founder/ceo, occasional investor
United States
Joined January 2011
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Zach Oschin retweeted
The Nuclear Company plans to deploy a series of gigawatt-scale campuses with fleets of reactors, totaling more than 40 GW. The first step in that journey was announced this morning with Prosperity One in Lewis County, Kentucky
Zach Oschin retweeted
New from me in the @FT: The US needs to find a way to build data centers that works for our workers and communities. BAAJA is the beginning of a model (pass it!) but there's so much more we can do to use this growth engine to help Americans. The piece makes a few points:
1 - Data centers pose challenges (emissions, energy use, noise, etc) some of which are highly concentrated, but also economic and strategic benefits that are more diffuse. Finding a way to build them in America allows policymakers to mitigate the challenges and maximize/share the benefits. Anti-building approaches that push construction overseas (the most likely outcome if we don't build) give up our ability to do so. We should want jurisdiction over them.
2 - If you want to take clean energy tech down the cost curve, you need a reason to deploy it--i.e., new demand. Use policy to push data centers to go clean (they can afford it). It would be like the IRA on easy mode.
3 - If you want to reindustrialize and create American manufacturing jobs, use the fact that data centers are massive industrial customers and already driving an American manufacturing boom to kick it into overdrive. The FT piece cites new research I published with @SIEPR showing data centers already support 300K permanent manufacturing jobs. We should want more!
The data center jobs debate that says the jobs are temporary misses upstream supply chain employment; the challenge is these jobs aren't in the communities where data centers are built. Use policy (tax credits, tariffs, permitting rules) to incentivize more domestic manufacturing and share these benefits.
4 - If you want to bring China to the table on AI safety, we need leverage. An overwhelming compute advantage helps with that, but we need to deploy compute. I'd rather race on compute than model capabilities. As I say in the piece, trying to stop data center construction as a safety measure would be like trying to solve traffic fatalities by shutting down car factories--vehicle and highway safety rules are obviously superior, do that instead!
ft.com/content/a1b2bdd8-212c…
Zach Oschin retweeted
David Vélez is the founder of Nubank, a bank with 140 million customers and a market capitalization of $60 billion.
When he started the business in 2013, no one thought it would work, not even his investors. He has faced down regulators, oligopolies, and corruption to build Latin America's largest digital bank. Now he is bringing Nubank to the United States, where he faces his biggest challenge yet.
@gabi_imarques, who grew up four miles from Nubank's headquarters in Brazil, spent time with @velez_david in São Paulo, where the business started, and in Miami, its latest beachhead.
She profiles a man who is no stranger to a fight, having grown up in Medellín, Colombia, when the city was at war with Pablo Escobar. Six-year-old Vélez would pull on layers of sweaters before stepping outside, hoping, as a child might, that the extra padding would cushion any bullets.
colossus.com/article/david-v…
Zach Oschin retweeted
My colleagues and I at @heatmap_news spent all day putting together a full explainer of the new bipartisan Senate permitting deal. Read and get up to speed! #energytwitter
heatmap.news/politics/bipart…
Zach Oschin retweeted
How buying compute is like buying drugs... you have to know someone who knows someone
On flight to Monterrey from LAX and our pilot came over the speaker before take off and mentioned:
- there’s a low cloud ceiling which will make landing at Monterrey hard and potentially dangerous, but we won’t know until we get there
- if we can’t land we’ll have to divert to Sacramento (!) which is 4 hours away driving
- the co-pilot has almost finished his training and so this is one of his final hard challenges
- commended us for being brave enough to fly on 9/11
- finished by saying he loves us
Zach Oschin retweeted
Browder Capital and I are thrilled to be large investors in Owner.com from the very beginning. Congratulations to Adam, Dean and the team on this incredible milestone
Zach Oschin retweeted
I did it with Grok Bot. You gotta try Instinct. Send it to your Townie.Put it in Work mode. Give it to Cowork. It’s just Hatch. Tandem can do it. Give it to Juno. Nudge it to Pip. Dude just use Manus. I got a Duggie invite. OpenClaw on a Mac mini can handle it. Crundle is goated.
Zach Oschin retweeted
Few things bring me as much joy as jamming with my dear friend @Alfredijohns0n. This is the first time we've done it on a podcast.
AI-Native Services, data center hate, robot apocalypse, etc.
tinyurl.com/wyykzsd9
Zach Oschin retweeted
We used ultrasound to let you talk without making any sound.
After just a month of collecting data, our model is already approaching existing silent speech modalities. We were surprised to find that it generalizes to unseen participants as well!
(1/n)
nitter.cf/vadi_ms/status/2074565…
Zach Oschin retweeted
Which emerging VCs have the strongest early-stage picking alpha?
Standard emerging manager evaluation still leans heavily on qualitative signals – GP background, thesis articulation, founder references. All useful, but by the time TVPI and DPI tell you something meaningful, you're usually already in or already too late.
So I experimented with a quantitative framework to answer a core LP allocator question: which small, early-stage fund managers consistently back seed-stage companies that go on to raise exceptional Series A rounds – before those outcomes are visible to the broader market?
I started with @harmonic_ai Scout (my fav research tool!) and checked every company globally that raised a first pre-seed or seed round between 2022–2026 (Post-ZIRP). The funnel looks like this:
1/ 55,491 companies raised a pre-seed or seed round – the full opportunity set
2/ 4,368 (7.9%) went on to raise a Series A – the base rate, roughly 1 in 13
3/ 764 (1.4%) qualified as Tier 1 Breakouts – above-median Series A for their vintage year, with at least one top-tier institutional VC (from a defined set of 38 firms: @a16z, @sequoia, @lightspeedvp, @IndexVentures, and peers)
For each of those 1,604 companies, I traced back to every investor who backed them at pre-seed or seed — before the outcome was visible. 4,176 unique investors across the breakout set.
Then I computed a simple ratio for each: breakout companies backed at seed divided by total seed investments in the period. I'm calling this the "Tier 1 Concentration Rate".
After filtering out mega-platforms, accelerators, CVCs, and angels and requiring a minimum of 10 seed deals – 20 emerging managers (sub-$250M AUM) surfaced with notably high concentration rates.
A few things stood out:
1/ Several micro-funds under $100M were placing 25–35% of their seed bets into companies that later raised from @Sequoia, @a16z, @lightspeedvp – consistently, not as one-off flukes.
2/ Participant concentration and lead concentration are different signals. Participant = network and access. Lead = independent conviction before consensus forms. For LP diligence, these deserve to be evaluated separately.
3/ The data has real limitations: ~12% of breakout companies had no named seed investor in the database, we can't cleanly separate Fund I from Fund III for a given manager, and small sample sizes mean some high concentration rates likely reflect luck rather than repeatable skill.
But the core idea holds. "Tier 1 Concentration Rate" is an early, measurable signal of picking ability – observable years before fund-level metrics tell you anything.
For LP allocators evaluating Fund I–III managers, that timing gap is the whole problem. This is one attempt to close it.
What’s your take on this experiment?
Zach Oschin retweeted
Excited to announce that @krrishd is joining @naturalpay's engineering team today from @tryramp.
At Ramp, Krish led payments and helped build the infrastructure behind bill pay, reimbursements, stablecoins, treasury, capital markets, and more.
I met him randomly at a basketball game when Natural was 100 days old. He told me that he’d read the agentic payments memo that I wrote, and I immediately clocked him as an energetic fit for the team we were building.
Right after that conversation, a mutual pulled me aside and said, “there are a few engineers that really matter at Ramp, and Krish is one of them.” So naturally, I spent the next four months convincing him to make the jump.
Krish is one of the few people I’ve met who deeply understands money movement, can move up and down the technical stack with ease, and is so broadly interesting that you can talk with him for hours before realizing just how deep his technical knowledge really goes.
During our work trial debrief walk (a ritual), one line really stuck with me: “there’s no fintech company going after anything nearly as ambitious as Natural. Either I’m joining you or starting my own thing, but the only thing I’d want to start is in agentic payments, and I think you’re doing it right.”
I’m very glad that we now get to say “we” instead of “you,” and even more glad to have him on the team.
If you want to join Krish, we’re still doubling the team. Email me: [email protected]
natural.co/blog/why-krish-jo…
