Eric Vishria
@ericvishria
GP @Benchmark. Director: @ConfluentInc @Amplitude_HQ @Contentful @CerebrasSystems @Benchling @CommerceLayer @acuitymd @FireworksAI_HQ @quilterai @pomerium_io
This is the definition of VC that we aspire to.
And I have a different definition of “venture capitalist” than the world has recently adopted. To me, it’s someone whose personal involvement and efforts can materially impact your chance of success. The work not the $$. Others are investors. There are few true VCs in the world.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had amazing American open models?
The dominance of Chinese open models is undersold in this post. Top four open models being Chinese is one thing, but also is the full top 10 of models were pre and post train is done in house, and 18 of the top 20.
I’ve worked for a few companies now from start-up through IPO and beyond. Here’s five lessons I’ve carried with me as an investor. None of them show up in a spreadsheet. 1. Culture is a company’s second product: Companies have two products - The one they sell to their customers…
Do you have any experience(s) with public companies that have shaped how you view them as an investor? I'll start:
I'm observing a mini Moravec's paradox within robotics: gymnastics that are difficult for humans are much easier for robots than "unsexy" tasks like cooking, cleaning, and assembling. It leads to a cognitive dissonance for people outside the field, "so, robots can parkour &…
After 2 great years at benchmark, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the firm in order to pursue a new adventure. Benchmark simply excels in the craft of early stage investing and forming deep partnerships with founders. I’ll always be grateful to have had the opportunity…
Peter said a few things on the podcast that required me to mull on them for a few days before I really got them. This was one of them. Values and incentives both drive human behavior, but they can get easily muddled if we're not careful.
One of the coolest parts of doing this podcast is the ability to get specific advice from amazing people about how to do my job. Peter's advice for me about how to be a better VC was basically to cultivate the ability to know a special person when you meet them. Which may sound…
> 2500 tokens per second > 40x faster than Sonnet-4 > 4 trillion transistor wafers (19x Nvidia B200) These are impressive numbers, but nothing beats a live demo. 1 million free tokens per day of lightning-fast qwen3-32b and qwen3-235b from @CerebrasSystems in Cline. Link below.
New Qwen3-235B-A22B-2507 is here, taking the spot as the SOTA non-reasoning open weights LLM from Kimi K2, just 9 days later and while being 4x smaller! 🤯 It’s amazing to have multiple open models at the level of closed providers, bridging the prior gaps for agentic use and…
Some news - I raised $175M for Verified Capital with a plan to back transformative technology companies at any stage of their journey. Thanks to @_IainMartin for the writeup in Forbes. forbes.com/sites/iainmart…
There is an irony that Lina Khan’s activism has resulted in deals that are far worse for everyone except the people she was targeting.
HUGE.
The world's fastest AI inference is now available in @awscloud Marketplace. It's easier than ever to access models like @AIatMeta Llama, @Alibaba_Qwen, @deepseek_ai, consolidate billing, and experience the speed of Cerebras.
Today at RAISE in Paris, I share the stage with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Hosted by RAISE CEO Henri Delahaye, the far ranging conversation touched on AGI, Open source versus closed source AI models, the geopolitical impact of Chinese open source models, the flywheel of…
Really well articulated.
There are different reasons/benefits with every OLTP DB architecture. I would classify them into largely three types and I have run and managed all three versions in my lifetime. Pick your option based on what your company needs 1. Full local storage. This is kind of how we ran…
Do yourself a favor and listen to @btaylor in this @stratechery interview. I consistently find the best entrepreneurs (and investors) are students of history, deeply thinking through WHY things evolved the way they did. Bret drips this. Wow. open.spotify.com/episode/5IT9TT…
Every single one of the 11 Meta superintelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. 7 China, 1 India, 1 Australia, 1 UK, 1 South Africa. 8 are PhD or PhD dropouts in the US. Immigration is key to US AI innovation.
George Church on Dwarkesh, talking about spotting talent, is one of the best bits on the subject. Also the clearest view on benefits of multidisciplinarity I've read in a while.
When I woke up today, I thought "I would like to take some data in Kafka, get it into Iceberg via Tableflow, and query it using Trino." And obviously I wanted to write my queries in English. Happily @OlenaKutsenko was way ahead of me: youtube.com/watch?v=EnxfTd…
AI x bio accelerating (and super cool to see the next gen in my family be part of it :-))
thrilled to share what we've been working on @arcinstitute... a step toward accurate in silico predictions of how cells respond to perturbations
.@FireworksAI_HQ processing 5 trillion tokens per day. Insane scale. Compare to MSFT where Satya mentioned 50 trillion tokens in all of April.
🔥 Day 7/7 Massive scale with @FireworksAI_HQ Virtual Cloud 🔥 I'm excited to announce the GA of the Fireworks Virtual Cloud, our foundational infrastructure that abstracts away the complexity of managing global GPU deployments, and scaling inference and post-training across…
If you care about AI silicon, this is a thoughtful read.
An interview with a current high-ranking $META employee working in their silicon unit hints that the industry is starting to shift more towards custom silicon vs $NVDA GPU: 1. He thinks GPUs have a lot of overhead that is wasted, but up until this point, the industry has not had…