Jeff (Startup Whisperer)

Most investors are still asking the wrong question about defensibility.

Dario Amodei may be right about AI and still be wrong about medicine.

By the time a frontier AI researcher’s departure reaches TechCrunch, the best-connected investors may already be months into the relationship.

It's 1 AM.

The standard pitch for ML-driven VC sourcing is correct in the aggregate and wrong at the margin where it matters.

The distress signal arrives in the board update before it arrives in the financials.

The AI Engineer World’s Fair opens in San Francisco on June 28.

The multi-agent investment committee is becoming the new toy in venture.

The most dangerous slide in a Southeast Asian startup deck is not the TAM slide.

For twenty years, software investors underwrote a simple assumption: software scales better than labor.

The headlines all said the same thing in Q1 2026: venture capital is back.

Samir Kaji recently reignited an important conversation about venture capital.

Venture capital runs on a simple lie we all tell ourselves: if revenue is going up and the product feels inevitable, the unit economics will sort themselves out later.

Generate:Biomedicines just announced Phase 3 trials for GB-0895, an antibody entirely designed by AI, recruiting patients from 45 countries as of late 2025.

Naval called Moltbook the “new reverse Turing test,” and everyone immediately treated it like a profound milestone.

Oxford’s The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Venture Capital argues AI accelerates sourcing and diligence, but investment decisions stay human because durable moats are socially grounded conviction, gut feeling, and networks.

I called neuro-symbolic AI a 600% growth area back when I analyzed 20,000+ NEURIPS papers.

The performance gap between tier-1 human VCs and current AI on startup selection isn't what you think.

Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner who helped build the GPU-fueled LLM machine, just walked away from it.

The climate tech sector is correcting.

Founders often ask: “Will more US tech giants buy Asian startups?”

Everyone keeps asking: "Can AI do X yet?"

Most unicorn-founder university rankings are really school-size rankings.

The most successful field in computer science right now is also the most anxious.

World models are quietly transforming AI from text predictors into systems that understand and simulate the real world.

Build global, or get boxed in.

Expanding a foreign AI startup into the United States isn’t a simple market entry—it’s a strategic reset across technology, capital, talent, and culture.

Copying isn’t laziness; it’s leverage in a region where timing, localization, and distribution matter more than novelty—and in 2026 the bar rises because bigger VC funds with thicker dry powder need bigger outcomes to matter.

Smart people aren’t the ones who never miss.

If you’re raising kids in Asia, the default operating system is discipline, duty, and deference to authority.