sequoia taylor retweeted
This man is worst than Adolf Hitler.
King Leopold II is not demonized like Hitler because his victims were Black Africans — and Black lives have never mattered to the people who built their wealth on our suffering.
He killed over 20 million innocent Congolese, and oversaw a regime that amputated the hands of countless Africans.
Leopold was even buried in a Catholic church.
Even worse, Europe still honors this colonial monster with monuments, while his African victims are forgotten.
Imagine an African leader doing this to 20 million Europeans.
Would the world ever let them forget ?
Western hypocrisy is absolutely disgusting.
sequoia taylor retweeted
Had a call with an under-the-radar family office. Sharing a glimpse into what some people are quietly building behind the scenes.
Well over $1B on its balance sheet. Owner still young. First generation.
"Buy and build for 25 years. We don’t call them roll-ups. We hold things for the long term and recycle capital at the holdco. We’re not in the news."
What was interesting?
Although the principal is still relatively young, significant effort is already being devoted to educating the next generation.
sequoia taylor retweeted
The billionaires can smell the end of Trump and are now socially positioning for 2028
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has endorsed California's potential new billionaire tax laws, even if it will cost him $8 billion.
"I don't mind paying taxes. The more you make, the more taxes you pay. I'm okay with that. I am the ultimate American Dream."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Jensen Huang has publicly supported California's proposed billionaire tax since at least January 2026, consistent with his later comments, while most other billionaires have opposed it.
forbes.com/sites/zacharyf…
fortune.com/2026/10/20/as-…
sequoia taylor retweeted
lord give me the confidence of a billionaire asking me for the PDF (and the subscription is $25 a month).
nitter.cf/alexrkonrad/status/211…
sequoia taylor retweeted
And y’all were berating her for not fucking with him… one thing about them tables!!!
Meghan Markle’s dad, Thomas, under investigation for ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ of child porn images: report trib.al/kKVQqVH
sequoia taylor retweeted
Around 3% of Muslim children attend full-time Islamic schools. Roughly 70% of Jewish children attend Jewish schools.
Yet only Muslims are constantly lectured about “integration”.
Funny that.
sequoia taylor retweeted
Fiquei feliz que eles não tiveram vergonha do filho ser assim no começo do vídeo. Conheço muita gente que não quer nem levar da maternidade, quem trabalha em hospital sabe do que estou falando…
