Will Dennis

ADT buy is cool, smart, actually AI forward move by @JoshuaKushner and thrive holdings

hey all - update for SR008: It's now the FINAL weekend to apply for our next residency in San Francisco. Applications close this Sunday, Nov 1 at 11:59 PM PT. Here's the link: speedrun.a16z.com/apply How it works: - you apply - we review, reach out to get introduced, etc - if there's a fit, we handshake and sign - we wire our investment right away! - plus you get access to >$10M in credits right away - you'll onboard + start working with us immediately, have access to working out of our SF offices, etc The official residency starts Feb 2027 where we'll have speakers, office hours, and much more. I plan to be on site and look forward to meeting many of you You might ask- who's the best fit for this? We want to talk to you as early as possible, and that means: - no company yet - no deck - no huge insight tweet thread - sometimes not even fully committed yet You don't need the perfect idea. We can start working together when you're iterating and getting the idea off the ground. That's the whole point of speedrun - it's our way of backing you from Day 0. More official stuff below: - Deadline is this Sunday, Nov 1 at 11:59 PM PT (this weekend!) - SR008 runs Feb 1 through April 18, 2027 in San Francisco -- twelve weeks of firesides, office hours, and sessions, closing out with Demo Day on April 13 in front of thousands of investors - Capital: up to $1M with a two-week close target, plus $10M+ in credits from 200+ partners - Customers: SR Insiders gets you in front of 10,000+ buyers and operators, including 150+ C-suite execs, plus a full day of live demos at AI Faire - Talent: our Talent Network of 171,000+ engineers, designers, and product people. 230+ hires so far, $0 in fees. Plus visa, banking, and housing help if you're coming from abroad - A team of ~40 battle-tested investors and operators who help cover your gaps without adding headcount -- GTM, marketing, brand, talent, fundraising, and more - a16z speedrun is super selective -- fewer than 0.4% of applicants get in. You'll join a tight-knit community of founders from 20+ countries who stay involved as speakers, advisors, and often each other's first customers - Still in school or still finding your idea/team? Check out the alpha fellowship too -- up to $250K for students, recent grads, and dropouts

every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath. except for our product, of course. in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much. we're special that way.

I think Duet and Dots are the wrong form factor for the enterprise because they aren't AGI-pilled enough. The major agent releases today (Grok Bot, Duet, Dots, Muse, Instinct) all act as an "AI Chief of Staff." This allows each employee to get their work done faster, but it doesn't always make a company move faster. Executing is no longer the bottleneck, so even proactivity on individual tasks isn't necessarily a big win. Models need to understand organizations and align with the overall mission to truly move the needle. They have demonstrated goal-directed strategic behavior in simulations: alignment.anthropic.com/2026…. The missing skill is aligning the models to the right goals. Until then, humans have to continue solving coordination. Anecdotally, I've heard "in the high MTS circles" that a lot more time for frontier researchers is now spent on meetings for coordination since agents are doing most of the implementation and execution. The rest of the industry will soon face this bottleneck. The AGI-pilled form factor is a model with autonomy that acts at the same level as other employees. A true collaborator rather than someone to manage.

Well said @hunterrice : “The agents that get identity context right will build a compounding advantage. They can be useful sooner, make better sense of what we tell them, and earn the trust to keep learning” I would argue that there are distinct buckets/verticals of identity context (eg food and grocery, travel, meetings, etc). There already exist apps in each vertical that maintain this identify context. If the app has a physical infrastructure or supply moat, if the vertical is large enough, and if the app has the talent to build a more proactive agent, they have a good shot of becoming THE agent for their vertical. @DoorDash has fired the first shot here in food / grocery. Excited to see how this evolves.

.@sama says the advice to pick one thing to build and pour all your focus into it no longer applies. "The canonical advice that was correct two years ago was, 'Pick one, and put all your effort into it, because you can't build all 30 things.'" "You can now build all 30 things. And you can get people to use them all. And you can work more on the ones that work." "So I think this mindset of lots of ideas, quick feedback, and being open to a lot of things not working is great for this new era for how people build."

BREAKING: DoorDash unveiled a text-to-order AI agent that works inside iMessage, its answer to popular agentic tools like Instinct and Muse It is also opening a waitlist for its MCP for enterprise agents to do corporate ordering. DoorDash doesn’t have an official connector for Muse, but @andyfang told me that’s “TBD”. Doordash is talking with Meta and different AI players to meet users where they are, he said. (CEO Tony Xu is on Meta board) Photo credit: DoorDash bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Brilliant @DKThomp take on the Decline of the American Dinner Party host. open.substack.com/pub/derekt…

perhaps the best technology will help the world feel a little smaller…

Announcing ChatGPT Space, a collection of new collaborative experiences right in ChatGPT. Edit rich notes with live visualizations together with others and your dots. Whether it’s a TODO list to delegate, a product plan or meeting notes. Working with others and your agents is seamless and they also be automatically kept up to date in the background. For developers, this is AGENTS.md taken one step further.

Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use. Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…

15 years ago, we were told that health insurance would be made super affordable due to federal intervention. What happened?