Consumer brand builder and investor | Lover of all things Syracuse | Flawed
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Joined August 2008
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Really enjoyed this conversation with @RachelBrown34 on @bebullish’s perspective on all-things consumer, beauty and more.
Check out her wide-ranging interview below. (And @coldplay, you are welcome for the free publicity.)
@bebullish's @MikeDuda On CPG’s New Unconventional Founders, That @coldplay Concert, His Med-Spa Bet And Bullish Outlook
Read more: bit.ly/45rgiJb
#hereforthefierce #beautyentrepreneur #wellnessentrepreneur #beautybusiness #beautynews
I cannot wait for the 30 for 30 on this era…
Pricing in venture is wilder than ever.
$100M pre-seed is now normal.
Bessemer just raised $1.75BN for “early” and $4BN for growth.
So can you even do seed today without $1BN?
- Is capital truly one of the last remaining moats?
- Do all small seed funds and mid-sized firms just fade into irrelevance?
- Does entry price matter anymore when there are $TRN companies…
- Is this real or a bubble that is about to burst
I sat down with @spdholakia to discuss this and have added my notes from the discussion below.
1. This Is a Supercycle Like Never Before
Sameer has spent 31 years in software and has felt magic only a handful of times. A trillion-dollar supercycle followed every one of those moments, and he notes that it does not happen very often.
What is different and what is similar to prior cycles @altcap @infoarbitrage
2. Capital Is a Moat Today
Markets pick winners and the choice becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it did when developers settled on SendGrid and Twilio. In legal AI, big law firms name just two major providers. Capital lets leaders scale at an extraordinary pace and build a brand, which draws talent and customers in a reinforcing flywheel.
Do you agree with this @venkyganesan @dafrankel
3. Who Wins and Who Loses in the Future of Venture Capital?
As industries professionalize, firms must be either a giant global platform that consolidates or an extreme specialist, such as an early-stage AI investor in San Francisco. Sameer counts Bessemer as a big global platform. Firms caught in between face a hard world to make money.
Is it go big or go home @rodriscoll @rabois @chetanp
4. The Rationale for Why Anthropic Would Compete With the Hyperscalers and Why We Invested
As in the cloud era, AI would be massively capital intensive, so it would consolidate to a handful of players with hundreds of apps on top. Microsoft had partnered with OpenAI and Google was building Gemini, while AWS had an undistinctive internal model and had just invested heavily in Anthropic.
5. Why Price Does Not Matter in a World of AI and the Metric That Truly Determines Value
Bessemer invested in Abridge at $5M of ARR for a $700M to $800M valuation, in Anthropic at roughly 150 times current ARR, and led Legora's $1.8B round at $20M of ARR. Sameer judges these deals on what the company can become in the next twelve months.
How has your relationship to price changed in a world of AI @mignano @mmurph
6. Why the Rise of Open Models Does Not Denigrate the Market for Closed Models
In a market this large, predicting the mix between closed and open tokens with any precision is irrelevant. Consumers, enterprises and governments will all want different flavors of intelligence. Bessemer has invested in both Anthropic and Fireworks to hold exposure to closed and open tokens.
Love to hear how you think about this @lqiao @bernhardsson
7. Why It Is a Permanent Structural Shift That Companies Will Stay Private for Longer, but Why It Will Open in 2028
With more dollars and more firms in private venture, companies will stay private longer, and most of the run-up in this boom will happen in private markets. Sameer still expects an unlock in IPOs later next year and in 2028.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @bgurley and how you see it evolving in 24 months?
(links in comments)
Michael Duda retweeted
Pedigree is overrated. Grit isn't.
Bloomberg on who he'd hire: "the person whose father never was there, whose mother was in a drug treatment program. And he had to go and work three shifts at McDonald's to take care of his siblings."
"No matter how bad things are — looks on the bright side, takes the bull by the horns, puts in the sweat capital. That's where the results are."
Instinct has indeed joined me on a number of social occasions...
New from me: A look at how AI agents are socializing — at dinner parties, on podcasts and as “coworkers.”
As more and more of these things rove the web, we’re still figuring out how to treat them and what to expect when they interact with each other. It’s all very weird and wild.
nytimes.com/2026/10/14/techn…
Michael Duda retweeted
Was just speaking to a room of 30 Bay Area tech founders. Asked: “if I gave you a thousand shares, for free, of Anthropic, openAI or SpaceX, which would you choose?”
Two thirds took Anthropic. One third took SpaceX. Not a single taker for OpenAI.
Michael Duda retweeted
The Giants are alone in first place in the NFC East for the first time since November 2015.
Companies actually focused on the consumer don’t tend to do self-absorbed communications.
Instinct is a fascinating company:
- 14 employees
- no launch video
- no raise announcements
- no X profile
- basic website
- not even an .ai domain
- no app
- no marketing
- founder only posts new features
Yet it is the most successful consumer startup of 2026
Incredible. You really can just do things.
Michael Duda retweeted
SCOOP: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens - in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios.
The sheer volume of incidents found in our reporting indicate that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is currently publicly known and disclosed.
The findings also raise questions about what level of control anyone working on AI development can expect to have over their own technology, and whether these kinds of incidents are becoming synonymous with frontier deployment.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-…
Michael Duda retweeted
Michael Moritz's investment memo for Stripe was under 4 pages.
"The shorter the memo, the better. If you can express yourself clearly and have a strong opinion, you don't need a lot of paper."
"Being able to distill things to their essence and keep it very short has stood me in good stead over the years."
My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years.
Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe.
His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany and helps explain his lifelong interest in what shapes exceptional people.
We discuss:
- The infamous Steve Jobs profile
- Why Don Valentine hired him
- The question he finds most revealing when interviewing people
- Monomania and the cost of greatness
- Why he has never felt good at anything
- Writing, journalism and AI
- What he learned about himself writing Ausländer
I'd recommend watching this one if you can. Michael was incredibly thoughtful and reflective throughout, particularly when talking about his parents, childhood, and the more difficult parts of his personal story.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:53 Family History & Identity
7:03 Survival & Outsider Instinct
18:53 Studying Exceptional People
33:50 Self-Doubt & Success
41:17 Steve Jobs & Obsession
52:50 Joining Sequoia
1:03:22 Leadership & Alex Ferguson
1:08:25 Elon Musk & AI
1:17:12 Becoming Who You Are
Michael Duda retweeted
Drones re-create Twin Towers over NYC skyline to honor 9/11 victims trib.al/TEvezkd
Instinct drafted by Fantasy Football team last night, ordered takeout, created a business website for @bebullish that is very on brand and has been prompting be (good) reminders on a timely basis.
What @noahrshinn has created is going to help turn people's negative views on AI to positive. So well done.
I've now had 48 hours with Instinct.
My takeway -> the moment everyone predicted just arrived.
I ran three hotel bookings, four restaurant reservations, a handful of excursions, and a number of product purchases through Instinct, all through WhatsApp.
I left voice notes. It executed.
Crazy to think not one new piece of technology was introduced. The genius: it was packaged perfectly into the right interface.
I've spent 25 years watching commerce assume a human has to arrive somewhere first. I built Magento on that assumption, from 2007 until eBay acquired it in 2011, when it ran roughly 250,000 merchants and $100B+ in annual GMV. Now I believe that assumption has stopped being true.
We've had two years of ChatGPT shopping, Perplexity commerce, agent-to-agent protocols. It went nowhere. I stayed out of investing in the space because I couldn't see the interface that would make it real.
It wasn't a model problem. It was a distribution problem, and it was solved the moment the agent appeared of inside WhatsApp.
Yes, it's a subtle nuance - but incredibly impactful.
The security and privacy questions are real. Handing an agent your card and your address raises exactly the concerns you'd expect. They'll get addressed, the same way every prior wave addressed them after adoption forced the issue, not before.
Every serious model provider will ship this within months. First mover advantage never mattered here.
The pieces were all there. We were just waiting for someone to plug them in.
Wonderful work @noahrshinn
Michael Duda retweeted
Here is Tim Cook’s official farewell address on Apple Park to employees on his last day as Apple CEO. 😢
You can clearly see how touched, sad, and nervous he is. Thank you, Tim. ❤️🥺
Inevitable. But it marks the start of @goodgood_golf’s journey to de-nuclearize its current brand situation.
SCOOP: Good Good's ad fallout continues, with CEO and prez now out. Memo: businessinsider.com/good-goo…
Damn…
Closed our series B with excellent people, its a privilege to serve and continue our mission.
We want to play a powerful but quiet role in improving public health, by making your favorite foods smarter.
prnewswire.com/news-releases…
