Kevin Ho Nguyen

📈 Meta reported our Q225 Earnings As I reflect on the quarter, we are proud to share that we achieved a strong 22% year-over-year revenue growth, with approximately 3.4 billion people using at least one of our apps daily. This outstanding performance was largely powered by AI, driving greater efficiency and significant gains across our advertising system. I am especially proud of my team’s partnership with the ecosystem to harness first-party data, fueling our AI-driven targeting to elevate advertising performance to new heights while pushing the boundaries of innovation with a strong focus on the user. Thanks to all our partners! As Mark said it: "[...] the strong performance this quarter is largely thanks to AI unlocking greater efficiency and gains across our ads system. This quarter, we expanded our new AI-powered recommendation model for ads to new surfaces and improved its performance by using more signals and a longer context. It's driven roughly 5% more ad conversions on Instagram and 3% on Facebook." - Here’s a quick peek into the highlights: 🏅Ranking Improvements: Enhancements to our recommendation systems improved quality that it led to a 6% increase in time spent on Instagram, and 5% increase on Facebook this quarter. 🔄Omnichannel Ads: Recent tests showed advertisers using Omnichannel ads saw a median 15% reduction in total CPA, compared to website-only optimization. 📱AI-Powered Recommendation Model for Ads: Expanded to new surfaces and improved its performance by using more signals and a longer sequence. It's driven roughly 5% more ad conversions on Instagram and 3% on Facebook Feed and Reels. 🌟AI for Ad Creative: We’re seeing good progress with a meaningful percent of our ad revenue now coming from campaigns using one of our GenAI features. This is going to be especially valuable for smaller advertisers with limited budgets, while agencies will continue the important work to help larger brands apply these tools strategically. We also shared our vision to build superintelligence that empowers everyone. As Mark stated, we have the resources and expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, as well as the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products.

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We’re cooking some cool stuff and building next-gen agentic UX interfaces that blend human & AI collaboration and handovers. Check out Ted’s post for more details on what we’re looking for! We’re also working with some great customers in industries such as payroll & hr, healthcare marketplaces, delivery services, and logistics, helping them automate some of their most complex manual processes!

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Netchex CEO Abhinav Agrawal's first stop in tech was at Zynga, where he led product for FarmVille and Words with Friends. It might sound like a circuitous path to HR tech, but the core lessons translate surprisingly well. Zynga was obsessed with data, analytics, and constant iteration. Products shipped live, updated daily, and evolved based on how people actually used them. The goal was creating experiences people wanted to come back to, which now informs how Abhinav is building the Netchex platform. One other benefit of the Zynga experience: Zynga was the case study company for successfully riding the early wave of social and mobile. As we navigate the next major technology transformation with AI, that experience of thriving through paradigm shifts is a real asset.

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Some personal news (and a few personal thoughts): The personal news: 1. I started a new company with my bestie Zachary Kim. 2. We're both back in SF (let's hang, people!) 3. We're building an AI video editing assistant that real MVPs (humans who make videos!) can delegate tasks to like watching hours of footage, building rough drafts, writing transcripts, organizing project files, etc... (the things that senior creatives would ask of an assistant editor so they can do the higher leverage creative work) 3. Editors work with our assistant editor like they would a human assistant editor. You provide it with source video, images, guidelines, etc and a "to do" list... and it does the to do list for you! 4. If your team edits videos for work (and use MacOS, not Windows), click to my profile for a free trial! I can't wait to show you what we've built. Thoughts: There is SO MUCH hype about how all content is going to be AI generated and therefore creative work is dead. This is extremely overblown. If you want a preview into what will actually happen, look into AI in software engineering right now. AI software engineering has hit an inflection point that will alter the job of software engineers forever, but not in the way everyone was worried about. Talk to any software engineer who has adopted the latest agentic coding tools in earnest... They are THRILLED! They can be MORE CREATIVE than ever. They can BUILD MORE than ever. Their time is now MORE VALUABLE because of how much better they are with AI. Just do a LinkedIn search for "Claude Code" or "Cursor" and you'll see what I mean. We want to give creatives the same superpowers that software engineers have now. We want to make creatives more productive and more creative than ever. More to come!

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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✨ A very fun start to Frameworks for Growth - a new video series from Vanta. "Frameworks" are core to who Vanta is: -We support 40 different compliance frameworks within the product -One of our principles is "Decide with frameworks," and a common question in meetings at Vanta is, "what framework did you use for deciding [x]?" -And now, we're hoping to provide founders and early operators with some frameworks *they* can use for scaling their businesses in the age of AI. Thanks to Garry Tan and Christina Cacioppo for this awesome first conversation. You should watch the whole thing, but tldw - one framework for growth: learn an industry deeply and vibe code towards something people want.

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Seattle VC panels are not exactly known for being spicy, which is why my AMA with Brooke and Rolanda at AI House last night was so refreshing. We got into the questions founders are too embarrassed to ask out loud. How do VCs actually decide behind closed doors? What counts as traction when you have zero revenue? Is enterprise SaaS dead? Do Seattle founders actually have a shot against the Bay Area? A few takeaways that stood out: ✅ Associates can't get to yes without a partner sponsor — but partners often can't reach deals without associate diligence. Arm them with the facts to fight for you internally. ✅ Expect 50-70 investor conversations before a term sheet. Send your deck a day early but assume nobody read it 😎 ✅ Enterprise SaaS isn't dead, but it's shifting from seat-based to usage and outcome-based pricing. Large orgs still need governed software. ✅ Traction isn't just revenue. How excited are your customers? Would they advocate for you? Paying pilots with automatic, KPI-specific conversion > free trials, every time. ✅ Learning slope > starting background. The strongest founders they've backed adapted fast — not started perfect. Brooke and Rolanda WILL take a second meeting even if you whiff the first one! ✅ Seattle has fantastic enterprise buyers and founders with sales relationships into them. But the equity-vs-cash culture gap is real, and hiring against big tech is still hard. What made it different was how candid Brooke and Rolanda were about what actually happens after your pitch ends, aka the internal deal dynamics most founders never see. Shoutout to the room full of 100+ early-stage founders who went against the Seattle grain and asked hard questions live to the VCs. That energy is what makes AI House work. Huge thanks to Brooke B. (FUSE) and Rolanda Fu (Madrona) for keeping it real! More AMAs like this coming. Tag a founder who we should invite for the next one! #AIHouse (photo credit to Jonathan G. Blanco 🛠)

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The Equity team at TechCrunch put together one of the better breakdowns I've heard on the Google-Wiz close this week. If you're in enterprise tech and haven't listened yet, make 20 minutes for it. Shardul Shah (Index Ventures, early Wiz backer) reframed the deal in a way most coverage hasn't. He didn't position it as a cybersecurity story. He positioned it as what happens when AI, cloud, and security spend all converge on one company at the right moment. The part that landed hardest for me: Wiz became a $32B company because most enterprises moved to cloud faster than they built the controls to manage it. The governance layer got skipped. And then they had to buy it back at a price that made history. I support the teams who see this playing out with AI every week. Agents shipping, copilots rolling out, automation programmes kicking off — while governance, observability, and compliance are still somewhere between "next quarter" and "whose budget is that?" EU AI Act enforcement starts in August. That's not theoretical. The Wiz story is a reminder that the unsexy work — assurance, operating models, the governance no one puts in a keynote — is consistently where the value ends up. It's exactly the gap we're focused on at @OnStak. 🎧 https://lnkd.in/eE2ycW3s

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Two main observations from my SF trip: 1) founding a company is fame now and 2) founders are getting younger and younger. Silicon Valley is turning into Hollywood and creating its very own Mickey Mouse Club in the process: an industrialised pipeline of teen founders. 1) Silicon Valley is turning into Hollywood: In a market that is as competitive as it has ever been, founders need to differentiate. Using consumer tactics, AI startups reach tens of millions in revenue over the course of months. Builders are becoming famous in the process. Many product launches now include Hollywood-level launch videos. Influential VCs are advising their founders to become Twitter-famous. PR manifestos herald the age of the "going direct”, making communication the founder’s job. 2) Founders are becoming younger and younger. The median age of founders in YC’s most recent batch was 24, down from 31 just a few years ago. This has a few reasons: 1) AI gives young folks superpowers and radically brings down the barriers of building a product. 12-year olds are now vibe coding and use their unfiltered imagination to build apps and games. 2) Second, starting a company is now a desired career path (which is AWESOME). 3) VCs are pushing earlier and earlier to get access to talent and build ownership at digestible prices. They are now scouting talent at the best high schools, maths olympiads and science competitions, often with the goal of convincing gifted teens not to study at university, but to start a venture-backed company instead. 4)Young founders worry that AI erodes the value of their intelligence. They are (half) joking that is the last window to escape the permanent underclass, i.e. the last time to build up wealth before their worth will be eroded by artificial general intelligence. Hollywood first invented a format for the industrialisation of teen talent: the Mickey Mouse Club. The MMC was a children’s TV show that made the career of countless Hollywood legends, including Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake. However, the mental toll that child stardom took on the stars was immense and famously ended in meltdowns, drug addiction and shaved heads. In the fierce race for returns, the superpowers and pressures that AI is bringing upon us, and an increasing search for fame, we are industrialising entrepreneurial teen talent in the same way Hollywood industrialised teen performers. In the end, Silicon Valley will likely gain new breakout companies. And if entrepreneurship is something that enables teens to do more of what they enjoy, great! The world certainly needs more incredible entrepreneurs. But the venture capital machine is unforgiving. It aims for a narrow set of excellence. It copiously rewards greatness and swiftly moves on from its failures. It will relentlessly and carelessly forget about most of us, so it’s up to us to make our young years worth remembering. Full Substack post: https://shorturl.at/82cEJ

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