Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you. Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet. The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations. This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year. Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m. To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)

AutoDip!! ❤️

Introducing Generative Commerce. @daletlabs

@Supertake feels novel and is an obvious AI-native network effect. Sharing a take is a low stakes way to test and refine your conviction.

It’s pretty clear to me that the internet is headed toward a new business model that we may not have figured out yet. Consumers will increasingly outsource tasks to agents, and agents will work around the clock to execute them on their behalf. These tasks require inference spend. The most obvious way to cover these costs is by passing them through to the user. Users pay a monthly subscription or simply pay for credits that get deducted as inference gets spent. But with the cost of inference dropping over time, this will ultimately be a race to the bottom. Pass-through pricing will get commoditized and won’t be able to sustain margins. So startups and incumbents will have no choice but to offer a different business model. Paying for task-based outcomes is an obvious iteration. You can imagine customers paying agents when they achieve certain goals, such as successfully booking an appointment or executing a refund the user wouldn’t have taken care of on their own. But most tasks aren't worth paying for one at a time. The most scaled business models on the internet let everyone participate, even when they can't pay directly. This is why advertising dominated as the primary business model of the past 30 years. Incumbents will subsidize usage dramatically over the next few years to onboard as many customers as possible. We’re already seeing this with Muse. But the question is, how will this work get paid for long-term? Can agents adopt a form of advertising that covers the cost? Or do we need a completely new model where the few big paid outcomes subsidize everyone else's usage? We may be headed toward a new world of haves and have nots. Or a world of abundance where everyone can get anything done at any time for free.

I’ve worked as a peer with the founders of Venmo, Granola, Maven, and Udemy. No two were alike. Each gave me a different lens for seeing life and startups. Iqram from Venmo is a true mad genius, and the most multi-talented person I know, and maybe because of this he’s incredible at instantly spotting the spark in someone. We’d often be surprised with a new teammate, hired on the spot after one meeting, and more often than not we’d end up impressed. The man knows how to place a bet. Makes him a great poker player too. Kortina was the yin to his yang. Body of a greek god and mind of a greek statesman, and easily the most disciplined and Good person I know. When I joined Venmo he worked from 7am to 11pm every day, did a crossfit workout before lunch, and never asked anyone else to do the same, and yet we were all pulled towards it. He has led by example ever since I met him in 2001. Chris, my co-founder at Socratic, now founder of Granola, has a clarity of mind that comes from ridding it of most extraneous things. His finances are systematic, he doesn’t angel invest, he doesn’t read the news. Instead, every year around his birthday, he camps out by the seaside and..thinks, I think. And out of that clarity comes an ability to doggedly and creatively seek the truth in the things that matter. Chris also has a knack for making ordinary things extraordinary. We spent a month in Brazil with our team right after starting Socratic, because why not. After raising our A, we framed a panel from an xkcd comic and sent it to every investor as a thanks, and it stayed on their desks and walls for years. I hear they had a group house in Mallorca in the early Granola days. There’s a joyful boldness that spreads out around him. Wes, our co-founder at Maven, held the quality bar at the company, and she held it high. She’s excellent with words and finds a way to produce a solid new piece of writing every week, but she always made it clear that the excellence was not easy - it was the output of a process, and we could get there too. She expects Shitty First Drafts™, she expects multiple revisions, she expects late nights, but excellence was there for the taking. Gagan, also co-founder at Maven and now the CEO of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, knew that you needed to make space to think big. He took three years off between Sprig and Maven, traveling, learning, and teaching, before settling on the space he was going to dedicate himself to. He told me once that I should make sure to not always be busy, or else the best ideas wouldn’t have room to reveal themselves and grow. Gagan is not just a fantastic storyteller, he’s also a fantastic story creator. He sells a big vision, but only after doing the work to figure out what every participant would care about, how to make the deal exciting for them, how to align incentives so they go all-in, and then he’ll sit down and bang out a top-notch announcement post in one shot because he’d already spent weeks thinking it over from every angle. A great thing about being in startup land for so long is that you get to work closely with people like this and watch them figure out their styles, grow into themselves, and try and try again. Thanks @iqramband, @kortina, @cjpedregal, @wes_kao, @gaganbiyani.

Some news: introducing Takes from X, now available on @Supertake. Turn alpha you discover on X into an investable portfolio, instantly. X is the best platform in the world for discovering real-time insights. I personally love following people like @compound248, @buccocapital, and @litcapital. But there's never been an easy way to invest behind the amazing insights shared by accounts like these and others. Now, you can easily share any post directly with Supertake to turn it into a real, investable take that magically rebalances itself in real time. Just send the post URL to Supertake (via the web or text message) and it'll instantly get to work on translating the post's insights to a take you can put real money behind. And it's all made possible through the X API. It works with other types of links, too. Send it research papers, earnings reports, S-1s, or links to PDFs to have Supertake get to work translating the ideas into potential alpha. To get started, make sure to connect your X account in your @Supertake settings. Enjoy!