Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan) header
Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan) profile picture

AGI 2029. LEV 2035. Abundance Now. MIT Physics & CS / YC S08 / Google / 3x founder / CEO @Avida_Life / Co-founder @getDiana_app / Co-Host @besuperhumanpod

San Francisco
Joined May 2007
Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)Photo by Dilan Dane - e/❤️ (@dilan)
Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
🚨 Neuralink just delivered one of its most emotional breakthroughs yet Terry, diagnosed with ALS in 2024, is now speaking again using only his thoughts. The implant translates brain signals into words, with Grok Voice restoring his own natural voice. Watching him hear himself speak again is incredibly powerful. This is what restoring human connection looks like. Truly life-changing. As found.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
I'd like to share a little about what I've been working on at my new company @ultrametricai with my cofounder @tylerlastovich. We have been exploring how we could automate the startup itself, leaving founders with more time to focus on their exact mission. Enter our first release of the Open Startup Repo: github.com/ultrametricai/ult… A common foundation for transparent automation of the startup. After close to 20 years in silicon valley, backing hundreds of amazing founders & startups, being in the trenches of founding Heyzap (YC08), then solo founding @golden, going through 2 acquisitions and working behind the scenes with some of the iconic companies today, I'm witnessing the largest change to how we work I could have imagined - a truly monumental era of creative abundance. I believe the next generation of companies will largely run themselves: from operations, code, product upgrades, growth, vendor control & selection, process execution, special situations, strategy etc etc. That leaves founder time for 'the art' at the very niche core: the (currently) unautomatable, the special leaps humans tend to make, and north star setting. We want founders to go super deep into the main problem they are trying to solve and not get held up doing anything else, from searching for domain availability with trademark checks to setting their company up, to running their processes on autopilot. So to help that broad foundational layer for starting and running a company, we have spent around a year exploring how to help founders focus on their mission across different verticals, geos, stages and initial starting conditions. Our first few attempts at making something useful actually failed as the market and AI was moving so fast; it just got absorbed into the models or other product releases. We saw polsia happen, openclaw, then grokbot, muse, dots, etc era as the astras, fables, opuses, kimis and jevs rolled out. What seemed to have been missing along the way was a common repo to identify, unify, open and normalize all the lego bricks that startups have to interact with (vendors, processes, business logic, law, best practices, surface areas, art of the possible). As the number of software vendors blew up, the interfaces to drive them multiplied, the international startup founder blew up as silicon valley moved from a specific location to a state of mind and global movement. Unlimited pre seed funding in unlimited vertical sub markets and permutations has brought us to the age of infinity but we have yet to achieve being able to type into an agent a very simple sentence with very complex implications 'just setup my company and make $1m/m'. We have ended up with a hybrid mismash of computer use, API calls, plugins, shifting surface areas (API/MCP/CLI/plugins/chats/musish futures), and changing model absorption to vendor balance making it an exciting and unstable time. As our first step we started to rank all the vendors that startups interface to when going about their journey in terms of how agentically controllable they are via their APIs, MCPs, CLIs etc and computer use compatibility as we are largely switching from a UI driven world to the agentic control surfaces and onto full automation. We have 100 ranking areas you can check out with an overall open ranking here: ultrametric.ai/overall Then we looked at the processes that startups do and how the vendors rank for the sub steps or process as a whole and how this changes across geos. Open processes: ultrametric.ai/processes Then we started to hack on an open repo for startups that would contain all the components we are going to need for a common foundation for founders across the globe even if our gov processes vary so much from Bengaluru to SF or Lisbon to Shenzhen. The founder spirit is geo-invariant. We have looked at special founder/startup situations, the business logic that will make open modules for the startup that we can hack on together, ranked law firms, government services and interfaces, stacks that go well together. We have mapped the law and lore that maps to startups and the schemas that make up the data objects and documents. But also the open documents and the missing gaps. MUCH TO DO. All the BS processes and fluff work that founders waste their time on needs to goto zero. I want to see more supersonic planes, cancer drugs, seemingly impossible missions done and increase the bang for buck founders have with their funding. This is a work in progress and we are keen for the community to come hack on the repo with us here: github.com/ultrametricai/ult… Lets get into the structure of the general repo and the visualizations we made on ultrametric.ai site with example links: - Open rankings: ultrametric.ai/overall - Open rankings example (online payments): ultrametric.ai/arena/payment… - Open ranking example 2 (cap table): ultrametric.ai/arena/equity-… - Open processes: ultrametric.ai/processes - Open process example (Incorporate C-Corp) ultrametric.ai/processes/inc… - Open situations that founders face: ultrametric.ai/situations - Open startup simulator (you can test our different initial starting conditions): ultrametric.ai/startup-sim - Open modules (e.g. cap table, payroll logic etc - we'd love help improving these) ultrametric.ai/open-modules - Open law (we are interested in how law changes the processes, situations and normalizing this over time) ultrametric.ai/open-law - Open lore (we are interested in the historical lore of startups, the rules of thumb and heuristics that might guide your agent): ultrametric.ai/open-lore - Open fields (we are interested in how the schema for the data connects to the open modules, business logic, open documents and artifacts of each process eg how is a EIN defined?) ultrametric.ai/fields - Open documentation (eg SAFE notes and missing! docs) ultrametric.ai/open-document… We have looked at YC companies as well in terms of which ones do well agentically: ultrametric.ai/yc We are interested in stacks and how people are changing their work: ultrametric.ai/stacks We are interested in what is automatable and where the agentic ceiling is currently and how to push that up in all areas: ultrametric.ai/rankings/proc… There is more for you to explore and a lot more coming in terms of how you will be able to navigate business in an optimal way in your chosen surface area; whether you are hanging in grokbot, dots, muse, claude, terminal, chat, or whatever is coming up in this exciting time. We have a lot of data to collect, clean up and help agents navigate the vast landscape emerging functionality the entire startup ecosystem has to offer. Come join us getting your vendor in, ranked or that access pattern you have wanted or getting the data more accurate in terms of which vendor is best for a process or steps. Or open a module of something that currently cost money that could be free. Also come play in our discord for founders and join the chaos (we can solve each others issues including fund raising tips from me personally): discord.com/invite/3aHky836q… It's time to lift all the boats in the harbor and I'm extremely excited as to what the community of hackers and painters will hack into the repo, what asks they will have and whether we can shift normalization of processes globally, gov agentic interfaces and have common repo for founders that grows over time. I expect a lot of experimentation along the way, bugs and upside... I appreciate our backers having faith in us as well from @ycombinator with @garrytan to @immad doing a sizable check (congrats on $1bn rev homie) to @darbyw (congrats on Stripe buying @clerkyinc), @drewhouston form @Dropbox and also @pioneer_fund @tomerlondon cto @GustoHQ and hopefully this is 'boring' and complex enough for Charlie Songhurst :> @delingpole @Liquid2V @ivolo from @segment @ryanpowe @sonicaghi of @kong @DellyTamer+ other supporters (@michaelwfrank, Fundamental ventures and if I missed you sorry moving fast!). [And don't worry, all vendor rankings are open scoring methods so no favors are being done if someone backed us and is a vendor they have to compete with how agentic and automatable they are just like anyone else.] PS: we have bugs and many quality upgrades to make but thought better to go out early and fix as a community. PPS: we have other stuff to launch we just thought this was a great place to start and have 200 PRs coming out pretty soon but I still want to know what is broken or doesnt make sense or inaccurate. Special thanks to current and past team members for getting us here and all the experiments we did you know who you are.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
Excited to announce @Mercury crossing $1bn/yr in revenue and 450k customers. Just getting started! View article
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
"I don't want flying cars. I want raw nature and real human connection." Brother… YOU are CURRENTLY SELLING $50 worth of protein bars that were not foraged, not hunted, and not hand-pressed by a village elder at dawn but manufactured in a FACILITY on a production line powered by the electrical grid, sealed in plastic made from petroleum pumped out of the earth by giant drills, boxed, labeled, barcoded, and scanned into an inventory system running on servers cooled by industrial AC units humming 24/7, then loaded onto a DIESEL TRUCK that hauls them down an interstate bulldozed straight through the exact wilderness you want to get lost in (you will not get lost, there is a Buc-ee's), dumped into a sorting hub full of conveyor belts and robotic arms and lasers, thrown onto ANOTHER truck, handed to a mail carrier idling in a van in a cul-de-sac, and dropped on a porch in a cardboard box that gets ripped open in four seconds and tossed in the recycling, all so someone can eat a bar they bought on a phone with a credit card processed in 0.3 seconds by a bank mainframe and then YOU logged on to tell the rest of us technology doesn't make anyone happy, when it's clearly making YOU very happy, and the second someone figures out drone delivery you'll be first in line with your logo on the propellers, so no, you're not a troglodyte, because troglodytes never offered free shipping on orders over $75.
I don't want flying cars. I want rivers and ocean I can swim in with friends. I want food that isn't full of toxic chemicals and clean soil to grow it in. I want raw nature and wilderness and places on the earth I can get lost without seeing another human. I want air that isn't "geoengineered" and polluted. Science is cool. Technological advancement is cool, but I don't think this makes us happier as humans. Real human connection and clean, natural food lead to happiness. This I know. Flying cars? I'm not sure. Maybe I am a troglodyte...
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
That Tesla demo was the most impressive thing ever. I had to double check that it was real and not AI. Wow.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
100% Watch this
.@JensenHuang is a national treasure 🫡
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
I'm not of fan of regulation for two reasons - 1) its hard to get right, and 2) its highly susceptible to regulatory capture. That said, if we insist on doing it, we should try to get it correct. As "safety" seems is the primary goal of this AI regulation exercise, I wanted to share that I recently went deep on both the 737 Max (2 crashes) and Fukushima accidents. In both cases, the investigations led to a conclusion that "regulatory capture" was the EXACT failure that led to both safety incidents. Boeing/FAA and Tepco/NISA. As a result, with safety as the #1 goal, the regulator MUST BE someone with authority and accountability "over" the regulated company. The idea that it could be a friendly third party with lots of cross-relationships is structurally broken idea. Ask Mr. Kiyoshi Kurokawa. If we insist on doing this the regulator (1) needs to be 100% independent, 2) the "tests" and "procedures" need to come for the regulator not the company, and (3) the regulator needs to understand their responsibility is to the American people. They need to feel the authority over the regulated company and the responsibility to the nation. It's imperative. Or it will fail.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
1/ Today, we're launching @Mercury Books. AI-powered accounting software, for your bookkeeper or you, that categorizes and reconciles your transactions the moment they happen.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
Actually most power grabbing is done sincerely, as most grabbers actually believe that the world is better off with them in charge. So there's no need to posit insincerity to be skeptical of such grabs.
BREAKING: Michael Burry just called out the AI safety slowdown crowd as a self-serving cartel. His argument is blunt and hard to dismiss. OpenAI and Anthropic execs pushing to "slow things down" aren't doing it for humanity. They're doing it because competition is closing the gap fast. Burry's core point: LLMs aren't AGI, there's nothing existentially dangerous to pump the brakes on, and the incumbents know it. So the "safety" narrative conveniently becomes a moat. The most powerful lobbying tool in tech right now is fear. Is the AI safety movement a genuine concern or a competitive strategy by the players already ahead?
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
Contrast the present hysteria with Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project scientists thought the first nuclear explosion could ignite the atmosphere and end humanity. They did the math. They determined it wouldn’t. And they proceeded. Because they weren’t fighting a thought experiment. They were fighting the Nazis. Effective Altruism inverts this. Multiply a sufficiently horrifying hypothetical future by enough hypothetical future humans and suddenly speculation acquires the moral authority of fact. That’s not empiricism. It’s secular eschatology. Take risks seriously. Do the work. Engineer against them. But don’t confuse the ability to imagine the apocalypse with the authority to rule the present.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
America was built by the world's greatest and most driven immigrants FOR the world's greatest and most driven immigrants. Yes, yes... the border should be secured, and there should be zero illegal immigration -- we're all in agreement on that. And we should seal that border so we can RECRUIT the best and brightest people from around the world, especially from our rivals like China, Russia or Iran. Every time an elite performer switches teams and goes from an authoritarian country to the world's greatest democracy, America, that is a major win for humanity and freedom. Note: these individuals must commit fully to assimilating into the American way of life and be part of the "Great Melting Pot." Finally, there is the issue of full employment for Americans. We are at the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes right now. This is as good as it gets. We shouldn't be using the H1B visa system to replace Americans with cheap labor, as I've been saying for over a decade. I'm extremely happy that President Trump took my suggestion to put a massive tax on the H1B program, because once you add $20,000 -- let alone $100,000 -- to a visa, you get rid of all the folks trying to hire $50,000 IT folks from India to replace $75,000 ones in America. I saw H1B abuse firsthand in the 1990s when I worked at SONY -- where the IT department used the program to create indentured servitude. It was cruel and disgusting then, as it is now, and it should be called out now and stopped.
I believe the most qualified person should get the job.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
hot take but i think AI is literally on the verge of solving california’s megafire problem > california already has 1,000+ AI-monitored wildfire cameras that have spotted 900+ fires before the first 911 call > now the first 3 satellites in Google’s FireSat network just reached orbit to catch fires those cameras miss > FireSat is designed to spot fires just 5 x 5 meters, roughly 1/400th the size current wildfire satellites can detect > once complete, the network will scan the planet every 20 minutes > together, cameras below and satellites above are creating a 24/7 early-warning system for finding tiny fires before they can grow into megafires > but the missing piece is getting water there just as fast > in one california test, an autonomous Black Hawk found staged fires, flew to water and filled a 324-gallon bucket > it then calculated its own drop and extinguished it with no human in the loop > NASA is also building the traffic-control system needed to coordinate aircraft like this through darkness and heavy smoke > california already stations 70+ firefighting aircraft around the state, positioned to reach even remote fires within 20 minutes > the goal is to automate that entire chain > so AI finds the fire, launches the aircraft and fully extinguishes it within 10 minutes without waiting for a human > each system is designed to do that across an area larger than SF + oakland + san jose combined > scale that across california and dangerous fires get extinguished before they can become megafires yes... obviously california will always have natural fires and scaling this statewide might take a decade but i'm increasingly convinced the $100B-entire-community-destroying fires will soon be a thing of the past 🤞
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
Slavery was ended primarily by Britain
The inconvenient truth.
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Disgusting, really. What a cheap shot by Anthropic's Julian Schrittwieser at Jensen and Satya for supporting open source.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
Possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. SpaceX and Starlink are opening our eyes to the universe.
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
i want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and i am glad to see this
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
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Dilan Dane - e/❤️ retweeted
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
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Yes
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