Passionate about helping people and businesses be better.
San Francisco Bay Area
Joined April 2009
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CONGRATS @TheHolyKau!
I'm willing to bet that the next industry to be completely transformed with AI is wealth management - and Nevis is proof of that. They're adding $50B every MONTH, 25x'ed revenue last year and now serve some of the largest wealth managers in the US.
I waited 2 years to invest in this company. I met them, immediately liked them but the stars didn't align until now. Incredibly excited to partner with them at a point when revenue is inflecting.
If you wished you joined a Harvey/Lovable like company at Series A, here's your chance - they are hiring!
@MarkSwan_ @chalov_ivan @neviswealth
Sam Wholley retweeted
Lost in the narrative of Silicon Valley is what really matters. Yes money is a thing. And a billion dollars is a lot. But over the course of a lifetime what really matters are family, friends, relationships.
Sam Wholley retweeted
@JeffDean has built the foundations that every era of modern computing has stood on, from web-scale infrastructure to scaling deep learning itself. Exceptional people inspire great talent and the founding team around him is among the strongest I have ever seen in over 25 years of investing. @lightspeedvp is honored to join them from the start of this journey.
Announcing Discovery Loop!
I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
♾
Learn more at: discoveryloop.com
Emphasis on purpose - purpose breeds hope, hope breeds optimism, and optimism promotes good habits. @CoachDanGo nailed it.
Sam Wholley retweeted
If anyone is creating a company that helps companies that pulls companies up these levels, I'd love to meet. Particularly around legibility and/or non-engineer usage of AI
Sam Wholley retweeted
Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers.
Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.
Sam Wholley retweeted
We have raised a $61M Series A to automate customer operations.
The world’s leading companies like DoorDash trust Giga to supercharge customer experience with AI.
Sam Wholley retweeted
We just led the Epiminds round @lightspeedvp!
I’ve spent $100M+ on performance marketing as a founder. Agencies are essential and AI changes everything.
Excited for Epiminds to power the world’s top performance agencies.
Sam Wholley retweeted
CREDENTIALS DON’T MATTER
Over the last few months, I’ve seen several A+ execs and operators flounder and fail at AI startups, while young “inexperienced” builders have crushed execution and performed superbly.
It’s the biggest discontinuity in talent evaluation I’ve seen in my 25+ years in technology.
All of one’s prior experiences, credentials, and traditional markers of success have become nearly irrelevant when the fundamental rules of the game have changed so dramatically.
The shift to AI represents such a paradigm break that institutional knowledge often becomes institutional baggage. The executive who masterfully navigated enterprise sales cycles finds themselves lost when the product builds itself. The operator who optimized for predictable growth metrics struggles when the core capability improves exponentially overnight.
Meanwhile, the 22-year-old who’s been fine-tuning models in their dorm room intuitively understands token economics, reasoning patterns, and capability scaling in ways that no MBA program ever taught. These “inexperienced” builders don’t carry the weight of how things “should” work. They don’t waste time trying to force AI capabilities into traditional product frameworks or business models. And so, they win.
If you’re an executive wanting to find a role at an AI company, be humble. Put in the work. Use the tools and create a personal AI stack. Train yourself to think differently - probabilistically, not deterministically. Be open to an IC role if needed. It’s not magic, but it will take real work.
If you’re an AI company founder, ensure your hiring process is not blinded by credentials. What matters is raw building ability (in EVERY role, not just Eng/Product/Design), comfort with uncertainty, and the ability to iterate and experiment exceptionally fast.
It’s a new era.
Sam Wholley retweeted
Proud to co-lead @reflection_ai Series A as they emerge from stealth with $130M in funding. Huge congrats to Co-Founders @MishaLaskin and @real_ioannis, and the incredible team they’ve built—one of the strongest Reinforcement Learning (RL) research teams in the world.
Misha and Ioannis bring unparalleled expertise from their time at @GoogleDeepMind, where they contributed to groundbreaking advancements in AI, particularly in reinforcement learning and decision-making.
AI-driven code generation is far more than just copilots—it’s about building autonomous systems that can truly reason, iterate, and debug like a software engineer. Reflection AI is tackling this challenge head-on, applying RL to train AI models capable of solving complex programming tasks end-to-end. Their system is designed to write, optimize, and debug code autonomously, changing how software development is approached.
Excited for what’s ahead! Read more: lsvp.com/stories/towards-sup…
Cc: @lightspeedvp @JamesAlcorn94
Sam Wholley retweeted
Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) is the CPO of @AnthropicAI ($10B+ raised) and the co-founder of Instagram, which he sold to Meta for $1B. Here's the full video of my recent conversation with him.
Mike has one of the AI industry's most interesting jobs. He shared with me how he and his team craft product strategy for the company that's leading the charge on AI in the enterprise. Specifically, we discussed how frontier model innovations both drive product and vice versa (how product ideas inform AI research).
We also talk about the long term defensibility of models (inspired by the emergence of DeepSeek), and how Mike believes that not only will individual models have specific strengths over others (such as in areas like coding, science, etc), but that a model's "vibes" will also be a major factor for driving customers' choice.
Mike also shared his view on how AI will reinvent media and the business model of advertising on the internet, drawn heavily from his work building one of the most successful ad products ever built (Instagram) and his work on Artifact, an AI news product he also co-founded.
Lastly, Mike dove deep into what it's like building for the Enterprise for the first time in his career, and how lessons from Instagram and Meta inform not only product development, but how Anthropic thinks about scaling its team in this period of hypergrowth.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:54 Mike Krieger's Journey to Anthropic
03:17 Building Product Strategy at Anthropic
07:43 Rapid Iteration and Safety
10:58 Differentiating AI Models and User Experience
17:57 Impact of AI on Consumer Products and Business Models
24:39 Enterprise vs. Consumer Product Strategy
29:19 AI in Personal Life Management
30:15 Open Source and Claude Integrations
33:09 AI-Assisted Product Development
37:13 Scaling Teams and Processes at Anthropic
42:17 Reflections on AI and Future Prospects
Sam Wholley retweeted
A lot of legitimately awesome science happening at @arcinstitute. (Including some coming later this month.)
Not that @hubermanlab needs me to validate that he doesn’t get paid to endorse anyone, but I have been following (and…literally following, the advice of, that is) @FitFounder for a long time and his advice is accessible, concise and effective. It has helped me personally and others I send it to
Informative thread. @FitFounder continuing to stand out as high-useful-information to post ratio. (No, I don’t get paid to endorse; save your conspiracies for politics where they sometimes end up being true later).
It doesn't matter if you're 25 or 75, but if you are 45+ just DO IT. Makes a huge difference. Mobility matters. #themoreyouknow
Sam Wholley retweeted
Each year @AtlanticoPart outdoes itself with LATAM Digital Transformation Report. This year is no different! If you want to understand the opportunity in Central and South America, I highly recommend it.
Congrats to my friend @JulioV and the Atlantico team! Well done! 👇👇
"LatAm does it best" is the theme for the 5th annual @AtlanticoPart LatAm Digital Transformation Report, where we introduce the "Triumphant Three" and show why Market Dynamics trump Market Size 🧵
Link here: atlantico.vc/latin-america-d…
Sam Wholley retweeted
lightspeed just became the top series a investor for consumer companies
Ladies & gentlemen: I’d like to share that I’m joining Lightspeed as a Product Growth Partner.
I've been talking with @mignano for a couple years about working together and the stars finally aligned.
In this new role, I'll be helping out their consumer companies grow, go-to-market, and everything in between. It’s part-time so I’ll continue advising and building my own products.
