Sarah Tavel

Mamdani's October 7th Address Derailed As Wife's Party Balloons Keep Floating Across Screen buff.ly/G2epjU3

Excited to announce @Furientis @DeptofWar OTA contract for 100mi interceptor and $25M Seed raise led by @benchmark!

This couldn't have happened w/o our incredible engineering team testing at industry best pace. Join us- we're hiring across all disciplines!
furientis.com/careers

The most insightful thing I read about technology eleven years ago was @benthompson’s Aggregation Theory. Amazon blocking Muse is another perfect example.

Customers want one agent that knows them and can get things done. The platforms being aggregated want the opposite. They want to own the customer relationship, not become interchangeable suppliers behind someone else’s interface + protect their ad business.

Imagine groceries: Your agent can compare Amazon, Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, then route every order to the best option. Amazon can block that access because it is a gigantic company. But smaller players have every incentive to offer agents a clean API and a seamless experience.

If Instacart embraces agents while Amazon blocks them, the agent will increasingly route demand to Instacart. Customers will be happy, and Amazon will eventually face the dilemma: keep protecting the relationship, or match the better value proposition.

This will be the defining tension of the agent economy: aggregators realizing they are now being aggregated.

Amazon will push its own assistant, of course. But a vertical Amazon agent will struggle against a horizontal agent that already knows my email, calendar, preferences, memories, and entire life context.

Many companies will want to become the aggregation layer. Very few actually can.

It's worth pointing out that practically speaking, the alternative to a sane regulatory regime isn't "no regulation." We are experiencing rapid improvements in capabilities, have multiple providers with differing levels of safe guards, and are at the point now where small things are starting to go wrong. The scope of AI capabilities are growing rapidly, and the scope of possible damage is going to grow with them.

Think for a second about what happens when the first actually bad and "politically gripping" incident occurs? Not Hugging Face, but something that makes the average person really scared. This isn't about extinction, think a human initiated, AI-orchestrated cyberattack that sabotages one piece of infrastructure that results in at least one person dying. The reaction will be violent.

Our political system doesn't work well at proactively handling purely theoretical problems, but reacts very fiercely and sometimes irrationally when something bad actually happens.

The August 2001 CIA memo "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" got little response, but buildings falling down changed the course of history.

An industry whose wealth and power is widely resented, that resists even the most innocuous and common sense safeguards, and then causes a significant incident, will see a violent reaction. This will result in a regulatory regime designed in a moment of populist outrage by people with little understanding of what will help, whose primary goal will be crushing AI progress as an end in its own right.

The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task

-- Kevin Kelly

Yesterday, the founder of a well-known, successful company called me to reference check two people he was considering for a senior role. He wasn’t looking for reassurance. He was genuinely trying to understand them, including anything that might cause him to reconsider either hire. He’s called me before about other hires, including people who wouldn’t even report directly to him. He doesn’t delegate this to others. He calls himself. I'm sure that kind of rigor is part of why his company has been so successful.

The call stuck with me because it happens so rarely. Many people I’ve worked closely with have gone on to senior roles, including C-level positions, at other companies. It’s shocking how infrequently I get called. These are among the most consequential decisions a founder makes, yet companies routinely make them without talking to people who actually worked closely with the candidate.

Part of the problem is timing. Most reference checks happen after the hiring manager has effectively decided to make the hire. You like the candidate, you’ve invested weeks in the process, and you’re under pressure to fill the role. You want the process to be over, so you’re looking for validation rather than truth. That defeats the purpose of doing reference checks.

A real reference check should attempt to disconfirm what you already believe. What am I missing? Where is this person weaker than they appear? What will I wish I had known six months after they start? You aren’t trying to build the case for the hire. You’re trying to find the flaw in the case while you can still do something about it.

I’ve learned a few rules. Start by putting limited weight on the references the candidate gives you. Nobody hands you the name of the boss or colleague who thought they were a disaster. The references that matter most are blind references, so find former bosses, peers, direct reports, and customers who aren’t on the candidate’s list. Each has seen the person from a different angle.

You also have to adjust for human nature. Most people don’t like being brutally honest when they know their words could affect someone’s career. They inflate praise and soften criticism, so my rule of thumb is to discount the positive by 3x and amplify the negative by 3x. That gets you closer to a balanced view.

When someone says, "He's a great leader, although some very good people struggled working for him," the second half of that sentence matters far more than the first. Who struggled, why, and where are those people now? When someone says, "She surrounds herself with people she trusts," ask whether those are the best people for the job or simply people who always agree with her. Hesitations, qualifications, and carefully chosen words often tell you more than the compliments.

Ask questions that make vague answers difficult. What would their direct reports say is the hardest part of working for them? What feedback did you give them repeatedly? What was their biggest blind spot? How do they behave when things are going badly? Tell me about a serious conflict they had and how they handled it. If this hire fails, what is the most likely reason? Would you hire them again?

My favorite is a forced ranking. Of everyone you’ve worked with in a similar role, where does this person rank? Top 1%? Top 10%? Top 25%? Then ask why. Adjectives can be misleading. Rankings force people to make an actual judgment and explain it.

I’ve hired many exceptional people and made some bad hires. The most important lesson I’ve learned is that the goal of a reference check isn’t to prove you made the right decision. It’s to discover why you might be making the wrong one while you can still change it.

Exclusive: Inside Fortell (@fortellresearch)

The $740M startup that had to waitlist billionaires and celebrities for its AI hearing aid.

Their custom chip helps you "hear where you look", distinguishing voices in noisy environments - which solved a problem no hearing aid had cracked in 70 years. Now they're expanding across America to start reaching the 1.5 billion people globally who need it.

Founded by four wildly impressive co-founders. Plus, backed from top VC's led by @JoshuaKushner @AntonioGracias @traestephens @wolfejosh @GavinSBaker @patrick_oshag @RobertIger @jaltma @aplusk @hbarra + more.

We flew to New York, toured their factory, and tried it ourselves. To date, this is our proudest episode, truly technology at it's best. Enjoy :)

0:00 Today's Most Intelligent Hearing Aid
2:09 70 years unsolved - until now
3:34 "I'd mortgage my house for this"
4:37 Igor: A Pianist Turned Physicist
7:18 Andy + Factory Tour: "Injecting The AI"
9:00 Why they built a custom chip
10:39 Live demo: AI vs conventional
14:48 Matt: Building For His Grandparents
15:22 Cole: Can $6,800 Reach Everyone?

I think you can prolly type something up.

Go to town!

We have had respectful relationship & hopefully will continue but call to US Embassy was AFTER your vehicle was stopped. We had no advance notice of your trip. I go often into Judea/Samaria & visit Palestinians. I publicly condemn ALL violence whether Israeli to Palestinian or Palestinian to Israeli. You would have been well served to have spent time with Israelis who were held hostage or victims of terror to understand big picture but you only chose to come in secretly with an anti-Israel activist to hear one version of reality. Please come back. Let me know when. I will go with you & we will meet with ppl in the PA & in Israel with Jewish, Christian, & Muslims We will visit Hadassah Medical Center which will destroy any notion of “apartheid “ & will arrange a classified briefing to dispel any doubt about the ridiculous claim that Israel engaged in “genocide.” Let’s elevate the discussion. I’ll leave the light on for you!

Stuy is New York’s most prestigious high school because it admits the highest-performing students as determined entirely by scores on an objective, unbiased test.

Seats at Stuy are not allocated by race. They are not given out through a subjective process that can be influenced by politics or favoritism or money.

The kids who got in did the best, and the kids who did not do the best cannot get in, no matter how much rich parents or woke politicians want to corrupt the fair and objective admissions competition.

People like Lincoln Restler think Stuy is prestigious for reasons other than the fact that it has a rigorous objective admissions standard. He thinks the prestige these kids earned through their excellence can be redistributed to the students who are not the best that he would prefer to pretend are the best.

But these students are not prestigious because they go to Stuy; Stuy is prestigious because these students go there. And if different students — inferior students— went there, then Stuy would no longer be the school that is a magnet for the smartest kids in New York and its prestige and reputation would dissipate rapidly, just like the University of California system’s has.

Or maybe Restler knows this, and he just wants to destroy Stuy, because he wants to prevent these students’ talent from being measured and identified, so they can be scattered into low-performing schools where they will languish instead of having their talent cultivated.

Regardless, his ideology of racial grievance and destruction is a monstrous evil masquerading as “social justice,” and it will not be tolerated.

I met Ben once. We were seated at the same dinner table.

At first, we did not recognise each other. Neither of us had any idea we would end up at the same table.

I asked him where I knew him from. He replied, “Ben, from Ben & Jerry’s.”

I smiled and said, “Nice to meet you. I’m Alex, Deputy Consul General of Israel to the Southeastern United States.”

This was at the height of the Ben & Jerry’s Israel controversy. I decided not to raise politics, out of respect for our gracious host. But I was also biding my time, because I suspected he would not be able to resist bringing it up.

About an hour into dinner, he came over to talk.

I saw it as an opportunity to understand where he was coming from, to explain a few things, and to keep the conversation as civil as possible. And to be fair, it was civil. He was pleasant, curious, and polite.

But quite quickly, I also realised he was completely ignorant about Israel.

He had never visited the country or the region. He had basic facts wrong, not only about the narrative, but about the foundations of the conflict itself: the makeup of the countries involved, the history, and the deeply rooted reasons each side sees the conflict the way it does.

For him, it was simple: there are people who appear oppressed, so someone must be the oppressor.

I do not blame Ben personally. He is a businessman who sells ice cream. Why should he be expected to understand Israel, the Middle East, or geopolitics?

The real problem is with those who treat him as an authority.

The media gives him a pedestal to speak about issues he clearly does not understand. And that is the absurdity of it all: taking an ice cream salesman and presenting him as a voice of moral clarity on one of the most complex conflicts in the world.

Meet Odessia.

She plans and books entire trips in one conversation.

Apparently, she's the goddess of travel.

.@grosen doesn’t get enough flowers. He’s quietly one of the best formation stage investors of this generation. Makes me happy to see him featured on the Midas Brink List for the first time this year.

Put him on Mt. Rushmore already @ericvishria

We are talking about the heater of all heaters

I’m old enough to remember when benchmark was past its prime!

A new @bgurley blog post!

I have been thinking about how sophisticated executives are using open source in super creative ways. Started writing this three years ago. Excited to finish it up and publish it! And with the new @p3institute brand.

substack.com/home/post/p-19…

Ringing the @Nasdaq bell is just the beginning.

Extended interview: Former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse has metastatic pancreatic cancer. He spoke with 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley about where America has been and where it could still go.

Excited to share some big news: I've joined @FireworksAI_HQ President.

I've spent my career at the intersection of great teams, disruptive technology, and massive market opportunity, from architecting @salesforce 50x revenue growth to $5B+, to driving 10x revenue growth at @twilio in five years.

I believe the opportunity at Fireworks is even bigger.

Fireworks is the world’s frontier inference platform, created by the team that built PyTorch, the backbone of modern AI. As the demand for tokens explodes, inference is poised to be one of the biggest markets in history. Now that we’ve hit an inflection point in the quality of open models, I believe no one is better positioned than Fireworks.

Fireworks brings together state-of-the-art training and inference on one platform, enabling companies to transform open models into private models that surpass frontier model performance. Owning your model is the key to being able to control your AI quality, performance, cost, and future. That’s why Fireworks has become the inference platform of choice for AI leaders like Cursor, Vercel, DoorDash, Genspark, Uber, Shopify, and thousands more.

Fireworks is in the early stages of this hyper-growth journey, now processing 30 trillion tokens a day, up more than 100% from just a few months ago.

I want to thank our visionary CEO @lqiao for this opportunity. I’ve had the privilege of partnering with some amazing CEOs like @Benioff and @jeffiel, and I have the same confidence that Lin and I will be amazing partners in building a generational company.

If you're looking for the ride of a lifetime, we're hiring across the board.

Let's bring the 🔥

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@extradotemail organizes your life.
Live today. extra.email

Life with ALS or a spinal cord injury often means navigating a gradual or sudden loss of independence.

Neuralink aims to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs—starting with device control and communication, and expanding toward vision and other applications.