2025-08-07 21:58:46
“I really enjoy the thoughtfulness you put into your writing. There is so much noise in the tech world and I never regret opening your work.” — Lia, a paying member
Friends,
I am extremely excited to announce the 2025 edition of The Future 50, a database of the world’s highest potential startups valued at or under $200 million at the time of nomination. It’s the product of a five-month process involving over 200 elite venture practitioners, access to confidential information, and detailed independent research. Last year's Future 50 was our most popular launch, with several companies already raising at significantly higher valuations.
We created The Future 50 with a simple goal: to introduce readers of The Generalist to the most promising startups before they’re well-known.
Why do that?
We know that hearing about a breakout company early can serve as a real inflection point—for investors looking for their next big win, operators searching for a worthy place to apply their talents, and founders seeking inspiration.
To do that, we have obsessively worked on creating our version of an early detection system for great companies. It’s driven by investor nominations, careful research, exclusive data, and our editorial process.
Given the depth and exclusivity of this reporting, The Future 50 is available only to subscribers of our premium newsletter, Generalist+. For $22 per month or $220 per year, you’ll get total access to our database of breakout startups, accompanied by our detailed rationale and exclusive traction information. If you work in tech, venture capital, or traditional investing, this product alone should more than justify a year’s subscription.
By joining as a member and unlocking the full Future 50, here’s what you can expect:
Detailed company profiles with clear explanations of what each does and why it matters
Exclusive traction data, including customer wins, revenue signals, and growth metrics
Three-point rationales explaining exactly why each company made the cut
A searchable database to filter by geography, sector, or team size
Join us now to unlock the full database and learn about 50 of the world’s highest-potential startups.
Though there is incredible variety among the awardees, a few key themes came to the fore. Pay attention to AI’s impact on traditional businesses, the unslakeable thirst for data, creative governance models, and much more.
As was the case last year, we discovered great companies worldwide. While America remains the undoubted epicenter of high-growth startups, we found exceptional teams operating in 12 different countries. We have awardees building incredible AI businesses in Brazil, high-performance drone systems in India, and elegant product software in Australia.
As you might expect, AI was everywhere from healthcare to defense to biotech to crypto to fashion. There’s no doubt that talented entrepreneurs are finding effective, original ways to leverage the technology to create net-new experiences, revitalize traditional industries, and unlock thorny problems.
Nearly 75% of awardees operate B2B, while 18% are B2C. Despite that, the Future 50 includes intriguing new consumer experiences that might change how we shop, spend, and connect with AI companions.
Though there were some outliers, most awardees operate with fewer than 50 full-time employees. While this is not entirely unusual given how young many of the startups are, it’s still striking to see how much traction companies can achieve with lean teams.
On the other end of the spectrum, a few startups have built large operations but still have valuations under our threshold. That’s an indication of the differing labor costs around the world and how strong unit economics can allow a company to fund its own growth.
This is just the start! There is much more to discover in the full piece and database.
There are an infinite number of ways you might try to create a list like this one. You could collate it based on perceived status, hard metrics, personal opinion, or the opinion of ceremonial judges. We took a different approach, with a few key characteristics:
Create a valuation threshold. We started by setting a valuation threshold of $200 million, post-money, at the time of nomination. (Naturally, some companies have raised in the five months since.) It is hard enough to compare a biotech firm to a social media app – it only becomes more so when one is a seed company and the other a Series D scale-up. The $200 million threshold prioritizes companies with real traction and strong products in market, but that still have plenty of room to run.
Focus on nominator quality, not quantity. We chose an outbound approach, believing it allowed us to create the highest quality list. We contacted over 200 of the world’s best-regarded investors and asked them to nominate companies with the highest potential. We started with those we know and consider exceptional pickers. In turn, we asked them to nominate other investors they consider impressive. We only considered nominations from partner-level investors and a few select angels with exceptional taste. Overall, investors from nearly every Tier 1 fund participated.
Push to the edges. We believe many of the most impactful companies will be built outside the United States. We proactively sought elite venture investors from Latin America, Africa, Europe, Oceania, and Asia to ensure global coverage. As you’ll discover, the list includes many stellar organizations from beyond Silicon Valley.
Force stack ranking to avoid over-nominating. As noted, we asked every investor to nominate the two companies they considered particularly high-potential, with an explanation for each. (Some investors ended up sharing a few more, which we considered.) Ultimately, our goal was not to solicit as many nominations as possible but to encourage nominators to make difficult choices, selecting those they consider the very best of the best. As a note, I did not nominate any companies myself to avoid a conflict of interest.
Study each company. After receiving an extremely strong cadre of nominations, I personally reviewed each one. This involved reading the investors’ rationales and studying the company directly via its website and associated press. We used this to filter the list down to a group of finalists.
Request exclusive, confirmatory information. We contacted the finalists directly and asked them to share data confirming their valuation at the time of the nomination, cumulative capital raised, and revenue run rate. We also asked them to outline their primary sources of differentiation and highlight other traction they consider notable. Companies have allowed some of this data to be shared publicly for the first time; the rest remains confidential but was invaluable in our assessments.
Make final judgments. We used the information gleaned from companies to choose our final 50. This relied on me personally reviewing all additional data supplied by the companies. In making our choice, we factored in metrics but also recognized that great companies have different commercial maturation rates.
Provide detailed descriptions and clear rationales. One of our frustrations with lists is that they are often light on detail. For each awardee of the Future 50, you will find a strong synopsis of the business and why it matters. You will also find a bullet-pointed rationale explaining its inclusion: what we liked about it and why.
No process is perfect, and there are certainly trade-offs to any approach. However, this process has enabled us to create something unique: a global, detailed, actionable list of potentially legendary companies, many of which I had never heard of before.
Join today to access the full database. As with last year's cohort, we expect these valuations won't stay under $200M for long.
Brex is proud to sponsor The Generalist’s Future 50—a list of bold companies building what’s next. At Brex, we believe founders should be focused on creating the future, not drowning in spreadsheets and clunky finance tools. That’s why we built a finance platform that’s simple, scalable, and fast.
With Brex, founders get everything they need to maximize runway and grow their businesses—corporate cards, startup-friendly rewards, banking, and high-yield treasury with same-hour liquidity—all in one place. Over 30,000 companies, including 1 in 3 U.S. venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help them spend smarter and move faster. Ready to join them?
Meet 50 of the world’s highest-potential startups. Nominated by investors, selected by The Generalist.
2025-08-05 20:03:23
Jesse Walden is the founder and managing partner of Variant Fund, an early-stage crypto fund backing projects like Uniswap, Phantom, World, Morpho, Flashbots, Farcaster, Blockaid, Blackbird, and many more. Before launching Variant in 2020, he was an investor at a16z crypto, where he supported early-stage builders shaping the future of Web3.
In this episode, Jesse offers a wide-ranging view of where crypto stands today and where it’s headed. He unpacks the rise of stablecoins, the role of meme coins in capturing attention, and why NFTs are evolving rather than disappearing. We explore the challenges of interoperability between blockchains, the shift from invention to productization, and the intersection of crypto and AI, two technologies that may supercharge one another’s progress.
In our conversation, we explore:
The fundamental difference between AI (technology of abundance) and crypto (technology of scarcity), and why the two technologies are complementary
How the GENIUS Act is transforming the regulatory landscape for stablecoins and creating unprecedented bipartisan support
How DAOs 2.0 will return to their original vision: automation at the center with humans at the edges
How meme coins generate hype and the value of attention
Why user experience still holds Web3 back and what needs to change
What still needs to be solved to scale crypto, including true cross-chain interoperability
(00:00) Intro
(02:19) An overview of Variant’s work
(03:03) Jesse’s vision of a tokenized future and why it makes sense
(06:19) The state of crypto since 2022
(10:46) The GENIUS Act: what it is and how it could reshape stablecoins
(14:28) How stablecoins are both a payment tool and a communication layer
(17:07) Why stablecoins are not yet convenient in the US
(19:06) Variant’s investment in stablecoins and blockchains
(21:33) The policy and regulation crypto still needs to mature
(24:15) Speculation vs. stablecoins
(27:06) Meme coins and the attention economy
(31:53) The shift from invention to productization
(33:47) How the user experience is evolving in crypto, and what’s still needed
(38:15) Phantom and other companies Jesse is bullish on
(42:20) The short-term dip and long-term rise in developer talent
(47:48) Jesse’s heuristic for determining a founder’s passion in the crypto space
(50:37) Where AI and crypto collide (and what they can do for each other)
(56:48) Why there’s still opportunity for NFTs
(01:01:57) An explanation of DAOs and DAO 2.0’s opportunity for humans
(01:07:04) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewalden/
Website: https://jessewalden.com/
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events: https://www.amazon.com/Narrative-Economics-Stories-Economic-Events/dp/0691182299
The White Paper: https://www.amazon.com/The-White-Paper/dp/1999675924
Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama
Vitalik Buterin on X: https://x.com/vitalikbuterin
Bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org
Stablecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stablecoin
Beyond Speculation and Stablecoins: Crypto's Next Phase?: https://jessewalden.com/beyond-speculation-and-stablecoins-cryptos-next-phase/
What is DeFi?: https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/plp-what-is-defi
Morpho: https://morpho.org/
Pump.fun: https://pump.fun/
Zora: https://zora.co/
Docker: https://www.docker.com/
Privy: https://www.privy.io/
Stripe: https://stripe.com/
Kraken: https://www.kraken.com/
Phantom: https://phantom.com/
Coinbase: https://coinbase.com/
Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/
Worldcoin: https://world.org/worldcoin-token
2024 Crypto Developer Report
Jesse’s post on X about NFTs: https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1749860648253526449
DAOs 2.0: https://jessewalden.com/daos-2-0/
Botto: https://botto.com/
Paul Graham’s post about planting trees: https://x.com/paulg/status/1682079355445424129
Land O’Lakes: https://www.landolakes.com/
Ethereum whitepaper: https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-07-29 20:03:51
What’s next for AI agents, and how will they change the way we work? In this conversation, Stanislas Polu (CEO of Dust, formerly research at OpenAI) and Harrison Chase (CEO of LangChain, one of the most influential open-source AI frameworks) unpack the current state and future of AI agents. They reflect on their early conversations in the pre-ChatGPT days, how the landscape has evolved, and where it's headed next.
Stan and Harrison share lessons from building today’s agent infrastructure—from chat interfaces to the future of ambient, autonomous systems—and discuss the challenges of operating in the chaotic "fog of AI." We dig into the open questions, early insights, and messy realities of building in today’s fast-moving AI landscape.
In this conversation, we explore:
What sparked Stan and Harrison’s early interest in LLMs
The pre-ChatGPT era and how the AI landscape has evolved since late 2022
High-leverage use cases for agents inside Dust and LangChain today
The critical differences between AI workflows and true agents—and why agents may unlock more powerful, long-term solutions
Why reliability is the main blocker to ambient agents
Real-world enterprise use cases for AI agents across customer support, sales, and engineering
How to build in the “fog of AI” and the challenge of maintaining product vision when foundations shift every six months
Strategies for creating defensibility in a world where tech giants can quickly replicate features
The future of multi-agent systems and how they could transform enterprise productivity
The current state of the AI talent market
And much more
(00:00) Intro
(02:33) Brief overviews of Dust and LangChain
(03:30) The early days of LLM product development
(11:02) Harrison's journey to founding LangChain
(14:35) Dust's evolution and focus on enterprise productivity
(17:15) Tobi’s AI memo
(18:42) An overview of AI agents and how they differ from AI workflows
(26:43) High-leverage use cases for agents at Dust and LangChain
(30:41) How to interact with agents and an explanation of ambient agents
(36:21) What the future of agents may look like
(40:52) Current limitations of AI agents and reliability challenges
(45:40) Will we converge to one agent or many specialized ones?
(51:32) How to solve the sycophant problem
(56:04) The challenges of building AI companies in a rapidly changing landscape
(01:03:06) Recent AI talent acquisitions and market dynamics
(01:05:28) How Dust and LangChain attract talent
(01:09:12) How far off AGI may be
(01:12:52) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spolu/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrison-chase-961287118/
Permutation City: https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597805394
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484
Anton Troynikov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antontroynikov/
Gabriel Hubert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabhubert/
Andrew Ng on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewyng/
Dust: https://dust.tt/
LangChain: https://www.langchain.com/
OpenAI: https://openai.com/
Stable Diffusion: https://stablediffusionweb.com/
CharacterAI: https://character.ai/
LangSmith: https://www.langchain.com/langsmith
Tobias Lütke’s memo reposted on X: https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514
ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629
Introducing ambient agents: https://blog.langchain.com/introducing-ambient-agents/
Claude task master: https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master
Google Jules: https://jules.google/
Stripe: https://stripe.com/
Windsurf: https://windsurf.com/
Cognition: https://cognition.ai/
Scale: https://scale.com/
Inflection: https://inflection.ai/
Adept: https://www.adept.ai/
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-07-24 21:10:51
“Incredible publication. Impossible not to subscribe.” – Francesco M., a paying subscriber
Friends,
It is difficult to separate an entrepreneur from the era in which they operated. How much of a founder’s success depends on the circumstances they inherited?
Would Mark Zuckerberg have run a banking house in the early Renaissance? Would Jensen Huang have been a textile magnate in the 1800s? Might a soot-browed Elon Musk have stomped across the Permian Basin in search of oil?
It is not an easy question to answer. And yet, when it comes to Ryan Petersen, it feels obvious. Quantum Leap Flexport’s CEO into any epoch, and you suspect he would find his way to build a logistics business – whether that meant digging a Great Lakes canal network or laying tracks toward the Pacific.
Is this just because Ryan looks a bit like a railroad baron – all cut and thrust and mustache bristles? It doesn’t hurt. More important, though, is the sense that he is a quintessential, natural entrepreneur, who seems to have an inexplicable love of logistics deep in his blood. Even before founding Flexport in 2013, Ryan had already spent years in the industry.
While you suspect he would have thrived in most eras, Ryan is building at the perfect moment. Global logistics is a $4 trillion industry that touches every product in your home, run largely by companies founded in the 1800s. That dynamic means Flexport has been blessed with colossal opportunities and significant obstacles. It is hard enough to build a successful startup, but doing so in the physical world – spanning continents, currencies, regulatory regimes, and time zones – is especially grueling.
Those challenges are part of the reason I’m especially excited to have this correspondence with Ryan, as part of our “Letters to a Young Founder” series. It allows us to explore what it takes to build one of the most operationally complex businesses on the planet.
As you’ll see, Ryan is an unusually thoughtful articulator of the founder’s journey, making this conversation especially valuable. In today’s exchange, we discuss how Ryan generates organizational velocity, quashes internal politics, and a founder’s unique responsibilities.
This correspondence is available only to subscribers of our premium newsletter, Generalist+. For $22 per month or $220 per year, you’ll get full access to my conversation with Ryan and unlock our library of case studies, tactical guides, and interviews. Get an MBA’s worth of insight for the price of a business lunch.
Build for velocity, not speed. You might wonder: What’s the difference? As Ryan points out, velocity has a vector. It includes a sense of direction. For a team to be productive, it’s not enough for each member to move quickly – they must pull in the same direction.
The physics of scaling. As you’ll find out, Ryan is fond of scientific metaphors. Another thought-provoking one involves the formula for kinetic energy. The Flexport CEO points out that velocity matters more than mass when creating kinetic energy. This is how small startups outcompete hefty incumbents.
Create clear decision rights. For every decision, it should be obvious who has authority. When conflicts arise, Flexport escalates them to where the disagreeing parties meet on the org chart. It’s a simple framework that removes politics and makes disagreements transparent rather than secretive.
Don’t reinvent everything. Just because an industry is stale doesn’t mean every practice is broken. For too long, Ryan ignored best practices from freight forwarding, slowing Flexport’s development. The better decision would have been to focus on which parts of the process truly needed reinvention rather than rethinking everything from scratch.
“Mercury is a company with undeniable taste. Use it once, and you are likely to rhapsodize about it.”
Last week, we published our correspondence with Mercury CEO Immad Akhund. As well as digging into Immad’s journey as a founder, it was also a chance to share a little bit about the banking* product The Generalist uses every day and that I genuinely love.
If you’re looking for beautifully, thoughtfully designed banking, learn more about Mercury by following the link below. I suspect you’ll enjoy using it as much as we have.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.
Subject: Organizing entropy
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Ryan Petersen
Date: Monday June 30 2025 at 8:14 AM BST
Hi Ryan,
I’ve been looking forward to this correspondence. Tech can often feel like an overly imitative industry, with a dozen companies chasing each obvious opportunity. But while others scrap for a share of the latest AI fad, at Flexport, you’ve been steadily building in a manual, complex, unsexy industry for over a decade. A dozen trends have come and gone and you and your team have remained focused on streamlining the transit of goods from Shanghai to Busan to Rotterdam to Los Angeles and beyond.
In that respect, you are one of tech’s quintessential “hedgehogs”– someone who has dedicated their life to a single powerful idea, rather than dancing across dozens. You’ve succeeded in building a truly unique company: a global logistics platform, with tech at its heart. Instead of competing with other well-funded startups, Flexport battles for share against freight forwarders that started operating in the 1800s.
It has evidently not always been easy. Flexport has had to endure the chaos and congestion of COVID, the route disruptions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the recent tariff turmoil. There have been startling surges, such as the $1 billion mega-round led by Softbank and $8 billion valuation secured in 2019. And there have been inevitable plunges. From the outside, at least, the most dramatic of those appeared to be the appointment of Dave Clark as CEO in 2022, only for you to take back the top spot less than a year later.
While parts of these stories have been told elsewhere, I’m keen to explore what these moments felt like from your vantage over the coming correspondences. What did you think at the time of these inflection points? How did each force the business to change? What lessons did you glean from these chapters?
To kick things off, though, I’d love to focus on a few fundamentals that I think will be of great tactical use to current founders. In particular, I wanted to focus our first letter on how you’ve architected Flexport for success in such an insanely complex industry. How have you structured your teams? What do you do to maintain speed? How have you had to change the composition of the business as you’ve scaled?
A big part of my motivation in beginning here is rooted in the industry that you operate in. Global logistics is, I would hazard, at least a couple of orders of magnitude more convoluted than SaaS. You cannot simply ship code; you must ship products from one corner of the world to another. A pure software company might be able to get away with a little background disorganization, but Flexport surely requires a different degree of precision, control, and structure.
I’m also asking these questions because I’m certain I will get an interesting answer. As I’ve told you, I remember attending your talk at a Columbia Business School incubator in 2016. Though I was studying international development then, I was trying to build a payments business on the side and managed to wrangle a spot in the program. You were only two years into Flexport at that point. Still, I remember you talking in compelling detail about how you’d built multi-functional SWAT teams to counteract the inherent complexity of the sector. Have you still kept that cross-disciplinary approach? Does it make sense at an organization of Flexport’s size?
The last reason I’d like to begin here is that, like all scaling CEOs, you seem to be constantly tweaking things. Earlier this year, Flexport launched a slew of new features as part of a shift to a semi-annual release schedule. Reportedly, you decided to make this change after talking with Airbnb’s Brian Chesky and being inspired by his now-famous “Founder Mode” speech, which you attended in person. Given how much that speech galvanized Silicon Valley, I’d love to hear any other wisdom you derived.
Best,
Mario
Subject: Organizing entropy
From: Ryan Petersen
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Monday July 14 2025 at 6:20 PM PST
Hi Mario,
We’ve picked a good place to start.
Building a company in global logistics is the hardest organizational design problem in the world. No other industry comes close, because a single transaction has to flow across multiple countries, in multiple modes. You must have your tech, operations, sales, and account management teams involved the whole way through. You have to serve your customer at a very strategic level (addressing their supply-chain goals) and a very tactical one (getting a container on time, in full, from A to B). No organizational structure can put all that under one person’s remit – except the CEO’s.
It’s hard for outsiders to understand just how complex it is. Compare it to a company like Coca-Cola, for example. Coca-Cola is a very global company, but fundamentally, Coca-Cola’s team in India does not have to coordinate at all with its team in Mississippi. In our business, though, if we’re shipping from India to Mississippi, both teams need to do some work to ensure everything flows smoothly. They need to talk to each other.
How do we do that? It’s about generating velocity, designing the right decision-making structure, and ensuring everyone has the right incentives.
The first thing to say is this: I have not built Flexport for speed. I’ve built it for velocity. That’s an important distinction. In physics, velocity has a vector. Speed only makes sense if you’re pointed in the right direction. To generate velocity, you need to make sure that you have people who are super-aligned both in the short and long term. Are they aligned with our mission and vision? Do they understand what we’re trying to achieve? Do they embody our values and show that through their behavior? Are they focused on the most important things right now?
Without that, people can move fast, but in opposite directions. That’s what matter looks like – atoms moving all around, while the whole appears to stay still. You need everybody moving in the same direction, and that’s where having a plan is useful. Things like the semi-annual release schedule you mentioned can help. Other roadmapping exercises are part of this, too. In general, you’re doing this planning to ensure different teams are aligned over the next 18 months.
There’s another aspect of velocity I try to keep in mind. The formula for kinetic energy is one-half of the mass (m) times velocity squared (v²). (K.E = (1/2)mv²).
The velocity is a square function. That’s what allows small startups to outcompete incumbents. When you’re trying to generate energy, to create this big kinetic release, your velocity matters much more than your mass. As we’ve grown, I’ve also started to think about the other side of that equation. When you become bigger, your mass increases, which means that you need a lot more energy just to maintain velocity. Mass is slowing you down at some level, so you have to keep putting more in.
As a founder, that means leading from the front, outworking everybody, and being involved in everything. You must constantly search the business for pieces that aren’t working anymore. You must look for bad incentives, people who don’t have skin in the game, or lack focus. Where is the sense of purpose no longer alive in the organization? Founders have to run around and do all these things because no one will care as much as you.
2025-07-22 20:03:12
Brex: The banking solution for startups.
Generalist+: Essential intelligence for modern investors and technologists.
Tomasz Tunguz has spent almost two decades turning data into investment insights. After an impressive run at Redpoint Ventures, where he backed Looker, Expensify, Monte Carlo, and more, Tomasz launched Theory Ventures in 2022. His debut fund, which closed at $238 million, was followed 19 months later by a $450 million second fund.
Theory’s goal is simple but striking: to build an “investing corporation” where researchers, engineers, and operators sit alongside investors, arming the partnership with real‐time market maps, in‑house AI tooling, and domain expertise. Centered on data, AI, and crypto infrastructure, the firm operates at the very heart of many of today’s most consequential technological shifts.
In our conversation, we explore:
How Theory’s “investing corporation” model works
Why crypto exchanges could create a viable path to public markets for small-cap software companies
The looming power crunch—why data centers could consume 15% of U.S. electricity within five years
Stablecoins’ rapid ascent as major banks route 5‑10% of U.S. dollars through them
Why Ethereum faces an existential challenge similar to AWS losing ground to Azure in the AI era
Why Tomasz believes today’s handful of agents will become 100+ digital co‑workers by year‑end
Why Meta is betting billions on AR glasses to change how we interact with machines
How Theory Ventures uses AI to accelerate market research, deal analysis, and investment decisions
Much more
(00:00) Intro
(03:37) Tomasz's background and journey to founding Theory Ventures
(04:57) Theory's data-driven approach to venture
(09:25) The importance of functional experts on investment teams
(11:45) Theory's focus on data systems and why they matter
(15:02) The decade of data
(18:40) The challenges of chip-level investment
(20:11) The state of crypto
(23:30) How crypto could accelerate IPO timelines
(28:12) Tokenized secondaries and venture capital’s evolution
(32:18) Ethereum's challenges against competitors like Solana
(37:25) Hyperliquid
(38:38) The shift from proof of work to proof of stake to proof of authority
(41:20) How Tomasz uses AI for personal productivity
(45:03) How Theory Ventures uses AI internally
(49:41) The future of work with AI agents
(52:42) The current state of the AI race between Microsoft, Google, and Meta
(58:28) Final meditations
Website: https://tomtunguz.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasztunguz/
Narcissus and Goldmund: https://www.amazon.com/Narcissus-Goldmund-Hermann-Hesse/dp/0553275860
Patrick O’Grady on X: https://x.com/_patrickogrady
Theory Ventures: https://theory.ventures/
Insight Partners: https://www.insightpartners.com/
Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/
Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/
Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/
Ethereum: https://ethereum.org
Solana: https://solana.com/
Jamie Dimon blasts crypto, tells Senate he would ‘close it down’—even as JPMorgan pushes forward with blockchain payments: https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/12/06/jamie-dimon-crypto-senate-hearing-jpmorgan-blockchain-payments/
Robinhood: https://robinhood.com/
Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com/
Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/
Sarbanes-Oxley Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
TSX: https://www.tsx.com/
Texas Stock Exchange: https://www.txse.com/
SUI: https://sui.io/
Hyperliquid: https://hyperfoundation.org/
Phantom: https://phantom.com/
Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code
Asana: https://asana.com/
Introductory Theory post: https://tomtunguz.com/theory/
Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/
Claude: https://claude.ai/
OpenAI deep research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/
Cursor: https://cursor.com/
Rabbit: https://www.rabbit.tech/
Humane: https://www.humane-ai.ai/
Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to interact with computers: https://news.mit.edu/2024/mouth-based-touchpad-augmental-0605
Orion glasses: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/
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2025-07-17 22:32:30
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