True North: People Are Everything

Twenty years ago, Jon Callaghan and Phil Black sketched a new kind of venture firm on a napkin at a Peet’s off 101. Last week in San Francisco, we gathered with the founders, investors, teammates, families and friends who helped make it real. Jon shared what the evening meant to us. The best is yet to come.

Signal

Is ephemeral code our new reality? Anthropic went from roughly 2,500 merged code changes a day in May to more than 30,000 in September. We used to say a printed product spec was out of date the moment it left the printer. Our prediction: code increasingly gets rewritten as needed, and more engineering work goes into defining what should happen and checking that it does. Anthropic on redesigning source control →

Cheap inference needs a bigger idea behind it. Keeping GPUs busy and models running reliably matters, but routing requests or switching models faster may be hard to build a lasting company around. We’re interested in what falling inference costs make possible: products that were too expensive to run, customers who couldn’t afford them, and work that can now happen continuously. Building with this in mind? We’d love to meet you.

How does your moat survive the next model? A product can have paying customers and still be one model release away from losing them. We’re digging into what’s technically hard to copy and what customers will still need you for as models improve, buyers consolidate, and companies decide which AI experiments are worth paying for.

Founders Building

The Nuclear Company: A nuclear campus for Kentucky. Jonathan Webb’s team announced Prosperity One, a proposed campus in Lewis County, Kentucky for six reactors generating about 6.6 gigawatts. The team includes people who helped build Vogtle 3 and 4, and plans to seek the approvals to begin construction in 2028. The Prosperity One announcement →

ICEYE: Finding fires sooner and following what happens next. ICEYE is pairing OroraTech’s thermal satellite data with its radar to help detect wildfires, track their spread and assess damage, giving responders more information from the early stages through recovery. ICEYE and OroraTech →

Handshake on the inaugural AI 100. Newcomer and Bessemer Venture Partners named Handshake to their first list of the top 100 private AI companies. Its network of experts builds the evaluations and training data frontier labs rely on. Congrats, Handshake! See the full list →

Nectar Social: Ask Claude what your customers are saying. Nectar connects a brand’s social posts, customer conversations, creator activity and competitor data to Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants, so teams can ask what customers think without exporting another report. Meet Nectar MCP →

Sandbar: Stream is shipping. Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong’s ring lets you whisper a note without pulling out your phone. Now it’s reaching customers, and Priscilla Tyler, Soul Dayan and Madeline Minshew joined the team to celebrate. Meet Stream →

Hindsight makes AI agent memory faster and cheaper. Chris Latimer and Chris Bartholomew’s new models cut costs 2.5x and double the speed. When we backed them in 2024, Puneet Agarwal said they were building an essential piece of the AI stack. Meet the models →

Concentrate AI: One API, more freedom to change models. Ari Jacoby and Todd Lieberman’s gateway lets teams use models from different providers with shared spending limits, access controls and automatic fallbacks, with no gateway fee or token markup. We first backed Ari and Todd at Deduce and are glad to build with them again. Try Concentrate →

Inside True

“People are everything.” Jon Callaghan returned to one of True’s founding mantras after our 20th anniversary, thanking the investors, founders, True team past and present, and the families behind all of us. He also shares what our late partner Om Malik once told him: “Jon, your job is to make a Founder’s dream come true.” Read Jon’s 20 Years of Gratitude →

The answer is in the room. Tony Conrad and Madeline Minshew joined Madison McIlwain on The Room Podcast, recorded live at Connected Stack, to talk about being a founder’s first institutional check and why relationships matter even more now that small teams can build big things with AI. Watch the episode →

Demo nights in San Francisco. Scrappy Sessions, hosted by our AI Builder in Residence Keerthi Nalabotu, brings builders to the True office for four-minute demos and real feedback. Next up on Nov 17: infrastructure and security for AI agents. Last time was AI x Bio with Adam D’Augelli, Rohit Sharma and Keerthi. Come demo or just come hang →

We are just getting started. “If every entrepreneur had access to an experienced, passionate, supportive investor with significant resources and vision, I think the world would be a dramatically different place.” A 2012 throwback from True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan. Watch the throwback →

Team Time

Rohit Sharma spoke on panels at Web Summit in Lisbon on Nov 10 and 11 about the open source advantage and whether VC is playing it too safe. Next: a Slush fireside chat in Helsinki with ICEYE’s Rafal Modrzewski on Nov 19. Rohit at Slush →

Natasha Sharma judged the Startup World Cup semifinals in San Francisco. See the post →

Rohit also joined the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about winning pre-seed without a product. See the post →