Managing Director and Cofounder, @adverbvc @hashtagangels. First CPO @slackhq; ex @twitter @google. BOD @zillow. Junkie for where culture and tech intersect.

Bay Area
Joined April 2007
When @Jess & I were launching @Adverbvc, we were eager for a day we could proudly display the humans we’d backed on our website. This month, we’re celebrating our two-year anniversary as a firm. We've backed 22 incredible companies, added 2 new team members (@LizaGurtin & @gary_pesola) & have a new website to boot. Check out the companies we’ve backed, and subscribe to our Substack for updates. adverb.vc/ 🚀
9
3
55
27,574
Welcome to the world @warpsciences! Inspired to see @kevinweil @dpatil each keep tackling important and massive problems — now together!
💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster. We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America. I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
1
2
145
April Underwood retweeted
First RP patient dosed in our Phase 1B/2 w/ OCT-980 Rho corrector for retinitis pigmentosa. Really thankful to the clinicians, staff, CRO partners & Octonauts for helping get this drug to patients w/ no other approved treatments. Exciting times! octant.bio/news/octant-annou…
27
22
9
220
18,310
I… I think I need to work on my bowling form.
3
15
1,302
April Underwood retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
973
8,189
1,545
63,786
3,515,181
3rd summit in the books 💚
Adverb Founder Summit 💚
14
1,382
April Underwood retweeted
Neil Bush, brother of one President Bush & son of another President Bush, just posted that he voted for @JamesTalarico. Neil still lives in the same neighborhood as father did for decades here in Houston.
625
3,197
231
22,535
853,817
April Underwood retweeted
keeping footage of billy in watching 2x speed of ai-narrated intro bio videos before he pitches investors on theranos 2.0 was just genius. founderslop on full display
you can see everything pulling off a brilliant second act by showing a large portion of the tech world how insane they seem to normal people
7
187
2
5,936
41,481
Lost sleep over this 👇👇👇
you can see everything pulling off a brilliant second act by showing a large portion of the tech world how insane they seem to normal people
1
2
1,588
Truly, the fastest 2:54 I’ve ever watched. Would have watched 5 hours.
3
6
1
835
11,153
April Underwood retweeted
I tell ya what, That boy Paxton ain’t right.
626
2,722
126
25,983
690,011
she’s becoming a noble gas
TRUMP: KATIE ZACHARIA WILL STAY IN SOME FORM, BUT MAYBE ANOTHER FORM
103
3,713
28
71,751
788,040
And if it worked for them, it would probably also work for spouses who grocery shop, but don’t cook…
336
Has anyone come up with a way to use one of the consumer agents to intercept questions and replacement suggestions from Instacart shoppers? Most of the time that I place an order it’s because I am tied up, and I often can’t keep up with the back-and-forth most of the questions boil down to an understanding of true substitutions, as well as personal preference, so it feels like a good fit…
3
6
1,998
April Underwood retweeted
Imagine trying to explain this to someone with a life
there’s an issey miyake kindergarten just down the street from the kelly clarkson bird shop
1
275
6
3,865
60,523
April Underwood retweeted
Talked primarily about AI with the homies @ftrain and @richziade on the @aboard Podcast. But I’m glad we also took the time to share important colorectal health tips.
1
9
1,230
April Underwood retweeted
Runway is such a perfect metaphor: it's great to have more distance, but it doesn't matter if your startup never reaches takeoff speed.
6
3
18
1,965
April Underwood retweeted
I don’t think you have a dog in this fight but if you did you would have shot it.
I’ll take @ellalangleymsic over Kacey Musgraves any day. And if I’m choosin’ Texas, I’ll take Ken Paxton over James Talarico.
7,588
63,214
4,503
498,826
9,575,921
April Underwood retweeted
At @MeckaAI, we spend a ton of calories on building models and human-in-the-loop workflows to achieve capabilities frontier models can't accomplish today. Dense captioning is one of these incredibly hard problems. The talented and sharp Concept team (@tkkong , @philhchen ) did a deep analysis on frontier model performance compared to our internal Mecka model - read more below!
Today, we're sharing results from our partnership with @MeckaAI to see if frontier models can label egocentric videos for robot learning. We had five frontier models caption 200 clips with human grading. GPT-6 Astra which performed the best got 43.5% of clips fully correct.
8
10
2
87
6,561
Pretty surprised at how wrong the pronunciations are for Hawaiian street names in Google Maps. How, in 2026, can this be? Kaanapali does not sound like Napoli or Annapolis…
1
1,923
New spirit animal dropped
4
1,589