Elad Gil and Sarah Guo: Built to Grow, by @she_travels

Built to Grow is a new sales handbook from Stripe Press. Two investors endorsed it on the same day. Elad Gil wrote that he was "so excited" for it @eladgil and linked to it on Amazon @eladgil. Sarah Guo gave a more specific reason. For more than a decade she has coached strong product builders through their first stretch of B2B sales and marketing, and she wishes the book "had existed sooner for me to gift." @saranormous She also called it "an education" @saranormous and praised its "beautiful design" @saranormous.

Paul Graham and Garry Tan: Eric Rea on rebuilding Podium around AI

Podium cofounder Eric Rea posted that his company has reached $150M ARR twice. The first time took 8 years and the second took 2.5. Podium has now crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue. @ericwilliamrea Three years ago the company had well over $100M in revenue, but it chose to "start over." It bet its future on AI employees that do the work for customers rather than protect the software it had built over a decade. @ericwilliamrea

Paul Graham said established companies will at best adapt to AI while new startups start out AI-native. He called Podium "an interesting example of a company in the middle" that remade itself as AI-native "by great effort." @paulg He also called it an example of founder mode: a hired CEO, he argued, wouldn't have the moral authority, or probably wouldn't care enough, to ignore existing revenue and refocus on AI. @paulg Garry Tan shared it as "what it looks like when it *really* hits." @garrytan

Patrick Collison: Arc Institute preprint on the genome's "dark matter"

Collison shared a new Arc Institute preprint thread from @pdhsu. The work uses latent-space representations of genomes from single-cell life to find new candidate functional RNAs. @patrickc The preprint uses genome language models and AI agents. It targets the RNA-encoding stretches between protein-coding genes, which conventional computational tools struggle with. @pdhsu Collison said he thinks it is "cool" for three reasons:

• It puts deep learning and model interpretability to productive use on a different kind of knowledge.
• It shows how agents might speed up discovery in huge combinatorial search spaces.
• It is an early example of computational methods working together with wet-lab biology. @patrickc

Brad Gerstner: "Why we invested in Arda"

Gerstner pointed followers to a post by @apoorv03 @altcap that links the investment memo. He also called Arda a "killer team" working to make US manufacturing the best in the world. @altcap Arda was founded by Bob McGrew, and the memo gives three reasons for investing:

• McGrew has been preparing for this mission for at least two decades.
• The mission is one that "MUST be pursued."
• The plan is sequenced well: first software for manufacturing engineers, then robotic lines that update as fast as the design does. @apoorv03

For readers who prefer video, the memo links a CNBC conversation with McGrew. @apoorv03

a16z podcast: the film Digger

In a16z's Frontier conversation with Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon, one speaker said he is "completely obsessed" with Digger. The transcript doesn't name the speaker. His advice is to sit through it even though you will be tempted to walk out after the first half hour: there is "a reason why they did what they did," and the film is "very clever." a16z He also used it to make a business point. The film lost about $200M on a roughly $180M budget, and he argued that on an AI-enabled $2M budget it "would have been insanely profitable." a16z

Shorter mentions

• Guillermo Rauch cited the book Running with the Kenyans. He described Kenyan marathoners who start races faster than seems possible, which sets a new pace and teaches them they could have gone faster. He tries to bring that idea into the standard he sets at work (interview). First of Kind
• Brian Chesky named the industrial designer Charles Eames, whom he studied at RISD, as one of his favorite designers. He quoted Eames's line that a designer is "a very thoughtful host anticipating the needs of their guest" and used it to describe Airbnb's role: "We set the conditions for magic" (interview). Semafor