daniel ha & gadi borovich / antigravity capital
slice podcast · 2026-05-12 · 37 min
Substance score
47 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
What our scoring noted
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
Insight Density
The episode is dominated by biographical origin story with occasional operational nuggets buried across 37 minutes. The Puentes talent-pipeline framing and the diligence-engine concept are genuinely interesting, but the insight-to-filler ratio is low for a B2B operator audience.
The bottleneck now is to have people who are thinking the right way of approaching these tools and approaching the world.
In 2007, 2008, if you were a startup founder, there's a euphemism for being unemployed.
Originality
The Puentes-as-talent-infrastructure-for-the-fund angle is a genuinely non-obvious framing that redefines a community program as a core fund strategy, but most of the episode recycles familiar GP-dynamics and origin-story tropes without first-principles depth.
what is a venture capital fund, if not that, right? Like you're trying to correct inefficiencies in them.
We started building the diligence engine at the end of 2024 and built into the shape we were using at the beginning of 25.
Guest Caliber
Daniel Ha is a credible practitioner operator — co-founder of Disqus at meaningful scale through a real exit — but both guests are early-stage emerging managers on a $2M pilot fund, limiting the depth of hard-won pattern recognition they can draw on.
4 million websites and 2 billion monthly unique users by the time you had exited to Zeta Global in 2017
Fun one was two million. your guys's pilot fund for antigravity that invested in 14 companies.
Specificity & Evidence
The episode has a decent number of concrete data points — Disqus metrics, hackathon numbers, fund size, portfolio company names — but much of the operational discussion remains at the level of principle rather than named metrics, timelines, or dollar outcomes.
400 engineers applied and we only accepted 70
There are four hackathons happening in Latin America, one in Bolivia, another in Argentina, another in Brazil, another in Chile.
Conversational Craft
The host did solid biographical prep but asks almost exclusively open narrative questions and offers no real pushback or follow-up probing; the one mild challenge ('elephant in the room, Daniel, you're not Latino') is the closest the episode comes to productive friction.
elephant in the room, Daniel, you're not Latino in America. How are you guys thinking about Puentas as part of anti-gravity strategy going forward?
love what you guys are doing with the point is program. think it's absolutely incredible. And the impact is huge.
Conversation analysis
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.
Filler words
Episode notes
Most of the AI conversation in venture is about tools. Who's running Claude Code, who built the better agent stack, who's moving faster. Gadi and Daniel are making a different argument. The tools are already everywhere, that's not the constraint anymore. The constraint is formation. People who've developed the right instincts for working with these tools, which mostly comes from having been in environments that built those instincts. And then Gadi pulls the thread: what the Puentes program is doing, finding engineers in Latin America who have the ability but never had the rails. It’s the same thesis, running in both directions at once. Daniel Ha dropped out of UC Davis in 2007 to go through Y Combinator and spent nearly a decade building Disqus, a blog comment platform that reached 4 million websites and 2 billion monthly users, before its acquisition by Zeta Global. Gadi Borovich is from Montevideo, Uruguay. He got into Minerva University, tracked down the Wefunder office across three different addresses until someone let him in, grew their market share to 45%, and built XX, an accelerator for technical outsiders, before most people his age had a degree.
Full transcript
37 minTranscribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Fabri Cara: The tools make it such that access to cogeneration is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck now is to have people who are thinking the right way of approaching these tools and approaching the world. And because it's so competitive in the hottest parts of this country, you need to think about who is not being exposed to this, who's not being brought in well enough and educated or given the opportunity to think about it right. And so now the two things we were doing, the thing that we talk about as like... AI core to Hentai Gravity, they start to overlap and now become smaller. They are the most ambitious engineers in their whole country. They want to be surrounded with the best. The other observation is in some ways what this program is like a portal of talent, right? Like we're finding excellent people outside the rails of Silicon Valley and putting them up on the rails. And what is a venture capital fund? if not that, right? Like you're trying to correct inefficiencies in them. Talents should have every single resource to be the best. if they ⁓ thing on my end. These two are some of my favorites. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah, they are such a special duo. I actually just got back from meeting the third cohort of the Pointis program and was blown away at the level of talent that Gotti and Daniel have been able to pull together in this cohort. They're truly creating the firm that they wish they had and the relationships and the tentacles that the Pointis program is creating amongst not only the cohort, but within Gotti and Daniel as anti-gravity and also the larger ecosystem, the portfolio. The other Latin Americans in San Francisco is just growing in also very deep within each cohort. So it's really awesome to see and experience in person and they're truly building something very special. Let's get into it. Welcome to the slice pod. We're excited that you're joining us today. You're the co-founders of antigravity investing in AI native founders. You're a Bay area native, former founder of the blog comment platform that was acquired in 2017. Gaudi, you're from Montevideo, dropped out of Minerva University. We're running an accelerator before most people finish college. And we have so much to unpack today about the both of you and the fun that you've built together. Daniel, you grew up in the Bay Area. I read that your father was a big influence for you, career. I'm curious, when did you go from being inspired by what was around you to wanting to build something yourself? I grew up in a town called Mopitas, about an hour south of San Francisco. Both my parents came from Vietnam. My dad studied engineering for about a year before switching to business. He was a CPA. His interest in technology was all around me. He liked to bring things home. For example, our first computer at home was a Apple II and then the second one was the first Mac. These were old computers at that time. He would tigger with them and he would show me. He wasn't programmer or someone who knew how they necessarily worked, but he would put it in front of me and then he would play with it. His curiosity about the world was my primary influence. By the time I reached maybe eight or nine, he made me the primary computer user of the house. took pride in that. And I went from that to feeling good about being the person who knows how things work in my house. that moved on to me playing around with programming. That little bit of programming ended up you meeting your co-founder, Jason, who you've known since seventh grade actually, right? And then you guys decided to build something while you were at UC Davis. Jason and met in seventh grade in algebra class. I met the person that loves talking about computers as much as I did. By the time we got to college, we ended up doing the same major, computer science and engineering. Between seventh grade and the first year of college, he had become one of the best and smartest programmers that I've seen around me. I had dwindled to become one of the least sophisticated computer scientists. in the school. I was like just a tourist at that point. In that major, I just asked him a lot of questions and I was the friend that he would tutor on the side. What I liked to do at the time was always figure out what to do as a business. I was very entrepreneurial and I wanted to start things and play around with projects. Computer science, this was 2004, was very much you start with C, you move to Java, then C++, and you learn a lot of lower level languages, a lot of core theory and methodologies, I was bored out of my mind. Mostly trying to get my bearings with I-Thon moving from PHP. PHP was a primary markup slash scripting language that I used on the web. I think MySpace was built in PHP. YouTube was probably the first big I-Thon shop. In the journey of learning I-Thon again, we were working on Python related projects, me and Jason. At the time, it was the notion of building for the web. When you talk about computer science, In 2004 and being a programmer, was mostly like you're programs on windows or building an app on Mac OS or OS 10. And so building for the web was novel. It was like a enabling condition where you're like, ⁓ shit, now I can build stuff. Not really think about the underlying architecture that much and get really easy distribution. You're not printing software to CDs or uploading them to a server where people are downloading this binary file and you are just. creating website, they're clicking stuff and it's just working. And so that was huge for us at the time. That was exciting. So we wanted to build a lot of stuff. You're very humble about it, but I did my homework, discussed through to 4 million websites and 2 billion monthly unique users by the time you had exited to Zeta Global in 2017. What is that compounding growth over a decade feel like when you're living it? The first year feels slow because you don't really know what you're trying to get to. There's not like a goal of hey, we have product market fifth. You're still trying to figure out what your product is and who you're trying to serve, especially when you are in the startup world where there's not a clear map on what milestones need to look like to be successful. Or you can look across the street and see another startup and seeing what they're publishing on Twitter to measure your growth against. You mostly are bathing in insecurity and you're like, all right, should I be doing this? I'm 21 now and if I can go back to school tomorrow, I might be able to finish. around 25 and I can still get a job. There's a stuff you're still wrestling with. And the first year for us was deliberate. It was slow, but we were having fun and we're like, there's no better way to learn and feel like we have control and agency and what we want to go to. And so we poured ourselves into it. I think by year two, it started to pick up and not for like, not like, oh man, it's finally working. We didn't really realize it. We had to look back and say, oh, this was working. You're grinding as much as possible in a way that You didn't look up to compare yourself that much. About a year, three-ish, and we had a bit more money, and startups were becoming less like a social pariah. In 2007, 2008, if you were a startup founder, there's a euphemism for being unemployed. It wasn't like a part of your career in which it was a celebrated fact of what you're doing. I'm gonna raise a little bit of capital and take my own hard work and agency and bring it to customers. Being a startup founder was more, are you sure you want to do that? That seems kind of stupid. So I think by year three, it felt more comfortable to talk about, like, this is what we're doing. And everyone's like, oh man, I get it. We were in San Francisco. So we felt the energy. So I think by that time you start to lift your head up and you start comparing yourself to everyone around you. So the benchmarks for what progress looks like starts to shift in good ways. And also. in more debilitating ways when you're like, oh man, am I growing faster than the other person? This foundation that you have, this pillar of your character of being able to compound into things as a founder is great, but it's also amazingly shown in the way that you guys are building anti-gravity. But Gari, now it's over to you. Let's go to Montevideo. You graduated from a bilingual high school. And then this was the part that I didn't know about you actually. that you left for Kibbutz in Israel, where your job was producing toy fish. You wake up at four or five a.m. pulling hundreds of kilos of fish out of artificial lakes. What was even going through your mind these mornings? It was one of the best times in my life. So, Kibbutz, for people that don't know, it's one of the few places on earth where communism has worked in the modern world. Depending on the Kibbutz, it's like 500 to 2000 families. There's no private property. And the wealth is of the community, but they're very intelligent in the way they transact with the rest of the Israeli society. A lot of the Eskimo team are very wealthy. They have successful companies as a community. I went there because I was in a program learning Hebrew in the second half of the day. The reason why I chose that was number one, my dad knew that would be very fun for me and formative. And number two, it was cheaper than going to the actual cities like Tel Aviv and only learning Hebrew. Hardly why I went was thinking maybe I would go study there abroad. And it was one of the best times in my life because it might be the only moment in my life in which I didn't care about my job. I was just doing it because I had to and I wanted to have fun all the other time. And I was the youngest in the community. It was like a program of 90 people and I was 18. The average was probably closer to 30. It was people from all over the world moving to Israel to start a new life. It was the first time I left the context that I always knew. And the first time I had the opportunity to figure out a little bit more, like why I really am. I grew a lot. It was 5 a.m. shifts. I would bike to these artificial lakes, producing koi fish. I was part of the entire production line, pulling a suit and going to the lakes and food to all the fish, getting them out from the lakes in really large nets, putting them into smaller pools, injecting them by hand with antibiotics, cleaning all their poop from the lakes and then all the pools and stuff like that. And then... packaging them up and sending them out. How do you go from Randall and Koi fish to San Francisco? While I was there, I was preparing the SATs and I reached out to a URI friend I knew that got into Minerva and he helped me apply. It was the one school I applied to in the US. They gave me full financial aid. So I went back to URI for two months to get my passport stamped and I immediately flew to SF to start college. I know in 2020 you launched Xx, the accelerator investing 70 K for about 2 % ownership. know that's where you two met as well, but Gotti, how did this come about? Yeah. Xx was like an accelerator project inside WeFundr where I started my career freshman year of college. I emailed them over 10 times. I heard back, but they never actually scheduled anything. And so I found a old article of what the culture at WeFundr was like. and just pictures of the office and then a corner at the bottom by the photographer who took the pictures. So I just went to that house. It took me hours. And then by the time I found the house, because it was hidden at the back door of a Safeway, the person that opens the door says they moved out years before. And so he had another address for some reason. So I went to the second house. It was empty. You could just see through the glass and there was no furniture inside. So I got lucky. The neighbor had come out to receive a package and I asked her. if she knew of a company called Wee Founder. And she had a phone number that got the third address. And then I go to the third house and the person that opened the door was Nick, the CEO. When he asked me who am I? And I said this. Essentially they gave me an internship on the spot. When I joined, it was a small team and an internship quickly became working directly with Nick in growth projects. The company started growing pretty quickly. And my focus was always in How can we make WeFundr as important as we can in the startup ecosystem? Because at the end of the day, the core of that business is very much of a venture fund in that you're convincing entrepreneurs at some scale that they should raise money on your portal from their communities. And so you want to find ways of scaling your impact beyond one-to-one because otherwise you're not going to be a billion dollar company as WeFundr. And so we were trying to find long-term initiatives that would help us. compound access and importance in the ecosystem. XX was a part of that. ⁓ We knew that if we started an accelerator that would write the first check into the best entrepreneurs we could find, even if they didn't raise on our portal immediately, also because they were small companies, they didn't have the community to raise on our portal in a meaningful way. It wouldn't matter because what it would lead to is building an incredible community of entrepreneurs in SF. There was something in the market that was missing for the small intimate first check accelerators that would invest in technical outsiders. So that's what we were trying to bring back into the Valley. And that resonated with a group of people and mentors like Daniel and many others. And so we would raise these very tiny funds to write small checks into founders of all kinds of backgrounds, doing all kinds of things. But the core thread was they were all people that would really care about the act of building companies. It felt like an accelerated path for me to learn how to build companies myself. But what ended up happening was I realized that I could really enjoy being a great investor. And it got me into this path. Once I'm in a journey, I want to see journeys through. I became very close with Daniel and the business that made sense for us to build together was a great fund. We were motivated to build a business together. We thought we could do something interesting in the ecosystem as a fund that we could be proud of, which led to starting Antigravity. I think it's like a running joke that Gotti will find you. Like no matter who you are, it doesn't matter. Gotti will find a way to find you. Can't lie. But Daniel, how did you find XX and Gotti, Daniel, did you know that you'd end up running a fund together? Did you know that you guys would be in like this co-founder dynamic at some point in life? No, definitely did not see from the start. I saw my company discuss it at the end of 17 and that would have been about nine years into running that company. And it was nine years of not just my first company, but also my first job ever. And I care a lot about it. It was wrapped up into every part of my life personally, where I wanted to grow as a professional person, who I was as as a technologist, as a person in the industry, as a leader, as a manager. When that finished for me, I was super burnt out, not on a personal level, but on a macro level. I was feeling disenfranchised with the industry at large. I came into software as a kid, very excited. I came into software as an adult, very excited. By the time things wrapped up, it was exhausting, very rewarding and enjoyable, but I was trying to figure out what do I still like about it. I spent a week or two, post that before I'm like, I want to start another software company. because I do love this stuff a lot. I put a lot of myself into what they were doing there as an advisor and mentor and I met Gaudi at the time. I really enjoyed talking to you because, I gotta be honest, in the early 20s, there were a lot of tourists. There were a ton of people who loved startups, sincerely, but not in a way that I loved them. But you had this excitement about you that felt sincere and when you are thirsty for sincerity and people were pitching different ways to monetize, everything felt to me like, where am I right now? Having a conversation with someone super young that was not bought into that, who was like, I love the people around this because I love what this could actually be, technology, was very refreshing. What really drew me to Gotti is our dynamic felt like my previous dynamic with my co-founder, Jason, who I had known since we were 13 years old. Gotti, I had known when I was 15 years older than this 20 year old. Very different. walks of life, different perspectives, but our dynamic felt the same. We just disagreed on a lot of stuff, but the disagreement was fun and we always landed well and we always came out of it learning something new. In my relationship with my co-founder, Jason, he was just as stubborn as me, just as hardworking and just as motivated to go do stuff. He was technically strong, much stronger than I was, but I brought a different perspective. With Gotti, I'm the more technically strong one. And Gotti is out there on the ground floor with people in a way that I could not be. Like with Jason, I was on the ground with people in a way that he wasn't. And that helped us a ton. It was a key part of how we were successful in earlier days. And I think this is why Gotti and I work as well. Gotti, did you ever think you and Daniel would build a fund together? When we started working together, it was pretty clear to me that I just didn't want that to stop. My first impression of him was earlier because I was observing him in the WeFundr community before he knew I existed. I was a very shy person back then. In moments of courage, I would do things like hunting WeFundr down. But my norm was not that. I was very shy and still very insecure. Seeing someone like Daniel Bayeria born early YC, almighty YC, was like, this guy is king to Silicon Valley, right? Like it's like too successful for me. I was very intimidated by him at first. I'm an extremely ambitious guy. So especially at that age, I was trying to identify the smartest person in the room and wrap myself around them to learn from what they had to give me. That was Daniel to me. I was trying to learn as much as I could from him. Over time, it became clear that there might be something here in which I can continue pushing him in that direction. That naturally became anti-gravity over a long period of time. For me at that moment, a year is a really long time. I ask because I think it's obvious why you guys are co-GPs and that you guys make each other better. A lot of the times with co-GPs, it's not obvious, but I feel like in this case, you guys work well together. But I'm curious for other GPs listening to this, how did you know that finding another GP was the right thing for you guys at Anti-Gravity? Obviously it's personal because you guys are two unique individuals, but what would you tell GPs considering that? The thing I feel most strongly is the importance of partnerships. I really believe in powerful partnerships. I think they are one of the hardest things to build. I don't think you naturally have a strong partnership in just a few days. I think it takes a lot of time to develop deep trust over the other person. And I think it needs to come from a place of equal, real respect. In our case with Daniel, it was never a consideration whether we shouldn't be 50-50. It was always an obvious thing and it wasn't even about the money. It's about the rules of the game. Right. We're here because we want to work with one another and we want to see if we can be great partners. There's something in that word that carries so much meaning. We really care about it a lot. It takes time to trust the other person and understand who they are. You have to go through hard times. I view life as an opportunity to build partnerships. Right. Once I found that in Daniel and I had conviction that if we are patiently working together for a long enough time, everything will work out. That's an optimism that I felt. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm doing anti-gravity because we're working together. It wasn't like, we're going to do this. I want to start a seed VC and then let's go find out how that's going to work. I would not be doing this in this shape if we did not connect in a way that said, all right, I got to do something with him. And I felt similarly with my old co-founder, Jason, we dropped out of our second year at school to do YC and I spent some time convincing him, we got to drop out. The world is moving around us. It's really exciting. People are building software on the internet now. It's amazing. It's cool. Websites are interactive. And with YC, was part of it. Like, you know, we can do this thing. This might be a scam, but I YC might be a cool little program we can join. And when he said, yeah, I'm in, then I knew like, this is what I want to do. With Gaudi, getting to know him, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to go do, but seeing what he was good at and seeing what I was interested in. what he was interested in, I could not imagine thinking, I want to start, I want to be an investor. 80 % I would have just done a software company, but the sort of deals that we were working through together, the way we saw the world, the conversations we had, it was so valuable to me. There's something in it that I wanted to keep and I wanted to build upon. And so from that was the idea of like, could do something that felt like a VC fund. that I would be proud of because this is my own insecurity talking, but I'm not, I don't love describing myself as a VC. There's sort of an archetype and a stereotype in my head that is triggered in my brain when I say those words. And that is not who I think I am. And that's a me thing, right? It's an insecurity thing. So I'm like, I don't want to be a VC, but in working with God, I really wanted to be a VC. Like the parts of it that I loved came out. And for me, that's why I GrabNixx. Yeah. Let's talk about the tools that you guys have built internally. It's called the diligence engine, right? An army of agents that reviews every startup that you consider investing in. Can you bring us into the science lab? We started building the diligence engine at the end of 2024 and built into the shape we were using at the beginning of 25. It's been a year and a handful of months. Another useful... The thing is that it gives us a better instinct for how things work. When we met BlueJ, now a portfolio company, the concept of AI simulation felt intuitive because we have been playing around with synthetic customer interviews. And we knew it made total sense that you create AI personas to test conversational AI workflows, which is what they started with. In a world that's changing so quickly, how can you have taste for how should software be built if you're not playing around with those tools yourselves? That's... something else that we really believe in that drove us to wanting to get our hands dirty in the way that we operationalize the fund. In my day, the early 2010s of startups, VCs, the early stage guys who really want to understand the world, they embraced social media. So you see VCs who were tweeting at the time, they're writing blog posts, now newsletters, because, I got to be out there, I'm investing in software that has user experiences and this is how people do stuff now. So I'm going to go blog and post on social media. Great, right? That's how they learned the world. What a lot of them did not do, because they couldn't, is embrace the big category of software innovations, right? From coding to no code, all the scaffolding around, like the many generations of how you are deploying code today. Today, you don't have an excuse. If you're an investor or anyone in this ecosystem and you are not using cloud code or codex, you're not in there building stuff, there is just no excuse to not. getting very intimate for understanding where the lines are between what is obviously possible and what should not be model driven or what should be more deterministic in nature. Just having those instincts becomes like table stakes. I think the tooling is so important for you guys because it allowed you to compound into the things that you as humans, as Goddian, as Daniel are really good at. What do you think those things are now? Have you figured out what the bot can handle in your workflow and what you guys are really good at. And what is that for you, Vadi, and for you, Daniel? I think it comes down to being very involved with the journeys of our companies. But that's also what makes this job way more fun. So there's a company called Tiraq in our portfolio, and we've been very involved in helping them build their team. Their first three engineers came from our network. It's not just about the introductions. Those engineers are now in San Francisco doing a week work trial. And helping them create a great experience for those engineers, just hosting the whole team at my house and doing a barbecue with all of them and every other investor on their cap table. It creates a level of trust with the founders when it comes to team building stuff in the early days of the startup. That's the type of reputation that we've been compounding with entrepreneurs. The chance to play a role in the way that they navigate. their seed to Sears and knowing that we are a partner that's going to always be there for them in the day to day. Those pre-product market fit challenges and especially team building. If you look at our portfolio, almost every founder is in their twenties and very technical. So their strength for hiring would have been their friends, right? Like people they met in college or their previous jobs. And all of those people are equally excited about AI now. and people are fluent with the stack and they're in San Francisco. The opportunity costs for their peers to also not be entrepreneurs is very large. Everyone they know is also starting companies competing for the same talent they share. It's never been harder to build teams. We knew another important aspect of how we had to build anti-gravity was figuring out something that we could consistently do well and turn it into a system. If you don't have leverage in this game, you cannot win long-term. We really want it. To find that it was pretty clear that the aspect we could play the biggest role on is team building. We wanted to find a program that could help us scale that, which evolved into Qantas. In short, the insight that there are a lot of people like me in Latin America that dream of being a part of this moment here in a love building and are very curious about what's going on now with technology and they're building stuff. They're well versed with what's happening and they want to be here working with the best. So. In this program, we solve everything for them. bring them to SF, we help with their visas. We help them find a great first job here. And a lot of those first jobs are in our portfolio. But the way that program started was experimental. Like the first thing we did was I bought a domain called latanisback.com. And I remember talking with Daniel and was like, that's so stupid, man. The idea was how can we create this narrative for everyone in Latin America? I'm not learning fast enough and I'm not a part of this moment to materialize things like click here, move to San Francisco. Right. And so that was like a dumb idea, but we created some structure around it to force distribution and build a brand around it. And we came up with the name Puentes and the fact that it should be a program where we bring engineers. What does Puentes mean? it's, it's bridges in Spanish. It was a very literal name. We're trying to be the bridge for technical talent into. the most important ecosystem in the world. We're hunting for these people. These people need to be searched for, but there's some brand around this where word of mouth is hopefully starting to take off, but it requires hard work. We've been doing things right now. There are four hackathons happening in Latin America, one in Bolivia, another in Argentina, another in Brazil, another in Chile. And we're sponsoring those hackathons. No money, more... The fact that whoever wins those hackathons gets fast-tracked into our interview process. And what I know to be true in that time is that there's grassroots engineering communities, like young builders doing really cool stuff, but they're typically in their own pocket of talent that doesn't participate in the local ecosystem. think that's less true now because there's great local funds serving that community. And I love working with those funds. But ultimately we knew that the way to find those people is by literally finding those people. and they all know each other there. We've met them and give them resources, expose them to SF. The most successful version where the brand continues to grow for this program is where we bring a little bit of San Francisco to them. For example, we did a hackathon in Brazil. We did the first agents hackathon in Sao Paulo a few months ago. 400 engineers applied and we only accepted 70. Our cohost was recent, the email API that's a YC startup that's remote and their founding team is in random cities across Brazil. We went to them and like, Hey, let's do a hackathon here. Let's bring the builders in Brazil together. It was beautiful because the founders, the art engineers at recent and so on, everyone was there and the prices were like $2,000 to the winner and so on. like we're bringing a bar of talent to these experiences that show people there's more to their ceilings and if they care to be the best, they need to start making slightly different decisions. That's the type of word of mouth that we're trying to force bottoms up. Now those people are starting to like, man, maybe I should be in this stuff. Maybe this is my time to taking a shot and saying, you know, I want to grow way more and take my shot at being an entrepreneur in San Francisco. Unless you already know what you want to build, the best way to start in this city is to come surround yourself with the best. calibrate what the bar here looks like because then those people make the best founding engineers. And as a fund, we get to build a network of talent that can serve us in very direct ways that we benefit from. love what you guys are doing with the point is program. think it's absolutely incredible. And the impact is huge. You're actually putting engineers into business. People are moving to the city because of you guys. People are starting companies because of the point is program. I'm sure that it'll only continue to grow as you do more. cohorts, but elephant in the room, Daniel, you're not Latino in America. How are you guys thinking about Puentas as part of anti-gravity strategy going forward? I think what we think about is extremely interesting and what we're good at. Together, can pull off a lot of these ideas because it's very personal to us. We'll find ways to have it reflect the way we work. And Gaudi's story from Uruguay, come to the US. It's a big part of what anti-gravity is. A couple of years into this, we realized that Latemi goes powerful because it becomes a core part of how we think about one of the hardest problems that we have that Gaudi already articulated, which is building the early team. You are at this weird moment in which the best people can do so much on their own versus needing to join a company. have a reason to start their own company. That makes a founder's first five hires. a arduous process to figure out the core culture, recruiting culture, and team building culture. You're not just looking for the best engineers anymore. The difference between one company and the other has been, I have an AI native way of approaching the world? Do I have the taste and judgment to do the right things? And that's tough because the people that you want to hire will bring into your team. They are being courted by other accelerators and other early stage fonts. So many people out there are not even participating in this because they're not aware of it. And that's where Poyntus came from. We need to bridge them into our world because they don't know how to get started. And so when those things started to click, I'm like, this is not just like the side. This is a core part of how we think about the world. Yes, the tools make it such that access to code generation is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck now is to have people who are thinking the right way of approaching these tools and approaching the world. And because it's so competitive in the hottest parts of this country. We need to think about who is not being exposed to this, who's not being brought in well enough and educated or given the opportunity to think about it right. And so now the two things we were doing, the thing that we talk about as like AI core to Hensy Gravity, they start to overlap and now it becomes one thing. I was never motivated to building something that American focused. It's not what I care about. Like everything is core to SF. Everyone has to speak English at all times. And the people that we bring are all. local people to SF. We brought incredible people in the past like Ted was the CTO of GitHub or David Crammer, the founder of Sentry. So we're really exposing them to our local network. And that's important even for them because they want to be in SF. They are the most ambitious engineers in their whole country. They want to be surrounded with the best. The other observation is in some ways what this program is like a portal of talent, right? Like we're finding excellent people outside the rails of Silicon Valley and putting them on the rails. And what is a venture capital fund, if not that, right? Like you're trying to correct inefficiencies in them. It's like talent should have every single resource to be the best, if they want to. I take a lot of inspiration in why, for example, Y Combinator did, like when we were doing the Accelerator XX, like I was a student of what made YC truly special. And the early YC was very different to what YC is today, right? Like they were finding... people like Daniel in their very early twenties that loved building web apps. And they were a part of that type of talent, right? Like you were finding hackers that loved building web apps and you were their first opportunity to get started and build what became tremendous Silicon Valley companies. And I think of it in the same way with this talent that we're bringing on that we're putting them on the rails of the ecosystem where we're trying to play an important role. I love it. So exciting guys. And I know fun one was two million. your guys's pilot fund for antigravity that invested in 14 companies. Fun2 is coming up soon. What is the typical LP profile that you guys are looking for? A lot of our LPs have been really useful. People that have introduced our companies to customers that are very great operators. Like we've had LPs that have come from private equity backgrounds or one of our LPs started a cold chain packaging company and he run a factory for five years. And so they have different views of the world that are operational, that we've leveraged our ability to learn about new problems quickly thanks to them. And also in our companies where they've been able to do market discovery faster or get to customers faster in niches of the world that are not that easy to access. We love LPs that look at us as their opportunity to be a part of this moment and surround themselves with people that love AI and understand what we do. So they get to see that and invest in. our fund, is exposing them into some of the best AI startups in the Valley. We get to learn a lot from them. So those are some of the best relationships. Another type of relationship that we love are professional LPs, like people that do this for a living. Because there's a level of seriousness to their evaluation of us as a fund that forces us to raise our own bar as professional fund managers. Because we want to do this for a really long time, getting ourselves to a place in which we think we're doing the job. correctly is very important. And if we have LPs that challenge us on the core part of this business, which is we need to perform and approach the asset class with a level of seriousness to just invest well in great companies, then that raises our bar. And so we love working with those types of people, like either professional OPs or operators that can add a lot of value to our network. You just listened to yet another episode of the Slice Podcast where we uncover the stories of fresh emerging managers across the early stage venture landscape. Next time, we're joined by another duo based in San Francisco, bringing together Europe and the Valley. Make sure you're subscribed to our podcast on slice.fund slash podcast or listen to Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcast these days. And until then, thank you Sunwoo for producing yet another amazing episode of the SlicePod.