Tootfinder

«Inside GitHub's Fake Star Economy:
Six million fake stars, $0.06 per click, and a VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction. We ran our own analysis on 20 repos and found the fingerprints.»
Who trusts his blind faith in optical impressions that are almost incomprehensible?!??
Oh no, that's JUST marketing.
🤷

Inside GitHub's Fake Star Economy
Six million fake stars, $0.06 per click, and a VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction. We ran our own analysis on 20 repos and found the fingerprints.

Sources: Nvidia's business development group, not its VC arm NVentures, has led much of its ~$90B dealmaking push across 145 companies over the past 16 months (Financial Times)
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/cc90e4b0-d971…

RE: https://newsie.social/@ProPublica/116261506729341121
Turning control of nuclear facilities over to the VC Bros that can't even remember to put a password on an AWS bucket containing all of their account keys seems... I'll advised.

In a viral X post that parodies the old Mac vs. PC commercials, General Catalyst posted a "VC vs GC" video, with the VC apparently modeled after Marc Andreessen (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/15/genera…

General Catalyst posted VC rage bait and it worked, especially on a16z | TechCrunch
Compulsive X user Andreessen himself couldn't resist responding, many, many times.

PitchBook: VC dealmaking in the media sector fell 69% YoY to $165M across 47 deals in the first two months of 2026, as investors take an "AI-first" approach (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/deal

AI Still Dominates as Media VC Deals Fell 69% to $165 Million in First 2 Months of 2026
Lead the Future, Justin and Ben Smith’s Semafor and former Paramount co-CEO Brian Robbins’ Big Shot Pictures were among the biggest VC investments in January and February

It's fun to be actively fighting Bilal Mahmood's legislation that would strip $500 million in voter-approved funds for affordable housing over the next five years, all to give a tax cut to the rich, and see that Garry Tan called Mahmood "too progressive."
The billionaire/VC class in SF are not reasonable people we can work with. They must be defeated.
#sfpol

@… so much funny money floating around via VC that it makes sense why folks are trained to think this. It’s almost systemically set up to exploit devs that are people pleasers 😅 *hides*

A profile of wealth manager Iconiq, which, sources say, has $100B AUM, with $26B specifically for VC investing; Iconiq invested $3B into AI startups in 2025 (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Founders are increasingly leasing multimillion-dollar mansions in San Francisco's wealthy neighborhoods as corporate HQs and hacker houses, amid the AI boom (The San Francisco Standard)
https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/17/move-garages-startups-now-hatc…

In SF’s newest gold rush, startups are competing for mansions
With VC money flowing, the new trend across San Francisco is leasing multimillion-dollar hacker houses.

@… Very much your kinda thing here.
https://oldbytes.space/@flexion/116568266171204034

/usr/people/flexion (@flexion@oldbytes.space)
Attached: 1 image Chased and fixed a lot of bugs today! GTA VC on IRIX ❤️

Garry Tan, VC and Y Combinator CEO: Brain computer interfaces are now giving sight back to the blind https://garryslist.org/posts/brain-computer-interfaces-are-now-giving-sight-back-to-the-blind by @…

Brain Computer Interfaces Are Now Giving Sight Back to the Blind
A 2mm chip restored sight more than 80% of blind trial patients, built by a former cofounder of Neuralink.

If people are worried about #emacs #vc-mode executing code when doing #git operations they are going to be shocked about the amount of access your average

King's Cross, where Google's new UK HQ is due to open later this year, has become London's new tech, VC, and AI hub, attracting OpenAI, Anthropic, and others (John Gapper/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/d0a7927d-3072-4bd5-b816-662f726b3699

I have a killer idea for an AI startup. The name says it all:
CanadianGirlfriend
You know what it does already, right?
I don’t even NEED a pitch. Someone send me VC checks!

The problem with relying on commercial services for hosting any of your blog content is that they may only be around 10 or 15 years.
My blog has been around for 29 years and every now and then I need to fix up a bunch of posts from a decade ago because some service shut down.
My personal site (paid for by doing side jobs for people) has outlasted corporations with VC backing and overpaid CEOs who failed.

European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to $17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/funding-picked-up-ai-led-europe-q1-2026/

AI Drives Europe’s Second Straight Quarter Of Funding Gain As Deal Volume Falls Sharply
European venture funding reached $17.6 billion  in Q1 2026, Crunchbase data shows. That’s up nearly 30% year over year and marks the second consecutive quarter of growth. The main driver was AI, which for the first time claimed more than 50% of the continent’s total funding for the quarter.

Mubi, which raised $100M led by Sequoia in 2025, faced backlash over Sequoia's ties to Israeli defense tech startups, but has since rebuilt subscriber numbers (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/…

Tether, flush with cash, has been investing in diverse sectors ranging from sleep tech company Eight Sleep to humanoid robotics company Neura Robotics (PitchBook)
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/stablecoin-issuer-tether-has-so-much-cas…

I think it's funny that VC was released 17 years after the year it was set in, imagine a new GTA intentionally set in 2009 (I know IV is basically that but there's a diff, contemporary v caricature)

Sequoia says Doug Leone is returning in a newly created role of chairman, after he announced his retirement in 2022 from his role as "senior steward" (Iain Martin/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/03…

Billionaire VC Doug Leone Back Investing At Sequoia In Chairman Role
Three years after his official retirement, the Midas List investor is back as a partner making active investments at the blue chip Silicon Valley fund.

A profile of Jeffrey Yan and his startup Hyperliquid, a $10B crypto exchange that never took VC money and generated $900M in profit in 2025 with 11 employees (Dom Cooke/Colossus)
https://colossus.com/article/beyond-the-sky-jeffrey-yan-hyperliquid/

Hyperliquid: In Singapore With Jeffrey Yan
Jeffrey Yan turned down $100 million, airdropped billions to strangers, and can’t travel without a bodyguard. The story of how he built Hyperliquid,

Source: Spark Capital, the first VC firm to back Anthropic in 2023, is raising about $3B in new funds, 50% more than the size of funds it raised two years ago (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-backer-spark-c…

Anthropic Backer Spark Capital Targets $3 Billion in New Funds
Spark Capital, the first venture firm to back Anthropic, is in the process of raising about $3 billion in new funds, 50% more than the size of funds it raised two years ago, according to a person with direct knowledge of the fundraise. The fundraising target will test investor demand in a ...

Jay Graber is stepping down as Bluesky CEO, saying a "seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution" is needed; VC Toni Schneider is named interim CEO (Kate Knibbs/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-stepping-down/
…

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down
Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will take over as interim CEO as Bluesky’s board of directors hunts for a permanent replacement.

Doc: Kalshi and Polymarket CEOs are investing in a VC fund, led by two early Kalshi employees, that is raising up to $35M to back prediction market startups (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/kalshi-polymarket-5cc-capital-prediction-…

Exclusive: The CEOs of Kalshi and Polymarket are arch rivals—but are investing in the same $35 million prediction market VC fund
Other investors include Marc Andreessen through the fund Moneta Luna and Micky Malka of the fintech investment firm Ribbit Capital.

Magnitt: startup funding in the Middle East and North Africa was flat YoY at $799M in Q1 amid the Iran war; Saudi VC firms are pressing ahead with fundraising (Yassmin Jabri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Global VC investment hit a record $297B in Q1 2026, up 150% YoY, with AI startups capturing 81% of the funding; just four companies raised 64% of the total (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/record-breaking-funding-ai-global-q1-202…

Q1 2026 Shatters Venture Funding Records As AI Boom Pushes Startup Investment To Nearly $300B 
The first quarter of 2026 was unlike any other for venture investment, driven by unprecedented spending on AI compute and frontier labs. Crunchbase data shows investors poured $297 billion into 6,000 startups globally in the quarter, up around 150% quarter over quarter and year over year, marking an all-time high for global venture investment not approached by any other quarter on record.

Fun, which builds fiat and crypto payment rails for platforms like Polymarket and Aave, raised a $72M Series A in January, co-led by Multicoin and SignalFire (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/05/01/fun-series-a-fundraise-multicoin-capital-signal…

Exclusive: Startup Fun raises $72 million for the serious business of converting crypto and cash
The crypto investor Multicoin Capital and the tech VC SignalFire led the Series A fundraise.

European VC firm Hummingbird raised $800M to find "misfit" founders, taking its total assets to ~$2B, after backing Kraken and AI vibe coding startup Lovable (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/4d29c556-bbd9-490e-a3c8-90f5b894af9e