Michael Brown

🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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Yesterday, two DCVC-backed companies raised about a half billion dollars. In today's funding environment, that's not that exceptional... Together, the two companies just happen to enable gigawatt-scale AI compute, except in the unprecedentedly small space of only about 40 shipping containers, no exotic cooling required. You have to wonder what the US military might do with a gigawatt-equivalent of compute they could fit in a few C5 flights... or a 100MW-compute platform that fits in a single rocket launch... Even that, in DCVC's world, isn't that exceptional. We like to say we help make the impossible and essential, profitable and available. But what is exceptional, and this is a theme with us folks, is that they are each only two of many of our companies delivering robustly on outcomes considered impossible on VC dollars or in reasonable time, at the point when we backed each company from very early on: - a safe, cost-effective, meltdown-proof, truck-portable 1 megawatt nuclear reactor (Radiant, see https://lnkd.in/gF3JAHwS) for American energy dominance - American-made AI semiconductor chips that match or outperform everything else at 100x the energy efficiency, on off-the-shelf models (Mythic, see https://lnkd.in/gWFdvZFT) We were able to make the calls on these, and how they could work together, along with similar calls on all of their brother and sister impossible companies, because of a very deep bench of unified scientific, engineering, operational, and business building experience considered passé by a lot of other folks. It's how we make the exceptional routine.

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As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE

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