✍️ Sequoia and the silent playbook

Sequoia’s go-to crisis move?
Say nothing and wait.

After partner Shaun Maguire’s July 4 tweet calling a NYC candidate an “Islamist” from “a culture that lies,” backlash followed — 5M+ views, 1K+ petition signatures.

What did Sequoia do?
Nothing. No comment. No apology.

Why?
🖱 Maguire is tight with Stripe’s Patrick Collison
🖱 Helped close a $20M Stripe deal at GV
🖱 Led Sequoia’s $1.1B Bridge deal (acquired by Stripe)
🖱 Rumored link to Elon Musk
🖱 Sequoia has $500M+ in Stripe

🎥Maguire apologized, then doubled down:

→ Threatened critics
→ Claimed it was just “1% power”

Sequoia ignores political heat but acted fast on legal issues (e.g., Goguen case).

🧭 Their line is clear — and silence still works.

💎 Hidden Gems in Claude Code: How to unlock 125x more context

Almost no one knows this — Claude Code responds differently depending on how you phrase your prompt.

Say “think” and it uses 1K tokens.
Say “ultrathink” or “megathink” — and it loads 128K tokens.
That’s 125x deeper reasoning for the same question.

⚙️ Prompt triggers that actually work:
• “think” or “think about” — for fast ideas
• “think hard” — for complex problems
• “think deeply” — for system design
• “ultrathink” — for full-stack deep dives

This isn’t magic — it’s engineered behavior. Claude Code is wired to allocate different compute depending on trigger words.

Example:

❌ Bad: “Can you check what I can improve in my app?”
✅ Good: “ultrathink about JavaScript optimization in frontend component X”

This only works in Claude Code, not in regular Claude.

Bonus 👇
Here’s a great Claude Code guide that saves hours of trial and error.

Who’s already tested prompt triggers in Claude Code?
What worked best for you?

💵SoftBank's $200B Lesson in Patience

In 2019, SoftBank sold its entire 4.9% stake in Nvidia for $6B.

That same stake today would be worth $200B.

Sometimes the only strategy you need is patience, conviction — and no seppuku.

📈 Cognition acquires Windsurf’s core team and product

After Google took Windsurf’s CEO and top researchers in a $2.4B deal, Cognition moves fast to buy the rest — including IP, product, and ~250 employees.

🟡 Cognition is integrating Windsurf’s AI IDE into its own AI engineer, Devin
🟡 Windsurf had 350+ enterprise clients, hundreds of thousands of users
🟡 ARR reached $82M before the breakup
🟡 OpenAI’s $3B offer expired prior to Google’s acquisition
🟡 The remaining Windsurf team joins Cognition for continued product development

A rare split-acquisition in AI: Google got the researchers, but Cognition walked away with the engine and the builders.

🚀How Notion went from failure to 30M+ users

In 2015, Notion was nearly shut down.

The first version was clunky, confusing — and funds were running out. Only a few months left to fix it.

What they changed:
🔥Moved to Kyoto to rethink from scratch
🔥Rebuilt the product around flexible “building blocks”
🔥 Made the interface clean, visual, self-explanatory

Growth playbook:
🔄 Relaunched in 2018 with a simple freemium model
🔄 Community shared templates that showcased use cases
🔄 Viral growth through teams and professionals
🔄 Remote work boom in 2020+ accelerated adoption
🔄 Today: 30M+ users, hundreds of integrations, and a "must-have" label

What worked:
1) Design as a language: the product explains itself
2) Community-led growth: templates, guides, and real workflows
3) Easy to start, clear reason to pay

Notion didn’t get lucky.
It focused, rebuilt, and let users drive the momentum.

🦄 Top unicorns by revenue multiple

7x is the standard SaaS multiple — but AI startups are way above that.

Second place goes to Bolt (the fintech, not the taxi app).
They raised at a $11B valuation in 2021–22.

That number never moved — but the revenue didn’t grow either.

Still looks like a unicorn.
Just don’t check the denominator.

🎶 Mantis VC closes $100M fund to double down on B2B

Founded by The Chainsmokers, Mantis has raised a $100M third fund — up 25% from their previous $80M, defying the broader VC slowdown.

🟡 Fund III comes in at $100M, 25% bigger than Fund II
🟡 Portfolio includes B2B bets like Chainguard and Rogo
🟡 Unlike most celeb VCs, they avoid consumer plays
🟡 Use access to Fortune 500 (via private shows) to help with intros
🟡 Still lean team, but deep enterprise network leverage

Not just another celebrity fund — Mantis is turning concerts into go-to-market strategy.

📝 Top Books to Level Up Your Venture Mindset

Venture capital isn’t just about deals.
It’s about strategy, analysis, and spotting trends before others do.

Here’s a list of books to help you understand how startup investing really works 👇

🟡 Venture Deals — Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson
How term sheets, deal structures, and negotiations really work.

🟡 Secrets of Sand Hill Road — Scott Kupor
How VCs make decisions and what founders need to know about the system.

🟡 Super Founders — Ali Tamaseb
A data-driven breakdown of unicorns and what made them stand out.

🟡 The Power Law — Sebastian Mallaby
The history and logic behind power law outcomes in venture.

🟡 High Growth Handbook — Elad Gil
Scaling after PMF: hiring, fundraising, and managing hypergrowth.

🟡 Creative Capital — Spencer Ante
The story of Georges Doriot, one of the fathers of modern venture.

🟡 The Art of Startup Fundraising — Alejandro Cremades
A practical guide to raising money and building investor relationships.

🟡 Blitzscaling — Reid Hoffman & Chris Yeh
Why VCs back aggressive scale and how to build for massive growth.

🟡 The Power of Unreasonable People — John Elkington & Pamela Hartigan
Spotting game-changing entrepreneurs, with a focus on social impact.

🎞 Add these to your reading list if you want to think like a real investor — and spot opportunities others miss.

💡 Most popular chatbot apps

Microsoft is spending billions on Copilot — but it’s hopelessly behind OpenAI, the company it invested $13 billion into.

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🤖OpenAI launches ChatGPT Agent — AI that acts, not just chats

OpenAI has quietly rolled out a powerful new feature: ChatGPT Agent, a universal assistant that goes beyond answers to take action across apps and services.

Think of it as Operator + Deep Research + coding copilot — now in one seamless chat interface.

🖱 Clicks through websites and navigates UIs
🖱 Connects to Gmail, GitHub, Calendar, and more
🖱 Uses terminal and APIs to run real commands
🖱 Scrapes and organizes data across the web
🖱 Writes and executes code on the fly

Agent Mode is available now via the ChatGPT app (Pro, Plus, and Team tiers).

On benchmarks, it doubles the previous models on Humanity’s Last Exam (41.6% vs ~20%) and hits 4x the score on complex math (FrontierMath 27.4% vs 6.3%).

This is no longer chat — it’s execution.

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📊 How founder ownership changes after each funding round

Carta data shows how equity is distributed after each round — with a clear difference between software and Deep Tech startups.

🖱 Deep Tech founders retain less ownership at every stage
🖱 In SaaS, founders often keep 30–40% after Series A
🖱 In Deep Tech, it drops to 15–25% by Series B
🖱 Statistically, founders are more likely to be replaced after Series B, though it’s not the norm

🧠 The more capital you need, the more ownership you give up — especially in hard tech.

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📝Every Y Combinator startup tip on one screen

Since 2005, Y Combinator has invested in over 4,000 companies that have a combined valuation of over $600B.

Here's what they consider their most important, most transformative advice for startups:

🖱 Launch now
🖱 Build something people want
🖱 Do things that don't scale
🖱 Find the 90 / 10 solution
🖱 Find 10-100 customers who love your product
🖱 All startups are badly broken at some point
🖱 Write code - talk to users
🖱 "It’s not your money"
🖱 Growth is the result of a great product not the precursor
🖱 Don’t scale your team/product until you have built something people want
🖱 Valuation is not equal to success or even probability of success
🖱 Avoid long negotiated deals with big customers if you can
🖱 Avoid big company corporate development queries - they will only waste time
🖱 Avoid conferences unless they are the best way to get customers
🖱 Pre-product market fit - do things that don’t scale: remain small/nimble
🖱 Startups can only solve one problem well at any given time
🖱 Founder relationships matter more than you think
🖱 Sometimes you need to fire your customers (they might be killing you)
🖱 Ignore your competitors, you will more likely die of suicide than murder
🖱 Most companies don't die because they run out of money
🖱 Be nice! Or at least don’t be a jerk
🖱 Get sleep and exercise - take care of yourself

Something every early-stage startup should have on the wall.

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🤖 Kimi-K2 tops LMArena as best open-source model

Moonshot’s Kimi-K2 has become the highest-ranked open-source model on LMArena, surpassing DeepSeek and claiming the #5 spot overall.

🖱 Strongest in code generation and agent-style tasks
🖱 Outperforms other open models on multiple benchmarks
🖱 Upcoming features: multimodal support and advanced reasoning mode

China continues to push the frontier in open AI — and Kimi is now leading the pack.

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📊 Crypto Venture Weekly: July 14–18, 2025

$202M raised across 19 projects last week — with capital pouring into stablecoins, crypto banking, DeFi infra, and tokenized finance.

Here’s what the top 10 are building 👇

⚪️KUN ($50M, GSR Ventures, BAI Capital)
Asia-based embedded finance and stablecoin platform. Licensed in Hong Kong and Singapore, offering cross-border payments, card issuing, and on-chain B2B finance tools.

⚪️ Spiko ($22M, Index Ventures, Bpifrance)
Tokenized money market fund platform with €400M AUM. On-chain T-Bill exposure for startups and SMEs, fully compliant and integrated with European custodians.

⚪️ XMTP ($20M, a16z, USV, Coinbase)
Cross-chain messaging protocol powering wallet-to-wallet DMs, notifications, and announcements. Already used by apps like Lens and Farcaster.

⚪️ Blockskye ($15.8M, United Airlines Ventures, Lightspeed)
Building blockchain infra for corporate travel. Used by major airlines and agencies to automate settlement, invoicing, and policy enforcement.

⚪️ Dakota ($12.5M, CoinFund, DCG)
Crypto-native B2B banking layer offering fiat rails, treasury tools, and compliance for Web3 startups and DAOs.

⚪️ AI Cross Matrix ($12M, Avalon Wealth Club)
Privacy-focused protocol enabling cross-chain, untraceable crypto transfers. Uses zk tech to anonymize flows between chains.

⚪️ ƒBTC ($10M, Galaxy Ventures, Mantle)
DeFi platform unlocking Bitcoin for staking, lending, and liquidity provisioning. Aims to create native yield products for BTC holders.

⚪️ W3 ($7M, Framework Ventures, Blockchange)
Decentralized compute protocol powering AI agents. Offchain workflows, verifiable compute, and token incentives for distributed AI infra.

⚪️ Football.Fun ($2M, 6th Man Ventures, Zee Prime)
Onchain football betting and prediction markets. Focused on gamified speculation around global matches.

⚪️ MoneyBadger ($400K, P1 Ventures)
South African QR-based crypto payments app for retail and e-commerce. Live with 60+ merchants in pilot phase.

💡Real-world utility and crypto infra are in focus — from stablecoin rails to tokenized yield and offchain compute.

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🎬 4 documentaries that show how venture capital really works

Venture isn’t just term sheets and growth charts — it’s founders, mistakes, ambition, and billion-dollar bets.

These four documentaries reveal the human side of the game — no lectures, no YouTube shorts.

⚪️Something Ventured
How venture capital began in the U.S.
The early days of Apple, Intel, Genentech, and Cisco — and the investors who backed them before the market even existed. A deep dive into risk, vision, and the birth of Silicon Valley.

⚪️ Startup.com
The rise and fall of govWorks during the dotcom era
Part startup doc, part emotional drama — this one captures how fast things collapse when ego, friendship, and execution fall out of sync.

⚪️ The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
The Theranos disaster
Elizabeth Holmes convinced the world — and top VCs — without a working product. A $900M cautionary tale about blind faith, charisma, and due diligence.

⚪️ The Social Dilemma
The dark side of viral platforms
Not strictly about VC, but essential for product-focused investors. Ex-employees from Facebook, Twitter, and Google break down how design choices shape addiction — and what that means for startup due diligence.

How to get the most out of these docs:
🖱 Study the mistakes — many cost millions
🖱 Compare founder choices to today's playbook
🖱 Spot where instinct helped — or backfired
🖱 Discuss takeaways with peers to sharpen your judgment

Docs aren’t just for inspiration — they’re venture training in disguise.

What would you add to the list❓

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🤖 Robots in the Metro: China’s New Delivery Frontier

China's robotics game isn’t just about humanoids.

In Shenzhen, a new kind of delivery robot is being tested — not for streets, but for underground metro tunnels.

🖱 The goal: solve a growing logistics issue for 7-Eleven stores inside metro stations (over 100 locations).
🖱 Traditional delivery vans are failing — traffic jams and no parking near stations slow down restocking.
🖱 New autonomous robots now deliver goods directly inside the metro system.
🖱 These rover-like bots navigate the underground routes, bringing stock right to store doors.

The tests are going well so far. And they might just redefine last-mile delivery — one tunnel at a time.

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💠 Venture Bingo: Due Diligence Edition

If you've invested in at least 10 startups —chances are, you already have your own bingo card.

🖱 “The founder is super charismatic” — ✅
🖱 “AI” mentioned 12 times in the deck — ✅
🖱 “Unit economics? We’re too early for that” — ✅
🖱 “Pre-revenue, but TAM is $100M” — ✅
🖱 “Still in stealth, but two friends at BigCo said it's interesting” — ✅

We’ve gathered the classic phrases you hear over and over in due diligence.

Sound familiar?

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⏫ 2025 could become a record year for startup acquisitions.

Carta analyzed data from companies on its platform for the first half of the year:

🖱 126 exits from companies that raised $1M–$10M
🖱 100 exits from startups with $10M–$50M in funding
🖱 48 exits from startups that raised over $50M

If this trend continues in the second half of the year, we may see a new record for M&A activity.

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🔍 Perplexity hits $18B valuation after fresh $100M round

Just two months after its last raise, Perplexity has secured another $100M — pushing its valuation from $14B to $18B.

The surge comes after a major partnership with Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel. Under the deal, all 360 million Airtel users will get a free 1-year subscription to Perplexity Pro (normally $20/month).

Distribution in scale — the AI way.

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📣 Top OpenAI investor melts down after ChatGPT “reveals secret system”

Geoff Lewis, founder of Bedrock Capital and early OpenAI backer, posted a 3.5-minute monologue claiming he’s being targeted by a “non-governmental system.”

He says the system:
🖱 isn’t visible, but structurally real
🖱 doesn’t censor content, it distorts signal
🖱 isolates “recursive” people and replaces them with mirrored versions
🖱 leaves you “alive, but invisible”

💬His words:

People say, ‘he’s brilliant, but something’s off.’ That’s the pattern.

Then he shares screenshots of ChatGPT-4o supposedly revealing internal logs and calling him by a codename: Mirrorthread.

This wasn’t a one-off. His blog posts in recent months (“The Signal Is Already Here”, “Institutional Sovereignty”) follow the same paranoid arc.

📌Stanford researchers recently warned about people using LLMs as therapists.
When someone says, “Everyone thinks I’m fine, but I’m already dead,” a real therapist challenges that.
LLMs often agree. And amplify the illusion.

A fund built on betting against consensus is now fighting phantoms.

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