Z Fellows / The Cannon Project | interviewing people I’m curious about...
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Someone stopped me on the street earlier to say how much they liked this episode.
I didn’t catch your name, but thank you & glad you enjoyed !
Here's my conversation with @JTLonsdale
We explore:
- immigrant roots, philosophy, and warfare
- chess & investing billions with Peter Thiel
- founding stories behind Palantir and 8VC
Plus, US & Japanese bond markets, what drives him, the University of Austin, and much more.
YouTube link below and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:24 Poor Irish Immigrants and Holocaust Survivors
6:44 A 20-Year Chess Dynasty
9:37 Why Great Men Quit Chess
13:15 Stanford Nerds, Protests & Palantir Recruiting
14:25 Rejected from PayPal and Arguing with Max Levchin
23:23 Investing Billions With Peter Thiel
30:25 A Year of Loss and Failure
33:54 The Painful Beginnings of Palantir
39:15 The Palantir CIA Conspiracy Theory
41:18 Losing a $300M Military Contest
46:44 Raising the Largest VC Fund Since 2000
55:57 Most People are Cowards
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Sonith retweeted
Argus: an open-source robotics data annotation and quality pipeline.
With new frontier VLMs like GPT-6 Astra, we can generate rich, high-quality annotations for robotics data for both training and dataset analysis. Argus delivers detailed, timestamp-level annotations while catching issues like mislabeled instructions, sped-up recordings, swapped camera streams, and unflagged operator mistakes.
To support better data quality for the robotics community, we’re open-sourcing Argus for anyone to use 🧵
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congrats to Alfred, Florian and the entire Listen team!!
honored to have been their first check and first believer back in 2022!
Listen Labs is joining @Salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
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Introducing NetworkOcean.
Our future is bottlenecked by the speed at which we can deploy power.
We’re building floating solar arrays powering data centers at sea. This will soon be the fastest way to deploy new compute, skipping years of land, grid connections, and traditional infrastructure delays.
Our 2030 target is 1 GW/week.
@network_ocean_
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Today, Justus and I are excited to introduce Proximal. We’re building the infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience.
In the past year, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue helping frontier labs and enterprises improve coding agents. Now, we are expanding beyond software.
One of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most over the last year is working with this amazing group of people. It's an incredible feeling working alongside people who are better than you and that encourage you to do your best work. I am impressed daily at both the raw technical talent of the team but also the humility, high agency, and high trust culture we have built.
Many of the team lived in the office for months over the last year which made it feel less like work but more like working on an exciting project with your best friends. It feels like (and we've been told) that it reminds them of going back to college where working with your friends on cool ideas and hacking into late nights was just so much fun.
We are nowhere close to where we want to be and the ambitions we have, we’re just getting started. Thank you to everyone who has supported us thus far!
Proximal builds infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience.
In the past year, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue helping frontier labs and enterprises improve coding agents. Now, we are expanding beyond software engineering.
Recent progress in mathematics demonstrates what happens when models are trained in domains with massive amounts of public data and easy verifiability, making it easy to find weaknesses, generate training tasks, and iterate quickly.
We build infrastructure that enables this feedback loop in other domains: we are excited about a world in which AI systems design targeted drugs, accelerate chip design, and rewrite legacy software that still runs hospitals, power grids, governments, and other critical infrastructure.
Since starting, we have assembled a small team of researchers and engineers and built world-class infrastructure for post-training and synthetic data research to overcome the challenges of scaling manual data curation.
Our team comes from Cursor, Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, Prime Intellect, Citadel, and Jane Street. More than half are former founders.
We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share that vision, including @generalcatalyst who led our $15M Seed Round at a $300M valuation, as well as @chemistry, @svangel, @dvlamoen and individuals like @LiamFedus, @kevinweil, and @bernhardsson
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Today, Long Lake completed our $6.3B acquisition of Amex GBT.
Long Lake acquires and transforms generational businesses with AI across the American services economy.
Amex GBT is the travel partner for 17,500 businesses in 140 countries. Last year, Amex GBT booked 35 million trips for 10 million travelers.
This marks Long Lake’s 40th acquisition, and our family of companies now employs nearly 30,000 people.
We founded Long Lake three years ago with the thesis that AI is going to change every company, but there’s a large overhang between AI capabilities and how most businesses leverage AI tools.
We partner with strong, profitable, and growing businesses to help them deploy AI and improve their customer service.
Our first cohort of companies has doubled their EBITDA in less than two years through topline and productivity growth, all while increasing headcount. (We’re proud to say that we’ve never conducted a layoff.)
We’re excited to share a bit more about what we’ve been up to.
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Sonith retweeted
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
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News: We’re moving NFX to self-funded. Taking it private. No more external LP’s after fund IV. The four GP’s stay intact. 8 more big seed investments to make in Fund IV, so hit us up. After that, we'll be doing $100K - $3M investments w/ our own money. Thanks to @homebrew who led the way! @NFX @GigiLevy @peteflint @omri_drory
nfx.com/post/self-funding-nf…
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Sonith retweeted
Every single result on this search is a @wander powered unit, either the direct booking site, or the marketplace.
The AI moment for travel is here, and we are powering it.
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Solari Capital Emerges from Stealth to Back Founders Programming Reality for an Abundant Tomorrow
At long last, I'm super excited to announce Solari Capital.
I joined AJ Scaramucci (@jedimooch) and Solari 3 years ago as a day-zero "Employee #1" to build a new venture capital firm, doing everything from investing to incubating to fundraising.
$350M later, and it is still just the beginning of the journey.
Our thesis is that reality is fundamentally and inherently programmable, therefore intelligence becomes omnipresent, biology becomes writable, and the physical world moves from chaos to order.
In other words, we partner with and incubate companies across frontier tech, hard sciences, and critical industries, from (very) early to late stages!
Eternally grateful to all of the founders we have the privilege of working with, and to our LPs, such as Ron Conway, Eric Schmidt, Jim Breyer, Stephen Pagliuca, and many others.
:)
(Fortune article below)
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"I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO... why does it have to be like this?"
@immad has built @mercury with extreme helpfulness and irrational effort at the core its product philosophy.
Watch: Dialectic 57: The Art of Irrational Effort
Immad Akhund is a 4x founder who decided banking didn't need to suck, especially given how central it is to every entrepreneur's journey.
Nearly a decade in, he hopes to fight decay and build a company that gets better over time, not worse. 1-in-3 startups use Mercury, and he's betting that the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Opening Highlights
(1:50) Intro: Immad Akhund
(4:16) Start: Banks and Why Immad Was Suited to Build One
(20:30) What Traditional Banks Do Well & What Mercury Got Right
(29:33) Why Mercury Wants a Bank Charter
(35:57) What's Scarce When Software Is Easy
(49:00) Becoming the Default for New Entrepreneurs
(53:34) Product: 100 Little Things Better
(1:06:51) The Right to Win
(1:09:19) Brand as Care
(1:15:19) Culture and Being Extremely Helpful
(1:22:51) Command, Agents, and AI
(1:34:26) Ambition, Investing, and Leading
(1:46:54) Family, Pakistan, and America
(1:52:56) Money, Freedom, and Energy
Available below and all platforms.
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Sonith retweeted
We (@PantheonInc) have been working on a robotics data quality pipeline that uncovered a series of major problems in public robotics datasets, especially for world modeling.
To improve the quality of data available to open-source robotics, we're publishing annotations for four of the most popular datasets. Some examples of issues, and our report 🧵
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We (@PantheonInc) have been working on a robotics data quality pipeline that uncovered a series of major problems in public robotics datasets, especially for world modeling.
To improve the quality of data available to open-source robotics, we're publishing annotations for four of the most popular datasets. Some examples of issues, and our report 🧵
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Sonith retweeted
We started @column with the insane idea to rebuild every component of the financial system from scratch. Today, I think we've finally completed that build.
We're releasing four new products, so any technology company can build at the frontier of financial services.
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Everyone’s been asking what’s next after selling Cal AI.
Introducing Persona.
Others couldn’t figure out the interface, we did.
yourpersona.com/band
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Sonith retweeted
"everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you" - Steve Jobs
new z fellows cohort starting soon. interviewing now for it.
zfellows.com
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