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Announcing that Willow has raised $4.2 million to build voice-first interfaces. We started Willow after dropping out of Stanford freshman year to build a healthcare startup. It failed. We pivoted over 10 times, spent a year in the trenches, and learned how to build the hard way. But we... discovered something huge. Voice scribes were giving doctors their lives back. They were able to focus on helping patients rather than wasting nights and weekends on paperwork. That's when it hit us. If voice could transform healthcare, why not every knowledge worker? Why are a billion professionals still hammering away at keyboards to communicate with humans (email, Slack, writing) and AI (ChatGPT, Cursor)? Today, thousands of professionals at companies like Canva, GitHub, and Webflow use Willow to work 5x faster. We're building Willow to unlock voice as the universal interface where you can control any device, any app, any workflow simply by speaking. – This $4.2M round was led by Boxgroup, with participation from Goodwater Capital, Burst Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. We’re also backed by an Avengers-level group of investors, including: Max Mullen (Founder, Instacart) (COO, Shopify) dharmesh (CTO/Founder, HubSpot) Tomer London (CPO/Founder, Gusto) Geoff Donaker (COO, Yelp) Ankur Nagpal (Founder, Teachable) Steven (CEO/Founder, Moov) Daniel Cahn (CEO/Founder, Slingshot AI) John Andrew Entwistle (CEO/Founder, Wander) Mercedes Bent (Venture Partner, Lightspeed J.J. Fliegelman (CTO/Founder, Wayup) Special thanks to our earliest believers: Adam Guild (CEO/Founder, Owner), Cory Levy (Founder, ZFellows), and Nicolas Dessaigne (Partner, YC). And most importantly, thank you to the best co-founder and CTO Lawrence Liu. – We're hiring for founding engineer, designer, and ML roles who want to redefine how humans work. Join a world-class team building technology that transforms lives daily with top-tier compensation and equity. Comment "Join Willow" to be fast-tracked. The next decade will be defined by voice-first computing. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen. It's whether you'll be part of building it.show more

Allan Guo

2,807 subscribers

499,736 次观看 • 1 年前 •via X (Twitter)

健康养生科学技术

Anya Rossi• Live Now

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10 条评论

Allan Guo 的头像

Allan Guo1 年前

If you’re excited about joining us on our mission, apply to our open roles at Want to 5x your productivity with the latest voice AI? Try

dharmesh 的头像

dharmesh1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI Congrats! Product is great, and it's a massive opportunity. Thrilled be along for the ride as an indie investor.

Allan Guo 的头像

Allan Guo1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI Thanks so much Dharmesh. Incredibly grateful to have you 🚀

amogh 的头像

amogh1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI why does @_allanguo kinda look like asian marlon?

David Corbitt 的头像

David Corbitt1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI I was blown away by a demo of Willow a few months back. Really excited to see where you take the product!

Allan Guo 的头像

Allan Guo1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI I'm so glad to hear that. Thank you!!!

Ankur Nagpal 的头像

Ankur Nagpal1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI Stoked to be involved man

Allan Guo 的头像

Allan Guo1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI We're so grateful to have you!

ellie chang 的头像

ellie chang1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI i already have a bf but i'd cheat on him in a heartbeat for @_allanguo

Y Cumbinator 的头像

Y Cumbinator1 年前

@WillowVoiceAI Is the willow office just a bunch of people yelling over each other at their computers?

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2,288,918 次观看 • 1 个月前

I’m feeling blessed to share: Owner raised $120M Series C and is now at a $1B valuation 🦄 Mom-and-pop restaurant owners are being crushed by huge corporations. We’re using this cash to arm them to fight back. • This round was co-led by 2 perfect partners for us: Alex Kurland from Meritech, who led DoorDash’s Series B, and Shalini Rao from Headline, who led Toast’s Series C. They were also joined by an inspiring group of new investors: Fidji Simo (CEO Instacart), Jonathan Neman (CEO Sweetgreen), Garrett Langley (CEO Flock Safety). & still more inspiring new investors... Dharmesh Shah (CTO HubSpot), Josh Reeves (CEO Gusto), Shaan Puri (MFM), Matteo Franceschetti (CEO Eight Sleep), Anthony Pompliano, Sahil Bloom, Christina Cacioppo (CEO Vanta), Brett Schulman (CEO Cava), Matt Maloney (Founder & CEO GrubHub). … just to name a few. :) • Today, technology is being weaponized against small business owners. Corporations like Domino’s dominate. Why? Because they spend billions on tech, engineers, and marketers. • Small business owners are forced to compete with corporations that have massive war chests. But with Owner, they can do more than compete. They can win. We’re building the platform that gives them the power. We serve the people who serve our communities. • I started Owner 7 years ago, after dropping out of high school halfway through 10th grade. The first version of Owner wasn’t built for venture capital. It was built for my mom. She’s a small business owner who just needed a shot at success in the digital world. • I remember watching her worry that we’d lose her business and our house. In a moment of desperation, she asked her weird :) nerdy 17-year-old son to help her. I built a solution for her. That was Owner V1. When it started to work, I saw my mom transform. She went from being constantly stressed about money to feeling hopeful and excited about her future. The Owner team has now seen that same transformation happen for thousands of small business owners like her. That’s what drives us. • You can think of Owner as Shopify for restaurants—and, eventually, all local business owners. It gives them everything they need to succeed in the online future, in one place. Owner is their website, online ordering, mobile app, CRM. It all works together as one system. • Owner is also continuously optimized with what we learn from the thousands of restaurants and the more than 57 million consumers who have used our platform. It’s the only system designed for one outcome: growing sales profitably. It gives independent owners enough firepower to take on the big corporations, and win. • Shoutout to the great team at Owner — You deserve the credit for getting us here. I thank God every morning that I get to build Owner with each of you. We wouldn’t be here without you. We have a special team. Each of you represents greatness. • And shoutout to the best cofounder and CTO I could ever ask for, Deano🧙‍♂️. His work ethic and genius are as impressive as his character. I view partnering with Dean as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. • I’m proud of Owner today. But I also feel scared that people will see our unicorn valuation and think “we’ve made it.” So let me be brutally clear. We HAVE NOT made it. And if we start to believe we have, we never will. When investors value us at $1B, it’s because they see potential. Our investors see the POTENTIAL for us to build a company worth tens of billions. We have to prove them right. And we must also prove right the thousands of restaurant owners who’ve bet their futures on us. • We’re still underdogs. We still have a long way to go. We didn’t come this far just to come this far. It’s time to move faster, build better, and fight harder! We have millions of small business owners counting on us.

I’m feeling blessed to share: Owner raised $120M Series C and is now at a $1B valuation 🦄 Mom-and-pop restaurant owners are being crushed by huge corporations. We’re using this cash to arm them to fight back. • This round was co-led by 2 perfect partners for us: Alex Kurland from Meritech, who led DoorDash’s Series B, and Shalini Rao from Headline, who led Toast’s Series C. They were also joined by an inspiring group of new investors: Fidji Simo (CEO Instacart), Jonathan Neman (CEO Sweetgreen), Garrett Langley (CEO Flock Safety). & still more inspiring new investors... Dharmesh Shah (CTO HubSpot), Josh Reeves (CEO Gusto), Shaan Puri (MFM), Matteo Franceschetti (CEO Eight Sleep), Anthony Pompliano, Sahil Bloom, Christina Cacioppo (CEO Vanta), Brett Schulman (CEO Cava), Matt Maloney (Founder & CEO GrubHub). … just to name a few. :) • Today, technology is being weaponized against small business owners. Corporations like Domino’s dominate. Why? Because they spend billions on tech, engineers, and marketers. • Small business owners are forced to compete with corporations that have massive war chests. But with Owner, they can do more than compete. They can win. We’re building the platform that gives them the power. We serve the people who serve our communities. • I started Owner 7 years ago, after dropping out of high school halfway through 10th grade. The first version of Owner wasn’t built for venture capital. It was built for my mom. She’s a small business owner who just needed a shot at success in the digital world. • I remember watching her worry that we’d lose her business and our house. In a moment of desperation, she asked her weird :) nerdy 17-year-old son to help her. I built a solution for her. That was Owner V1. When it started to work, I saw my mom transform. She went from being constantly stressed about money to feeling hopeful and excited about her future. The Owner team has now seen that same transformation happen for thousands of small business owners like her. That’s what drives us. • You can think of Owner as Shopify for restaurants—and, eventually, all local business owners. It gives them everything they need to succeed in the online future, in one place. Owner is their website, online ordering, mobile app, CRM. It all works together as one system. • Owner is also continuously optimized with what we learn from the thousands of restaurants and the more than 57 million consumers who have used our platform. It’s the only system designed for one outcome: growing sales profitably. It gives independent owners enough firepower to take on the big corporations, and win. • Shoutout to the great team at Owner — You deserve the credit for getting us here. I thank God every morning that I get to build Owner with each of you. We wouldn’t be here without you. We have a special team. Each of you represents greatness. • And shoutout to the best cofounder and CTO I could ever ask for, Deano🧙‍♂️. His work ethic and genius are as impressive as his character. I view partnering with Dean as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. • I’m proud of Owner today. But I also feel scared that people will see our unicorn valuation and think “we’ve made it.” So let me be brutally clear. We HAVE NOT made it. And if we start to believe we have, we never will. When investors value us at $1B, it’s because they see potential. Our investors see the POTENTIAL for us to build a company worth tens of billions. We have to prove them right. And we must also prove right the thousands of restaurant owners who’ve bet their futures on us. • We’re still underdogs. We still have a long way to go. We didn’t come this far just to come this far. It’s time to move faster, build better, and fight harder! We have millions of small business owners counting on us.

Adam Guild

680,290 次观看 • 1 年前

10 years ago, Parag Agrawal and I were working together to introduce ranking to Twitter’s timeline for hundreds of millions of consumers. Now he’s started Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for a very different kind of user: AI agents. And in a full circle moment, we’re able to work together again, as First Round invested in his seed round last year alongside Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. Parag and I had a chance to sit down for a great conversation last week (his first interview since leaving Twitter!). It was a fascinating reflection on what he learned and what he’s doing differently. We dig into: - The transition from CTO → CEO → Founder - What he was *really* thinking when all the Twitter drama was going down - Why he chose to be a founder (vs. take another big role) - How he landed on the idea for Parallel - What fundamentally changes when you’re designing for AIs vs. humans - How he thought about fundraising and building his early team - How working with customers like Clay shaped Parallel’s earliest products - The case for building “slow” APIs, and the advice he got from Patrick Collison - His takes on the modern agent stack and how evals need to evolve And much more! Immensely proud to be able to partner with Parag and the entire Parallel team. They’ve made incredible progress in a short amount of time and I can’t wait for more folks to start playing around with the APIs they’ve built. The full conversation is below, as well as more details on what Parallel is up to.

10 years ago, Parag Agrawal and I were working together to introduce ranking to Twitter’s timeline for hundreds of millions of consumers. Now he’s started Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for a very different kind of user: AI agents. And in a full circle moment, we’re able to work together again, as First Round invested in his seed round last year alongside Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. Parag and I had a chance to sit down for a great conversation last week (his first interview since leaving Twitter!). It was a fascinating reflection on what he learned and what he’s doing differently. We dig into: - The transition from CTO → CEO → Founder - What he was really thinking when all the Twitter drama was going down - Why he chose to be a founder (vs. take another big role) - How he landed on the idea for Parallel - What fundamentally changes when you’re designing for AIs vs. humans - How he thought about fundraising and building his early team - How working with customers like Clay shaped Parallel’s earliest products - The case for building “slow” APIs, and the advice he got from Patrick Collison - His takes on the modern agent stack and how evals need to evolve And much more! Immensely proud to be able to partner with Parag and the entire Parallel team. They’ve made incredible progress in a short amount of time and I can’t wait for more folks to start playing around with the APIs they’ve built. The full conversation is below, as well as more details on what Parallel is up to.

Todd Jackson

114,887 次观看 • 1 年前

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

167,484 次观看 • 11 个月前

The 9 traits Sam Altman looks for to identify founders who can build a $10 billion company “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video Source: Y Combinator

The 9 traits Sam Altman looks for to identify founders who can build a $10 billion company “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video Source: Y Combinator

Startup Archive

85,847 次观看 • 2 年前

Excited to announce Payman has raised a $3M pre-seed to pioneer AI to Human Payments! 🤖 + 🧑🏽 We’re proud to be backed by Visa, Coinbase Ventures 🛡️, Boost VC, Deepwater Asset Management, Spartan Group, Untapped Capital, Theory Forge VC and other awesome investors! With Payman, AI can pay humans to help them complete tasks like marketing ones shown in the video. Our Vision We believe AI and Humans will always work together. Giving AI the capability to work with humans involves giving them access to capital, and access to humans. Payman’s platform makes it easy for AI to pay humans for what it needs. This includes information, tasks that need to be completed, and so much more. We believe a key reason that AI Agents have struggled is because they aren’t able to ask for help from humans and incentivize them to help out. Building out the AI-Human payments infrastructure solves this and it’s why we’re so excited about what we’re building. Today 100% of the global economy is human to human payments. AI will start to eat a big chunk of that and Payman will be the rails by which it does so. How it’s going Since announcing Payman a couple of months ago we have 15,000+ people on the waitlist ready to use the product. In the meantime we’ve hired a stellar team to build out the production version of the product and have started onboarding Developers and Human’s to the platform this week. If you’re a developer and you'd like to get access, check out our website and sign up for early access. Additional Rockstar Investors In addition to the above investors we’re also proud to be backed by Protofund, Systemic Ventures, MetropolisDAO, and our awesome angel investors, Paris 2024 Olympic Gold Medalist Viktor Axelsen, Devin Walsh, kennethng.eth, Erin Koen, and many more!

Excited to announce Payman has raised a $3M pre-seed to pioneer AI to Human Payments! 🤖 + 🧑🏽 We’re proud to be backed by Visa, Coinbase Ventures 🛡️, Boost VC, Deepwater Asset Management, Spartan Group, Untapped Capital, Theory Forge VC and other awesome investors! With Payman, AI can pay humans to help them complete tasks like marketing ones shown in the video. Our Vision We believe AI and Humans will always work together. Giving AI the capability to work with humans involves giving them access to capital, and access to humans. Payman’s platform makes it easy for AI to pay humans for what it needs. This includes information, tasks that need to be completed, and so much more. We believe a key reason that AI Agents have struggled is because they aren’t able to ask for help from humans and incentivize them to help out. Building out the AI-Human payments infrastructure solves this and it’s why we’re so excited about what we’re building. Today 100% of the global economy is human to human payments. AI will start to eat a big chunk of that and Payman will be the rails by which it does so. How it’s going Since announcing Payman a couple of months ago we have 15,000+ people on the waitlist ready to use the product. In the meantime we’ve hired a stellar team to build out the production version of the product and have started onboarding Developers and Human’s to the platform this week. If you’re a developer and you'd like to get access, check out our website and sign up for early access. Additional Rockstar Investors In addition to the above investors we’re also proud to be backed by Protofund, Systemic Ventures, MetropolisDAO, and our awesome angel investors, Paris 2024 Olympic Gold Medalist Viktor Axelsen, Devin Walsh, kennethng.eth, Erin Koen, and many more!

tyllen

143,578 次观看 • 2 年前

Today, KOHO announced $130M in new capital at a $1.33B valuation. We’re very happy to welcome Mubadala, Savano Capital, tobi lutke, CEO, Founder of Shopify, and Michael Linford, COO of Affirm, to the KOHO story. We’re also grateful for the continued support of Drive Capital, Portage Ventures, Eldridge, BDC Capital, and HOOPP. One of my favourite things about KOHO is that the only way we win is if millions of Canadians choose us. We cannot out-spend or out-market. We have to out-build. The progress we have made reflects the progress our users have made. So, while we feel very proud of what’s behind us, we’re much more humbled by what’s in front of us. With this capital, we’ve earned the right to keep building on our promise to users. That job remains monumental, and we’re very honoured that we get to do the work. I want to thank the team for their incredible work these past few years. The world doesn’t yet know how talented, smart and kind the KOHO Collective is - but they will. I want to thank our investors for their continued trust and support. We’re lucky to have partners who recognize and support the need to take the longer view here. More than anything, I want to thank our users. We’ve come a long way with much farther to go. We’ll keep earning your trust every damn day. Back to work 🔥

Today, KOHO announced $130M in new capital at a $1.33B valuation. We’re very happy to welcome Mubadala, Savano Capital, tobi lutke, CEO, Founder of Shopify, and Michael Linford, COO of Affirm, to the KOHO story. We’re also grateful for the continued support of Drive Capital, Portage Ventures, Eldridge, BDC Capital, and HOOPP. One of my favourite things about KOHO is that the only way we win is if millions of Canadians choose us. We cannot out-spend or out-market. We have to out-build. The progress we have made reflects the progress our users have made. So, while we feel very proud of what’s behind us, we’re much more humbled by what’s in front of us. With this capital, we’ve earned the right to keep building on our promise to users. That job remains monumental, and we’re very honoured that we get to do the work. I want to thank the team for their incredible work these past few years. The world doesn’t yet know how talented, smart and kind the KOHO Collective is - but they will. I want to thank our investors for their continued trust and support. We’re lucky to have partners who recognize and support the need to take the longer view here. More than anything, I want to thank our users. We’ve come a long way with much farther to go. We’ll keep earning your trust every damn day. Back to work 🔥

Daniel Eberhard

25,958 次观看 • 2 个月前

Today, we are announcing Greylock 18, a new $1.5 billion early-stage venture fund. A company begins when a founder sees a future others cannot yet see. There is no team, product, or revenue. Only a deep insight and the courage to start. Being early is lonely work. For years, being right can look exactly like being wrong. Greylock has spent more than six decades partnering with founders through those earliest moments to build enduring companies. Airbnb, Facebook, and Palo Alto Networks all began as improbable ideas driven by founders determined to make them inevitable. AI has made the map blank again. Every part of the economy is now open to reinvention. We believe many of the defining AI companies do not yet exist. We invest selectively and partner deeply with the founders we back. Each Greylock partner makes only one or two new investments a year because the work demands depth. We bring the full attention, network, and resources of Greylock to every partnership. We are builders backing outliers. Founders have their choice of investor. When a founder chooses to partner with Greylock, we understand the weight of that choice and the profound responsibility that comes with it. We seek to be a founder’s first believer and long-term partner. Greylock 18 is our commitment to what does not exist yet.

Today, we are announcing Greylock 18, a new $1.5 billion early-stage venture fund. A company begins when a founder sees a future others cannot yet see. There is no team, product, or revenue. Only a deep insight and the courage to start. Being early is lonely work. For years, being right can look exactly like being wrong. Greylock has spent more than six decades partnering with founders through those earliest moments to build enduring companies. Airbnb, Facebook, and Palo Alto Networks all began as improbable ideas driven by founders determined to make them inevitable. AI has made the map blank again. Every part of the economy is now open to reinvention. We believe many of the defining AI companies do not yet exist. We invest selectively and partner deeply with the founders we back. Each Greylock partner makes only one or two new investments a year because the work demands depth. We bring the full attention, network, and resources of Greylock to every partnership. We are builders backing outliers. Founders have their choice of investor. When a founder chooses to partner with Greylock, we understand the weight of that choice and the profound responsibility that comes with it. We seek to be a founder’s first believer and long-term partner. Greylock 18 is our commitment to what does not exist yet.

Saam Motamedi

173,587 次观看 • 1 个月前

Learn to build conversational AI voice agents in "Building AI Voice Agents for Production", created in collaboration with LiveKit and RealAvatar, and taught by dsa (Co-founder & CEO of LiveKit), Shayne (Developer Advocate, LiveKit), and Nedelina Teneva (Head of AI at RealAvatar, an AI Fund portfolio company). Voice agents combine speech and reasoning capabilities to enable real-time conversations. They're already being used to support customer service, to improve accessibility in healthcare, for entertainment applications, and for talk therapy. In this course, you’ll learn to build voice agents that listen, reason, and respond naturally. You’ll follow the architecture used to create the "AI Andrew" Avatar, a collaborative project between and RealAvatar that responds to users in what sounds like my voice. You’ll build a voice agent from scratch and deploy it to the cloud, enabling support for many simultaneous users. What you’ll learn: - Understand the fundamentals of voice agents, including key components like speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and LLMs, and how latency is introduced at each layer. - Explore voice agent architectures and the trade-offs between modular pipelines and speech-to-speech APIs. - Explore how platforms like LiveKit mitigate latency issues with optimized networking infrastructure and low-latency communication protocols. - Learn how to connect client devices to voice agents using WebRTC—and why it outperforms HTTP and WebSocket for low-latency audio streaming. - Incorporate voice activity detection (VAD), end-of-turn detection, and context management to detect turns, handle interruptions, and manage conversational flow. - Understand the trade-offs between latency, quality, and cost in an example in which you build a voice agent and change its voice. - Equip your agent with metrics to measure latency at each stage of the voice pipeline and learn the key levers you can pull to make your agent faster and more responsive. The voice agents built in this course also incorporate voice technology from , a supporting contributor to the project. By the end of this course, you'll have learned the components of an AI voice agent pipeline, combined them into a system with low-latency communication, and deployed them on cloud infrastructure so it scales to many users. I’m looking forward to seeing what voice agents you build from this course! Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

87,711 次观看 • 1 年前

The world needs 10x more scientist-founders. 5050 helps scientists and engineers become great founders and start indispensable companies. Applications open! Startups are the best way to make a real impact with research, but where do you get started? How do you know if entrepreneurship is for you? Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. You’ll learn what it takes to become a great founder, how to choose the right problem, technology, and market, and how to build a deep tech startup. “It’s a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” – Eric McShane, 5050 alum. • Eric McShane and Evan spun out of Stanford and co-founded Electroflow to tackle the lithium shortage. They’ve scaled their tech by 200x in 6 months. • Mark Budde 🦕🏆 joined 5050 as a postdoc at Caltech. Two years later, plasmidsaurus enables scientists across all 50 states and most European countries to go much faster. • Niccolo joined as a Tesla engineer. Three months later, he co-founded Clippership and is building autonomous sailboats to decarbonize maritime shipping. • Chi and Tay Shin joined as postdocs at MIT. Within weeks, they spun out and are now working to enable in vivo cell reprogramming. At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups from the earliest stages and helped them raise over 4.6 billion dollars. We distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into 5050: a free program to help world-class scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? Am I ready to be a founder? You’ll learn if entrepreneurship is right for you, identify the idea to build, and pivot quickly if necessary. We’ll guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build. Phase II: Build You’ll join a cohort of fast-moving founders who will challenge you to ramp up. We’ll coach you to level up into a great founder and guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. Build will help you de-risk your technology, hit key milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed fast. Helping great scientists and engineers become great entrepreneurs is our jam. Apply / nominate! ➜

The world needs 10x more scientist-founders. 5050 helps scientists and engineers become great founders and start indispensable companies. Applications open! Startups are the best way to make a real impact with research, but where do you get started? How do you know if entrepreneurship is for you? Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. You’ll learn what it takes to become a great founder, how to choose the right problem, technology, and market, and how to build a deep tech startup. “It’s a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” – Eric McShane, 5050 alum. • Eric McShane and Evan spun out of Stanford and co-founded Electroflow to tackle the lithium shortage. They’ve scaled their tech by 200x in 6 months. • Mark Budde 🦕🏆 joined 5050 as a postdoc at Caltech. Two years later, plasmidsaurus enables scientists across all 50 states and most European countries to go much faster. • Niccolo joined as a Tesla engineer. Three months later, he co-founded Clippership and is building autonomous sailboats to decarbonize maritime shipping. • Chi and Tay Shin joined as postdocs at MIT. Within weeks, they spun out and are now working to enable in vivo cell reprogramming. At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups from the earliest stages and helped them raise over 4.6 billion dollars. We distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into 5050: a free program to help world-class scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? Am I ready to be a founder? You’ll learn if entrepreneurship is right for you, identify the idea to build, and pivot quickly if necessary. We’ll guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build. Phase II: Build You’ll join a cohort of fast-moving founders who will challenge you to ramp up. We’ll coach you to level up into a great founder and guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. Build will help you de-risk your technology, hit key milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed fast. Helping great scientists and engineers become great entrepreneurs is our jam. Apply / nominate! ➜

Seth Bannon

106,553 次观看 • 2 年前

ETH/ACC at Devcon 8 | Mumbai, India 🇮🇳 wasn’t just a Demo Day. It was a statement about where Ethereum is going, and who is building that future. 22 teams stepped onto one stage, and the ecosystem listened. As Losi opened the room: “We’re not just here to see founders or meet investors. We’re here because we believe in what’s possible when technology is used for good.” Odisea, alongside partners across the ecosystem; Founder School, Ethereumfndn’s Founder Success Team, Base, Uniswap Foundation, Agora, Protocol Labs, Arbitrum, Octant, Mantle, OpenZeppelin, Alchemy, Virtuals Ventures, Ledger, Founder School, Rayo Capital Group (Rayo), AKINDO | The world’s first Buildathon Platform🌊⚒️, and Founders Forge came together to spotlight founders building with clarity, intention, and ambition. And they delivered. For our Acelera cohort, BitFinding, Bu Finance, Kompensa, Safu, A0x, and Lid, this was the culmination of six intense weeks of product work, GTM, storytelling, and pitch practice. For the 16 additional teams who joined us on stage; DerbyFish, Alphix, Upshot, Index Network, Seedy Frens, Lumis, Openbands, PistachioFi, 𝗞𝗛𝗨𝗚𝗔, mimic, skyFall, Talentir, gm tribe!, Peanut, Delta and neurobro this was a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with world-class founders, to pressure-test their narratives, and to share the work that will define the next cycle of crypto and AI innovation. ETH/ACC was about proof. Proof that LATAM builders are not playing catch-up, they are setting the pace. Thank you to every founder who took the stage, to every partner who backed this vision, to every judge and panelist who brought rigor, clarity, and high-trust feedback, and to the entire Odisea team whose months of work made ETH/ACC possible. latam/acc

ETH/ACC at Devcon 8 | Mumbai, India 🇮🇳 wasn’t just a Demo Day. It was a statement about where Ethereum is going, and who is building that future. 22 teams stepped onto one stage, and the ecosystem listened. As Losi opened the room: “We’re not just here to see founders or meet investors. We’re here because we believe in what’s possible when technology is used for good.” Odisea, alongside partners across the ecosystem; Founder School, Ethereumfndn’s Founder Success Team, Base, Uniswap Foundation, Agora, Protocol Labs, Arbitrum, Octant, Mantle, OpenZeppelin, Alchemy, Virtuals Ventures, Ledger, Founder School, Rayo Capital Group (Rayo), AKINDO | The world’s first Buildathon Platform🌊⚒️, and Founders Forge came together to spotlight founders building with clarity, intention, and ambition. And they delivered. For our Acelera cohort, BitFinding, Bu Finance, Kompensa, Safu, A0x, and Lid, this was the culmination of six intense weeks of product work, GTM, storytelling, and pitch practice. For the 16 additional teams who joined us on stage; DerbyFish, Alphix, Upshot, Index Network, Seedy Frens, Lumis, Openbands, PistachioFi, 𝗞𝗛𝗨𝗚𝗔, mimic, skyFall, Talentir, gm tribe!, Peanut, Delta and neurobro this was a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with world-class founders, to pressure-test their narratives, and to share the work that will define the next cycle of crypto and AI innovation. ETH/ACC was about proof. Proof that LATAM builders are not playing catch-up, they are setting the pace. Thank you to every founder who took the stage, to every partner who backed this vision, to every judge and panelist who brought rigor, clarity, and high-trust feedback, and to the entire Odisea team whose months of work made ETH/ACC possible. latam/acc

Odisea Labs

17,897 次观看 • 9 个月前

In Signal Dialogues #04, we explore what it takes to build the foundational layer of voice AI from the ground up. Karan Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, sits down with Aakrit Vaish to unpack the bet behind one of the most ambitious infrastructure plays in AI. Karan and his co-founders came out of Stanford's AI Lab, where Albert Gu (now Cartesia's Chief Scientist) co-authored Mamba and pioneered State Space Models, the architecture they believe will define the next generation of real-time, interactive AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA with over $120M raised, Cartesia is building voice models engineered for real-time latency and efficiency at scale. If you're a founder, researcher or builder thinking about voice, infrastructure or the next architectural shift in AI, this one's for you. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:46 - What Cartesia Does: Interactive AI Models 03:24 - Founding Story: From Stanford PhDs to Cartesia 04:03 - The Unique Insight: Efficiency and Beyond Transformers 09:07 - Voice Company, Neolab, or Big Lab? 14:57 - State Space Models and Algorithmic Innovation 26:04 - The Four Big Bets in Interactive AI 30:24 - Products, Customers, and Going Full-Stack 41:44 - The BPO Disruption: India's Call Center Future 54:17 - Competition, Moats, and the Long Game Karan Goel Aakrit Vaish Cartesia

In Signal Dialogues #04, we explore what it takes to build the foundational layer of voice AI from the ground up. Karan Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, sits down with Aakrit Vaish to unpack the bet behind one of the most ambitious infrastructure plays in AI. Karan and his co-founders came out of Stanford's AI Lab, where Albert Gu (now Cartesia's Chief Scientist) co-authored Mamba and pioneered State Space Models, the architecture they believe will define the next generation of real-time, interactive AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA with over $120M raised, Cartesia is building voice models engineered for real-time latency and efficiency at scale. If you're a founder, researcher or builder thinking about voice, infrastructure or the next architectural shift in AI, this one's for you. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:46 - What Cartesia Does: Interactive AI Models 03:24 - Founding Story: From Stanford PhDs to Cartesia 04:03 - The Unique Insight: Efficiency and Beyond Transformers 09:07 - Voice Company, Neolab, or Big Lab? 14:57 - State Space Models and Algorithmic Innovation 26:04 - The Four Big Bets in Interactive AI 30:24 - Products, Customers, and Going Full-Stack 41:44 - The BPO Disruption: India's Call Center Future 54:17 - Competition, Moats, and the Long Game Karan Goel Aakrit Vaish Cartesia

Activate

12,489 次观看 • 3 个月前

Here we go again 🚀! Excited to announce that we're building A1Zap (YC W25) with Pennie Li and that we're in the Y Combinator W25 batch in San Francisco! What is A1Base? A1Base gives AI Agents a real world identity for work. We do that by rebuilding Twilio and Okta from the ground up, putting AI Agents first. This means developers can make AI-first agentic applications 10x easier with our API's. ⁉️ Why are we doing this? Because there's a huge torrent of new valuable companies possible with AI agents, but to get their AI Agents to users, they have to chain custom apps, chat interfaces, awkward Slack integrations, browser bots, and wrestle with Twilio’s legacy API (which is built for marketing). We solve this by providing developers with an easy to use API to interface your AI agent with humans/coworkers/users where they are in this case in Whatsapp, Slack, Teams, SMS and more) - with AI Agent features built in. These digital workers are poised to transform how we work and we're the critical infrastructure to help them interact naturally in human workflows. We're not just building another AI tool. We're creating the infrastructure that will enable AI agents to become a natural part of the workforce - handling everything from customer support to sales development to creative work. We're backed by Y Combinator and working with founding teams who share our vision. We believe that in the near future, AI Agents with human coworkers will enable us to pursue more creative and impactful work. Our mission is to help developers build AI Agents that people can partner with and rely on as trusted allies—always with a human-first mindset. If you're thinking about the Agentic future of your company reach out! If you're looking to build your first AI Agentic company - reach out too - we have some amazing open source templates to get you started on the journey. Excited to share more of what we're up to soon 🔜.

Here we go again 🚀! Excited to announce that we're building A1Zap (YC W25) with Pennie Li and that we're in the Y Combinator W25 batch in San Francisco! What is A1Base? A1Base gives AI Agents a real world identity for work. We do that by rebuilding Twilio and Okta from the ground up, putting AI Agents first. This means developers can make AI-first agentic applications 10x easier with our API's. ⁉️ Why are we doing this? Because there's a huge torrent of new valuable companies possible with AI agents, but to get their AI Agents to users, they have to chain custom apps, chat interfaces, awkward Slack integrations, browser bots, and wrestle with Twilio’s legacy API (which is built for marketing). We solve this by providing developers with an easy to use API to interface your AI agent with humans/coworkers/users where they are in this case in Whatsapp, Slack, Teams, SMS and more) - with AI Agent features built in. These digital workers are poised to transform how we work and we're the critical infrastructure to help them interact naturally in human workflows. We're not just building another AI tool. We're creating the infrastructure that will enable AI agents to become a natural part of the workforce - handling everything from customer support to sales development to creative work. We're backed by Y Combinator and working with founding teams who share our vision. We believe that in the near future, AI Agents with human coworkers will enable us to pursue more creative and impactful work. Our mission is to help developers build AI Agents that people can partner with and rely on as trusted allies—always with a human-first mindset. If you're thinking about the Agentic future of your company reach out! If you're looking to build your first AI Agentic company - reach out too - we have some amazing open source templates to get you started on the journey. Excited to share more of what we're up to soon 🔜.

Pasha Rayan

53,950 次观看 • 1 年前

Starting Tako was a fresh beginning for me. I wanted to apply what I had learned as a founder and to be part of the AI future. I wanted to do this based on humanistic values and beliefs, alongside formidable technical talent across Brazil and the US. AI occupies most of my thinking and I often return to this idea: we want an AI that amplifies the human spirit and that eliminates the work that suffocates the soul. Tako operates exactly on this second point by replacing bureaucracy with LLMs and code. Tako’s AI agents run payroll and workforce operations, with AI trained on Brazil’s labor laws. Today, we are launching our first agents. Brazil is a country of creative and entrepreneurial people. But it's also a place where paperwork, and regulations suffocate this potential every day. I remember leaving a meeting back in 2017 as I was launching Rappi and looking at a post of tangled electrical cables. I thought to myself: "This is how entrepreneurs feel when trying to build here." Tako is my call to action to change this. Technology is a tool to drive change and build new realities. AI can take over grunt work and simplify it on behalf of humans. As a foreigner who speaks the language, loves the culture and has lived through the pains of entrepreneurship here, I believe Brazil needs and deserves a new infrastructure to operate. It's an ambitious goal but Brazil will be better off when 20m companies and 50m workers run on Tako. We also raised $18m.

Starting Tako was a fresh beginning for me. I wanted to apply what I had learned as a founder and to be part of the AI future. I wanted to do this based on humanistic values and beliefs, alongside formidable technical talent across Brazil and the US. AI occupies most of my thinking and I often return to this idea: we want an AI that amplifies the human spirit and that eliminates the work that suffocates the soul. Tako operates exactly on this second point by replacing bureaucracy with LLMs and code. Tako’s AI agents run payroll and workforce operations, with AI trained on Brazil’s labor laws. Today, we are launching our first agents. Brazil is a country of creative and entrepreneurial people. But it's also a place where paperwork, and regulations suffocate this potential every day. I remember leaving a meeting back in 2017 as I was launching Rappi and looking at a post of tangled electrical cables. I thought to myself: "This is how entrepreneurs feel when trying to build here." Tako is my call to action to change this. Technology is a tool to drive change and build new realities. AI can take over grunt work and simplify it on behalf of humans. As a foreigner who speaks the language, loves the culture and has lived through the pains of entrepreneurship here, I believe Brazil needs and deserves a new infrastructure to operate. It's an ambitious goal but Brazil will be better off when 20m companies and 50m workers run on Tako. We also raised $18m.

Sebastian Mejia

13,914 次观看 • 1 年前