Co-Founder & CEO @steadymd
St. Louis, MO
Joined June 2009
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Guy Friedman retweeted
The MOST obvious (but REALLY good) STARTUP ideas right now:
1. Zestimate for company data (what your data is worth to an AI lab)
2. Google Analytics for agents (see which agents visit your site and what they want)
3. Y Combinator for 1 person companies (back solo founders running a team of agents)
4. Okta for agents (who each agent is and what it's allowed to touch)
5. Marie Kondo for your company's data (clean it up so agents can use it)
6. FICO for agents (a trust score before an agent can spend money)
7. Geico for agents (insurance for when an agent makes an expensive mistake)
8. Datadog for agents (see every step your agents took)
9. Twilio for agents (phone numbers and texting for agents)
10. Upwork for agents (hire an agent for a job instead of a freelancer)
11. ESPN for AI (every model launch covered like a big game).
12. Shutterstock for robot training videos (get paid to film yourself doing chores)
13. Credit Karma for what AI knows about you (see it, fix it, delete it)
14. Norton for AI scams (protect your parents from fake voices and emails)
15. PayPal Buyer Protection for agent purchases (fixes it when your agent buys the wrong thing)
16. Geek Squad for AI (set up personal agents for families and small businesses)
17. Dell for private AI (AI in a box for firms that won't use the cloud)
18. Carfax for used GPUs (a health report before you buy secondhand)
19. Airbnb for idle GPUs (rent out computing power you're not using)
20. Rotten Tomatoes for AI models (real reviews instead of benchmarks)
21. G2 for skills (find the best skills for your agent)
22. Dropbox for your AI memory (take what your agent knows about you to any agent)
23. Canva for physical products (design it with AI and get it made)
24. ADT for your personal agent (alerts when your agent does something it shouldn't)
25. Hertz for robots (rent one for a move, a deep clean or an event)
26. Harvard Business School for internet businesses (a real education in building online)
27. Workday for agents (onboard, manage and offboard your digital workers)
28. Getty Images for your face and voice (license your likeness to AI safely)
29. Meta Muse for older adults (and other high LTV niche)
30. Google Ads for agents (pay to be what the agent recommends)
31. Loom for agents (a walkthrough of everything your agent did)
32. Plaid for agents (approved access to banks, airlines and stores)
33. Jiffy Lube for vibe coded apps (quick fixes when your AI built app breaks)
34. Ancestry for datasets (where your training data came from)
35. The organic label for human-made content (proof a person made it)
36. Strava for builders (track what you ship every week)
37. Honey that haggles for you (your agent negotiates the price)
38. SEM Rush for personal agent platforms (like Muse etc)
39. Frequent flyer miles for agents (loyalty programs built for agents)
Good idea for parties and dinners too
🇩🇪 🚨 𝗡𝗘𝗪: Borussia Dortmund will REWARD fans who DON’T use their phones during matches!
The German club is introducing a new “Fan Mode” in its official app, where supporters earn points for every minute they go without unlocking their phones.
Fans who collect the most points can win SIGNED SHIRTS and shopping vouchers.
The initiative comes after a study found that 63% of supporters regularly use their phones during matches.
Interesting nature vs nurture implications
The US military gets over 80% of its dogs from Europe, and fewer than half of them turn out fit for service.
South Korea hit the same wall back in 2007, and their fix sounds like a movie plot. They took their best drug-sniffing dog, a Lab named Chase, and cloned him seven times.
All seven puppies got the same name, Toppy, short for "tomorrow's puppy." They went through the customs service's detector dog program like any other recruit while researchers tracked how they did. Regular puppies made the cut about 30% of the time. The clones made it 86% of the time, and by 2009 they were working airports and harbors across the country.
That's the business case for what Palmer Luckey and Colossal's Ben Lamm just launched.
Training one of these dogs can run past $60,000. When half your dogs wash out, every dog that graduates is secretly paying for the one that didn't, so each graduate really costs you something closer to $120,000. Get the pass rate up to Korea's 86% and that drops to about $70,000. You'd knock roughly 40% off every working dog the military buys before the dog does a single thing better.
And Warhound wants the dog to do things better. Korea could only copy a great dog. Lamm's team is banking cells from top German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois and then editing the genes. According to Lamm, the dogs that fail usually fail on stuff they were born with, like bad eyesight, cancer risk, hip dysplasia and muscle wasting. So the plan is to copy the best dog they can find and fix whatever would have ended its career.
The cloning runs through ViaGen, a Texas company Colossal owns that has spent years cloning people's pets for around $50,000 a dog. Anduril builds what goes on top of the dog, like vests with sensors that feed data back to the handler. For the record, Palmer doesn't own any of it. Colossal holds the equity, and the CIA's venture fund In-Q-Tel is in the $200 million round with Sequoia.
First puppies are due early next year. Korea's clones needed 16 months of training to prove themselves. If Warhound's dogs put up anything close to those numbers, the next generation of America's war dogs gets born in Texas instead of bought from Europe.
Guy Friedman retweeted
We're about to enter the five biggest years in the history of women's soccer:
• 2027: Women's World Cup in Brazil
• 2028: LA Olympics
• 2028: FIRST Women's Club World Cup in USA
• 2031: Women's World Cup in USA (co-host)
I'm telling you, get on board now.
NEWS: FIFA confirms USA will host the first Women's Club World Cup in 2028 (no cities confirmed)
FIFA also announces that each 2027 World Cup participant will receive $2.5M in preparation money, the same as the 2026 Men's World Cup
Guy Friedman retweeted
Go crazy St. Louis 🍾🏆
Epic scenes at Amsterdam Tavern in St. Louis for @stlCITYsc's U.S. Open Cup Championship win!
Guy Friedman retweeted
People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X:
1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself.
2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund
3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now
4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine
5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents
6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through
We're going to make it
Guy Friedman retweeted
BREAKING: The FDA just granted accelerated approval to the first immunotherapy for a leading cause of cancer death in U.S. men under 50. This therapy allows certain patients to skip radiation, chemo, and surgery altogether.
Healthy for US IMO
A new look. A shared ambition. One United Soccer League.
Rooted in communities across the country. Connected by our love of the game. United by the belief that soccer belongs to everyone.
United for Soccer.
Launching January 2027.
Discover more: uslsoccer.com/brand
Guy Friedman retweeted
Remember the Starbucks effect? It's faded: homes near a Starbucks are worth just 16% more than otherwise similar places. Meet the Club Pilates effect: homes nearby are 64% higher.
What a journey for @Foursquare
"Almost exactly a month ago, Foursquare was acquired, marking the end of a 17-year story that started around my kitchen table in the East Village in 2009.
The Foursquare acquisition was a $0 outcome for equity holders – $0 for preferred, $0 for common. It’s bittersweet to see these details surface publicly – at least now there’s an opportunity to comment on them."
Man.
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Is there any healthcare issue with such 180-degree news then peptides on X? One set of streams it’s getting banned & everyone being sued, on the other it’s just about to be legalized and boom.
Guy Friedman retweeted
What is different this time is the percentage of venture dollars going into a small number of companies by an even smaller number of venture firms. This concentration of capital is unprecedented.
So where does this leave the rest of the industry with a smaller quantum of dollars but a larger n of firms? Feeling squeezed at both ends. The cost of entry in the consensus companies is beyond reach while the access to capital to support non-consensus businesses is sharply constrained.
Only the strong, the visionary and those with unwavering conviction in the non consensus will survive this super cycle. Thousands of firms will be the walking dead, while a small set will survive and emerge from the ashes of the inevitable washout even stronger.
So which group are you in? Unless you know you’ve got what it takes to win and can sell this vision to LPs and founders alike, you’re toast.
Welcome to early stage non-consensus venture investing c.2026.
@gamechangersvc
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)
Guy Friedman retweeted
KYLIAN MBAPPE WHAT A GOAL !!!!! xitter.cf/alaskafreezys/status/2…