I mainly tweet about Food, Music, Coffee and Technology, None of which I really have a clue about, but so far so good.
London
Joined December 2008
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Shakil Khan retweeted
A top Mubadala tech investor is leaving the UAE group to start his own fund.
Scoop with @GeorgeNHammond
Shakil Khan retweeted
Anthropic files for IPO. But who is poised to get the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇
Investors will be sharing nearly $1 TRILLION of proceeds on ~$142b invested. A ~6.5x blended multiple on a huge amount of capital, in just 5 years. 🤯
Note: all those numbers assume a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation.
So let’s dive in 🔎
1) The craziest fact: no VC in the Series A or Series B 🤯
The $124m Series A in May-21 was led by Jaan Tallinn (Skype’s co-founder), with Dustin Moskovitz and Eric Schmidt. It is likely to return ~345x the original capital, or ~$43b to those early angels. Mind-boggling.
The $982m Series B in 2022 was led by... SBF and FTX: it will return ~79x the capital invested. FTX’s $500m would be worth ~$39b today.
Plot twist: the estate sold it for ~$1.3b in 2024, in one of the worst trades ever.
2) The first VCs in: Spark and Menlo are killing it 🏆
Spark will make over $10b from its Anthropic investments.
They first came into the 2023 Series C and are making ~79x their investment in that round. They followed in every single round since, investing $777m in total, now worth ~$11b.
Menlo led the Jan-24 Series D and will make ~30x its money on that round. And finally, Lightspeed’s Series E lead will make ~16x in 18 months.
3) The real winners in $ terms: the strategics 💰
Amazon put a grand total of ~$18b in, mostly via convertible notes converting at ~$2 a share, against $58.90 for the Series H investors.
That gives Amazon ~21% of the company, worth ~$310b. That’s ~17x its investment. 💵
Google is not that far behind: its notes and the $10b it put in this April alone will be worth ~$83b.
And that’s before the compute: Anthropic has committed $110b+ to AWS and $111b to Google Cloud. They are both investors and suppliers, so they win twice.
4) Founders and team: incredible outcome, and giving most of it away 🙏
The seven co-founders hold ~240m shares each. That’s ~$21b per person, or ~$150b combined. 👏
And each of them has pledged 80% of it to philanthropy. So ~$120b will be going to good causes. On top of that, Anthropic put 5% of the company (~$75b) into its own Public Benefit Fund.
And the IPO will mint a huge number of UHNW in the team: they will share ~$355b worth of shares, options and RSUs. Perhaps the biggest and fastest employee wealth creation event in history.
Congrats to Dario, Daniela and everyone involved. Legendary. 👏
Shakil Khan retweeted
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Shakil Khan retweeted
21 years ago I named "Reddit" and everyone said it was a horrible name, but I insisted one day people would say "I read it on reddit" and used my CEO-privilege to overrule everyone + kept the name. Now the company twitter account (unbeknownst to them) is making the joke. Heh.
Shakil Khan retweeted
You must learn to reverse the polarity of the negative energy your best ideas will inevitably generate and turn it into positive, forward momentum.
I love this idea from @dhh:
All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact sound stupid at first.
“You've got to have a high tolerance for people telling you:
-What you're building is stupid.
-What you're building is ugly.
-What you're building is never going to work.
When I get that feedback, I know I'm onto something.
I’ve found that’s often true about products. You enter some domain and you think:
"Who's the best? Can I just copy them?I'll do a slight tweak."
That's not gonna work.
All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact sound stupid at first.
They're not intuitive.
That's where all the value has been locked up. It's locked up in this misconception about what people actually want, because most people don't know what they want.”
Shakil Khan retweeted
Rarely do you see a company have so much positive influence on an ecosystem as Foursquare did on the NYC tech scene… especially to have it end like this.
Kudos to @dens for writing an eloquent post-mortem that takes on that impact, and its sad final chapter, head-on.
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…
Shakil Khan retweeted
When we launched @Neko in the UK two years ago, it took us 10 months before expanding to our second city.
The US demands a whole new pace of execution.
Just three months after launching our first US clinic in NYC, we’re bringing Neko to Miami.
This location is very different from anything we’ve done before! Sharing more soon.
Shakil Khan retweeted
Angel investor lifecycle:
1. Invest $25k in random friend's company
2. Friend's corp random sells in 1 year, make $500k
3. Think you're a genius
4. Throw $5M at 20 random companies
5. None sell, illiquid nightmare
6. 20 yrs pass, feel like an idiot
7. It all hits, repeat
Shakil Khan retweeted
Tesla's Roadster flying stunt is all over your timeline today.
But Neko Health CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne says the Roadster already provided a key lesson for founders: startups are selling a vision to consumers.
"I think companies and founders get too much credit," Hjalmar says.
"The biggest change force that exists in human society is the consumer's willingness to have one future versus another future."
Paint a compelling enough vision, and consumers will vote with their feet, their interest -- and their money.
Which brings us to the Roadster. Nilsonne's previous startup was in climate tech. The focus was on politics, lawmaking and "boring" improvements like biofuel tanks, he says.
"And in all these places, there was always this little, little, company. They were making sports cars for rich people, and everybody thought, 'That's so silly.'"
That company was Tesla, pitching the original Roadster 🚘
"They were the laughing stock of all the climate people, and they ended up having a bigger impact than all these other things put together, and the way they did it was showing consumers a better future, saying, 'Hey, let's live in a future where your car is super fast. It looks awesome. You're gonna be proud to drive it, and of course, it's sustainable.'"
That pitch resonated with consumers above all. And according to Nilsonne, "forced a whole transportation industry to change."
Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast (link below).
Neko CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne was licking his wounds after "crash landing" a climate startup. Then he got a fateful DM from Spotify's Daniel Ek
Together, @HjalmarNilsonne and @eldsjal co-founded @Neko, a $7B startup that calls itself "the most valuable hour you can spend on your health."
After years operating in Europe, Neko recently launched in NYC, where it's quickly built a waitlist of 50,000 people, and started work on 3 more locations. Miami, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are next.
“People sometimes think that there’s some machine, and you go in, and you get a kind of paper receipt telling you if you’re gonna die or not,” Hjalmar tells me. “In reality, it’s the exact opposite.”
On The Upstarts Podcast, Nilsonne talks about the fateful Twitter DM from Ek that got Neko going; why the doctor visit hasn’t changed much in 100 years; and how to keep a startup team motivated while chasing a long-term “moonshot.”
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: a bet-the-company pivot driven by an internal memo he wrote, “Free Is Not Enough.”
A big thanks to this season's sponsors @Atlassian and @chargebee for supporting unfiltered founder interviews like this 🫡
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
01:48 Mapping Your Body In One Hour
03:54 Why The Doctor’s Visit Hasn’t Changed In 100 Years
07:31 Building Four Businesses In One: Devices, Hardware, Software, Clinics
09:22 Breaking Down A Neko Visit First-Hand
12:58 Why Half of Neko’s U.K. Members Never Had A Health Check
16:59 ‘Brutally Efficient With Your Time’: Why Every Second Counts
19:04 Helping Human Doctors, Not Replacing Them
22:40 Delivering Outcomes For the 92% Of Members Not At Risk
26:47 A Climate ‘Crash Landing’ And A DM From Daniel Ek
33:12 Motivating A Team To Chase A Moonshot
37:42 Neko’s Upstart Moment: The ‘Free Is Not Enough’ Memo And Pivot
41:30 Pricing Neko Accessibly For The 99.9%
45:44 What The Tesla Roadster Can Teach Founders About Change
48:33 Space-Age Scan, Old-School Advice: Cut The Coffee
Thanks for watching!
Shakil Khan retweeted
Holy shit the @Neko experience is awesome. The bar for public and private healthcare in the UK is so low that I felt like I’d been teleported 100 years into the future.
Insane value at the equivalent of £25/m.
Shakil Khan retweeted
As cool as it is to skip work for an hour to get a @Neko robe pic, the real value of what we're building is the behavior change that takes place in people after a scan
If you have even the tiniest interest in the future of health & heathcare systems, then this convo between @HjalmarNilsonne + @alexrkonrad is worth a listen ✨
Neko CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne was licking his wounds after "crash landing" a climate startup. Then he got a fateful DM from Spotify's Daniel Ek
Together, @HjalmarNilsonne and @eldsjal co-founded @Neko, a $7B startup that calls itself "the most valuable hour you can spend on your health."
After years operating in Europe, Neko recently launched in NYC, where it's quickly built a waitlist of 50,000 people, and started work on 3 more locations. Miami, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are next.
“People sometimes think that there’s some machine, and you go in, and you get a kind of paper receipt telling you if you’re gonna die or not,” Hjalmar tells me. “In reality, it’s the exact opposite.”
On The Upstarts Podcast, Nilsonne talks about the fateful Twitter DM from Ek that got Neko going; why the doctor visit hasn’t changed much in 100 years; and how to keep a startup team motivated while chasing a long-term “moonshot.”
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: a bet-the-company pivot driven by an internal memo he wrote, “Free Is Not Enough.”
A big thanks to this season's sponsors @Atlassian and @chargebee for supporting unfiltered founder interviews like this 🫡
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
01:48 Mapping Your Body In One Hour
03:54 Why The Doctor’s Visit Hasn’t Changed In 100 Years
07:31 Building Four Businesses In One: Devices, Hardware, Software, Clinics
09:22 Breaking Down A Neko Visit First-Hand
12:58 Why Half of Neko’s U.K. Members Never Had A Health Check
16:59 ‘Brutally Efficient With Your Time’: Why Every Second Counts
19:04 Helping Human Doctors, Not Replacing Them
22:40 Delivering Outcomes For the 92% Of Members Not At Risk
26:47 A Climate ‘Crash Landing’ And A DM From Daniel Ek
33:12 Motivating A Team To Chase A Moonshot
37:42 Neko’s Upstart Moment: The ‘Free Is Not Enough’ Memo And Pivot
41:30 Pricing Neko Accessibly For The 99.9%
45:44 What The Tesla Roadster Can Teach Founders About Change
48:33 Space-Age Scan, Old-School Advice: Cut The Coffee
Thanks for watching!
Shakil Khan retweeted
Neko CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne was licking his wounds after "crash landing" a climate startup. Then he got a fateful DM from Spotify's Daniel Ek
Together, @HjalmarNilsonne and @eldsjal co-founded @Neko, a $7B startup that calls itself "the most valuable hour you can spend on your health."
After years operating in Europe, Neko recently launched in NYC, where it's quickly built a waitlist of 50,000 people, and started work on 3 more locations. Miami, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are next.
“People sometimes think that there’s some machine, and you go in, and you get a kind of paper receipt telling you if you’re gonna die or not,” Hjalmar tells me. “In reality, it’s the exact opposite.”
On The Upstarts Podcast, Nilsonne talks about the fateful Twitter DM from Ek that got Neko going; why the doctor visit hasn’t changed much in 100 years; and how to keep a startup team motivated while chasing a long-term “moonshot.”
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: a bet-the-company pivot driven by an internal memo he wrote, “Free Is Not Enough.”
A big thanks to this season's sponsors @Atlassian and @chargebee for supporting unfiltered founder interviews like this 🫡
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
01:48 Mapping Your Body In One Hour
03:54 Why The Doctor’s Visit Hasn’t Changed In 100 Years
07:31 Building Four Businesses In One: Devices, Hardware, Software, Clinics
09:22 Breaking Down A Neko Visit First-Hand
12:58 Why Half of Neko’s U.K. Members Never Had A Health Check
16:59 ‘Brutally Efficient With Your Time’: Why Every Second Counts
19:04 Helping Human Doctors, Not Replacing Them
22:40 Delivering Outcomes For the 92% Of Members Not At Risk
26:47 A Climate ‘Crash Landing’ And A DM From Daniel Ek
33:12 Motivating A Team To Chase A Moonshot
37:42 Neko’s Upstart Moment: The ‘Free Is Not Enough’ Memo And Pivot
41:30 Pricing Neko Accessibly For The 99.9%
45:44 What The Tesla Roadster Can Teach Founders About Change
48:33 Space-Age Scan, Old-School Advice: Cut The Coffee
Thanks for watching!
Shakil Khan retweeted
My @Neko health checkup by @eldsjal @HjalmarNilsonne was INCREDIBLE! This is the future of preventative health.
Hands down Neko health best experience I’ve EVER had in healthcare.
First off I was excited to go to for the last two weeks.
Second, the experience lived up to the hype.
Third, I bought another scan for a year out.
Fourth, Im happy to know so much insight about my body (53 blood markers, kidney health, liver health, skin health and more)and what I can do to continue to optimize my health.
Some pics and vids (think I will make a more comprehensive one later):
Shakil Khan retweeted
Just 2 weeks after launching @Neko in the US, our NYC waitlist has doubled – with 50K people now in line for a scan.
The good news is that more capacity is on the way!
Today we're announcing that location #2 in the city will open at Brookfield Place in Battery Park City in January.
Plus, we have 2 more NYC locations already under construction so that we can deliver even more scans next year.
Shakil Khan retweeted
60 seconds for Europe: We are launching a euro hype video edit competition!
Remember our hype video from last year? We want to 1000x that.
So we partnered with some bigger pro-European social media accounts to spread this far and wide. @NXT4EU @Frid45 @POTFES
Know an incredibly capable, young editor that loves to do short-form, high energy edits? Send this to them!
Theme:
Europe invented democracy, industry, capitalism and much of modern science. We are a continent of high culture, deep history and extraordinary civilizational achievements.
Now Europe is being reshaped by crisis, war and geopolitical realignment. At the same time, a new generation of Europeans is building frontier technology, advancing science and creating new culture in pursuit of a stronger, more prosperous and unified Europe.
That energy deserves to be celebrated!
We want a high-energy, ~60-second edit about what inspires you about Europe and why you are excited for its future.
Be ambitious, observant, artistic, optimistic, unique — and above all, yourself.
More infos, and submission here: euromaxxing.fr/
@euromaxxing_fr
Shakil Khan retweeted
Everyone needs to go — nyc - check this out
I’m deeply compelled by proactive healthcare. Give me all the blood tests, cancer screening, body composition work ups.
As a super user I was still so completely blown away by how amazing @Neko was.
Launches next week in NYC. I can’t imagine NOT going annually👏🏼 👏🏼
Shakil Khan retweeted
This is going to save lives and I'm so happy about that. Preventative medicine needs these massive steps forward & I'm so glad Neko [776] is bringing them to the USA.
nitter.cf/alexchungtweets/status…
finally got my @neko robe pic...
but in all seriousness, most people put off their annual checkup. after my scan yesterday morning, i can confidently say that this might be the one that you actually look forward to.
the whole thing takes ~1 hour and the part that i loved as someone with a million questions (at all times) was this: there's a screen up the entire time that shows you what's next and where you are in the appointment, so you always know what's coming and why it matters. there's no sitting alone in a flimsy paper robe wondering what's happening, or when you'll actually see the doctor. (also the butter yellow robe is very chic, which shouldn't matter but absolutely does)
they imaged my feet for longevity markers, checked visceral fat around my organs, took 6,000 photos of my skin (i apparently have 222 markings??), and did an EKG.
my favorite part was that they sent my blood to the lab while i was still there, and by the time i sat down with the doctor, all my bloodwork and scan results were ready. no waiting a week and wondering if something's wrong. you know everything before you walk out the door, then you get a personalized action plan in the app after (i opted into the AI transcription during the visit).
i'm about to start training for the tokyo marathon, so it was a good time to get a baseline (but honestly it's always a great time to check in on your health)!! so grateful for the @neko team for this awesome experience - if you're in NYC, i hope you can try it for yourself soon!!
@shak @sarahmcbride @eldsjal @alexisohanian
shoutout @N_Sportelli for the intro 🤝
