General Partner @PropelVC | Backing the builders of the new economy | [email protected]
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2009
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David Mort retweeted
The governor-elect of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, has explicitly said that all currently permitted datacenters in Texas will be allowed to finish construction. This essentially covers all of the 2027 and likely well into 2028.
She is going to pass laws that ensure that all *newly* permitted datacenters going forward for delivery in 2028/2029 will pay taxes, commit to no increase in power prices for consumers, don’t impact water availability for people, be constructed with union labor and give “Texans a seat at the table.”
Sounds reasonable. She doesn’t want to lose a lot of good blue collar jobs and property taxes for small towns in rural Texas.
Datacenter commentary starts at 6:30 in this interview.
Also attaching her official campaign position from her website in the next post.
Sidenote: After watching a bunch of her speeches and interviews, I do think she is a political talent and probably has a future in national politics.
youtu.be/D-T6H3b8ZeE?is=mEWu…
David Mort retweeted
NVIDIA's consensus revenue estimate for 2027 is roughly $700 billion. Vera Rubin runs ~$40B per GW. SpaceX is "exclusive to NVIDIA", per Elon.
So when Elon claims SpaceX is going to build 20GW of capacity next year, he's suggesting SpaceX will spend $800 billion on NVIDIA chips.. or greater than 100% of NVIDIA's total revenue, lol.
$SPCX $NVDA
David Mort retweeted
$CRWV - HSBC WARNS COREWEAVE IS SPENDING BILLIONS TO DESTROY VALUE
HSBC maintains its Reduce rating on CoreWeave, with a $39 price target implying 36% downside.
The bank estimates CoreWeave's 2026–2030 return on invested capital at 8.9%, below its borrowing costs.
With over $51 billion in debt and slowing AI revenue growth, HSBC warns further investment could destroy shareholder value.
David Mort retweeted
Forced liquidations due to excess leverage typically mark near-term historical bottoms. Situational Awareness at ~4x leverage & over $20B in assets at its peak is now wound down. While I heard there were at least 3 other funds in trouble, today’s rally may have fixed their issues.
I also wanted to put today’s rally in context. I gave the stats in my post yesterday about the historic meltdown and why “In summary, my view is that we could have seen at least a short-term bottom today with a strong rally ahead of us in the sectors most caught in the latest speedbump.”
The 10.7% rally today in the Morgan Stanley Momentum Index beats all but the 11.1% gain on 4/3/2001 during the dotcom bust. All the other moves in the top 10 occurred during either Covid (3x), the GFC (2x) or the dotcom bust (3x).
For the more concentrated Morgan Stanley TMT (Tech Media & Telecom) Momentum Index today’s gain of 19.1% crushes the prior 11.9% gain seen on 12/5/00 during the dotcom bust. 5 of the other top 10 gains were seen just since November of 2025 during the recent meteoric rally. There were 3 more during the dotcom bust.
While some give back is certainly likely in the days ahead given the ferocity of this one day move, I believe we have seen the near-term bottom yesterday due to the forced liquidations. I am hopeful the “speedbump” I started expecting back on my June 20th post is now behind us. Getting oil prices back into the $70 range with a decline in bond yields would certainly increase the odds even more.
I believe we are still early in the adoption of Agentic AI and the 10-100x increase in tokens needed since January relative to Chat-based AI.
David Mort retweeted
Kimi K3 just fixed 15 critical security bugs that Codex and Fable refused because of “cyber guardrails.” There’s no reason to limit American models on tasks that Chinese models handle without issue. We’re only making ourselves less competitive.
David Mort retweeted
The market also needs to learn to differentiate among the business models of companies in “data centers”.
If the largest companies in the world now want to sell compute, that would logically increase demand for hard-to-find megawatts in an already constrained market. If a company has a 4.2GW portfolio of development sites and builds turnkey data centers for tenants (so the tenant can manufacture and sell compute), recent headlines seem very positive for such a company.
@CipherInc $CIFR
The market needs to learn how to differentiate among the teams building data centers. We are on schedule at Barber Lake and our confidence is unwavering.
$CIFR
David Mort retweeted
SITUATION EXPLAINED: What happens to AI labs' margins when the gap between open source and frontier models shrinks to a month?
We asked @braeden_norris, investor at @PropelVC
"The labs have had this incredible ramp in terms of revenue. But the social tide is changing. People are thinking more about costs."
"They're in this constant battle between each other and also between open models, keeping that gap between near frontier and frontier alive. The existence of these margins is probably reliant on there being a gap that's somewhat substantial and isn't like a month long or even shorter."
"There are plenty of use cases, drug discovery, material science, where the marginal cost you're willing to pay for a token is basically infinite. And so this defends the eighty percent plus gross margin potentially."
"As an investor, that's a precarious spot to be in as a lab. It's a running race. You have to raise a lot of capital. You're investing more capital over time in R&D even if you are spinning off good margin on the inference side."
David Mort retweeted
I wrote about GLM-5.2 as a window into frontier API economics.
Near-frontier intelligence is getting cheaper and more commoditized, but frontier labs may still have meaningful inference margin on the last increment of quality and reliability.
Link below.
David Mort retweeted
I’m fully forward deployed engineering pilled specifically because AI simply is not the same as software. In software, you deliver a stable piece of technology to a customer and they adopt it and that’s that (extreme over simplification).
In AI, you’re delivering something that is constantly evolving both due to the nature of the new capabilities and best practices that emerge, but also because the underlying models change so much that they can meaningfully change the workflow as a result of their upgrades.
For this reason it’s far more logical that one vendor can share best practices across thousands of companies more efficiently than every single company can learn and manage these best practices themselves. Further, the learnings from those customers should go right back into the core product as a result.
As we go from chat systems to anyone can relatively easily adopt to agentic systems that require more meaningful efforts to manage and update, the FDE model (or equivalent) essentially becomes a core competency for anyone deploying AI at scale.
The real power of forward deployed engineering has always been putting strong technical people directly alongside the operators who own the outcome. That proximity forces the work to solve the actual problem instead of some sanitized version of it.
In the AI era this principle has become even more valuable. Agents can now sit inside real workflows and improve from actual decisions, which means the highest-leverage work is extracting the tacit knowledge that lives with subject matter experts, building evaluations that reflect how things actually break, and closing the production feedback loop so agents get better from real outcomes.
David Mort retweeted
Mythos appears to be the first class of models trained at scale on Blackwells. Then will be Vera Rubins. Pre-training isn't saturated. RL works. And there is *so much* computing coming online soon.
Buckle your chin strips. It's going to be fucking wild.
David Mort retweeted
If you invested $10,000 in Filecoin $FIL in 5 years ago today, you would have $47 today.
That would be enough to buy a 10TB hard drive and store your own data like a normal human being.
David Mort retweeted
I answer about a dozen or so emails every week from students and early stage founders. One of the most common red flags I see are people who want to be a founder for the sake of it and are chasing ideas or guessing. It's so common I have a canned response. Here it is:
(Starting the canned response here)
I’m sorry to say it sounds like you’re searching for an idea. Or, you have a solution in need of a problem. Or, you just like the idea of being a founder (for whatever reason).
This isn’t what you want to hear, but go get a job and work for awhile. If you have a solution that needs market validation, then work in the industry that you think that market exists. Immerse yourself in some industry, it really doesn’t matter what one, because they’re all so filled with problems that need to be solved that you can choose anything.
It only takes one or two years.
Then your problem isn’t going to be wondering “is this a good idea?” “What is a good idea?” Etc. The problem is going to be: which of these 10 obviously good ideas won’t be solved unless I do it, and which do I want to spend the next 10 years of my life working on? That’s the real hard question.
Remember, the key questions a VC is going to ask you and you should ask yourself is: “Why this? Why now? Why you?” You should have full confidence in all of them. The easy part is confidence in all of them. Then the hard part is executing fast enough and hoping the market moves with you with external factors that are mostly out of your control. :)
Don’t search for an idea. Let one come to you. Go get a job.
I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the advice I think you need to hear. Like I said, it won’t take long, one or two years or so. But that one or two years of working is going to save you more years of your life most likely wasting your time on the easy part (finding the idea). Plus, you’ll get paid for it.
David Mort retweeted
Former Check co-founder, after $360M Intuit exit, launches Safebooks with $15M in Seed funding.
The Israeli startup introduces Agentic Revenue Integrity, a real-time automation engine for quote-to-revenue operations.
calcalistech.com/ctechnews/a…
David Mort retweeted
We just raised $6.6M to make sourcing physical products as simple as launching an online store.
Shopify made selling easy, but manufacturing is still painful.
It takes brands 6+ months and thousands of messages with low quality factories over WhatsApp/WeChat/email to source a single product. With tariffs forcing businesses to shift their supply chains, the urgency around fixing sourcing has only intensified.
@cavelahq uses AI agents, a vetted network of 200,000+ factories across 40 countries, and experts on the ground to handle everything from collecting quotes to delivering orders to warehouse.
The round was co-led by @SusaVentures (Robinhood, Flexport), @xyz_vc (Anduril), and with participation from @CrossoverVC. Other investors include @PropelVC and Go Global Ventures.
We’re thrilled to have partners who recognize that global manufacturing should operate with the efficiency and accessibility of software.
Thank you to @MTemkin and @TechCrunch for the story, and to the many people who supported. Now back to work.
A special thank you to: @chadbyers @fubini @deeeniseS @camillericketts @Noah_L @milesdeamer @dvlamoen @davidmort @JayReinemann @0xelton @braeden_norris @LucyWilmot1 @ImChauncey
David Mort retweeted
Goosebumps, as we list on the @NSEIndia tomorrow.
We’ve always built for our customers, and our customers have loved us back. As we unravel a new chapter in our journey, we are extremely grateful to you 🙏
We Groww, if you Groww.
Here’s to Growwing together 🚀
David Mort retweeted
3 things:
1. New vehicles are really expensive now
2. People under 40 are all in on the stock market
3. Wealth inequality is turning into health inequality
awealthofcommonsense.com/202…
