Anand Dass

Monthly earnings is up in SF—while every other AV city saw drops. What do you think happened? San Francisco was one of the earliest AV markets—Waymo went fully commercial there in June 2024. Yet despite a drop in ride density and pay per unit, monthly earnings increased. San Francisco stands apart from every other AV-active market in our dataset. While driver pay fell in Austin, Phoenix, and LA—monthly earnings in SF increased, even as trips per hour, utilization, and unit pay all declined. That raises questions. Are fewer drivers staying active—and working longer hours? Is platform supply adjusting to early AV rollout? Or is demand shifting in ways that concentrate earnings? Our AV Impact Report compares these city-level trends to the national baseline—and helps clarify where AV activity might be playing a role. 📊 Austin, SF, LA, Phoenix 📉 Year-over-year changes in pay, volume, and utilization 📍 Local vs national baselines Download the report for a deeper look into the insights: https://lnkd.in/drHnjtCS

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OpenAI's $6.5B Acquisition of io: A Landmark Acquihire? OpenAI's recent acquisition of io, the hardware startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, for $6.5 billion, is huge news. With a team of just 55 employees and no commercial products to date, should this move be viewed as the most significant "acquihire" in history? What are your thoughts on this acquisition? Could this be the most significant acquihire in tech history? How do you see this influencing the future of AI-integrated hardware? #OpenAI #JonyIve #Acquihire #AIHardware #Innovation

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Bezos reentering the arena as co-CEO of Project Prometheus signals a shift, elite founders formerly devoted to bits are now building atoms or AI for the physical economy, not just software. With $6.2 billion raised and nearly 100 researchers from Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind, Prometheus aims to industrialize engineering and manufacturing with simulation-driven AI. https://lnkd.in/drkFdqzG

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Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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We chose a good subject for our march Autotech Council meeting, and after this year's CES, it seems even more obvious. Our meeting on the AI Defined Vehicle will show how it's a natural next step after the Software Defined Vehicle phase that we've been in Tesla launched the Model S in 2012. Now, most carmakers have SDVs. It's time to layer on the AI in user-facing roles, and in invisible functions managing the vehicle.

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Big news from the Flox, Hetz Ventures PortCo, on partnering with NVIDIA to bring pre-built #CUDA packages to the Flox Catalog. A major milestone for the whole ecosystem. Congrats to everyone Ron Efroni and the entire Flox team! This partnership is about supporting developers with a more seamless experience and strengthening CUDA’s value across the wider ecosystem. It’s a major step forward for anyone building AI, ML, HPC, and GPU-accelerated applications as teams can now build and deploy portable #CUDA runtimes that just work, anytime and anywhere. #proudseedinvestor

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Martin Eberhard played a key role early at Tesla and even brought in Elon Musk. Then he was pushed out of the company for pennies. Founders get most of the attention in Silicon Valley, but the ecosystem is built on the people who take a chance and join early stage ventures. Unfortunately, those same people are often the easiest to cut out. Founders can dilute early employees, change vesting terms, and restructure equity with little effort and zero consequences (you can literally do it in Carta in 5 minutes). Daniel Kottke was a close friend of Steve Jobs and helped build the Apple I and II computers. He got no equity (Steve Wozniak eventually gave him a few of his own shares). Brian Acton co-founded WhatsApp and stayed through the Facebook acquisition. When he left Facebook over privacy concerns, he had to walk away from $850 million in unvested stock. There’s more awareness now around how vesting works, what happens during a liquidity event, and how to think about re-ups and dilution. That’s good. But the truth is, if someone really wants to screw you, they can. It still comes down to one thing: trust the people you work with. Or don’t work with them at all.

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Why does the SF Bay dominate the tech landscape? There's a network effect, like a gravity well that creates compounding benefits from those that are within the region. Here's one of my slides from my TEDAI San Francisco speech on why community and culture play a key role in the AI ecosystem development in our region.

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Arm just delivered its second-highest revenue quarter ever — with 25% year-over-year royalty growth. AI is reshaping everything — and Arm is the platform powering it. - ~50% share of the AI data center market. - Compute Subsystems (CSS) strategy is exceeding expectations, helping customers launch their products faster and with less risk. - Largest developer ecosystem in history with this software driving the flywheel for more Arm based platforms. As the need for scalable, power-efficient compute continues to soar, Arm is meeting the moment with technology that fuels the future. Congrats to the Arm team on a great quarter!

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I spoke with Amplify Partners about Kyutai and Gradium, and more broadly about why voice is the modality where small, disciplined teams routinely outcompete larger organizations despite having far less compute and staff. The post goes into how we approached audio end-to-end, why we insisted early on full-duplex, real-time interaction, and how much of that came from tight iteration loops rather than scale. It also reflects on our culture, competition as a forcing function, and why having fewer people can actually make technical progress faster, not harder. No grand vision statements. Just how things were built, why certain bets were made early, and what it feels like to work at the edge of audio and interaction. If you’re interested in audio, voice, or small teams doing real systems work, this captures it well: https://lnkd.in/e8X_zmiP

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