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I'm a Sneakerhead and VC focused on redefining partnership in the world of venture…
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Phin Barnes reposted thisPhin Barnes reposted this“I would say it helped me kind of solve my own problems … just answering Jordan every morning and getting him through his problems.” - A Dayton, OH student on "Jordan," the social-emotional learning chatbot created by our portfolio company SchoolAI More in NPR: https://lnkd.in/gCFgiZNrSchools are experimenting with AI with little evidence or policy to guide themSchools are experimenting with AI with little evidence or policy to guide them
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Phin Barnes shared thisIncredible founders. Massive vision. Glad Daniel Hanover and Toni Oloko chose to work with Dorm Room Fund and to build with The General Partnership (cc Daniel Portillo)Phin Barnes shared thisYesterday we took out a full-page ad in The New York Times for dentures. Not exactly the category you expect to see taking over a page in the Business section, but roughly 1 in 8 Americans rely on them and almost nobody talks about them outside dentistry. I’ve always thought that was odd. A denture is one of the most personal things a person wears. It affects how they eat, speak, smile, and whether they feel like themselves sitting across the table from their family. So why have dentures been made largely the same way for decades? We’ve spent a lot of time at Dandy changing that. That work became Dandy Fusion™ Dentures. It combines a digitally engineered base with hand-poured acrylic, so dentists don’t have to make the same trade-offs between precision, appearance, and repairability. It took years to get there. Figured it was worth putting the conversation in front of a few more people.
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Phin Barnes shared thisGenuine happiness is rare in life, much less in work - especially as AI p(doom) rises - but every time Dorm Room Fund is mentioned I am happy. From vision to recruiting and interviews for the first team in Philly, through multiple incredible leaders to what DRF is today and where the community will go in the future - so grateful to be part of this story and even more grateful for the friends I've made along the way. Can't wait to meet all the new teams this fall. Nice work Mrs. Molly Fowler. #respect.Phin Barnes shared thisI know I'm a broken record, but Dorm Room Fund is magic because of our people. The The New York Times journalist Erin Griffith got it bang-on today: we stand on the shoulders of giants. And it's true again-- thanks to the DRF community, we've raised a ✨ very-over-subscribed new $50M fund✨, and 💜launched a new brand 💜, so we can keep backing the best student and recent grad/drop-out founders. As our people thrive, so does DRF-- 14 years in, we're lucky to count incredible founders, investors, and LPs in our DRF alumni ranks. 30% of our investors in Fund 2 are DRF alumni and their funds. And it's very on-brand that our most successful investment has been into one of our own-- Michael Truell at Cursor. Today we get an excuse to celebrate all of the amazing people that have made our success to-date possible, folks like Claire Smilow and Aryan Shah who joined as student investors and became investors in our funds. Folks like Josh Kopelman and Phin Barnes who dreamed up DRF in the first place and let us fly when it was time to go independent. Folks like Rei Wang, CeCe Cheng, and Chauncey Kerr Hamilton who shepherded us through our first iterations. Folks like Toni Oloko and Will M. and Kashish Gupta who let us invest in their companies. And people like Bill Trenchard, Ann Miura-Ko, Iris Choi, Hayley Bay Barna, Shane McAndrew, CFA, Lewis Hower, Ekwutozia Nwabuzor, Doug Bernstein, and Ben Cmejla who have helped hold the rudder at moments when things were not going quite so smoothly. Most of all, DRF works because the humans on our team care so very deeply-- so the biggest thank you to Madison Jacox, Conor Harbeck, the DRF student managing partners, and our student investors for making this magic machine so much fun to work on, every darn day. To the DRF Community: let's take a very brief, and very well earned victory lap today! And if you haven't applied to join the student investing team before Thursday's deadline, take this as your sign! #DRF4Life 💜 Article here: https://lnkd.in/gXiPKi5uCollege Students Flex Their Power in A.I. Investment FrenzyCollege Students Flex Their Power in A.I. Investment Frenzy
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Phin Barnes shared thisinformed individual choice is the best way to fix healthcare in America. Thatch is leading the way.Phin Barnes shared this🚨Today, we’re announcing Thatch raised a $108M Series C at a $1B valuation. But the bigger story is the idea we’re betting on 👇 Healthcare is the biggest purchase that you never really get to make. For decades, employers have chosen one health plan for everyone. We think there’s a better model: give people a health budget and let them choose the insurance and care that actually fits their life. Healthcare serves whoever controls the dollar. We believe more of that power should belong to the consumer. The idea is catching on. In the last twelve months, our ARR has grown nearly 7x, and more than 5,000 employers now use Thatch. Grateful to raise this round from incredible partners at The General Partnership, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Scale Venture Partners, Avid Ventures, SemperVirens VC, Quiet Capital, and QuantumLight. I’m especially excited to highlight ADP Ventures, Paychex, and Eli Lilly and Company as strategic investors. When companies this deeply embedded in how America runs payroll and pays for healthcare back an individual-first model, it’s a sign the shift is real. More importantly, none of this happens without our team, or without the employers making a simple but significant bet: that their people know what their families need better than they ever could. We’re building a healthcare system people love by changing how we fund it. And we’re just getting started.
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Phin Barnes reposted thisPhin Barnes reposted thisfal and Kenneth L. took my interactive detective show, gave it rabbits and dragons and I'm here for it. One of the biggest learnings for me on the journey of Whispers has been seeing what people do with and to it. As Pickford has begun working with fal and the new MiniMax h3 models, we've begun exploring how real time video would change how we did our show (which if you've seen, is currently on a unity game engine). The demo that we showed at Genmedia was fun, and a total crowd pleaser. This was genuinely inspiring and cool to see. Yeah it's my detective with a random blue rabbit on his shoulder and that makes very little story sense, but it does open up the storytelling canvas if something like that is possible. And while with this new industry wide innovation, the obvious question has been, well if the audience can input anything, will it show up, accurately. But the real question I'm trying to peace together as a storyteller is, if you allow the audience to input anything, how far do you let them go before it breaks the story... OR more importantly the character? The characters are who we follow and fall in love with in the stories we enjoy... if they fail to be that character... well all bets are off. Excited to keep tinkering! Pickford
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Phin Barnes reposted thisPhin Barnes reposted thisMost security teams write rules for attacks they already know about, then wait for an alert. David Hunt and the Unmanned team come at it from the attacker's side. David developed Vex which acts as an "Offensive SOC." It collects activity from everywhere an attacker might go, including systems with no API, which can feed it by email. It triages each signal in real time. Then, instead of matching events against thousands of rules, an AI analyst works through a specific question: given everything we know, has this environment been compromised? Other models then try to prove that answer wrong, and a finding counts only if it holds up. Every human comment or change of disposition goes back into the loop, so the system keeps learning about your environment over time. The General Partnership backed David at formation because he's spent a decade on offense, from building Caldera at MITRE to Prelude, Praetorian and Rapid7. This post shows how that background shapes the product. Unmanned is looking for a few design partners. If you run security or detection engineering and want to shape what VEX becomes, comment or DM me and I'll connect you with David. https://lnkd.in/gZumgahn
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Phin Barnes reposted thisPhin Barnes reposted thisModels get all the news, but the harness deserves at least as much attention. Evals help qualify the combination! Strands Harness with GLM-5.3 was 46% cheaper than Claude Code with Opus 5 on a mini eval suite I built for #Valkey with mo-eval. Both passed all three tasks. Let's dive in. mo-evals built the tasks from merged Valkey PRs, covering three different kinds of bugs (algorithmic, arithmetic, and adversarial input): 1️⃣ Silent Data Loss 2️⃣ Integer Overflow that crashes the process 3️⃣ Stream validation gap The agents get failing tests, no bug reports, & minimal prompts. Every combination we cover here successfully completed each task. Claude Code with Opus 5 cost $4.47 for the suite. Strands with GLM-5.3 passed the same tests for $2.43. But how much of that was the model, and how much was the harness? Claude Code with GLM-5.3 cost $3.30. So switching from Opus 5 to GLM-5.3 saved 26%. Keeping GLM-5.3 and switching to Strands stacked another 26%. The harness and the model are one system. This is why our evals approach assesses the combination. You can try this on your own repo: https://lnkd.in/gUeVCe-t
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Phin Barnes reposted thisIf you're not lucky enough to be a student at the Texas Immersive Institute, we're doing a free online screening Monday at 7pm. Details here: https://lnkd.in/g3JG_6hRPhin Barnes reposted thisWhat if the detective could hear the audience? Join us Tuesday, September 22, at 3:30 p.m. for Whispers, a live, interactive AI cinema experience where the audience helps shape an original murder mystery as it unfolds. Using your phone, send Detective Marcus Kent clues, theories, and unexpected ideas. An AI-powered narrative engine weaves the audience’s contributions into new dialogue, scenes, and twists in real time. No two screenings produce the same story or ending. Three-time Emmy and Peabody Award winner Bernie Su, the creator of Whispers, will join us in person for this special screening. Whispers features permissioned performances from SAG-AFTRA voice actors and is a 2026 Primetime Emmy finalist. Participation is encouraged but never required. Come whisper, or simply watch the case unfold. Tuesday, September 22 at 3:30 p.m. 📍 G.B. Dealey Center for New Media (DMC), Room 5.102 Approximately one hour
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Phin Barnes shared thisFun to be back in conversation with Akash Pasricha on The Information TiTVPhin Barnes shared thisAI has a distribution problem. Massive data center investment creates intelligence, but without the systems to deliver it, the people who need it won't benefit. Phin Barnes joined Akash Pasricha on The Information's TITV to explain what distributed compute could look like:
Phin Barnes commented on a post
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great job Molly Fowler. Incredible what you and the team have done over the last few years -- Now, back to work!
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Jeremy Fiance it’s good they chose the stadium and not the Haas Pavilion. Data is big in all sports but bricks and hoops don’t mix!
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Phin Barnes liked thisConsumers should be able to choose their own healthcare, and I'm so excited about this launch because we're making it 10x easier to do so!!Phin Barnes liked thisEvery group health plan I've ever seen has the same flaw: everyone gets the same plan. A 24-year-old with no health history and someone managing a chronic condition end up choosing from the exact same options, weighted the exact same way. Group insurance was never built to account for who you actually are. When we built Thatch, we didn't just want to give people more health insurance choices. We wanted to give them health insurance that was optimized for their life. Now you can answer a few questions about your life: your prescriptions, your providers, and what youre actually optimizing for. Then get the plans the best fit you and your specific situation, with the trade-offs laid out in plain language. This is how choosing a health insurance plan works now inside Thatch.
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Phin Barnes reacted on thisPhin Barnes reacted on thisI created the Compound a long time ago in a row home in South West Philly! Then in 2008 I moved it to the Bronx! Then in 2021 I moved it to Red Hook Brooklyn. I always say I built a creative sparring gym for creatives. Through the years we have done projects for ESPN LISTERINE® Professional DraftKings Inc. DraftKings Inc. @Rich Paul and a host of others. I wanted to create a feeling like no other! I’ve ask a bunch of my friends what they think about the Compound and here are their thoughts! Thank you GOD for everything! 🙏🏾7 filmed and edited Andre Cole
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Phin Barnes liked thisKenneth L. and the fal team are crazy good! The speed at which they build things is incredible!Phin Barnes liked thisWhispers is Pickford's interactive murder mystery, where the audience shapes the story live. As part of Pickford x fal, I built WhispMax, an H3 LoRA trained on the show's Unity footage. This is one most complex loRas I have ever trained. To learned more about how I trained this LoRa, check out the X link in the comments.
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Phin Barnes liked thisPhin Barnes liked thisI know I'm a broken record, but Dorm Room Fund is magic because of our people. The The New York Times journalist Erin Griffith got it bang-on today: we stand on the shoulders of giants. And it's true again-- thanks to the DRF community, we've raised a ✨ very-over-subscribed new $50M fund✨, and 💜launched a new brand 💜, so we can keep backing the best student and recent grad/drop-out founders. As our people thrive, so does DRF-- 14 years in, we're lucky to count incredible founders, investors, and LPs in our DRF alumni ranks. 30% of our investors in Fund 2 are DRF alumni and their funds. And it's very on-brand that our most successful investment has been into one of our own-- Michael Truell at Cursor. Today we get an excuse to celebrate all of the amazing people that have made our success to-date possible, folks like Claire Smilow and Aryan Shah who joined as student investors and became investors in our funds. Folks like Josh Kopelman and Phin Barnes who dreamed up DRF in the first place and let us fly when it was time to go independent. Folks like Rei Wang, CeCe Cheng, and Chauncey Kerr Hamilton who shepherded us through our first iterations. Folks like Toni Oloko and Will M. and Kashish Gupta who let us invest in their companies. And people like Bill Trenchard, Ann Miura-Ko, Iris Choi, Hayley Bay Barna, Shane McAndrew, CFA, Lewis Hower, Ekwutozia Nwabuzor, Doug Bernstein, and Ben Cmejla who have helped hold the rudder at moments when things were not going quite so smoothly. Most of all, DRF works because the humans on our team care so very deeply-- so the biggest thank you to Madison Jacox, Conor Harbeck, the DRF student managing partners, and our student investors for making this magic machine so much fun to work on, every darn day. To the DRF Community: let's take a very brief, and very well earned victory lap today! And if you haven't applied to join the student investing team before Thursday's deadline, take this as your sign! #DRF4Life 💜 Article here: https://lnkd.in/gXiPKi5uCollege Students Flex Their Power in A.I. Investment FrenzyCollege Students Flex Their Power in A.I. Investment Frenzy
Experience & Education
Projects
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Dorm Room Fund
- Present
See projectHelping students fund students as a partner and advisor because I believe that when small amounts of capital can find remarkable students with big ideas, amazing things can happen.
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Design+Startup
- Present
See projectOur goal with Design+Startup is to create a design community within the startup industry. We partnered with IDEO and created a forum for designers to speak to other designers and provide actionable, tactical advice that will improve the craft of design in the startup industry.
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