Founder @trytalentos - Multiplayer AI for teams, Prev @frontiertower @buildmyanmar
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2019
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James Win retweeted
When two founders call themselves co-CEOs, it doesn’t mean they’ve found a better structure. It means they haven’t decided which one of them is CEO.
James Win retweeted
founder → VC partner is like rapper who made it out the hood
analyst → VC partner is like white boy from the suburbs rapping bout the hood
James Win retweeted
Random observation from a founder relatively new to VC fundraising.
I’ve only been through a Series A for one of my companies, and I’m preparing for a Series A for another. So I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on venture capital.
But coming from a capital markets background, there’s something about the VC fundraising process that I find fascinating.
In capital markets, if you want alpha, you do the homework.
You research the market. You identify opportunities before others recognize them. You develop conviction, take a position, and hopefully capture the upside.
The opportunity doesn’t come knocking on your door with a pitch deck asking you to invest.
So why does venture capital sometimes seem to work in reverse?
One of the most common pieces of fundraising advice I’ve received is that founders need to proactively reach out to VCs, build relationships, pitch their companies, and constantly follow up.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around, too?
I’m running two companies. I’ve completed one Series A and am preparing for another. I barely have time to fundraise, let alone chase VCs.
Interestingly, the investors who impress me most are the persistent ones who do their homework, understand our business, and add value BEFORE getting an allocation.
They’re often the ones who become our strongest supporters.
If VCs only invest in founders who are good at fundraising, are they missing founders who are too busy building?
Genuinely curious what founders and VCs think. I’m still learning this game.
James Win retweeted
When it comes to hiring, it’s easier to tame a reckless hustler than it is to instill that dawg in someone
James Win retweeted
Excellent code mode env:
github.com/stencil-hq/dquick…
MCP vs CLI for LLMs is the wrong discussion. People are debating at the wrong layer.
Both work incredibly well as long as they are run through a repl like environment that can persist state. The funny thing about CLI is that CLI tools are usually accessed through BASH which happens to be a repl with persistent state (the file system), therefore cli works much better than mcp. But this isn't even close to being an intrinsic property of MCP. Just means that we need better harnesses.
Right now the best repl for this are:
- bash + fs
- jupyter kernels
- codemode type repls, usually quickjs
LLMs understand the concept of forward evolving a system to solve a need very well. This comes from the agentic RL. They understand how to change the state of a codebase or acquire data from databases and then operate on it similarly to humans. But without an execution environment, they actually cannot do this properly.
My bet? Sometime soon someone will (or has already?) create a embeddable, sqlite style mini execution environment that parses bash, typescript, or tool calls into a common IL execution plan that's easy to security check before executing. And design this specifically for durable execution environments. Then we will just connect cli, mcp, webmcp, whatever to that and it accepts any of the input modalities as they can all be represented as each other.
James Win retweeted
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.
There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with sustained warmth, authenticity, humor, and integrity, great gifts will be laid before you. White pill.
James Win retweeted
There is literally no stability to be found in the AI stack. In the last few months:
1.) I moved all my intense recurring workloads from OpenAI to Anthropic and now back to OpenAI
2.) Used GrokBot as an over lay on top of OpenAI and Anthropic but am now switching this to Muse
3.) liked Instinct for a week until Muse came out
4.) Was using Exa and TinyFish only to now discover this new model called Jev which can save me money on all of the tools listed above
In the matter of days, something that was an “oh shit moment” becomes underwhelming. As a consumer of these tools what a fun time to be alive
Muse for Mac is out today! It works across apps, files, calendar, notes, and messages on your computer. You control what it can access. The team is shipping fast. Download at ai.meta.com/muse/download
James Win retweeted
Any one who is privileged therefore owes it to the world to work on the most obnoxiously hard problems, not just build a life for themselves, but uplift people by building great companies and employing as many people as they can.
The privileged must risk it all, over and over again, until they are tortured to greatness.
This is my version of socialism, re- distribute risk. The rich have a moral imperative to embrace more risk.
James Win retweeted
whenever someone asks me how i think about purpose, i usually respond with this:
a good life is basically the continuous expansion of consciousness & generosity.
the mind becomes more capable of seeing. the heart becomes more capable of caring. your actions become more capable of expressing both.
everything else is mostly logistics.
James Win retweeted
Searching for the best skills & examples outputs for your agents?
A lot of the "best skills, tools, techniques" are ai marketing posts, and not even relevant to your team. trellner.com/reports/manufac…
Start building and relying on your team's expertise instead @trytalentos
James Win retweeted
Marriage used to be the starting point.
Two people would come together with almost nothing to their name, but each other, and then they would build everything side by side. This process of building led to bonding, it built loyalty, it required tremendous sacrifice and most of all it taught interdependence. But now we are told the opposite. We are told instead that we need to have it all before we marry.
We need a good career, a home, a bunch of money in the bank, your entire identity discovered and solidified, a passport filled with stamps, a degree and much dating experience.
The problem with this is that by the time two people finally decide to join one another, well they have spent most of their lives learning how to do life alone.
So it is not wonder then that building a life with someone else, suddenly feels so much harder. Marriage used to be a beginning, not it is an after thought to an already built life.
Two already self-sufficient and self-reliant people do not easily merge and mesh. It is hard to go from the perspective of “mine”, to “ours”, when individualism is all we have ever known.
And this is why individualism has become the death of marriage.
James Win retweeted
0→1 is hard.
People will open source you. Thought bois will elegantly pick apart your product choices. Poasters will say nobody will ever use it, but also that it’s a commodity. That you’re the symbol of the top. That you’re cooked cooked cooked.
Until you’re inevitable. Then the idea was obviously good to anyone with eyes.
Fuck em and keep shipping. Coming up with one great idea means you can come up with the next thousand, while the replicators / NPCs are still struggling to copy your first.
And if you’re a mad observer, the best revenge is building something better—not extinguishing the flame of genuine new thinking, product craft, and the beginning of a new cycle for consumer software.
Build mad. Build happy. Just build.
James Win retweeted
Honestly, from my experience
Cursor has the best harness
Codex has the best limits
Claude Code is worst of both worlds somehow while being the company with arguably the strongest model
