Joined March 2011
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Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
Hosting a private super intelligence dinner on November 5th, NYC. Who needs to be there?
Private market investing has been broken for so long that people stopped noticing
Just got early access to @uselegion and it's pretty sick
@fabrizio_builds your vouch made my day
SPVs made private markets easier to access.
They also made them easier to abuse.
If an SPV burned you, keeping it private is part of why it happens again.
SPV Confessions is live.
Tell your story. Change the system.
Fully anonymous: confessions.uselegion.com
We will soon have enough compute to know the right questions to ask
We are entering a new era of discovery now:
openai.com/index/sharing-ai-…
Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
After 7 years quietly building, it was fun to share some of my mistakes & learnings @MIT this week.
@fun's last financing was done at a $425M valuation, and we’ve now grown 9x since our $72M Series A. Our 30d volume just crossed >$100B annualized.
A few of my mistakes along the journey 🧵
Huge
Rain has filed with the @USOCC to establish Rain National Trust Bank.
If approved, the bank will:
1. Provide fiduciary custody of digital assets and dollars
2. Manage reserves for permitted stablecoin issuers
3. Issue and redeem USD-backed stablecoins
Rain will stay a payments platform. It will not take deposits or make commercial loans.
Brandon Soto, former CFO of Square Financial Services and most recently CFO of Coastal Financial Corporation, will serve as the proposed President and CEO of Rain National Trust Bank.
The public portion of the application will be posted on the OCC's website shortly.
Full press release linked below.
Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
the range of rubio
🤖 Made with AI
Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations.
(1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment.
(2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users.
(3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one.
(4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper.
(5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government.
(6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms.
As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.
The federal government just ran a product launch and I love everything about this
We have to rebuild the country like a startup
The only way to win is to ship
Chief Design Officer @jgebbia officially unveils America.gov, the new online home for the United States of America
That’s what’s up, @drydenwtbrown continues mogging
Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
My conversation with Gabe Stengel (@GabeStengel), founder and CEO of Rogo.
For years, Gabe and I have talked about how much of an investor's job AI will eventually do and how he is building Rogo toward that future.
Today, Rogo helps some of the world's largest financial institutions research companies, run diligence and execute M&A.
But Gabe's ambition is much bigger. He is building toward investing superintelligence, where Rogo does much of the work inside investment banks and firms and becomes the venue where they do their deals.
It's a fascinating business and has been so fun watching Gabe build it.
We discuss:
- 10,000 agents searching for one great investment idea
- Which investing skills will still matter
- Why Anthropic/OpenAI won't win finance
- "Chewing glass"
- Why the harness around the models matters so much
- Getting rejected by 40+ investors
- Building an AI native Bloomberg
- Becoming a black hole for talent
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Intro
2:38 Building Rogo
6:12 10,000 AI Agents
12:02 Skills That Still Matter
17:31 Beating OpenAI and Anthropic
28:35 Bloomberg of the AI Era
37:37 Rogo’s Company Brain
44:19 Chewing Glass
53:34 AI-Native Finance
59:21 What Humans Still Do Better
Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
There are so many seasoned software executives who are completely out of their element with the types of products that will breakout in the next few years.
Over the last 20 years, their brains were wired to build apps that deliver value by outputting deterministic results, but AI produces value from probabilistic results. This is such a different way to approach how something should work.
Young people who are thinking in this way from the outset will be at a significant advantage -- in the same way they were advantaged when thinking about how products could be social in 2010.
Circletinis & @jerallaire
Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
Today I'm excited to share that @usefootprint has raised a $25M Series B, bringing our total funding to $45M.
Financial institutions are in an arms race with cartels and oligarchs.
The movement of illicit money globally has grown by $1.3 trillion since 2023, now sitting at $4.4 trillion. And bad actors have taken full advantage of AI’s capabilities: generating fake identities and shell companies faster than any team can manually review.
Yet, the work to combat financial crimes is still being done the old way - risk teams sifting through spreadsheets, PDFs, and disconnected tools one case at a time.
AI lets us reimagine this sector.
We're solving for this at @usefootprint by focusing on two things: time and memory.
→ Time: Percy runs your compliance program end-to-end in 1/10th the time, so your institution has extra eyes on every case, and your human analysts dedicate their time to the ones that truly matter.
→ Memory: Trust Fabric makes sure the grey area is removed and learnings are universal so your team (whether 5 or 500 people) catches more true positives and identifies fraud rings before they form.
With this raise, we're doubling down on the thesis that risk operations will be re-envisioned for the AI-native era. As AI increases financial crime in the global economy, we're building the defense system that can expand to meet and defeat it.
We're honored @QEDInvestors doubled down on their conviction, leading our Series B two years after leading our Series A. The same goes for those who have invested since day one: @lererhippeau, @indexventures, @BoxGroup, Operator Partners, Definition, and @animalcapitalco. And for new investors @am_mufg_jp, @commercevc, @lightbank, and @alumniventures.
To the Footprint team: this company would be nowhere without your belief in building a digital world full of trust. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on this journey with us.
To our customers: thank you for trusting us with your most important decisions. Your partnership is helping us build a better future for financial crime compliance.
Full story on our blog: onefootprint.com/learn/serie…
Branding, and design in general, shape how people feel about your product before they’ve even had a chance to evaluate the substance of your product
Peter Thiel on why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure
“This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.”
PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives:
“PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.”
“You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber:
“Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.”
And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace:
“You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.”
Source: @mercatus (Apr 2015)
I’ve always been a big fan of both these teams
M&A at its best is 1+1=>3 and this is a prime example. Happy to have played my part in bringing this one together
Congratulations @tikhbana, @SimkinStepan, @deni_ersht!
Shiv Shrivastava retweeted
the news is out - Acctual is joining @altitude.
their team spent the last three years working on invoicing and bill pay, and that work is now becoming part of Altitude.
one of the interesting problems we’re looking at here is that AI is probabilistic, but money movement needs deterministic rules.
an agent can read an invoice, figure out who needs to be paid, how much, and why. but the decision to actually move money shouldn't rely on the model alone.
the constraints can be enforced at the point the payment is made.
bringing invoices, bills, payments, accounts and approvals into the same system gives the agent more context to work with, while keeping execution constrained.
the more context the system has, the more of this work it can do without asking the same questions over and over again.
i’ve known @tikhbana and @tweetsbymo for a while now and have wanted to work together for a long time. very excited that we finally get to cook on this together.
Special shoutout to @shivnull for helping Altitude go higher
