BACK FOUNDERS

“There was a company called Orr that came through. Hardhat Chat is an Anon developer that built Orr. It was a store of value that was built on top of Solana. They basically used a proof of work mechanism, but then settled to Solana. And throughout the hackathon, it actually broke Solana or was very close to breaking Solana. And so we saw this and we were like, this is one of the coolest things we've seen in a long time. Ultimately, what Hardhat landed on was like, it actually isn't proof of work, it's gamifying the experience around mining. So he actually created a consumer application that does that. And now that's one of the top revenue generating applications on Solana.”

“You could also see AI being used to do things like create pandemic viruses or bioweapons. And we already know from OpenAI and Anthropic that the current models that are released out in the world right now do provide uplift on those fronts, which is to say makes it easier for a relative amateur to do something like create a pandemic virus that could cause a COVID or worse level pandemic, right? So this is like a present-day risk. This is not something that you have to believe, you know, that some crazy super intelligence will come into existence to sort of find this salient.”

“So people talk a lot about defense in depth, right? It's not just about securing at one point of vulnerability or one layer. You want to secure at many points. So for example, one starts in pre-training, right? What datasets are going into the models? If your dataset includes a bunch of biological information, say about like the structure of and function of viruses, then you want to take that really seriously. And so a bunch of the organizations that are building bio models are actually choosing not to include viral data in their training sets because they know that that just opens up this can of worms of risk.”

“MetaDao is another one that has sort of wandered through the idea of being amazed under the umbrella of these different types of companies that can be governed, but this concept of futarchy, where decision markets rather than one token or one share, one vote govern sort of the direction a corporation can take. It's, for whatever reason, just because the world is weird, aligned very closely with the founder type that we like, where in order to have a token from essentially day one with your company, you have to be essentially a public market CEO where you're communicating, hey, here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it and kind of managing the expectations of a market, but as a like pre-seed or seed stage company.”

“Although, you know, this is sort of, there's this irony, right? Because 10 years ago, if you asked anybody, what jobs is AI going to automate first, it would have been physical jobs, right? And now we realize, but like the white collar, people will all be safe. And we've realized that that's exactly wrong, right? Because the most powerful models are language models, right? And, you know, white collar knowledge workers are roughly speaking doing language-oriented work, which are typing into a screen all day, right? So of course, that's the thing that language models are really good at.”

“The reason I started Halcyon was much more about talent than money. Right. To solve any big problem, climate change, health care related stuff, education, AI stuff. The most important thing is that you have some of the world's most talented people, entrepreneurs, researchers, etc. dedicating themselves to solving that problem. And yeah, you got to raise more money and all the stuff, but who's good at raising money? Really excellent entrepreneurs and leaders. Okay, you need more rank and file talent. Well, you know who's really excellent at recruiting? Excellent entrepreneurs and leaders.”

“The thing that's changed, at least within Coliseum, is for us to be, I think that we've like, oriented more and more towards the individuals rather than the ideas. Because at the end of the day, the ideas are pretty pliable in terms of a direction a product can take. And I think early on we may be overindexed on having to have the perfect marriage of the two. And that led to like the biggest disagreement because we were not arguing over the person, but we were arguing over the idea that they had and the merits that are associated with that.”

“Then there is what people call like, diffusion, right? So AI actually solving problems in the real world. So you see a lot of companies say like, well, we build this AI that is better than radiologists at diagnosing cancer. And for some use cases, AI has been better than radiologists at diagnosing cancer for like many years. And yet we still have a lot of human radiologists. In fact, we have a shortage of them. So why has AI not like in the real world solved this problem? Because there are all these either operational constraints or bureaucratic constraints to actually implementing the technology in the real world.”

“But I told you this story about COVID, right? About a year into COVID, I took a walk with a friend of mine who's like the world's largest biosecurity and pandemic preparedness grant maker. And so I was like, kind of like, well, but on the bright side, I'm sure now that COVID has happened to the world, it's like come to its senses. And now we're doing all this great biosecurity and pandemic prevention investment. And he's like, dude, you are so naïve. It is the opposite, right? Because first of all, everybody's sick of it, right? Everybody's sick of wearing masks, everybody's sick of the pandemic, they're sick of talking about pandemics. And now it's become super politicized.”

“The other thing that they taught me that is still true with what we do day to day is they frame every investment memo in what is the 10x case and what's the 100x case. Meaning the 10x case is, hey, with these dollars, you believe there's a 10x value. And usually that's around a single particular product hypothesis. And then the 100x case is like, what is the unreasonable thing that could happen with this company that in retrospect is going to be perfectly reasonable.”

“Well, they do partner actually with big insurance companies that you would have heard of. But think of it more akin to cyber insurance, right? So thinking about how insurance can mitigate AI risk, if you just look at other industries that have come up over the years, the insurance sector within those industries was often the force that brought more safety to those industries. So for example, if you look at the history of automobiles, they didn't put seat belts in automobiles for a long time, cars for a long time. And the thing that got them to put seat belts in was the insurance industry insisting on it, right?”

“Sub three, though, is sort of like... Yeah, is like the, I guess, gold standard for when you cross over to kind of doing something special in the marathon. And for me, it's like just a natural extension of a lot of the endurance training that I've done. And it's funny, like, I've done a bunch of different endurance events, but had, up until this past year, never done a marathon. And when my old boss from Slow, Sam Lessin, found out that that was the case, he publicly on his podcast, like, challenged me to run a sub three marathon. And so, yeah, I put, you know, a great training block in. And just, you know, the most important thing, honestly, is like showing up to the race healthy and getting to the starting line. Because a lot of folks overtrain, they get injured, and then, you know, wheels fall off.”

“It becomes very clear over the course of a conversation, whether someone is looking to us for validation that their idea has merit, versus basically not caring and being like, I'm going to will this idea into the world, whether or not you guys agree with me or not. I do think that really lobbing in these sort of grenades that pierce the veil of like someone's confidence and seeing that their ability to kind of take that in, but, you know, answer the question constructively, I think is, is, you know, the thing that we see a good bit of.”

“We recently, in the last cohort, rented an office in San Francisco for two weeks of the Accelerator. And the feedback at the end of that was, hey, guys, do you have somewhere where we can just stay longer? And we looked around, like, well, we only have this for two weeks. And so, that then precipitated, hey, we need to actually go and get an office so that, you know, not only can we have people stay longer than the program itself, but I think, too, in starting something by yourself, right, or with one other person, and especially if you two are remote at the outset, like, it's a pretty lonely endeavor.”

“If you went into the Anthropic office or the Open AI office and just pulled out 30 random people and pulled them, and you're like, what do you think our prospects are for, you know, hitting AGI and that that has really terrible catastrophic consequences for humanity? You know, you'd hear a pretty big range, but your median answer might be something like, I don't know, 20% chance that AI really has catastrophic consequences for society in the next decade. Let's say your friend was an astronomer, right? And you went over to their house and they had a telescope, and you looked up into their telescope and you saw this, like, asteroid hurtling towards Earth.”

“I think that the impact of AI and, you know, vibe coding and all of that is like, it certainly democratizes the ability to express an idea in code, and that puts a little bit more emphasis for us, again, on the individual behind that. But also, importantly, it really creates an emphasis on the execution of that idea. Because, like, I think at least the current subset of tools that people have at their disposal is quite good at getting from, like, zero to one. But then to take that to something that is, like, maintainable production-level code over the long term and, like, has a product that is truly differentiated, that's, like, the magic.”

“And so that helps us triage the top part that we want to review first. And from the 2,000 or so submissions that we get each hackathon, we distill that down to about 150 that we then go and interview. Each project gets two sets of team members' eyeballs on them. We have mentors, founders, other investors in the ecosystem that represent a judging panel that evaluates those projects from that subset of 150, and then that gets cut down to about 40 that are considered for category winners down to honorable mentions for the non-dilutive prize money, and then we distill it down to about 10 to 15 that we invest in at that 250k check size and then bring into the accelerator program.”

“So we were a nonprofit first. The fund came much later. So maybe I can like back up and say what Halcyon's worldview is. And we can share on. So super powerful AI is coming, whether you believe that means AGI or super intelligence or whatever, we can get into the distinctions there. It's going to radically reshape the world. Or you could almost think of the nonprofit as the platform team to the VC fund. You woke up tomorrow with an AI security VC fund, and then you thought, what would the platform team look like? How do we develop relationships with the labs and the researchers and the lawmakers and the biggest potential customers and the CISOs of the big companies? Well, that's just the thing that the nonprofit's been doing for the last two years, and so the fund really benefits from that.”

“I think one thing is like, has this person made expensive choices to do this thing? Did they walk away from something else that would have just been an easy path to a prestigious career, lots of money, a great life? Yeah, I took a big pay cut to do this work for sure, and so I love seeing people who do that kind of thing. I also love to see founders who really care about how their companies are governed.”

“Sycophantic AI, right? I hate when I ask ChatGPT a question and it's like literally like how much cumin should I put in this chili? And it's like incredible question. And I'm like, it was not an incredible question. It was a super mundane question. And I really worry that we're going to AB test AI into this mode that is on some level what we prefer, but on another level, what we really wouldn't want for society.”