Jonathan Abrams @abrams

Harvard kids singing Radiohead’s “Creep.” This could have gone very wrong. Then the lead singer opens his mouth. The Harvard Veritones have won at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella — the real-world competition that inspired Pitch Perfect. Turn the sound on for this one.

Happy 1st air date to...Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979). A man from our century dropped into a shiny one. Twiki. Wilma. A theme that sounds like a toy advert that somehow worked. I still sit up when the ship hits the titles.

A big problem with California is it tries to solve the worlds problems instead of focusing on the major problems at home

Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom

3 days ago

BREAKING: I just signed an EXECUTIVE ORDER to dramatically accelerate independent oversight of AI companies and advance the creation of an “AI kill switch.” With Donald Trump and Congress failing to lead, California is stepping up to keep all Americans safe.

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Galaga (Namco, 1981) You could hear it from a mile away and were magically drawn toward it when entering an arcade. It was usually the most packed machine, surrounded by kids watching a “pro” play. I didn’t have much money back then, so I could afford maybe three or four games, but I’d still hang out with my brother for another hour or two just watching others play. Just being there was already enough. Arcades were a world of their own. The games and graphics were so far ahead of what my Atari 2600 and C64 could do. That magic slowly faded in the late 80s when the Amiga (and later PCs) caught up.

On September 18, 1995, the Netscape Communications Corporation launched Netscape Navigator 2.0 as its new major product.

The New Kingmakers It's become clear that revenue scale no longer matters - or is correlated - with raising a round. It's important but not sufficient. Besides team caliber, what ACTUALLY matters to fundraising is how many top AI-native companies use your products, love your products, embrace your products and profess undying loyalty to you (i.e. say they won't replace it at the drop of a hat). Why? AI-native companies are the hardest customers to win. They have the engineers to build it themselves. They have the taste to know when something is mediocre. They try every new tool the week it launches and rip it out the week after. If one of them pays you and stays, your product survived the toughest evaluation there is. Investors know this. Revenue can be bought. Pilots, services, discounts, a heroic enterprise sales team. ARR built from Fortune 500 pilots proves you can sell. The product might still be mediocre. Loyalty from a kingmaker can't be manufactured. These companies are the leading indicator. Investors are underwriting where the market will be in 5 years, and the AI-native companies are already living there. Their workflows today are everyone else's workflows in 2029. If they picked you, you've been chosen by the buyers everyone else will copy. The last reason is distribution. Kingmakers talk. Their engineers post what they use. Their founders compare notes. One of them begets the next three. Who There are probably ~50 AI-native companies that are perceived as kingmakers for startups. I've seen $50M+ rounds raised on the backs of just having one of these as a customer. (not pilot, but actual paying customer using the product as a core part of their infra and workflows). Meanwhile, I see early-stage founders spending 12 months chasing CVS, Walmart, and Pfizer. Long procurement cycles, security reviews, a pilot that never converts. Even when it lands, the logo proves you can survive procurement. That's the wrong thing to prove in 2026. If you're an early stage enterprise/B2B AI company, Instead of targeting CVS, Walmart, Pfizer, etc, go after the companies on Forbes' AI 50 list. The new milestone is kingmaker logos. That's what your next round will be priced on.

sending this video to a group chat with your parents, uncle and aunts to see their reaction is single-handedly worth $2T in capex, a 3x in electricity bills and 14x DRAM price hike

Caveman Issues Dire Warning That The Wheel Is Going To Eliminate Countless Jobs buff.ly/u9nCQoL

2026: The New York Times cites seriously academics who say AI might end the world 1881: The New York Times cites seriously academics who say telegraphy might end the world newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/telegraph-do…

Time magazine's doomer covers: 1954 nuclear war 1960 population explosion 1970 ecological collapse 1982 nuclear war 1989 endangered Earth 1992 ozone 1999 Y2K 2001/2006/2007 climate 2005 pandemic 2009 extinction 2013 bees 2019 climate 2020 pandemic 2023 AI extinction 2026 AI tipping point

Founder PSA. We've all created enough slides and mockups with Claude. We know what the default template / font / layout looks like. By all means, use AI to make your deck. But if it looks like it was one-shotted with zero iteration, its a huge red flag.

Why does every cold email seem to start with telling me what 8-Bit Capital invests in? I think I already know that...

Parents are drowning in school apps businessinsider.com/parents-drowni… via @BusinessInsider

Agents are only as good as the information they retrieve, which makes the retrieval engine the most important part of the agent stack. So we raised $2m from @heavybit and @8bitcapital to build retrieval for agents. Better retrieval means better agents. geekwire.com/2026/portland-…

The cover of Time magazine in 2006 and 2026. From "climate change will destroy humanity" to "AI will destroy humanity".

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This whole situation is very weird. We were customers of Pulley. It had: - A great functional product - Working GTM within their ICP (early-stage startups) - Better pricing than Carta with what I'd assume are healthy SaaS margins - $50M total raised from tier 1 VCs No one out there to buy their business? No acquihire? A cryptic message from the founder saying they "have no intention of riding off quietly into the night"? What really happened?

Nick Abouzeid, EA @nickabouzeid

5 days ago

Wow, sad day. Pulley is shutting down, looks like Carta is picking up the business / referral engine. As a former-AngelList-er, I still do not grok how these businesses run unprofitably and have high hopes for a new entrant who will take down the cap table giants

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Wow, sad day. Pulley is shutting down, looks like Carta is picking up the business / referral engine. As a former-AngelList-er, I still do not grok how these businesses run unprofitably and have high hopes for a new entrant who will take down the cap table giants

@TurnerNovak Try @AgreeHQ

I’m thinking to get the kids today to be able to understand computers and programming we should teach them BASIC on a #C64 first.

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Happy 49th anniversary to the Atari 2600! Released on September 11, 1977, as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), the Atari 2600 helped transform video games from a novelty into a major part of home entertainment. Its use of interchangeable cartridges meant you weren't limited to the games built into the console. Players could build a library of games, with classics such as Adventure, Pitfall!, River Raid, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and many more becoming part of gaming history. The Atari 2600 went on to become one of the defining consoles of the early video game era and helped establish the model that home consoles would follow for decades. 49 years later, its influence can still be felt throughout the gaming industry.