Founder @qventures @eldiario | Board member @UpstateFilms

Rhinebeck, NY
Joined April 2008
Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
we made a kiosk. we made it really smart. you can talk to it if you want. and it looks pretty good too.  squ.re/kiosk
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
Risk management 101—every exposure should have a limit, even when you’re sure nothing could go wrong. After all, the Titanic sank and AAA mortgage bonds went to zero. I worry about the market’s (and the economy’s) unlimited appetite for exposure to the positive AI revenue story.
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Here’s an idea for @sama @DarioAmodei et al: - buy the books - scan the books - employ the best book binders and book restorers in the world to re-bind the books - enlist @mspringut to build a gorgeous, classical stone and glass library whose mere edifice stands as a testament to human knowledge, never mind its contents - and its contents are all the rare books in the world, preserved for our posterity - put them in the library - require (free) membership to visit (now it’s non-public, members only, might get you around the legal stuff) >> new human library of Alexandria
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
Build4Venezuela 🇻🇪 Humanitarian hackathon to support Venezuela after the earthquake, until June 28 🙏🏼 👥 Verified directories 🗺️ Maps to report needs by area 🤖 Whatsapp bot to guide families 🛠️ Tools for coordination 📣 Translate critical information 🤝 Tracking systems 🔗 build4venezuela.com/en
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
we're hiring! for onsites we fly people to sweden until our US visas are done you'll enjoy working with us if you always have work top of mind, enjoy rational product dicussions, and want to build/sell/market something amazing reach out through a mutual or otherwise dms!
i have resigned from openai i left sora early this year to start a team at openai to build something great. but i've always been a founder, and there is one last product i need to build before AGI already miss all my friends and Colleague(s), i believe in you! more soon
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
BREAKING: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Mistral’s Arthur Mensch will meet for a 2-hour lunch today, per politico.
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
The mission statement SpaceX adopted when it absorbed xAI in February reads: "scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars." This is, depending on how you read it, either the most ridiculous thing a serious company has ever put on its mission page or the most honest. We think it’s the latter. If you squint at the org chart, SpaceX is a launch provider with an internet subsidiary and a recently-acquired AI lab. If you squint at the technology roadmap, it’s the only company on Earth assembling the full prerequisite stack for the post-scarcity transition. If you squint at the mission statement, it’s a serious attempt by one of the most operationally capable founders of our time to push humanity through the bottleneck that ends with us either as an interplanetary species sharing the cosmos with intelligent machines we built, or as a footnote on one rocky planet that didn’t make the leap. SpaceX & the Sentient Sun, by @mikemcg0 and @pmarca: a16z.news/p/spacex-and-the-s…
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
What comes next: The govt will rollout an emergency citizenship program for any foreign-born employee working in a lab contingent on them immediately moving to the U.S. Everyone will be heavily vetted via the same screening construct already utilized by the defense primes. Google will have to move the entirety of DeepMind to the U.S. and fire whoever refuses to relocate. People will gleefully assume Demis will just start his own UK lab instead before realizing the next step is the US is about to gut foreign “unmonitored” access to compute. You can pull a LeCun but you won’t have sufficient compute to do shit. Greencards will be given to family members too. Foreign govts will freak out when they realize what is happening. We are gatekeeping and hoarding intelligence preemptively. Why? Because by GPT 7 France will be like “oh you just destroyed our services sector we are going to tax the labs to pay for the necessary benefits to prevent riots” and it’s a lot easier to do that if labs have critical employees based in Paris. Ditto for every other foreign nation. Anyone acting like this is surprising is simply incapable of thinking four steps ahead. We are going to see industries nuked over night. There will be civil unrest. The only way to navigate that is to tax and gatekeep. The only way you can tax something is if it lives in your borders. We are repatriating exposure points preemptively. Compute gatekeeping comes next. 🫡
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
the dollar didn't win in Venezuela because they love the US it won because they trust phones more than banks and the people in power
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
Sanctions hurt people, not dictators. Right? Wrong! This book by @miguelsantos12 @JoseMoralesA and @zp2903 carefully looks at Venezuela and tells a much more interesting story: the sanctions forced the dictator to reduce their damaging command and control destructive measures. Read this 🧵!
1/ We are very pleased to share our new @CambridgeUP Element: "From Collective Punishment to Constraints on Authority: Rethinking the Impact of US Sanctions on Venezuela". Co-authored with @miguelsantos12 and @zp2903. Thread Below! Download: cambridge.org/core/services/…
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone. No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum. Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too. Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund. It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital. And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee. — Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital. Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring. But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line. This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in. Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition. But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital. USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages. It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere. There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid. Get access here: usvc.com
Announcing: USVC AngelList exists to power the innovation economy. To date, we have powered $125 billion in assets, 25,000+ funds, and 13,000+ startups. Today, we’re opening it for retail access. @usvc_ is a regulated fund that holds stakes in promising private companies. There are no accreditation requirements and anyone can get started with as little as $500. Early portfolio includes xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, Vercel, Crusoe, and Legora. Own a stake in the companies defining the future. Learn more: usvc.com/
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The post may imply more direct access than the filings support. Per the fund’s own filings, liquidity is board-controlled, fees include up to 3% sales load + 1.00% management fee + acquired fund fees, and exposure may be via SPVs/VC funds, not direct stakes. usvc.com/documents/USVC…
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
timeline cleanse: pediatrician with a young patient
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….” The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
As a Venezuelan, these last few days have been a rollercoaster of happiness, frustration, and sadness. On the day I thought would be the most important for my life and my country, I find myself struggling to make people understand that our reality isn’t an internet slogan. It has left me completely broken to see that the fall of the criminal dictator who destroyed my family, my friends, and my country was not universally celebrated. What I found instead has left me with a profound sense of emptiness: What I have seen confirms something I have felt for a long time. Nuanced thought has practically vanished. There is no longer a common ground where we can reason with any depth. We are so consumed by radical narratives that we have reduced complex, painful realities into simplified versions that feel comfortable to us. Today, people react before they even try to understand. They take a stand based on their hatred of a figure or an ideology first, and only then do they look for a way to justify it. The question is no longer about what actually protects human life, but rather who is saying it and which side they belong to. Moral analysis has been replaced by political identity. Fewer and fewer people bother to learn from direct sources or real communities. Very few take the time to actually talk to those living the realities they criticize from afar. Instead, we consume fragments of information filtered by social media and algorithms designed to reinforce what we already believe, all seen through the lens of privilege. We have reached a point where trying to understand nuance feels dangerous. Defending something objectively good is seen as a betrayal if the person doing it is on the "wrong side." Many people now reject actions that relieve human suffering simply because acknowledging them would mean agreeing with someone they have decided to hate. Ideology has been placed above reality. We are reducing entire countries and cultures to Instagram posts and slogans shared without context. People are taking to the streets to defend realities they have never experienced and pains they have never had to carry, convinced that a narrative learned online is enough to speak for others. We have never been so technologically connected while being so humanly disconnected. Being right has become a priority over listening. What disappoints me most is seeing how human rights fall below personal or political interests. People aren't thinking from a place of reason or shared humanity; they are completely rooted in extremes. I only ask for a little respect and compassion for those of us who have suffered through 30 years of dictatorship. Please, listen to the voices that have been silenced for so long.
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
This image looks grim to us, but when Terence Cuneo painted it in 1947 it was a picture of progress. In fact it was commissioned by Ford, whose factory it portrays.
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
In case you missed it, @Function just announced a $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation from Redpoint, a16z, Spacecadet, and many others. Huge congrats to @swerdlin, @drmarkhyman, @pranithapat, and the entire Function team for building what is quickly becoming the operating system for human health. I couldn’t be more proud or more grateful to be one of the earliest investors. The most rewarding part is having a front row seat to the impact Function is having on hundreds of thousands of people in the US, and soon, millions around the world. America spends ~2x more per capita on healthcare than Canada (my home country) and yet we have substantially worse outcomes and higher rates of disease. The biggest problem that plagues healthcare in America is that we’re far too reactive and not preventative enough. For most Americans, their first interaction with the healthcare system is a hospital visit, which is expensive and means the person waited far too long. By pushing healthcare from reactive to truly preventative, Function has a chance to rewrite how we care for people around the world, and, if they succeed, to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet 👨‍🚀
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Pedro Torres-Mackie retweeted
YC is the YC for crypto
Why is there no other YC? Not just in crypto but any other vertical or in web2, nothing comes close - Accelerator can only be done by two kinds of people - a founder who has scaled and has had a massive exit (with their own $) or by someone who is so obsessed with helping founders that they study this super contrarian advice and behaviours like darwin observing beings. PG and Jessica Livingston/SamAltman are the archetypes - Work to $ ratio: out of those two, an accelerator has the worst work (hours) to $ ratio. Even the most successful ones will require 10x the work of running a VC fund and not have the ROI of a top tier fund. Hence, no successful founder wants to do it. They just want to invest in a YC/early stage dealflow (eg: Naval with Coinlist). Only PG had the care to work with founders for 4-6 hours even ‘after’ making $300mn exit - Power law: Accelerators are startups too. And power law applies hard. If you cannot get the top 0.1 percentile of founders, you might as well be dead. Mid-tier founders make a weak network. Only Alliance has been able to do this until now. - Network of people: Everyone approaches this as a school. But PG has made it abundantly clear that it is a network of a certain kind of people. You don’t teach Michael Jordan how to shoot. Imagine giving Alon from Pumpfun a GTM playbook. No, you are creating a scenius. Requires soft skills more than knowledge of hard tech - YC has no secret sauce. Recipe is out there in the open. It just is so contrarian AND simple sounding, hard to wrap one’s head around what is really imp —— - Bonus: all chain accelerators will have adverse selection. None of them will become YC. Go figure. Credit to Alliance. It is the closest and they understand the nuances.
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