Mark Suster✓

Isaiah Granet @zaygranet

@msuster Can confirm :)

Kevin Zhang @kevinyzhang

@toddhooper @msuster Thank you for taking a chance, and glad to still be working together as fellow investors.

Koby Conrad 🌻 @kobyjconrad

I feel reallyyy bad saying this but after raising over $9.5M, talking to 500+ VCs in my life ... I have never, ever, not once ... gotten a single dollar via an intro from an associate or a junior VC thousands of hours of wasted time 👀

Amjad Taha أمجد طه @amjadt25

They called it apartheid. The ballot box called them liars. Arab and Muslim parties are winning 17 seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Arab turnout was above 70% in town after town. Wait, I thought Zionists were racist, so how come these “racists” are giving parliamentary seats to Arabs and Muslims, who, in turn, came out to vote? Some villages hit 90% turnout. They democratically participated and voted in a Zionist democratic system they believe in? Arabs now hold about 14% of Israel’s parliament. Muslim MPs hold about 4% of Britain’s. Odd kind of apartheid, where the “oppressed” vote harder than London does.

נדב איל Nadav Eyal @Nadav_Eyal

ניר עוז. גדי איזנקוט מלווה את גדי מוזס לקלפי. "בלי תקווה ואופטימיות לאן נגיע במדינה הזו. הגיע המושיע", אמר מוזס, "יש לי דרך ואל תפחד".

Michael Eisenberg @mikeeisenberg

I was quite emotional this morning. I davened (prayed) at 6am. Then, I voted. In democratic elections. I then read about the $2+ Billion acquisition of 🇮🇱 quantum computing company Qlassic by intel. I was thrilled for our friends and colleagues who backed and built Qlassic. And, on a small personal level, I am excited by the new book I was privileged to write that is arriving in stores today. On the voting line at 7 a.m. I met a female soldier with an M16 slung on her shoulder. A yeshiva student. Elderly people and professors. Some with yarmulkes and others without. We live in neighborhood in this city where you see everything and everyone. I also thought about my children who are voting at special ballot boxes because they’re in the army or on the front lines now. I want you to stop and think for a minute. Almost any other country that would have gone through what we in Israel went through would not have made it to this moment. Massive protests, covid, a 7 front war, fractious politics and cacophonous social media. Indeed, arguments and disagreements are very present — but even this morning, people who will vote differently from one another at the ballot box will then get in the same tank and share a shabbat dinner. They are willing to give up their body and soul, one for the other, for something greater than themselves. Before I cast my vote this morning, I paused and thought about those who unfortunately and tragically didn’t return from the front lines and the hostages that did not return from captivity. Our biological family and our Israeli family. It is our first election since October 7th. My eyes teared up. I then thought about the heroism and self-sacrifice of young Israelis: the hundreds of days of service by our soldiers—our children—and their families stationed on the front lines and holding down the home front so that we may merit to live as free people in our land after two thousand years. This is no trifling matter. Our ancestors would have given arms and legs to have this gift. Many people around the world yearn for our freedom. We are privileged to be part of this incredible people and this amazing country at this extraordinary time. We are fortunate and blessed. I feel personally fortunate and blessed. Am Yisrael Chai. 🇮🇱

Ritchie Torres @RitchieTorres

FACT: The annual funding Israel receives from the US amounts to less than one-tenth of 1% of the federal budget. Less than 1/10th of 1%. FACT: That annual funding would cover only a few hours of federal health care spending. A few hours. Yet politicians who specialize in scapegoating would have you believe that Israel is responsible for America’s affordability crisis. Like every form of scapegoating before it, it is a dangerous lie.

Saul Sadka @Saul_Sadka

New low for normalized Jew-hate in the American Democratic Party. Very sad: Painting your political opponents as puppets of Jews, as this El-Sayed ad does, and as crazed baby-killers and money-grubbing villains who are the root cause of every bad thing not just in the world, but in your life—from wars to the price of eggs to the reason you can’t have free healthcare—is not just low-grade Jew-hate. It’s pure Third Reich stuff, translated directly from the original German. Do you remember when Jewish Democrats in Michigan explained that they would vote for El-Sayed despite his open disdain for Jews, since there are many other important issues they need him to fight for? That anything was worth it to “defeat MAGA”? Well, here’s El-Sayed’s answer to them: Don’t worry, all those issues we agree on, like healthcare, inflation, and climate change, I’m going to make them about Jews too! I will tell the public that the Jews are the reason they can’t have those things.

Cristina Cordova @cjc

Having been both an investor and the one asking investors for intros, I disagree. Your investor knows your company, but you should know how to pitch it to a specific prospect. Which customers, use cases, or proof points will resonate? That’s context you have and they probably don’t. Asking for a blurb isn’t laziness. It’s asking the person who knows the product best to help sell it. The investor brings the relationship. The founder brings the pitch.

Jamie Metzl @JamieMetzl

Unless Abdul El-Sayed immediately demands that this campaign ad be taken down and unequivocally condemns it and its creators, he will be exposed as a vile, dangerous, and divisive antisemite. Any (of my fellow) Democrats who condemn the disgusting Ramaswamy ad in Ohio but do not condemn this deserve our unflinching contempt.

Aaron Levie @levie

Good assessment of the on the ground reality for security in most large enterprises right now. The fragmented landscape of the risk surface is only going to get more gnarly, making it even more complex for enterprises to solve. There’s a never ending set of libraries to keep up with, tools to leverage, and sprawling infrastructure, data, and code to secure. Most large enterprises can barely keep up with this, let alone smaller startups or most companies outside of tech. In many cases enterprises need to work to modernize their tech stacks. Data, in most organizations, is highly fragmented which means you don’t really know the state of risk at any given time. Some systems are open up privileges too broadly, and others are operating primarily via security through obscurity. Lots of upgrading here to do. Once you can get your data and infra into a better spot, at least you have a chance for agents to help you secure the environment. Agent swarms can fan out, leverage any security tool, test various perpetuations of attacks, read through logs, process enterprise data for risk level, and more. This capability only emerged in the past few months, and none of it would be possible before we had long running agents and computer use good enough. This is a huge area of opportunity right now for every layer of the security stack across identity, firewall, network, code scanning, data protection, and more. And it’s at least one reason to be optimistic about the balance of offensive and defensive capability. But everyone does need to do the hard work of getting the basics right at the start.

Nikesh Arora @nikesharora

It's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down: 1/3 1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option. 2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse. We will need a hybrid patch approach. 3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point. 4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off. 2/3 Medium term solve: Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem. To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency. Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one. 3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety. AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence. There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code. Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.

Nikesh Arora @nikesharora

It's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down: 1/3 1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option. 2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse. We will need a hybrid patch approach. 3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point. 4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off. 2/3 Medium term solve: Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem. To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency. Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one. 3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety. AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence. There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code. Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.

Bill Maher @billmaher

One reason young people want socialism so much is that they're jealous that older people have it and they don't.

Object Zero @Object_Zero_

Mask Off Moment This is an anonymous account I use to post a bunch of deep tech content on X covering heavy industry, light industry, technology trends, industrial bottlenecks, weird explainers and esoteric insights. iykyk. A lot of very talented people (many of whom run amazing companies) DM me saying please keep posting “this is the best content on X”. I get DMs from VCs asking about companies, and DMs from LPs asking about industrial and economic theories. This is all very flattering, and whilst I sometimes post a bit sporadically I do try and make the effort to tap out a new post most days. The quality of people who follow @object_zero_ is frankly phenomenal, it’s a real privilege to have this channel in my pocket. 40k followers including world leaders, centi-billionaires, serial inventors and entrepreneurs, world renowned scientists, and engineers. I would say it’s a mix, but the reality is that it’s not a mix at all, it’s an extremely high mean and median. I have posted about shipbuilding, nuclear power, the Kroll process, silicon carbide, laser interferometry, heavy steel forging, machine learning, design engineering, CFD, manufacturing methods, power transmission and HVDC. I post about energy and commodities and industry and global macroeconomics. I post about mines and prospecting, minerals on the sea bed and drilling and producing hydrocarbon basins. Don’t worry… I’m not leaving. I’m not ill and I’m not asking for anything. A quick apology… I would post here more often, except I don’t have the time. I am able to post with a bit more breadth and depth because I am genuinely engaged in these things. I don’t want to be presumptive, but I think the people who have reached out to talk to me about their work would attest to this. I simplify a lot of the posts so I don’t collapse the audience, but if you reach out in the comments or DM you can get much sharper commentary. So what is this post? Well, it’s time that I start talking about what I am actually doing irl, who I am, what I am engaged in. Some people on X already know some loose details, some people have met me as Object Zero. But irl, I work about 5,000 hours a year and have done so for 20 years, I believe hard work puts you in a privileged place. It changes you. Over the years I’ve invented and developed new industrial technologies, I’ve built big things, I’ve executed major capital projects. I feel I understand what the world needs in the 2030s and where we are falling short. If you believe you are capable of such things, then you have an obligation to society to go and do them. I am confident I know what it’s possible to do, and what it takes to get it done. I intend to solve our energy infrastructure, generation and transmission and the big BTM loads that are emerging. I’ve already hired the best people in the world for this, people who have architected $6bn assets, people who have commanded $40bn fleets. I’ve hired the best research faculty from the best university. This isn’t a game. We’ve already built and tested the first prototypes, we are already completing the permission processes, the licences and the permits. All the elements already exist, it just needs 21st Century system integration. Because technology has changed, the past is already obsolete, the genie is out of the bottle, the 21st century is getting built on a Western tech stack and/or an Eastern tech stack. There is no in between, there is no middle ground. Both sides have strengths and weaknesses, but if we want freedom we’re going to have to earn it again. We are going to build the biggest products (by mass) that have ever been manufactured, we are going to build a lot of them. They’re going to change the world, and we’re going to get more of this…