Loudcloud's Near Death Experience and the Power of Resilience

We did 750 one-on-one demos before we knew what to build for Syncupp. Not 15-minute calls. One-hour calls. With real business owners, about their real chaos. 750 hours of listening to people explain why their team management was broken. The result: → 2,500 active users in under 6 months → 50% still with us a year later → And those same people upgraded a second time That last number is the only one I care about. Anyone can get a signup. Signups are cheap. Getting someone to pay you twice — after a year of use, after the novelty is gone, after they know exactly what's broken — that's the real scoreboard. We didn't guess Syncupp's roadmap. We were handed it. 750 separate times. Most founders build for six months, then go looking for customers. Build from 750 conversations and you don't have to look. They're already waiting. P.S. Nikhil Ahlawat & I were so overstimulated, I believe on occasions we were blurting out demo lines in our sleep xD

Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla has struck a deal to pay $9.6 billion for the reigning Super Bowl champions. https://on.wsj.com/4h6bj7V

Gallot didn’t come to Redmond to trade favors. She cleared out eight of Bell’s top brass before the morning coffee lost its heat, replacing the old guard with a mandate for AI. The new regime isn't built on handshakes; it’s built on Security Copilot and MDASH. Hundreds of layoffs left the hallways quiet, but the real noise is in the machine. She’s pivoting the whole operation to hunt down AI-native rivals in a game where the old rules have been buried. It is a cold, efficient shift for a company trying to outrun the shadows. Full report at The Information: https://lnkd.in/gQHtyZmb

Total agreement with Vivek Ravisankar on this one. It's time for companies to adjust their hiring bar to match the reality of today's tech landscape. This is undoubtedly the way forward. AI coding assistance is becoming the standard, and it is a massive driver of employee productivity. Companies should fully adapt this and accept the reality that nearly every tech professional is already utilising these tools to stay competitive. Moving the interview bar from simple recall to testing judgment—like identifying where to delegate to AI and where to verify its output—is a much more accurate reflection of modern engineering. #GenAI #FutureOfWork #EngineeringManagement #TechHiring #SkillsOverPedigree #AIIntegration #CodingAssistant #Cursor #Codex #ClaudeCode

Every month, we get some of the sharpest operators and investors in the game on a call with our founders, and open the floor. They ask whatever they like and get straight answers. This week was no exception. Chris Tottman, the man who sold MessageLabs to Symantec for $700m, co-founded Notion Capital and has backed over 500 founders, gave us an hour. You had to be there to get the answers, but the takeaways we can share are in the slides. Want to know when the next one is happening? SYCM subscribers find out first. Link in the first comment.

My job last week involved chatting to a man who sold a company for $700m. Chris Tottman came on our AMA. He joined MessageLabs as an early employee, rose to Chief Commercial Officer, and later sold to Symantec for $700m. He then went on to co-found Notion Capital, where he’s backed over 500 founders since. Our members spent an hour asking him anything they liked, and he answered all of it, including the questions people usually get media training to dodge. Somewhere in my inbox right now are the next few guests. If the confirmations land the way I think they will, this series is about to get real.

Jason Roe, Principal of Roe Strategic, joins WJR's Kevin Dietz to discuss the official end of DOGE and reports that federal agencies are moving to bring back positions eliminated during Elon Musk’s workforce reduction efforts. They examine what this could mean for government operations and taxpayers. https://lnkd.in/dmumsPxd

Get asked this constantly: "Should I use [some big platform] or Finpace?" Wrong question. We're not competitors. A platform runs your whole lifecycle: notes, onboarding, growth. Broad by design, and they're 'sometimes' good at it. Finpace does one thing: the paperwork. The part everyone hates and nobody escapes. It's all we care about. I hate it too. But here's the deal: paperwork isn't going anywhere. Automating it is all we do. So if it's painful enough for you, we solve that. Fully. So don't pick between a platform and us. Run your big-picture process on platforms. They're your tool belt. But the worst job needs the sharpest blade. That's Finpace. We kill your biggest recurring pain: paperwork. It's not either/or. It's both/and.

If I was Matt Garman... I'd go all in on partnering with NVIDIA on NemoTron and merging the Nova model dev into it after the announcement of the AGI unit layoffs. Why? AWS has always been an opensource company****EDIT profiting off OpenSource technology , and while the Chinese openweight models are way ahead... American based openweights lag. So let's go back to the make opensource easier playbook and expose it by API, and remove the doubt a lot of CISO's have about a DeepSeek or GLM... even if on a Bedrock or Vertex. It's becoming so damn apparent that providing power/ping/pipe is going to be the winner.... I've been predicting model commoditization for 2.5 years now ever since I saw Falcon the first time. It will shift spend more and more to compute versus licensing.

When Vinod Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems, he had little sense that he would go on to revolutionize computing. Later, he joined a venture-capital firm as a partner where he struck deals worth billions. And on his personal investing front, he was among the first to pour money into OpenAI. That history of success gave Khosla the confidence to make another eye-popping acquisition: the reigning Super Bowl champions. Khosla, 71, and his family have agreed to pay $9.6 billion to buy the Seattle Seahawks, a record price for the controlling stake of an NFL franchise. The number shatters the previous high-water mark that was set when a group led by private-equity titan Joshua Harris bought the Washington Commanders for $6 billion. 🔗 Read more: https://on.wsj.com/4pgEPKt