The work you do in private is the work you are rewarded for in public. Today’s news is 10 years in the making. $400M raised. Time to get back to work and work harder than ever. ft.com/content/7b553b44-7c92…
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I think we often hear a lot of bullshit about venture partnerships. I will tell you about mine with @PaulBonnet and @Kieranleehill. They make me better. They make me think smarter, and I know that whatever situation we are in, we will get through it together, stronger. That, to me, is a venture partnership.
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It is BS to think that open source runs away with it by being cheaper. “This whole cost dynamic does not mean that open source just runs away with it. The labs are obviously also going to offer much cheaper versions of their own models. Their access to compute is structurally very strong, and they have a lot of different ways to make money. It does not mean that open source will dominate, but it does mean that open source is going to be a big part of the market.” @jaltma Love to hear your thoughts @natolambert @bindureddy @alexatallah @Teknium
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)
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Should we invest in Jev at $10 billion? “Of course we should do it. After the last 20VC, I have decided to recommend up to 30% of the fund. Jev is already 17% of the traffic on OpenRouter and 20% of the traffic through Vercel’s router. Jev is a 70th of the price and 100 times faster. This is exactly the kind of bet we have to do. I do believe there is a 50X upside to $500BN.” @jasonlk Love to hear your thoughts @EGafni @hardimanjames @alexatallah @cramforce
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)
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Seed round should still be $2M to $3M. “You can do as much for $2M to $3M as you could 10 years ago. If you do not have folks dying to give you capital outside of demo day, that may still be the natural atomic amount of capital. A seed round should still be $2M to $3M.” @jasonlk Love to hear your thoughts @chudson @dunkhippo33 @TurnerNovak @semil
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)
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Why will we see many more Neo Lab acquisitions? “All the big foundation model companies are probably in the market to acquire some kind of robotic foundation model story. There are still 100 Neo labs, so you have got to be in the 10 that win. I think there will be a bunch of these big acquisitions over the next six to 12 months if the market continues to hold.” @rodriscoll Love to hear your thoughts @peteflorence @pathak2206 @lachygroom @BerntBornich
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)
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Why the personal assistant space is very reminiscent of the AI coding space “It kind of reminds me of what happened with coding and with Cursor and Cognition in the face of the labs. These agents can interact with the entire third-party internet. It is not just talking to it anymore. This is something that primarily does things for you. When something is that important, a lot of things can win. There can be an amazing independent player like Instinct, and the labs will have offerings around this.” @jaltma Love to hear your thoughts @alexgraveley @pirroh @ScottWu46 @mattshumer_
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)
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So @harmonic_ai just released their Hot 25 Report on the most in-demand early-stage companies. The top 3: 🥇 @resolveai AGAIN for the 3rd time. 🥈 @TheLatentCo making it's debut as the highest ranking newcomer on the list. 🥉@Starcloud_ returning after last being on the list back in Q3 2025 Newcomers to watch: @PrimeIntellect at #4, Strala AI #5 & @trajectorylabs at #7 Find the full report here: harmonic.ai/hot-25-startups/…
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The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)
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Agents require completely different search inputs, outputs, and latencies “The problem’s inputs are different, outputs are different, and constraints are different. Imagine someone running an agent built with a Luna model and someone running an agent built with a Fable model. They are very different models. How you want to optimize signal-to-noise and tokens for each of them is so different in terms of what you do in the web search stack.” @paraga Love to hear your thoughts @sarahmsachs @simonlast @RLanceMartin @charlespacker
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Search compute is an economic trade-off against model compute “You are essentially allocating compute to web search in order to save compute on the model. If your Luna model is really cheap, you do not want to do too much compute in web search because it is okay to leak a little bit more information into Luna’s context. Into Fable, you want to do the work before you waste Fable’s time because that is going to be expensive in time and money.” @paraga Love to hear your thoughts @rweiss57 @jerryjliu0 @douwekiela @jeffreyhuber
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Why team sizes won't be impacted as much as people think “Our legal team is over 10 people, our customer success team is over 40 people. All of them use AI heavily. I definitely can say that I do not see any elimination. Over 60% of customer support requests can be handled with AI, but when it especially comes to B2B, AI just does not work.” @alexmashrabov Love to hear your thoughts @marty_kausas @jasonlk @searchbrat @maryshenocarro1
Higgsfield is the most untold story in tech. $1BN in ARR in 18 months. Faster than everyone other than OpenAI and Anthropic. They spend $4M a month on models. They expect this to be $100K per person per month. They have 150 people working in a content machine. They will breed more millionaires than any other company in Kazakh history. For the first time, @alexmashrabov on the journey to $1BN in ARR. (below) 1. The Power of the Immigrant Founder Coming from Uzbekistan, Alex was pushed into competitive programming at age eight as his single path to reach the United States. For international founders, placing top in global competitions serves as the ultimate social elevator, instilling the relentless work ethic required to build breakout companies. 2. My Biggest Lessons in the Journey to Finding Product-Market Fit @higgsfield burned over $10 million of its $16 million seed round chasing hype and narrative rather than product quality. With under $5 million left, the team pivoted to product-led growth, solving camera control for creative directors, which immediately triggered organic hypergrowth without paid ads. 3. The 150-Person Content Team Powering Higgsfield's Billion in ARR Nearly half of Higgsfield's workforce consists of 150 in-house creative professionals producing tutorials, ads, and cinematic projects. Generating 90 minutes of TV-quality AI video requires 100 hours of raw output, proving human taste and curation remain the primary drivers of distribution. 4. We Spend $4 Million per Month on Models Higgsfield spends $4 million monthly on internal model usage, averaging $10,000 per employee so teams can freely vibe code and test workflows. Uncapped inference compute acts as a force multiplier, allowing top talent to discover breakthroughs at maximum velocity. 5. Why Chasing Benchmarks Is Bullshit and the Corporate Misalignment Occurring Public benchmarks have devolved into corporate psyops where lab researchers overfit test data to secure bonuses before job-hopping. Text-to-video benchmarks ignore real production workflows requiring 3,000-word prompts, proving direct customer iteration beats artificial leaderboards. 6. Why Team Sizes Won't Be Impacted as Much as People Think While AI handles over 60% of basic support requests, complex B2B environments cannot eliminate human teams. High product velocity constantly shifts rules and context, requiring smart, coordinated operators across legal and customer success. 7. Americans Are Way More Promiscuous When It Comes to Leaving Companies Silicon Valley workers routinely jump jobs every two years, prioritizing short-term trends over deep commitment. This transactional market gives international hubs an advantage, where cultural loyalty and team stability build compounding technical moats. (links in comments)
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Is the man high? You can’t my friend cos energy prices are 4x higher here than elsewhere. You can’t because you need 5 years and more regulation than ever to open a datacentre. You have to create the environment and ecosystem for AI to thrive. And we haven’t.
🚨 WATCH: Andy Burnham says he will create a "global code" for AI so Britain can "capture the benefits" "We led the world's first industrial revolution from the Midlands and the North of England. So why can't we lead the next one? We can, and we will"
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The 150-person content team powering Higgsfield's billion in ARR “We have an in-house team of over 150 creative professionals. It is almost half of the whole workforce. For 90 minutes of TV-quality content, it was over 100 hours of AI-generated content. Creative decision-making, picking the right piece, is still very important. That is what is driving most of the revenue.” @alexmashrabov Love to hear your thoughts @Diesol @bilawalsidhu @PJaccetturo @c_valenzuelab
Higgsfield is the most untold story in tech. $1BN in ARR in 18 months. Faster than everyone other than OpenAI and Anthropic. They spend $4M a month on models. They expect this to be $100K per person per month. They have 150 people working in a content machine. They will breed more millionaires than any other company in Kazakh history. For the first time, @alexmashrabov on the journey to $1BN in ARR. (below) 1. The Power of the Immigrant Founder Coming from Uzbekistan, Alex was pushed into competitive programming at age eight as his single path to reach the United States. For international founders, placing top in global competitions serves as the ultimate social elevator, instilling the relentless work ethic required to build breakout companies. 2. My Biggest Lessons in the Journey to Finding Product-Market Fit @higgsfield burned over $10 million of its $16 million seed round chasing hype and narrative rather than product quality. With under $5 million left, the team pivoted to product-led growth, solving camera control for creative directors, which immediately triggered organic hypergrowth without paid ads. 3. The 150-Person Content Team Powering Higgsfield's Billion in ARR Nearly half of Higgsfield's workforce consists of 150 in-house creative professionals producing tutorials, ads, and cinematic projects. Generating 90 minutes of TV-quality AI video requires 100 hours of raw output, proving human taste and curation remain the primary drivers of distribution. 4. We Spend $4 Million per Month on Models Higgsfield spends $4 million monthly on internal model usage, averaging $10,000 per employee so teams can freely vibe code and test workflows. Uncapped inference compute acts as a force multiplier, allowing top talent to discover breakthroughs at maximum velocity. 5. Why Chasing Benchmarks Is Bullshit and the Corporate Misalignment Occurring Public benchmarks have devolved into corporate psyops where lab researchers overfit test data to secure bonuses before job-hopping. Text-to-video benchmarks ignore real production workflows requiring 3,000-word prompts, proving direct customer iteration beats artificial leaderboards. 6. Why Team Sizes Won't Be Impacted as Much as People Think While AI handles over 60% of basic support requests, complex B2B environments cannot eliminate human teams. High product velocity constantly shifts rules and context, requiring smart, coordinated operators across legal and customer success. 7. Americans Are Way More Promiscuous When It Comes to Leaving Companies Silicon Valley workers routinely jump jobs every two years, prioritizing short-term trends over deep commitment. This transactional market gives international hubs an advantage, where cultural loyalty and team stability build compounding technical moats. (links in comments)
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“Ads do not work with agents in their current form. Agents show up, no one sees ads, and you make no money. We are effectively building an AdSense for agents showing up to read your content. We like to pay content owners a variable amount of money every time an agent derives benefit from reading their information.” @paraga
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“Agents will use the web 1,000x more than humans. Hence, new tech is needed and new business models are needed. No tech built for a certain scale survives three orders of magnitude. When you need new business models alongside new technology, a problem becomes really interesting.” @paraga
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The controversial question: How do you really calculate revenue? “We look at revenue over the last 28 days and multiply it by 13. What is very important is that we take revenue, not sales. If that is an annual subscription or annual enterprise contract, we prorate this across 12 months. It is only live revenue. We are not taking three-year enterprise deals and baking them into a $1BN figure.” @alexmashrabov Love to hear your thoughts @BR_Murray @cjgustafson222 @Kellblog @poyark
Higgsfield is the most untold story in tech. $1BN in ARR in 18 months. Faster than everyone other than OpenAI and Anthropic. They spend $4M a month on models. They expect this to be $100K per person per month. They have 150 people working in a content machine. They will breed more millionaires than any other company in Kazakh history. For the first time, @alexmashrabov on the journey to $1BN in ARR. (below) 1. The Power of the Immigrant Founder Coming from Uzbekistan, Alex was pushed into competitive programming at age eight as his single path to reach the United States. For international founders, placing top in global competitions serves as the ultimate social elevator, instilling the relentless work ethic required to build breakout companies. 2. My Biggest Lessons in the Journey to Finding Product-Market Fit @higgsfield burned over $10 million of its $16 million seed round chasing hype and narrative rather than product quality. With under $5 million left, the team pivoted to product-led growth, solving camera control for creative directors, which immediately triggered organic hypergrowth without paid ads. 3. The 150-Person Content Team Powering Higgsfield's Billion in ARR Nearly half of Higgsfield's workforce consists of 150 in-house creative professionals producing tutorials, ads, and cinematic projects. Generating 90 minutes of TV-quality AI video requires 100 hours of raw output, proving human taste and curation remain the primary drivers of distribution. 4. We Spend $4 Million per Month on Models Higgsfield spends $4 million monthly on internal model usage, averaging $10,000 per employee so teams can freely vibe code and test workflows. Uncapped inference compute acts as a force multiplier, allowing top talent to discover breakthroughs at maximum velocity. 5. Why Chasing Benchmarks Is Bullshit and the Corporate Misalignment Occurring Public benchmarks have devolved into corporate psyops where lab researchers overfit test data to secure bonuses before job-hopping. Text-to-video benchmarks ignore real production workflows requiring 3,000-word prompts, proving direct customer iteration beats artificial leaderboards. 6. Why Team Sizes Won't Be Impacted as Much as People Think While AI handles over 60% of basic support requests, complex B2B environments cannot eliminate human teams. High product velocity constantly shifts rules and context, requiring smart, coordinated operators across legal and customer success. 7. Americans Are Way More Promiscuous When It Comes to Leaving Companies Silicon Valley workers routinely jump jobs every two years, prioritizing short-term trends over deep commitment. This transactional market gives international hubs an advantage, where cultural loyalty and team stability build compounding technical moats. (links in comments)
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When I was a kid, I used to love MTV Cribs where you get to see inside the houses of mega-wealthy rappers. This is that for venture nerds and cap tables!!! 😂😂
AMD acquires World Labs for ~$8.2b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 From founding to an $8.2b exit in ~2.5 years. A huge value creation event. This is a fantastic exit, especially for the co-founders and the team. Investors will still share ~$2.3b of profits on $1.2b invested, a ~2.9x blended. Low-ish because most of the capital came in last. But it hides a lot of disparity between the various rounds! So let's dive in: 1) The real home run: founders and team 🏆🥳 This is one of the best founder outcomes I've modelled. @drfeifei, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall started World Labs in Apr-24. Less than 2.5 years later, they and the team still own ~56% according to my estimates. At an $8.2b valuation, that's a total prize of ~$4.6b to share between them. Taking a 15% attributed option pool, that's ~$1.2b for the team and ~$3.4b for the four co-founders. If split equally, that's ~$850m each, in just two and a half years. 💸 And, at close, Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su! Legendary. 2) The buyer was already on the cap table (again) 🔁 AMD Ventures invested in the Series B and the Series C here. Now they are buying the whole company. It's the same playbook as Nvidia with Hugging Face: strategic corporates are using their venture arms as a free option on future acquisitions. 3) The standout VC winners: a16z and Radical Ventures 👑 Both backed Fei-Fei at inception, in Apr-24 at a ~$300m valuation. That Series A will return ~19x the money, or ~$1.2b of proceeds, in under 2.5 years. Congrats to @martin_casado and team. Another mega win after Cursor and OpenRouter. The team at @a16z truly is on a generational run. 4) The star angels did well 🌟 The Sep-24 Series B had arguably the strongest AI angel list ever assembled: Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ram Shriram and more. Priced at $1.3b, it was never going to be a 1,000x. But ~5x in two years is a ~125% IRR 📈 And the best part is: Hinton's AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and ImageNet was the dataset Fei-Fei built. Twelve years later, he backed her company. Full circle. 🔄 5) The late money: a great IRR, but a poor multiple of money 🤏 The $1b Series C in Feb-26 at $5.4b returns ~1.5x in 7 months. That's a great IRR, but in terms of venture returns, this is a poor multiple of money. Although I am sure no one will complain about seeing DPI this quickly! Congrats to all involved!
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My biggest lessons in the journey to finding product-market fit “We spent more than a year in search of a product that could work. We burned more than $10M out of $16M raised in seed fundraising. I feel I am responsible because I was focusing on the wrong things. I think I just lost touch with reality back then. I was optimizing for what is hype today, what is the right narrative, how we can hijack the attention, everything instead of building a good product.” @alexmashrabov Love to hear your thoughts @mwseibel @ElenaVerna @bbalfour @hnshah
Higgsfield is the most untold story in tech. $1BN in ARR in 18 months. Faster than everyone other than OpenAI and Anthropic. They spend $4M a month on models. They expect this to be $100K per person per month. They have 150 people working in a content machine. They will breed more millionaires than any other company in Kazakh history. For the first time, @alexmashrabov on the journey to $1BN in ARR. (below) 1. The Power of the Immigrant Founder Coming from Uzbekistan, Alex was pushed into competitive programming at age eight as his single path to reach the United States. For international founders, placing top in global competitions serves as the ultimate social elevator, instilling the relentless work ethic required to build breakout companies. 2. My Biggest Lessons in the Journey to Finding Product-Market Fit @higgsfield burned over $10 million of its $16 million seed round chasing hype and narrative rather than product quality. With under $5 million left, the team pivoted to product-led growth, solving camera control for creative directors, which immediately triggered organic hypergrowth without paid ads. 3. The 150-Person Content Team Powering Higgsfield's Billion in ARR Nearly half of Higgsfield's workforce consists of 150 in-house creative professionals producing tutorials, ads, and cinematic projects. Generating 90 minutes of TV-quality AI video requires 100 hours of raw output, proving human taste and curation remain the primary drivers of distribution. 4. We Spend $4 Million per Month on Models Higgsfield spends $4 million monthly on internal model usage, averaging $10,000 per employee so teams can freely vibe code and test workflows. Uncapped inference compute acts as a force multiplier, allowing top talent to discover breakthroughs at maximum velocity. 5. Why Chasing Benchmarks Is Bullshit and the Corporate Misalignment Occurring Public benchmarks have devolved into corporate psyops where lab researchers overfit test data to secure bonuses before job-hopping. Text-to-video benchmarks ignore real production workflows requiring 3,000-word prompts, proving direct customer iteration beats artificial leaderboards. 6. Why Team Sizes Won't Be Impacted as Much as People Think While AI handles over 60% of basic support requests, complex B2B environments cannot eliminate human teams. High product velocity constantly shifts rules and context, requiring smart, coordinated operators across legal and customer success. 7. Americans Are Way More Promiscuous When It Comes to Leaving Companies Silicon Valley workers routinely jump jobs every two years, prioritizing short-term trends over deep commitment. This transactional market gives international hubs an advantage, where cultural loyalty and team stability build compounding technical moats. (links in comments)
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Every single day in this role I think to @arampell: The battle between a startup and an incumbent is a race to see whether the startup achieves scale and distribution before the established company replicates or acquires its innovation. The race is on.
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