Pinned Tweet
A thesis should take you somewhere new.
Ours began with the possibilities of the open internet. Today, it reaches across AI, energy, financial markets, and the physical world.
We’re evolving USV alongside it, with $900M in new funds to lead more rounds, back founders for longer, and support the scale of their ambitions.
@mignano on the next chapter of USV.
USV retweeted
As a former voter in Uniswap DAO, I'm really excited by this idea of DAOs 2.0.
DAOs were what got me into the crypto world in the first place, but the human version of it was simply slow, bureaucratic, and labor-intensive. What you ended up with was voter apathy and intense centralization.
With agents that have infinite attention, DAOs could become a canonical coordination vessel, with inbuilt notions of identity and authorization.
These DAO 2.0s may or may not be natively onchain entities - they could simply be coordinated via API calls etc. But I'm excited to see something like this take off as a primitive of the agent-native, antifragile internet
USV retweeted
One old crypto-cypherpunk idea that I think will come back with a vengeance is autonomous organizations, where you combine the automation of smart contracts for deterministic functions + ai for subjective input: DAOs 2.0.
User-ownership on the internet sounds incredible until you need to figure out how to compensate everyone fairly.
Bitcoin rewards hash rate. DeFi rewards liquidity. But how do you measure and reward contributions that aren't so easily quantified?
@jessewldn on how AI might solve one of crypto's hardest problems: allocating ownership at scale.
USV retweeted
In the last month, the Hermes Agent processed 53.3T tokens, making it the most widely used open source agent harness in the world according to @OpenRouter.
So how did a project that started as 10 anons in a @discord go head to head with the largest, best-funded labs in the world?
The only way these things have ever happened - a bunch of friends making something they believe should exist. @NousResearch
🤖 Made with AI
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
USV retweeted
For anyone who has a lot of commuting/driving/working out in their near future, here are two things to watch/listen that speak to autonomy and agency in the AI era;
USV retweeted
User-ownership on the internet sounds incredible until you need to figure out how to compensate everyone fairly.
Bitcoin rewards hash rate. DeFi rewards liquidity. But how do you measure and reward contributions that aren't so easily quantified?
@jessewldn on how AI might solve one of crypto's hardest problems: allocating ownership at scale.
Everything is getting more autonomous. Except us.
When @jesseldn went out to raise his newest fund, he built the strategy around one word: autonomy.
But getting there was a long and circuitous route.
In 2016, @usv invested in Jesse’s company Mediachain. That’s given us the chance to work together for a decade, including his time at @a16zcrypto and now at @variantfund .
The through line is a belief that technology should give people more control over their lives.
In this week’s episode of The Slow Hunch, we trace that belief back to Jesse’s humble beginnings as an internet pirate and talk about what it will take for AI to fulfill that promise.
Jesse is consistently one of the most cogent thinkers I get the chance to speak with, and I think you’ll enjoy our chat.
0:00 Preview
01:15 Variant's new thesis
02:20 Automation ≠ Autonomy
06:50 How piracy shaped Jesse's worldview
09:00 How the internet went from open to closed
15:45 How BTC inspired Jesse’s startup MediaChain
21:00 Why breaking the rules drives innovation
24:00 The Variant founding story
29:30 Why crypto's ownership thesis didn’t fully play out
34:00 Could AI agents deliver on crypto’s original promise?
37:00 Will AI become another walled garden?
39:00 “You can just do things”
46:15 Will AI give us more agency or take it away?
What we mean when we say Rebel Alliance
In the last month, the Hermes Agent processed 53.3T tokens, making it the most widely used open source agent harness in the world according to @OpenRouter.
So how did a project that started as 10 anons in a @discord go head to head with the largest, best-funded labs in the world?
The only way these things have ever happened - a bunch of friends making something they believe should exist. @NousResearch
USV retweeted
$300 million is what Walmart paid for Even, the last company Quinten Farmer (@quintendf) built.
Now he's building Tolan, a personal AI that's hit $15M in revenue and raised $60M, with backing from Khosla Ventures.
I asked him what is Tolan and what is it not.
"I have zero interest in helping you write your work emails." Booking flights is off the list too.
He wants Tolan to "show up for you in the sort of tough, in-between moments in life."
He told me the closest archetype is a guardian angel, even though he admits that sounds a little crazy for a product.
New pod drop!! Congrats to Quinten Farmer (@quintendf), co-founder of Tolan, on a $30M raise from @usv and @khoslaventures, for a total of $60M in funding!
Quinten sold his last company to Walmart, then opened a pizza place and started keeping bees on the island he grew up on. Now he’s building Tolan, an AI “guardian-angel”.
We talk about:
- “I have zero interest in helping you write your work emails”
- Why Silicon Valley loves AI assistants: they’re “legible to the average investor”
- Dropping out at 19, and the only time he saw his grandfather cry
- Emailing David Tisch: hire me, or I’m going to Afghanistan
- The retired Navy captain who said “When I grow up, I want to be like Quinten”
- Why B2B SaaS for dental offices can go 996 and Tolan can’t
- “Belief in you is the most powerful and most sacred thing you can give somebody”
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Trailer
(00:49) Quinten Farmer, Co-Founder, Tolan
(00:58) What Tolan is and what it is not
(02:02) The car accident that showed Tolan's agentic side
(04:47) Anthropic's machine God VS being nice to your toaster
(06:24) Social penetration theory and why every Tolan has a backstory
(09:36) 200 minutes a week and taking share from TikTok
(10:47) Why great friendship gets mistaken for therapy
(14:26) Talking to his Tolan at 2 a.m. in the hospital
(16:32) Why Silicon Valley is obsessed with AI assistants
(21:38) Dropping out and the only time he saw his grandfather cry
(29:35) The David Tisch email: hire me or I go to Afghanistan
(32:22) Selling Even to Walmart for $300M
(37:24) Why shipping a lot with AI is the wrong move
(57:43) How Tolan runs without 996
(1:03:38) What he wants his boys to remember
(1:04:30) Outro
USV retweeted
These are the heroes we all need to hear from right now
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
USV retweeted
We at @usv believe it's time to build a new Internet.
An Antifragile Internet.
We need an "Antifragile Internet" built for the agentic era.
The hacks over the past few days (PHP, Railway, eMudhra, LiteLLM etc) show how fragile the existing Internet has become. AI agents are challenging the Internet's structure in 3 distinct ways:
1/ On the offense side, agents are a weapon - AI finds and exploits bugs on a scale not seen before, and the cost of attack asymptotes to 0. Bugs that used to take human experts weeks and months are easily found, adapted, and exploited by AI agents. Decades of legacy code that ran on "security by obscurity" no longer holds against agents.
2/ On the defense side, agents are a target - AI generated code is often bug-prone. AI agents themselves, as machines of unconstrained output are liable to prompt injections and other types of attacks that can leak keys, PII, and other pieces of information.
3/ On the identity side, agents are dominating Internet activity - this year, machine traffic has already passed human traffic, and may continue to grow 1000x over the next few years. Content and webpages used to human requests and behavior are breaking with agents, and it is increasingly difficult to tell human content from AI content.
All this means we will need to see a ground-up redesigning of the Internet, one with more cryptographic verifiability, identity protocols, rule-enforcement, and other security primitives that eliminate bug categories rather than simply patch them - an "Antifragile Internet" that gets stronger and more secure as more agents participate in it.
This is an emerging thesis area for us at @usv, if you're building in the space please reach out!
More thoughts soon.
Agents present three unique types of security threats.
@0xfishylosopher breaks them down below in his first piece on the "Antrifragile Internet"
We need an "Antifragile Internet" built for the agentic era.
The hacks over the past few days (PHP, Railway, eMudhra, LiteLLM etc) show how fragile the existing Internet has become. AI agents are challenging the Internet's structure in 3 distinct ways:
1/ On the offense side, agents are a weapon - AI finds and exploits bugs on a scale not seen before, and the cost of attack asymptotes to 0. Bugs that used to take human experts weeks and months are easily found, adapted, and exploited by AI agents. Decades of legacy code that ran on "security by obscurity" no longer holds against agents.
2/ On the defense side, agents are a target - AI generated code is often bug-prone. AI agents themselves, as machines of unconstrained output are liable to prompt injections and other types of attacks that can leak keys, PII, and other pieces of information.
3/ On the identity side, agents are dominating Internet activity - this year, machine traffic has already passed human traffic, and may continue to grow 1000x over the next few years. Content and webpages used to human requests and behavior are breaking with agents, and it is increasingly difficult to tell human content from AI content.
All this means we will need to see a ground-up redesigning of the Internet, one with more cryptographic verifiability, identity protocols, rule-enforcement, and other security primitives that eliminate bug categories rather than simply patch them - an "Antifragile Internet" that gets stronger and more secure as more agents participate in it.
This is an emerging thesis area for us at @usv, if you're building in the space please reach out!
More thoughts soon.
USV retweeted
A really great and timely articulation of how agents are changing the structural fabric of the Internet
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
USV retweeted
One way to predict the future of technology is to look at who's breaking the rules today.
BitTorrent paved the way for Spotify. Bitcoin made stablecoins possible.
@jessewldn on how permissionless experimentation reveals latent demand that incumbents haven't figured out how to serve.
Everything is getting more autonomous. Except us.
When @jesseldn went out to raise his newest fund, he built the strategy around one word: autonomy.
But getting there was a long and circuitous route.
In 2016, @usv invested in Jesse’s company Mediachain. That’s given us the chance to work together for a decade, including his time at @a16zcrypto and now at @variantfund .
The through line is a belief that technology should give people more control over their lives.
In this week’s episode of The Slow Hunch, we trace that belief back to Jesse’s humble beginnings as an internet pirate and talk about what it will take for AI to fulfill that promise.
Jesse is consistently one of the most cogent thinkers I get the chance to speak with, and I think you’ll enjoy our chat.
0:00 Preview
01:15 Variant's new thesis
02:20 Automation ≠ Autonomy
06:50 How piracy shaped Jesse's worldview
09:00 How the internet went from open to closed
15:45 How BTC inspired Jesse’s startup MediaChain
21:00 Why breaking the rules drives innovation
24:00 The Variant founding story
29:30 Why crypto's ownership thesis didn’t fully play out
34:00 Could AI agents deliver on crypto’s original promise?
37:00 Will AI become another walled garden?
39:00 “You can just do things”
46:15 Will AI give us more agency or take it away?
USV retweeted
what yesterday means if you run anything on the internet:
- assume your attack surface is being scanned by models, not people
- patch windows are shrinking
- put protection at the network layer, not just the app
- use AI on your own stuff before someone else does
@cloudflare 🤝 @NousResearch
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
USV retweeted
Our CEO @dillonrolnick sat down with @eastdakota, CEO of @Cloudflare, for a wide-ranging conversation about agents, the future of the internet, and the fight for digital sovereignty.
Thanks to the @usv team for hosting!
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
USV retweeted
Feels like these guys might become two very main characters in the anti-fragile internet over these next few years...
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?
We are in the early innings of the destruction of the internet as we know it.
At our CEO summit this year we introduced @Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince @eastdakota and @NousResearch (creators of Hermes) CEO Dillon Rolnick @dillonrolnick to discuss what's at stake for the future of the web.
Yesterday AI was used to uncover major vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the internet.
It's yet another example of how profoundly AI is reshaping the web.
But what emerges on the other side is very much up for grabs.
We were lucky enough to recently introduce two heroes of the Rebel Alliance
@eastdakota, CEO & cofounder of @Cloudflare
@dillonrolnick, CEO & cofounder of @NousResearch, the creators of Hermes, the largest open source agent harness in the world.
Together they discussed who gets to build, control, and benefit from an internet run by AI
It's worth a listen if you care about the future of the web.
0:00 Preview
1:41 From a Discord Group to an AI Lab
8:45 Can Anyone Actually Pause AI?
12:59 Would You Trust an Agent With Your Inbox?
14:58 Why Matthew Wouldn’t Trade Places With Sam or Dario
20:28 The Dead Internet Theory Was Wrong
22:28 Agents Don’t Click Ads. Who Pays?
30:38 Where Should Your Agent Actually Run?
32:32 Why American Builders Are Using Chinese Models
38:37 What Happens When Our Agents Work Together?