Tom Gonser

As a VC or founder, you should be focusing on consumer. GPT, Claude, Lovable, Cursor all have one thing in common. Their growth was led by the individual consumer. AI unlocks massive value for individual consumers, in a sense that it disintermediates expertise and intelligence, and changes content interaction and buying behavior. Still, the focus of YC and most VC’s is still on ‘vertical AI’ which doesn’t require a massive leap of logic from the Vertical SaaS gold rush of the past decade. I get that vertical AI will unlock massive value and may be an easier wedge, but I’m yet to see anyone even remotely interested in the possibilities unlocked for consumers. AI has unlocked new content interaction possibilities, new ways to manage personal knowledge, and new behavioral patterns are already emerging. Consumer has been out of vogue for the past 3-4 years now, and now with consumer purchasing power increasing, right now may be the best time to build / grow a business. 3-5 years from now when consumer is the flavor of the month, it may be too late to dislodge the ones who’ve built on conviction and clarity today. Side note: I understand that the chat interface is still the preferred UI, but does no one else find it just a bit clunky / inconvenient? Some food for thought. 😏

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Most founders treat security as something you add later, but the best build it into the product from day one because it doesn’t just reduce risk, it creates trust that lets users move faster. Security isn’t defence. It’s what allows you to scale without friction. #ReplitPartner

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Had a great panel a couple weeks ago at Technology Association of Oregon on the future of stablecoin in Portland 🎉 We discussed a few key items: > Stablecoin is different than the crypto bull runs we have seen in the past. The value is not in speculation. It's in improved treasury operations. In access to the US banking system for the world. In anyone being able to send money reliably and easily. > With the growth of stablecoin, there will also be a growth in compliance. Adding more headcount is not the solution anymore. Companies need to lean into using AI agents. We're already seeing a 60-80% reduction in Average Handle Times for our customers who use AI agents. > The best way to know how to use AI is to also use it personally for your own work. Dave Dyk gave a great example of how to convert docs that you have to read into 5 min podcasts using Google's NotebookLM. Thanks Dana Lawrence for having me 🙏 #stablecoin #amlcompliance #agenticai

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Whether you're building a factory, an IP portfolio, a platform, an app, or any kind of asset, there's one foundational layer that drives long-term economic value: 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. Infrastructure is what makes everything else possible. It’s the base that enables you to build, buy, or scale. It becomes your moat—because it takes time, thought, and effort to design and create. It’s built to last, and it’s where value begins. In software, infrastructure makes integration, security, speed, and adoption easier. But this idea goes far beyond tech or tangible assets. It applies to business too—𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲: a solid, long-term strategy built with intention. So, what does it take to build great infrastructure? An 𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁—someone who sees what matters in the long run and can turn that vision into protocols. Because protocols are the blueprint of infrastructure. I believe every product or company we build should start with its own protocol. It’s hard work. But it’s also what creates enduring value—and enduring companies.

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Another missive from Chuck Cotter and Daniel Faierman. Thanks guys for continuing to help to ecosystem. If you've not seen their posts, peek at https://lnkd.in/gPiu9Z4z. Topics include: · CPG Co-Manufacturing Contracts · Early Stage VC Terms to Rarely Accept · More Dividends (and Dividend Recaps?) · 5 Raises, 5 Takeaways · A Founder's Guide to Secondaries · Standing Out Pre-Traction · The State of VC · Corporate Governance 101 · Anti-Dilution Provisions · Primer on QSBS · 4 Fund Raising DON'Ts · Liquidation Preferences · Understanding SAFEs · Understanding Convertible Notes · Understanding Prorata Rights · Founders & Athletes · Employee Stock Options Demystified · The Art of Start-Up Valuation · What Is A Term Sheet Anyway? Check it out ...

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Today, a bipartisan group of leaders in the House took an important step in introducing crypto market structure legislation: the CLARITY Act. This follows the recent progress on sound stablecoin legislation and is crucial for ensuring US leadership in blockchain technologies. The CLARITY Act shows a meaningful effort to strike the right balance between laying out appropriate guardrails for the industry while also supporting responsible entrepreneurship and innovation. It signals strong momentum toward smart regulation. We look forward to working with policymakers to ensure strong consumer protections that build public trust while giving entrepreneurs the clarity — and level playing field — they need to keep innovating. It’s time. Congress should move quickly and pass market structure legislation. The future of crypto in America depends on it. 🇺🇸

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Inertia is the commercial fusion energy company, and today we're taking a big step forward with $450M in funding! With support from Bessemer Venture Partners GV (Google Ventures), Modern Capital, Threshold Ventures, Neo, Uncork Capital, Long Journey, and WndrCo we're taking proven physics from the lab to build the industrial foundation for gigawatt-scale fusion power plants. The road to get here involved $30 billion in government funding for inertial confinement fusion experiments, the groundbreaking demonstrations of fusion that works at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the incredible ingenuity of my co-founders Andrea (Annie) Kritcher and Mike Dunne, and the team of DO-ers we’re building at Inertia. Now, with our funding, we're going to: 🔆 Build and scale the production of the world's most powerful laser  🔆 Build the world's first fusion fuel factory to mass produce fusion targets 🔆 Design and build the first gigawatt, utility-scale fusion energy power plant We're bringing star power to Earth. Read the founders' letter: https://inertia.com/news/ Read the press release: https://lnkd.in/gVEEYEpv And come build with us: https://inertia.com/jobs

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Today is the due date of California’s Fair Investment Practices' first annual demographic report, and my team at Fabric VC is proud to report on our 100% diverse-led portfolio. 🎉 We look forward to seeing other funds like ours changing the paradigm in VC, and will be calling out those whose numbers look far different than ours to start making intentional choices to create a more diverse VC system. #FIPVCC

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From Glue to Gold: A Lesson for All You Wrappers Out There In the early days of digital video, we were the "LLM company" of our time. C-Cube Microsystems dominated in building MPEG chips. Every major OEM depended on us. Entire product roadmaps were built around our silicon, and we were rolling. Then the special requests started coming in. Customers wanted small modifications to suit their markets. Different interfaces. Support for their systems. Each vertical had its own quirks. We were a standard chip company. We told them no. Customization was their problem to solve. So they solved it. They initially built "glue logic" around our chips. Extra components to handle I/O, demodulation, integration, and all the messy edge cases needed to make real products work. Then a startup came along and began to integrate all of that into single chips. We thought it was great. They were taking on the headache we didn't want. We were successful in our own right, but what we missed was what came next. As MPEG processor competition increased, customers switched between us and other vendors. But they always needed the glue to fit their specific design needs. We fought to get designs wins, but that startup quickly became a critical dependency across nearly every system, with or without us. That company? Broadcom. Yes, that one. That same pattern is playing out again today in enterprise AI. Frontier models are advancing fast. It is tempting to believe they will capture all the value. Seems easy to dismiss many of today's B2B AI startups as “just wrappers.” That is short-sighted. The models are converging. The real differentiation is shifting to the layer that connects AI to enterprise reality: data, workflows, systems, and users. RAG pipelines. Vector databases. Prompting. Interfaces. Training and inference are the MPEG chip. Everything else is the glue logic. And just like before, model providers have plenty to do and are effectively saying: customization is your problem to solve. That gap is where the next set of great companies is being built. As enterprises grapple with DIY efforts, they'll need "glue" to get things to work, opening the door for new AI startups to go deep in specific verticals, solving the nuanced integration, data and security requirements unique to those domains, and building indispensable relationships with those customers. My advice: find a compelling market you understand and transform it. While you may start out as a wrapper, that's how you learn what the customer actually needs. But your goal should be to eventually own the "gold", the specialized, integrated workflow that makes the underlying model secondary. In tech, the noise we try to avoid is often where the biggest opportunities are hiding. I learned that the hard way. Curious how others are thinking about this. Are wrappers being underestimated? #AI #LLM #MPEG #B2B #startups #vc #markets Ammar Hanafi Kate Fry Neil Nag Moment Ventures

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Congratulations to the Stablecore team! A partnership with Q2 enables hundreds of banks and credit unions, including institutions like Bank of Utah and Amarillo National Bank, to quickly implement digital asset capabilities through a single integration. This partnership comes at a time when many institutions are facing infrastructure hurdles as they evaluate how they can support stablecoin adoption compliantly and at-scale. Stablecore is powering the next wave of fintech and we’re proud to be in Alex Treece and Nick E.'s corner.

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I've spent two decades providing capital for businesses. From funding my own startups to providing capital for mature companies. If you're a founder or small business owner, here is a simple cheat-sheet to help you fund your business the right way! https://lnkd.in/gifc2GRR

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Tesla’s recent robotaxi launch in Austin introduced a $4.20 flat fare—a clear nod to cannabis culture, echoing Elon Musk’s past 420 references. This pricing choice seems less about affordability and more about sparking buzz in a crowded mobility market. Can playful branding like this drive consumer interest, or does it risk overshadowing the technology itself? #Tesla #Marketing #Branding”

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Sustained ~252–291 GiB/s of HBM memory throughput on H100s under decode load — essentially hitting the hardware roofline. This matters because HBM throughput, not FLOPs, is the real bottleneck in LLM inference. By keeping memory nearly fully saturated, I’ve unlocked far higher efficiency and throughput than standard engines. The result: 0.9–1.36M tokens/sec with ~0.1 ms first-token latency  #AI #LLM #GPURouter #H100 #Inference #CostEfficiency #Innovation #DeepLearning #AIInfrastructure #HighPerformanceComputing NVIDIA AMD OpenAI Google Shilpa Kolhatkar Keith Strier a16z speedrun

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Found this interesting article "Do AI-enabled companies need fewer people?" by Laurie Voss within the Venture Capital topic on AI Colorado. AI-Native vs Traditional SaaS: AI-native startups operate with roughly 60% fewer people at $10M ARR (15-20 vs 50-70), generate 6x higher revenue per employee ($3.48M vs $580K), and raise 30% larger Series A rounds ($51.9M vs $39.9M). Layoffs Continue: Over 126,000 workers were cut at US tech companies in 2025, with the pace carrying into 2026. Tech job growth has flatlined since 2023 in what the author calls another K-shaped graph. Interesting times ahead.

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Interesting take here from Tim Rowe from State of Streaming, comparing The Trade Desk's new OpenTTD platform with FirstPartyCapital's new model for corporate innovation. It's a strong validation of our offering for it to be positioned as an alternative solution to one of the greatest adtech companies of all time. We are working hard to give clients streamlined access to our portfolio, in a modular way, so that they can build a stack that is tailor-made to their specific needs. https://lnkd.in/eEe9-WwW #adtech #data #tech #business #media

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It is great to be working with RaviKiran Gopalan and Aditya Akella as they build Canyon Code, the workflow intelligence layer for heterogenous AI datacenters. Proud to see these fellow Indian Institute of Technology, Madras alums taking a research-led approach to tackle a large problem within enterprise AI today: abstracting the complexity of heterogenous datacenters to deliver agentic workflow level transparency. NewBuild Venture Capital co-led this pre-seed round alongside Cota Capital and Blackhorn Ventures.

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👀 Web3 x AI is accelerating, aligning economics with intelligence. In our latest blog along the AI x Web3 Market Map series, my colleague Abdul Al Ali explores this innovation in the Sui Foundation ecosystem. What we found: Sui is quite supportive of its AI founders and projects. This alignment of investors, infrastructure and interfaces across the Sui ecosytem sustains durable adoption. Their team and social accounts often post partnerships with Sui AI builders, including Atoma Network (inference layer on Sui) that enables decentralized and scalable inference on Sui’s network. Abdul is active alongside Alex N. in convening the Sui community together in Chicago, recently speaking on a panel along other AI innovators from #TalusNetwork and #Lofi. Explore more on Web3 x AI on Sui below:

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