We caught up with @christinacaci (Co-Founder & CEO of @TrustVanta) right after they announced a $150M Series D at a $4.15B valuation, and asked how it all started. "We started with SOC 2 for startups, because in 2017, no one got SOC 2. Now you get it when you’re two founders. That wedge gave us the access to help with more and build trust." "That was the seed pitch. It was literally the 2018 deck. And now we're here, a little later, actually doing it."

Today, we’re announcing @TrustVanta's Series D and new valuation – $4.15 billion – led by @Wellington_Mgmt alongside @sequoia, @ycombinator, @CrowdStrike, @GoldmanSachs, @jpmorgan, @craft_ventures, and @Atlassian. Vanta’s mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust.

Bret Taylor (@btaylor) talked about why AI is still in its Yahoo! directory phase, how to go enterprise-first as a startup if your name isn't "Bret Taylor," and what agentic *actually* means (it's not a bag of floating-point numbers) in the latest Frameworks for Growth.

To me, founder mode includes getting yourself genuinely excited about whatever the company needs next. Easy when it's product, harder when it's HR policy, but you figure it out.

Big day at Vanta: after a couple of days in the transfer portal, @scottiholden commits to the purple llamas. Looking forward to working with you Scott!

Evergreen tweet, especially during iced coffee season

The play right now is to go deep in a vertical and build AI Agents with the context of the critical workflows, domain expertise, specialized instructions, and data of that industry. And build anticipating what’s possible with AI models in a year from now, not just today.

One of the best things about startups is how emails like this one can just work out.

I first (cold!) emailed @amasad in March 2014. Gmail tells me we've swapped 291 messages since then, so it was especially fun to talk to him in @TrustVanta's Frameworks for Growth series.

My full conversation with @DanielaAmodei of @AnthropicAI. A couple highlights: hiring AI talent in *this* market, incorporating as a PBC (not, say, a novel form of an LLC), and how East African governments are using AI.