Founder of Eden, ex-White House Correspondent, building institutional credibility for frontier tech. Proud Jewish Australian New Yorker.
New York City
Joined December 2009
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I was surprised last week when someone on the WSJ's VC desk told me they were taking a break from exclusives due to the pace of the news cycle and to evaluate what even qualifies as "news" right now.
Then I read this line from Colossus: "300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far."
Damn. Makes sense.
If you're pitching a funding round, you'd better have some interesting narrative elements in play.
The people of Silicon Valley are unwell.
If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn, you’ve got it bad. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, invites from friends to hang out are waning, even weddings are on hold. This is the time to make your mark and make your money, after all.
If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100M on the table, you fucking idiot. Being an underdog isn't as fun as you thought.
If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death.
"Too many of my friends are spiraling," Brie Wolfson writes. "I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this."
It’s all too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. Every month, a new frontier model is released. Every day, a new unicorn is minted. Seriously. 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far.
So what’s left for the sane ones? Brie went looking for teams playing a different game. She found one in Ottawa: a search infrastructure company that many of the AI darlings rely on.
It's growing fast, and its people are well.
Read @zebriez’s latest company dispatch from inside the sane asylum of turbopuffer.
colossus.com/article/sane-as…
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
Spot on. I've been at cnbc, fox, and cheddar -- the guest has to add value first. After a few appearances, a polite ask pre-show for a company-geared question is fair. But bringing up your company being great unprompted on air always got eye rolls in the control room.
Most founders don't realize there's a secret game to becoming a regular on the major TV networks.
Against my own interests, I'm giving you the playbook that only the smartest operators have learned.
"The best dinner party guest doesn't always make the best podcast guest."
The host of a fast-growing tech podcast told me this yesterday and it nails what I'm constantly trying to teach business leaders and executives.
You may be incredibly professionally accomplished, well educated, travelled and successful.
But are you engaging and entertaining? Are you interesting to watch?
Are you a good storyteller?
And most importantly, do you have a strong, differentiated point of view that is going to piss a couple of people off?
Without these skills, you're probably not going to become one of the leading voices in your industry or have podcasters and TV networks lining up around the block to feature you.
Been listening to Ari Emanuel's memoir for the last two weeks and it's only reaffirmed how insanely bullish I am on phone calls.
Ari is dyslexic and credits his gruelling daily routine of hundreds of phone calls with the secret behind his success.
Every day, I encourage my team to not default to emails or texts to lock in opportunities, create relationships, or problem solve.
Phone calls are king and a forgotten art. Roll the calls.
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
I interviewed George Arison about why Grindr would pay $250M to buy a telemedicine company. It was a really interesting conversation, some highlights:
1) The company believe healthcare could be at least half as big as their core dating business if not more
2) There's a lot of 340B work that happens under the hood between their partner pharmacies + clinics
3) Some interesting ideas around how the dating app and healthcare pieces could be tied together - e.g. with fast-acting PrEP in trials, you could notify someone before they meetup to remind them to take it
Yesterday was one of those "pinch me, this is my job?" days helping our friends @RoboStrategy ring the Nasdaq Closing Bell.
Nothing quite prepares you for being in the presence of these incredible feats of engineering, including seeing a robot ring the Nasdaq bell.
Robotics and physical AI will transform our lives, bringing manufacturing back to the United States, speeding up breakthroughs in medicine, and enabling all of us to spend more time with our loved ones.
@Rewkang and the RoboStrategy team are still so ahead of their time and we're excited to keep sharing their incredible work.
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
Everyone wants to tell me how great their office pantry is but after the Bloomberg pantry nothing can surprise me. The Bloomberg pantry is the size of a small regional airport. The Bloomberg pantry has a fresh peanut butter machine and matcha on tap. The Bloomberg pantry makes the Thrive Capital pantry look positively soviet. Its memory will drive you to tears whenever you visit another newsroom
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
I don’t understand why the Mayor couldn’t simply give Jews *one day* to mourn the largest mass killing of Jews since the holocaust.
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
Watching this with my husband who works on AI for Google just absolutely slack-jawed.
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Thursday nights in NYC look like:
1. Being interviewed by @EmilyDempsey
2. Drinks at the NYSE for our client @wintermute_t
3. Finally meeting the @MTSlive legends in real life.
I love this city and building a company in it!!
Good media coverage creates momentum that fuels an entire organization’s morale:
- The BD team is more confident to chase down bigger deals
- The founder or CEO is more bullish and committed to their vision
- Sensing the wind at their back, the entire team is more fired up about the mission
We’re seeing this right now with a client who spent months locked in a negative press cycle. With our help, that’s finally changing.
The feedback has been clear: each new piece of coverage is boosting morale with the team and having real impact internally.
Aura = business growth.
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
if you've been wondering if the ethereum:0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca fud fest has been working... take a look
after "$15B migration" and "the great migration" and "we are secure by default" and "Bryan is a liar" and whatever else they said
LayerZero has mainteained its 83%+ marketshare throughout the year
dominant
layerzero:native
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
Gonna raise a fund one day to invest exclusively in founders who are eldest daughters.
Will be raising exclusively from LPs who are youngest brothers.
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.
2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.
According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.
The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.
Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.
And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.
What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?
3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.
It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.
4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
Ebony Lewkovitz retweeted
NEW: LayerZero, which counts Citadel Securities, DTCC, and Intercontinental Exchange among its partners, said it’s launching a new blockchain-based exchange targeting financial institutions this fall
theinformation.com/briefings…
