Labs enable hackers to infiltrate big banks, @straikerai catches it and helps to stop the attack. This story will repeat itself over and over. Excellent distillation of what's happening behind the scenes @coryweinberg (and congrats!)
theinformation.com/articles/…
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
The @wafer_ai team is elite and stacked, and also knows how to have fun.
If you are world class at anything and are incredibly competitive and driven, do yourself a favor and join them.
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
This is mind boggling.
It would have been 60 times worse than the previous largest hack in crypto ($1.5B), genuinely one of the craziest bugs you can find.
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
To everyone who didn’t make it off the waitlist for @LarryFitzgerald's fireside chat, we come bearing reparations.
@Nabin_Niural got him for a rapid fire.
Enjoy.
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
Fastest company ever to $1b annualized revenue
Nope it’s not Higgsfield or Cursor or Cognition.
Met a data company yesterday that did 0 revenue in November 2025 and 80m “in month revenue” in September 2026. They will hit $1b annualized from 11 months of being started. They are still under the radar so I can’t share who they are. Hopefully soon, with their permission.
I don’t make the rules.
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
In the ICU, we have one enormous advantage: we already know the child is sick.
General pediatricians must find the seriously ill child among countless kids who will be fine.
We see the end of the story; they see the first few pages.
davidepsteinmd.substack.com/…
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
Read the details in our proposed regulatory framework: lead.bank/blog/leading-into-…
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
Conversations about AI regulation stop being abstract once AI can move money.
Thanks to @andrewrsorkin and @SquawkCNBC for having me on to talk about how financial services can be a blueprint for governing agentic AI.
The age of agentic finance is coming and it's time to update the rules.
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
William Hockey (@williamhockey) on why SF has a consensus problem:
"I'm a product of Silicon Valley. I started Plaid back in 2012. I've been there since I was 21, and it's very easy to stay in Silicon Valley.
But you can start to get isolated and get very consensus focused. San Francisco is probably the most consensus place I've ever been to. That is both a huge crutch for us, but it's also probably the most valuable asset.
As a founder, if you're building in something that SF believes is very consensus, but the world does not believe yet, that's actually a great operating environment.
That's why Silicon Valley and SF are so dynamic and we're so in front of the curve. But we also have completely lost touch with how the rest of the world operates. Even how the everyday American operates.
So I think it's very important to go to places that don't have that same bias. If you think about emerging markets specifically – the founders who build there, they're the everyday people, they live in this constrained society.
They're constrained in a way that San Francisco and New York isn't. And that breeds a different type of creativity, it breeds a different type of innovation that you really can't get anywhere else.
If you go to talk to people in London or Vienna or San Francisco, people are living in a world of abundance. And that causes a very specific creation cycle.
SF and Silicon Valley are probably more akin to Wall Street in the 1990s than they are like a research lab in Cambridge in like the 1950s. Maybe that was Silicon Valley in the 90s, but it's not anymore."
.@williamhockey is one of the least visible founders in tech relative to what he has created.
He co-founded Plaid and is now building Column, a software company that owns a bank, and powers Ramp, Wise, Bilt, Mercury, and others. He funded it himself by borrowing against nearly everything he had in Plaid shares, and has never raised any outside capital.
His story matters because so much of the value in our industry gets created through exactly this kind of extreme personal risk. He is maniacal about being the best in the world at his thing, and has spent his entire career betting on himself and doing whatever it takes to win.
He also spends a lot of time outside the US (in places like Kinshasa) which has given him a rare perch on the power of the US dollar.
We discuss:
- Why emerging markets are often the most financially innovative
- What owning 100% of his company allows him to do that VC-backed founders cannot
- Getting margin called and nearly going bankrupt
- Why the best founders are specialists
- What it takes to be the best in the world at your thing
- How Silicon Valley's consensus culture produces consensus founders
- How the US dollar functions as an instrument of national security
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
9:19 Emerging Markets
14:03 Silicon Valley's Elite Consensus Problem
16:03 Rejecting the VC Hamster Wheel
21:45 Equity and Liquidity
26:03 Funding a Bank
29:45 The Necessity of Extreme Founder Risk
37:18 Finding Leverage
45:20 Longevity and Profitability in Banking
48:46 Matching Your Capital Structure to Your Business
51:44 The Unseen Power of the US Dollar
1:02:30 How AI Will Transform Legacy Banks
1:09:23 The Kindest Thing
The layers and layers of flex here is so beautiful and warranted. Respect.
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Merchant acquiring for SMBs in the US is on the verge of being disrupted and turned inside out. @GetJIMnow @cloudwalk using the OG PayPal playbook to fix acquiring economics. Tick tock @Square @ToastTab
STATEMENT game indeed! @nyliberty showing off that championship DNA out of the gate. Stewie doing Stewie things! One down, eight to go for that 🏆
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
Impressive, but again - these charts should all be gross profit not ARR
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling dollars for pennies
If AI companies gross margins are 20-30% (high range), these ARR charts are 2-3x overstated
adding Cognition’s growth to a chart that circulated last year (h/t @Yuchenj_UW), you can see that execution speed defines the company
this should not surprise those who saw Scott’s childhood mathcounts video, but hard to fully appreciate until seen in the context of the greats
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
High ARR multiples won't save an AI startup with runaway burn rates.
Gokul Rajaram @gokulr, Founding Partner at Marathon Management Partners, explains why evaluating companies on revenue alone is a major risk:
"The ARR multiple in isolation without looking at the burn is basically irrelevant…What I want is a company that when the markets turn, they can still keep growing efficiently and they can raise a round even in a bad market."
Using your own brain and instincts have somehow become a competitive advantage. Using AI to *make decisions* in this job is the definition of alpha destruction.
Very useful insight from a portfolio founder: VCs are using Granola and feeding notes into a poorly prompted version of Claude to evaluate and pick apart what founders are saying mid-pitch. The frustrating thing is that AI tends toward groupthink...so "trends" on the internet (whether true or not) color how VCs respond even more today than historically. This founder is tracking those sometimes unfounded trends and turns of phrase and ensuring he rebuts them right out of the gate.
I remember this somehow being the number one signal for business strength during zirp. And then the metric was how quickly and deeply they did a RIF. Short memories.
Michael B. Gilroy retweeted
We’re entering the “$5 Uber” era of consumer - inference edition
VC $ subsidizing huge token usage on products aiming to become indispensable enough to eventually monetize
…and who can stomach the short term burn to try to kill their competitors
Enjoy it while you can!