The job market is tough right now - especially for new grads. All three were 1–2 years out of college, siblings of friends or family friends. Two were looking for any job. The third was specifically interested in tech.

But like my friend who found a middle ground, I’ve come to see that joy matters too. Sometimes longevity means the glass of wine, the night out, the moment that keeps you human. The old adage was that money can’t buy time. These days, that may no longer be entirely true.

Then one day, you meet a truly special founder. That’s when it matters to move faster than the funds waiting for their Monday partner meetings. To decide, commit, and win the right to invest before the market catches on. And it will catch on fast if you don’t.

I just spent the week with my older sister, and left reminded of how magnetic a personality she has. We laugh at this, but she always says the trick to social success (and anxiety) is to have three recent stories prepared that you can weave into any conversation.

The hackathon spanned two full days, brought together 19 top startups as sponsors, and was packed end-to-end with builder energy, creativity, and grind. We gave away 5K in cash prizes, exclusive bounties, and tens of thousands in credits to help the winners take their ideas even further.

You’ll be joining a world-class team of operators turned investors, with experience at companies like Tinder, Twitter, Scale AI, and more. But we're not just a world-class team - we're a winning team. Every Chapter One fund has been in the top percentile of returns, and that’s incredibly hard to do.

Google Sheets has finally added AI. And now you can call a prompt directly from a cell. Internally, we’ve built a ton of workarounds to pull data from Google Sheets, prompt & process it with LLM APIs for analysis or categorization, and then write it back to the spreadsheet. Sure, it works, but it’s never felt smooth.

Silicon Valley’s game of musical chairs now includes everyone, even founders of billion-dollar startups with hundreds of employees and nine figures in the bank. The same founders who once sold a “lifelong mission” are now stepping away the moment a better seat opens up.

I'm in Vegas right now for the World Series of Poker to play the Ladies' No-Limit Hold'em Event tomorrow. For anyone not familiar with the WSOP — before you get too impressed by the name "World Series" — I didn't qualify for anything. You just pay a buy-in fee and get a spot in the tournament.

He's 37 years old, an age when professionals in most fields are entering the prime of their careers. But today he's witnessing the AI-driven product design landscape reinvent itself in a language he hasn't yet learned.

I am deeply grateful to Jeff Morris Jr. and the rest of the Chapter One team for their support and partnership, and the opportunity to continue to build an iconic venture fund.

It’s now obvious to most builders and investors that AI Agents are the new platform shift. We’re in the early innings and seeing major breakthroughs in reasoning and chain- of- thought (CoT) everyday. Frameworks like LangChain are driving rapid agent development, while software giants like Anthropic and Google are explicitly exploring agent-to-agent (A2A) communication paradigms.

At Chapter One, we’re teaming up with the AI and Entrepreneurial societies from top UK universities — Cambridge, Imperial, Oxford, and UCL — and partnering with leading venture funds Bessemer, Dawn Capital, and Seedcamp to organize a two-day hackathon.

During the last crypto cycle, I was in text groups where almost every $100 price movement, someone would message about it. Tweets, every day, “New high!”, “Bitcoin hit $47,000!” followed by the next hour, “Bitcoin at $47,100!” As if Bitcoin moving less than half a percent changed or proved anything.

AI is crowded. Founders building in AI and investors investing in AI, wake up every day thinking about how competitive the market is. That’s why, two years after the ChatGPT-3 launch, I’ve been obsessed with the question: what’s working? Who is making money? What startups have broken through? Achieved early product-market-fit?

We spent nearly 20 minutes wrestling with a design question, a reminder that “chewing on glass”—feeling stuck and frustrated—is just part of the process. But that’s when breakthroughs happen. Every iteration sharpens your skills, and although I’m still rusty, I’m beginning to see the progress over the past few months.

Offering a candid look at the struggles and strategies of today's fund managers, Jeff describes ecosystem where only the most adaptable will survive. He talks about the delicate balance between chasing deals and building a sustainable franchise, all while navigating a landscape where past unicorn valuations holds diminishing returns.

Based in London and love building as much as we do? We'd love to see you there! We're bringing together the sharpest product, engineering and GTM minds in London's startup scene for honest conversations about the one thing that actually matters: finding true product-market fit.

Jasper had won multiple gold medals in international mathematics competitions, graduated as the student of the year from China’s premier university Peking University for mathematics, and completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley – one of the world’s most prestigious programs – in just two years. Yuchen had a Ph.D. in distributed systems and networking from the University of Washington, achieving multiple publications in ICLR, Sigcomm, NSDI, and SOSP.

Last week, I was doing diligence on a Seed stage company we were evaluating — and I used the public Big Query PyPI table to verify the number of Python downloads listed as a key metric on the deck. I’m somewhat embarrased to admit this because data is my thing — but before last week, I didn’t know this dataset existed.

Here is my problem: I receive a lot of information through emails or documents, and I am constantly reformatting data into spreadsheets or databases for organizational purposes. But when I ask ChatGPT to reformat the text/unstructured data, the URL links get lost.

But what about founders who aren’t sure about the accelerator trade-offs? The ones that have put together a strong team, developed an early MPV, and are looking for initial capital to scale and land the first few customers. Where should they focus their fundraising energy?

Bryan Johnson is the world's most measured human. Johnson sold his company, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800m in 2013. Through his Project Blueprint, Johnson has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5% of 18 year olds, inflammation 66% lower than the average 10 year old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.

YC’s most recent W24 batch includes 240 companies. Batch size is interesting because, notably, there was a pull-back in batch size after the winter 2022 batch. Also, I still speak to people all the time who are stunned that the YC batches have 200+ companies. We’re out of the days when the YC batches were 20 companies working out of Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and the rest of the founder’s office in 2005.

The substack will act as a notification system. If a new market map is published by a fund, organization, or person and added to the venture market maps website - we’ll write a post that includes the link, authors, and the map - so subscribers can keep up to date on the latest!

In venture, market maps have emerged as THE visualization tool for funds to articulate research insights, publish frameworks they’ve been working on, and provide an inbound call to action to signal this is a space they are investing in.

Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano is an entrepreneur and technology investor. He runs his family office which makes private investments, along with owning majority stakes in a number of operating businesses. Additionally, Pomp hosts popular conversations on “The Pomp Podcast,” which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Pomp also writes a letter that is read by more than 250,000 investors each morning.

Delian Asparouhov is the co-founder, President and Chairman of Varda Space Industries, a company building spacecraft to manufacture materials in microgravity that are difficult or impossible to produce on Earth— starting with pharmaceuticals. He’s also a Partner at Founders Fund.

Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He’s the author of 8 books, including The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His next book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing, will be published by the Cato Institute in 2024.

Robin Hanson is a professor at George Mason University and researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Chris Mason is a professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also one of the founding Directors of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, and the co-author of The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk.

Keith Rabois is a General Partner at Founders Fund and the CEO of OpenStore, which acquires small direct-to-consumer businesses. Keith co-founded Opendoor and led the first institutional investments in DoorDash and Affirm. He has early stakes in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Wish, and also led investments in Faire, Ramp, Trade Republic, and Stripe. He’s regarded as one of the greatest early stage investors.

Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist and writer. He is the CEO and co-founder of Tusk Ventures, the world’s first venture capital fund that invests solely in early stage startups in highly regulated industries, and the founder of political consulting firm Tusk Strategies. Bradley’s family foundation is funding and leading the national campaign to bring mobile voting to all U.S. elections.

Jeff Morris Jr is the Managing Partner at Chapter One, an early stage venture capital fund. He’s formerly the VP of Product and Revenue at Tinder, which he helped scale to become the #1 grossing app in the world.

Let’s be honest: handling authentication configuration is a chore. It’s a task we do so rarely that we often forget the process almost as soon as it’s completed. By the time we need to revisit it, the whole procedure seems unfamiliar once again.

Large Language Models (LLMs) will reshape every business, industry, and consumer experience, but only if the models, tools, and infrastructure are easy to use and available to everyone. The advantages of artificial intelligence need to be equitably spread to the use cases, problem sets, visions, and new ideas as varied and diverse as we all are.

Ether.fi’s value is easy to explain. ~14% of ETH is staked. The majority of staked ETH is in centralized solutions. EtherFi provides ETH staking, fully decentralized and non-custodial.

The Ethereum blockchain is designed to let protocols flourish as fully decentralized and permissionless systems, yet we do not see projects building with this focus in mind daily. It is becoming more clear that DeFi is needed globally, a strengthening market that will power the next evolution of our peer-to-peer financial system. However, with all systems, we must invest in the infrastructure that powers the underlying technology.

Squid lets its users swap and transfer tokens between blockchains and buy NFTs on any chain with any currency. With just one click on your preferred wallet, you can effortlessly swap tokens from Ethereum to Polygon, buy an NFT on Avalanche from Arbitrum, and access value on various application-chains, amongst other actions.

The headlines do not sugarcoat how devastating the failures of smart contracts can be. DeFi in particular has seen several billions of dollars wiped out from novel smart contracts due to exploitable code. While smart contracts are crucial to financial transparency, the attack vectors also increase when code is made fully public to the community.

This week, I have the pleasure of teaching a Blockchain Analytics 101 lesson to Imperial’s Blockchain Club. As a part of the class, we’ll run through examples of how to pull on-chain data for an NFT smart contract using Dune Analytics.

In my former life, I worked as a data scientist at a big-tech company. We lived and breathed metrics: growth, active users, retention, engagement, health, and churn. And all of the topline metrics and charts would be displayed on dashboards that we’d build and constantly review.