Just your daily reminder if you're looking for jobs at startups you should bug your VC friends! I have way more visibility now than I did as a candidate across sectors / stages + it's one of the (IMO) few ways VCs can actually be helpful...
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"Leigh Marie" Braswell✓
@LM_Braswell
partner @kleinerperkins; previously investing @foundersfund, first pm & early eng @scale_ai; if you like infra, ML, or poker let's chat
5.6K Following22.7K Followers2.9K Posts
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @allgarbled: I hate sf halloween what do you mean you’re the exponential time hypothesis05013
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @tachim: Starting today, Aristotle can verify C code including ~~memory safety~~, and control- and data-path properties of Verilog designs! We’ve started with bytes and electrons, and this is just the first step on our path to making all software and hardware verified by default.Harmonic @HarmonicMathWe’re bringing Aristotle to code. AI is writing more code than anyone can review. We're building the AI that verifies it. Starting today with C and Verilog.02408
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @fdesouza: The @scale_AI Mafia is an unreal force 🤯. Wild to see what this crew is doing—and the talent and ambition of the next generation. It’s clear this story is just getting started.Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wangTHE SCALE MAFIA one of the most special parts of starting a company is watching the people you fought and bled with in the early days go out and change the world. the Scale crew was supernatural. @scale_ai was one of the first companies to IOI and IMO-maxx, and the magic of Scale was that all of these geniuses gave a shit and ran through walls. it's no wonder that the Scale mafia is the first true mafia of the modern tech era. just to name a few: - cognition founder @stevenkplus1 & president @russelljkaplan - modal founder @akshat_b - tech & science advisor to POTUS @mkratsios47 - claude code head of product @_catwu - kpcb partners @LM_Braswell & @nayakkayak - bun founder @jarredsumner - tbd head of product @lindugong - netic founder @melisatokmak - cobot founder @BradPorter_ - secureframe founder @shravvmehtaa - paramount skydance cfo @DennisKCinelli - thinking machines gc lauren lennon - partner at greylock @sophia_luo_ - liquid ai coo jeffrey li - gallatin ai founder @agilemofo - tbd safety @_julianmichael_ - center for ai safety president @devindkim [photo courtesy the beautiful wedding of @thenateherman (who in many ways was a cofounder of Scale) and @ChristinaG325]06012
THE SCALE MAFIA one of the most special parts of starting a company is watching the people you fought and bled with in the early days go out and change the world. the Scale crew was supernatural. @scale_ai was one of the first companies to IOI and IMO-maxx, and the magic of Scale was that all of these geniuses gave a shit and ran through walls. it's no wonder that the Scale mafia is the first true mafia of the modern tech era. just to name a few: - cognition founder @stevenkplus1 & president @russelljkaplan - modal founder @akshat_b - tech & science advisor to POTUS @mkratsios47 - claude code head of product @_catwu - kpcb partners @LM_Braswell & @nayakkayak - bun founder @jarredsumner - tbd head of product @lindugong - netic founder @melisatokmak - cobot founder @BradPorter_ - secureframe founder @shravvmehtaa - paramount skydance cfo @DennisKCinelli - thinking machines gc lauren lennon - partner at greylock @sophia_luo_ - liquid ai coo jeffrey li - gallatin ai founder @agilemofo - tbd safety @_julianmichael_ - center for ai safety president @devindkim [photo courtesy the beautiful wedding of @thenateherman (who in many ways was a cofounder of Scale) and @ChristinaG325]
2493468.2K5.4M- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @jarredsumner: a growing part of how I feel about bun is this whole category of software - linters, formatters, package managers, type checkers, test runners, bundlers this used to be hard software to build and now it can be prompted into existence in a day or two02709
- Being in the @scale_AI mafia is truly an unfair advantage … lucky to still work with a lot of this list (and many others outside of it)!Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wangTHE SCALE MAFIA one of the most special parts of starting a company is watching the people you fought and bled with in the early days go out and change the world. the Scale crew was supernatural. @scale_ai was one of the first companies to IOI and IMO-maxx, and the magic of Scale was that all of these geniuses gave a shit and ran through walls. it's no wonder that the Scale mafia is the first true mafia of the modern tech era. just to name a few: - cognition founder @stevenkplus1 & president @russelljkaplan - modal founder @akshat_b - tech & science advisor to POTUS @mkratsios47 - claude code head of product @_catwu - kpcb partners @LM_Braswell & @nayakkayak - bun founder @jarredsumner - tbd head of product @lindugong - netic founder @melisatokmak - cobot founder @BradPorter_ - secureframe founder @shravvmehtaa - paramount skydance cfo @DennisKCinelli - thinking machines gc lauren lennon - partner at greylock @sophia_luo_ - liquid ai coo jeffrey li - gallatin ai founder @agilemofo - tbd safety @_julianmichael_ - center for ai safety president @devindkim [photo courtesy the beautiful wedding of @thenateherman (who in many ways was a cofounder of Scale) and @ChristinaG325]11214822.7K
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @dkao_: For the last 5.5 years, it has been one of the most profound experiences of my career to build @trucksmarterinc. We served over 1M+ truck drivers, built a $500M+ lending business and facilitated billions in transactions. We forged through the toughest of markets across both freight and fintech and survived winters where so few could. When we sold our assets, we poked our heads up to see the opportunities around us. We are amidst one of the greatest revolutions in capitalism and I have yet to see a company with as clear of a vision (& working AI business model) as @PoeticHQ. Poetic works with the largest companies in the world to turn their most complex processes into intelligent software. We are talking immensely long (40+ hours), complex and critical processes at 99.99%+ accuracy at less than tenth of the cost of traditional agents. Those results have propelled Poetic to go from pilot to production across some of the most regulated industries every. single. time. I've been able to watch @markiewagner build Poetic over the last few years. They are at the very same inflection point that I was lucky enough to see at DoorDash, Square and Uber. I am grateful for the opportunity to head up the business and operations team. And I cannot wait to do my part in taking this rocket ship to the moon.Markie Wagner @markiewagnerThrilled to announce that Trucksmarter has joined @PoeticHQ. Dan Kao will lead operations, and the rest of the team will focus on accelerating our work in supply chain. Dan is a force of nature. He got his start as DoorDash’s youngest GM, where he ran all of Canada. He then led one of Uber’s largest business units, scaling freight from zero to $500M+ revenue. We met years ago through @foundersfund, who backed us both. I watched Trucksmarter grow to a $500M+ lending business, serve 1M+ truckers, and facilitate billions of transactions. The most important companies on earth run as a collection of thousands of archaic processes. Poetic learns each one from experts, translates it into self-healing code, and proposes improvements so companies can evolve past where they got stuck. As we began running core operations at the largest manufacturers, we realized it was possible to leapfrog old approaches to classic problems like scheduling, forecasting, and procurement. To move faster, we needed a team who knew the industry deeply. We’re lucky Dan and the team decided to join the fight.01010
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @markiewagner: Thrilled to announce that Trucksmarter has joined @PoeticHQ. Dan Kao will lead operations, and the rest of the team will focus on accelerating our work in supply chain. Dan is a force of nature. He got his start as DoorDash’s youngest GM, where he ran all of Canada. He then led one of Uber’s largest business units, scaling freight from zero to $500M+ revenue. We met years ago through @foundersfund, who backed us both. I watched Trucksmarter grow to a $500M+ lending business, serve 1M+ truckers, and facilitate billions of transactions. The most important companies on earth run as a collection of thousands of archaic processes. Poetic learns each one from experts, translates it into self-healing code, and proposes improvements so companies can evolve past where they got stuck. As we began running core operations at the largest manufacturers, we realized it was possible to leapfrog old approaches to classic problems like scheduling, forecasting, and procurement. To move faster, we needed a team who knew the industry deeply. We’re lucky Dan and the team decided to join the fight.02008
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @mamoonha: Congrats @amspector100 @bfspector @aidanmantine and the whole @flappyairplanes team on the Series A! Most of the AI conversation is about how much compute you can buy. Flapping Airplanes is focused on how efficiently it gets used: new algorithms that learn more from less data, and new ways of programming GPUs so they do more useful work per cycle. It's a research-first lab with a small team. Thrilled that @kleinerperkins is backing Flapping Airplanes.Flapping Airplanes @flappyairplanesWe’ve spent the past year developing new primitives for GPUs. We believe this enables new algorithms to change how machines learn, open new markets, and dramatically reshape AI’s cost structure. We have raised a $1 billion Series A, co-led by Index and Lux.04011
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @amspector100: Awesome to talk to the incomparable @rachelmetz about what we've been up to :)Rachel Metz @rachelmetzNew scoop from me: @flappyairplanes is now valued at $6B with a new $1B funding round, and they’ve been working on ways to make AI more efficient (including an effort to squeeze more performance out of investor @nvidia’s GPUs). Gift link below. 🍦0207
Rachel Metz@rachelmetzNew scoop from me: @flappyairplanes is now valued at $6B with a new $1B funding round, and they’ve been working on ways to make AI more efficient (including an effort to squeeze more performance out of investor @nvidia’s GPUs). Gift link below. 🍦547110.6K- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @flappyairplanes: We’ve spent the past year developing new primitives for GPUs. We believe this enables new algorithms to change how machines learn, open new markets, and dramatically reshape AI’s cost structure. We have raised a $1 billion Series A, co-led by Index and Lux.022208
- Chick-fil-ARex Salisbury @rexsalisburybad news -- house of air (trampoline park) in the presidio is shutting down. good news -- you can rent the space! 18,000 sqft. epic location. What do you do?8416011.7K
bad news -- house of air (trampoline park) in the presidio is shutting down. good news -- you can rent the space! 18,000 sqft. epic location. What do you do?
87228286.9K- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @mamoonha: We've talked about AI as labor for high-wage work. This is the most extreme version yet: AI doing the work of an entire pretraining team. Frontier labs spend billions and hire hundreds to pretrain. @mirendil did it with 1 researcher, 3.5 months, and <$10M, beating DeepSeek-V4 and GLM-5.3 on code, with bigger runs already passing Kimi-K3. When the bottleneck shifts from team size to judgment, the AI map gets redrawn. Much more to come soon.Behnam Neyshabur @bneyshaburWe formally announced Mirendil less than 4 months ago. Today, I'm excited to share an important milestone for: Pretraining at scale without a pretraining team. Mirendil's mission is to solve Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) and use it to democratize frontier AI development, ultimately accelerating science and technology. At Mirendil, when we think about RSI, we think holistically about the company as an intelligent entity that self-improves toward its goal. From that perspective, the most powerful notion of acceleration is reducing the time and resources (number of human experts, compute, and other costs) needed to achieve ambitious goals. Given that pretraining is perhaps the most important yet most challenging part of frontier AI development, we decided to run an ambitious controlled experiment: Starting fully from scratch, can we significantly reduce the time, number of human experts, and compute resources needed to go all the way to successfully pretraining a strong coding model at scale? Mirendil-Base is the result of this experiment. Our first pretrained model was built by one researcher in 3.5 months, with less than $10M in compute. This includes all the research and small-scale experiments it took to get there, as well as the final training run. The recipe holds up as the models get bigger. For reference, Mirendil-Base is in the 100B-500B parameter range, Mirendil-Base-Large in the 500B-2T range, and Mirendil-Base-XL in the 2T-10T range. We're beginning to see a world where a single researcher, empowered by AI, can take on work that once required an entire research organization. As these systems improve, the bottleneck shifts from the size of a team to the ambition and judgment of the people directing them. This has profound implications for who gets to build AI and, ultimately, who gets to push the frontiers of science and technology forward. We’ll share independent evaluations, post-training benchmarks and API-access sooner than you think so stay tuned!0408
We formally announced Mirendil less than 4 months ago. Today, I'm excited to share an important milestone for: Pretraining at scale without a pretraining team. Mirendil's mission is to solve Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) and use it to democratize frontier AI development, ultimately accelerating science and technology. At Mirendil, when we think about RSI, we think holistically about the company as an intelligent entity that self-improves toward its goal. From that perspective, the most powerful notion of acceleration is reducing the time and resources (number of human experts, compute, and other costs) needed to achieve ambitious goals. Given that pretraining is perhaps the most important yet most challenging part of frontier AI development, we decided to run an ambitious controlled experiment: Starting fully from scratch, can we significantly reduce the time, number of human experts, and compute resources needed to go all the way to successfully pretraining a strong coding model at scale? Mirendil-Base is the result of this experiment. Our first pretrained model was built by one researcher in 3.5 months, with less than $10M in compute. This includes all the research and small-scale experiments it took to get there, as well as the final training run. The recipe holds up as the models get bigger. For reference, Mirendil-Base is in the 100B-500B parameter range, Mirendil-Base-Large in the 500B-2T range, and Mirendil-Base-XL in the 2T-10T range. We're beginning to see a world where a single researcher, empowered by AI, can take on work that once required an entire research organization. As these systems improve, the bottleneck shifts from the size of a team to the ambition and judgment of the people directing them. This has profound implications for who gets to build AI and, ultimately, who gets to push the frontiers of science and technology forward. We’ll share independent evaluations, post-training benchmarks and API-access sooner than you think so stay tuned!
1711591.6K300K- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @appliedcompute: Introducing Shift-1, a frontier coding router trained on AC2 that reduced coding agent cost by up to 55% with no noticeable drop in quality. Try it at03409
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @alexandr_wang: 1/ muse spark open is the most capable US open-weight model to date. 816B total params, 42B active. 1M-token context. natively multimodal. built for coding and agentic work like long-horizon tasks, hard software engineering, multi-step reasoning. america! 🇺🇲046006
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @appliedcompute: Nemotron 3.5 Super VL by @NVIDIAAI is now supported for both training and inference on AC2. In early post-training runs for our customer, we've been impressed with the quality of the base model for its inference efficiency.0507
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @mamoonha: Congrats @GuptaRK22 and @johnwhegeman on Ithaca’s agreement to acquire Bumble! Ithaca was built to be a long-term home for enduring tech companies, and Bumble is a great first one. Proud to back you both and excited for what’s ahead. 🐝Ravi Gupta @GuptaRK22Today we announced an agreement to acquire Bumble. Over the past six months, we’ve looked at hundreds of companies, asking which businesses would become more valuable as AI advances. Bumble stood out. As intelligence becomes more abundant, we believe connecting with the right person and forming meaningful relationships will become even more precious. And frontier technology can help more people find and build those relationships. Our purpose at Ithaca is to apply frontier technology to things that matter. We acquire enduring businesses, transform them with technology, and hold for the long term. We focus on businesses not only for their financial potential but their ability to enrich lives. Whitney and her team have built something extraordinary. Millions of relationships began on Bumble, and we’re honored to help take it into its next era. Together we intend to build the best company in the world for helping people find each other. Let’s get to work.0208
Today we announced an agreement to acquire Bumble. Over the past six months, we’ve looked at hundreds of companies, asking which businesses would become more valuable as AI advances. Bumble stood out. As intelligence becomes more abundant, we believe connecting with the right person and forming meaningful relationships will become even more precious. And frontier technology can help more people find and build those relationships. Our purpose at Ithaca is to apply frontier technology to things that matter. We acquire enduring businesses, transform them with technology, and hold for the long term. We focus on businesses not only for their financial potential but their ability to enrich lives. Whitney and her team have built something extraordinary. Millions of relationships began on Bumble, and we’re honored to help take it into its next era. Together we intend to build the best company in the world for helping people find each other. Let’s get to work.4191473.4K1.3M- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @josh_coyne: The world needs a new hyperscaler purpose-built for AI. We believe @modal can be that company. An extraordinary team tackling one of the biggest opportunities in infrastructure. We at @kleinerperkins are fired up to be in business with them. @bernhardsson see you in Cleveland for some Euchre ;)Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson03011
- "Leigh Marie" BraswellRT @rhythmrg: You can now train your own decision model in our platform AC2! Jev-like models, custom fit for your use case :) We implement decision models through a language-model backbone with a small learned output layer called a decision head. The backbone processes the input, question, and answer choices, and the head produces scores which are softmaxed to produce a probability distribution over answer choices. Our software interface makes it easy to add a variable-sized decision head to frontier open-weight models. Choose any open source model, and train it as a decision model using Brier loss or cross-entropy loss. Training updates both the decision head and the language backbone. We tried it on 50k sampled training datapoints from the Civil Comments dataset, starting from Perplexity’s pplx-decider-v1-27b, and F1 for detecting toxic comments increased from 0.482 to 0.677 on 20k sampled eval datapoints. The training job took less than an hour on four B300 GPUs. Reach out to get started with your own classification task:019011
- RT @lindugong: run through walls why not faster contributors are cornerstone ownership is the job earn customer love results speak loudest…Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wangTHE SCALE MAFIA one of the most special parts of starting a company is watching the people you fought and bled with in the early days go out and change the world. the Scale crew was supernatural. @scale_ai was one of the first companies to IOI and IMO-maxx, and the magic of Scale was that all of these geniuses gave a shit and ran through walls. it's no wonder that the Scale mafia is the first true mafia of the modern tech era. just to name a few: - cognition founder @stevenkplus1 & president @russelljkaplan - modal founder @akshat_b - tech & science advisor to POTUS @mkratsios47 - claude code head of product @_catwu - kpcb partners @LM_Braswell & @nayakkayak - bun founder @jarredsumner - tbd head of product @lindugong - netic founder @melisatokmak - cobot founder @BradPorter_ - secureframe founder @shravvmehtaa - paramount skydance cfo @DennisKCinelli - thinking machines gc lauren lennon - partner at greylock @sophia_luo_ - liquid ai coo jeffrey li - gallatin ai founder @agilemofo - tbd safety @_julianmichael_ - center for ai safety president @devindkim [photo courtesy the beautiful wedding of @thenateherman (who in many ways was a cofounder of Scale) and @ChristinaG325]01051
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