Silicon Valley lawyer, partner @Orrick, angel investor, former college athlete, husband to Jess, dad to Theo and Isabella, opinions are my own
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2009
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John Harrison retweeted
Watch Index Partner Mark Xu & Flapping Airplanes' Ben Spector's full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=08A3Rb3z…
John Harrison retweeted
Fresh off @flappyairplanes’ $1B Series A, @marklxu1 catches up with CEO and co-founder @spectorb on his path from running Prod to building a lab that’s making AI orders of magnitude more efficient, and what separates founders from everyone else.
Increased efficiency is going to be a complete unlock that brings AI closer to reaching its full potential...
Startup @flappyairplanes is betting the future of AI is making models more efficient. cnb.cx/3UiruGm
John Harrison retweeted
big efficiency breakthroughs usually drive waves of new demand. robotics, trading, scientific discovery, consumer applications, lower latency inference, generative UI---efficiency gains will help unlock all of these things
the stuff flappy is working on is good for everyone :)
Every neocloud should be watching this.
What happens when the useful compute you can squeeze out of a GPU improves faster than the hardware itself?
Billions in GPU-backed financing depend on assumptions about future rental rates and residual values. Software breakthroughs could make those assumptions obsolete overnight.
John Harrison retweeted
We’ve spent the past year developing new primitives for GPUs. We believe this enables new algorithms to change how machines learn, open new markets, and dramatically reshape AI’s cost structure.
We have raised a $1 billion Series A, co-led by Index and Lux.
Where Etched is today comes as no surprise to me and is just the starting point (which is the most exciting part). An amazing combo of leadership (@UbertiGavin and @robertwachen), talent, vision in a rapidly evolving space, big bets, ambition, pace, purpose, problem solving + ruthless execution against the plan.
We’ve raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix.
Our mission is to run the world's inference. This round accelerates production of our inference clusters.
We've opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility 15 minutes from our office to expedite production and prototyping.
John Harrison retweeted
One of the biggest constraints on growth has always been the ability to scale human judgment.
At Palantir, we saw firsthand why exceptional people matter in helping customers understand and deploy transformative technology. The hardest work wasn't explaining the technology. It was understanding context, reasoning through novel situations, and helping customers make better decisions. Until now, that hasn't been scalable.
That's changing.
@8vc led @sablehq's $45M raise alongside my friend @shaunmmaguire at @sequoia. I'm honored to be joining the board.
The best founders recognize platform shifts early and execute even faster. Nim Ravid and the Sable team saw where multimodal AI was heading early and built with remarkable speed.
Sable is building an AI employee that can see what a customer sees, interact with the product alongside them, and reason through complex problems in real time.
What felt like science fiction a year ago is already working in production with some of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world.
We’re excited to work alongside @Nim_Ravid1, Linda, Leon, Itamar, and the entire Sable team as they build one of the defining AI companies of this next era.
Introducing Aidan, your newest AI employee
Aidan is the first computer-using AI built for realtime conversation
We’ve raised $45M from @sequoia and @8VC to bring Aidan to the world
@NotionHQ and @DecagonAI already use Aidan to run customer interactions. This is how @sablehq works:
Congrats to @Nim_Ravid1 and the Sable team! Super exciting product!
Introducing Aidan, your newest AI employee
Aidan is the first computer-using AI built for realtime conversation
We’ve raised $45M from @sequoia and @8VC to bring Aidan to the world
@NotionHQ and @DecagonAI already use Aidan to run customer interactions. This is how @sablehq works:
Singularity is bringing air and drone defense systems into the modern era. Proud of the work that @JackOswald10 and @svgiroux are doing to keep us safe!
John Harrison retweeted
Etched is going to be the first chip to market that was designed after ChatGPT. Sohu is a full stack solution for serving frontier inference fast and cheap. Etched is coming to market with the perfect product at the perfect time. I suspect frontier inference is going to become one of the biggest markets in history; models keep getting bigger (and thus more expensive and slower to serve) and the demand for them is skyrocketing.
Etched has rebuilt the entire stack (even building their own racks!) around delivering the highest throughput and interactivity for big models. By codesigning everything from the programming model of Sohu to novel work with Low Voltage Inference, Etched can improve beyond where all other chips hit the roofline. Sohu is necessary to fulfill the massive demand for AI and distribute intelligence to everyone in the world.
It has been a great pleasure to watch the Etched team grow over the past couple of years and break all kinds of records for hardware companies. Congratulations!
Just a reminder that if you’re waking up healthy today, it’s a good day. Enjoy it. Prayers up for Chris Johnson and his family.
John Harrison retweeted
Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world.
Almost everyone I called at the time said it was impossible.
Today, Etched (@Etched) comes out of stealth with $800M total raised, $1B in signed customer contracts, and a working next-gen AI chip.
This was my excuse to ask the two founders, @UbertiGavin and @robertwachen, every question I have about compute and inference.
We discuss:
- Why they built an entire rack and not just a chip
- The two technical bets behind their architecture no one else has tried
- How two founders in their twenties recruited industry legends
- The night they nearly ran out of money
- Why whoever produces the most tokens wins
If you care about the future of compute, Gavin and Rob are two people to know. I think you will find the story of what they have built hard to forget.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work
14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck
22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories
33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster
49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack
1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive
1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence
Etched is a generational company in the making. They have been skating ahead of the puck for a while, and their accelerated inference infrastructure is going to be game-changing. So excited for @UbertiGavin, @robertwachen and the entire Etched team!
contrarian view, and I agree
"We will have more lawyers in five years, not less.
Lawyers are being inundated by all of these AI responses that they're now getting from their clients.
When everybody thinks that they're a lawyer; do you know what the ultimate constraint is?
The actual number of lawyers that are able to go and review all of this stuff being produced." @levie
Do you agree with this @winstonweinberg @rabois @gradypb @MaxJunestrand @dickc @ryanjdaniels @thepericulum @scottastevenson
John Harrison retweeted
In our annual letter, we describe the progression we expect in agentic commerce. You tend to hear the later levels discussed in the hype, but we're already seeing lots of activity in levels 1 and 2 of agentic commerce. Read more: stripe.com/annual-updates/20…
