Summer Hua

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on the atlas — 15

highlights — 40

In the last few months, however, the evidence of AI’s incredible power, as well as its risks, has become undeniable. Perhaps the most emblematic example is Claude Mythos Preview and the discovery that frontier models pose very real risks to cybersecurity, creating the potential for disruption of the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security. Mythos Preview scrambled the global cybersecurity landscape. But its broader significance is that it proves beyond doubt that AI models are now tools of global and national strategic consequence. The cyber risks that Mythos-class mod…
Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
The mechanism is clear; the destination isn't. What I'd bet on is the direction: intelligence keeps getting cheaper, and value keeps sliding toward the few places a model can't reach. The untrainable is value with history. So get inside one, do the unglamorous translation, and start writing down what good means there, because someone is going to. The most cited benchmark score of the year is a map of territory about to be worthless, and a notice of who is about to lose the right to say what counts as good.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
The absorption frontier keeps rising, because we keep learning to measure more of the work, and the measurable gets eaten.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
Sierra charges when its agent resolves a customer's issue and nothing when it kicks the problem to a human, so the price becomes the evaluation, and it works only because Sierra owns the definition of resolved. Cognition's Devin makes the same move in software with a “performance guarantee,” which you can only offer for outcomes in a system you're trusted inside.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
This is also the job. An application earns its place in the untrainable corner by doing unglamorous work: arranging a company's private reality so a model can act on it, handing the model the tools to act, working with the customer to change the reality of its workforce. A company that brings the translation is tough to copy – and the translation never ends. Integration and maintenance run as long as the relationship does, won by teams that put domain-specialized engineers and tools next to the customer.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
trust is built slowly, on relationships, with user’s acquiescence, not gradient descent that erases them
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
So, we may ask two things of any kind of work. Is its correctness private and expensive to establish, the kind of truth that exists only inside someone's data? And is it walled off, locked inside a system you can't get into? Set those against how saturated the task is, and you get a 2x2. Saturated work with public answers is commodity tokens, and open models own it. Frontier work with public answers, where coding benchmarks live, is where the labs win, because when the eval is free, owning it counts for nothing. The prize is the last corner, the untrainable one: frontier work whose correctness…
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
Margin pressure cuts the other way too: a general agent has to be ready for anything, which is expensive, while a focused application can tune one workflow until it runs on a fraction of the token spend, and unlike the lab selling those tokens, it keeps the difference.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
Put it in money terms, the way my friend Matt MacInnis at Rippling does: a token spent answering a generic question is worth almost nothing, since anyone's model can answer it, while a token spent reasoning over your company's data is worth much more, because it does the thing you actually want, not just the plausible thing.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
As Gabe Pereyra says, real automation isn't only the model getting better. It's the product, the model, the workflow, and the firm moving together, and three of those four move at the speed of an organization. Moving people is the part no benchmark touches: getting a skeptical partner to change how she runs her matters, holding a team together through a rebuild. It's why, when we hire a CEO, the ability to deal with people weighs at least as much as the analytical horsepower, and a smarter model doesn't change that weighting. The feedback is ambiguous, the horizon is years, and the trust belon…
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
Mert Demirer and coauthors at MIT finally put numbers on it: across more than 100,000 developers, the latest coding agents lifted how much code got written by roughly 180%, and how much actually shipped by about 30%. Writing got cheap. The rest still runs through a person, and it matters.
sarah guo on X: "The Untrainable" / X
We’re excited about modular generation technologies, a low-levelized cost of energy (LCOE), and a repeatable deployment playbook across the broader electrification industry.
Roadmap: The AI data center stack - Bessemer Venture Partners
While this is a true cross-functional team effort, the CEO should also be clear as to who specifically is directly responsible for the international expansion (typically this is the CRO).
ICONIQ | International Expansion Playbook
This Readiness Checklist will be highly country-specific, which is why selecting a specific market is a prerequisite for completing this step. This process will be repeated for each new market you enter.
ICONIQ | International Expansion Playbook
However, even small differences in language, culture, or regulations can impact adoption, so localization is key
Building Locally, Scaling Globally: A SaaS founder’s 7-step guide for global expansion | Insight Partners
Competitors are a form of market validation. If you’re entering a market without any competition, you need to find out if it’s because potential customers aren’t aware of your kind of product, or there simply isn’t enough demand
Building Locally, Scaling Globally: A SaaS founder’s 7-step guide for global expansion | Insight Partners
You also have the advantage of being able to talk to your customers and establish demand before you invest in the expansion.
Building Locally, Scaling Globally: A SaaS founder’s 7-step guide for global expansion | Insight Partners
They already use your product and may have a need for it in other geographies as well
Building Locally, Scaling Globally: A SaaS founder’s 7-step guide for global expansion | Insight Partners
. Inbound leads, website traffic, and customer feedback often reveal markets with strong interest.
Building Locally, Scaling Globally: A SaaS founder’s 7-step guide for global expansion | Insight Partners
Start by identifying where your product is already gaining traction.
Building Locally, Scaling Globally: A SaaS founder’s 7-step guide for global expansion | Insight Partners
MPP, the Machine Payments Protocol, is a protocol for internet payments. When a client requests a paid resource, your server returns an HTTP 402 response with payment details. The client authorizes the payment, retries the request, pays, and gets access to the paid resource along with a receipt.
MPP payments | Stripe Documentation
Whether sending money home or shopping from abroad, individuals increasingly expect cross-border payments to work as instantly and transparently as domestic ones. Meeting that expectation will require modern infrastructure that unites low-cost settlement, clear pricing, and universal acceptance across digital and physical economies.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
Beyond remittances, a growing number of individuals make cross-border payments for everything from e-commerce to travel
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
At the individual level, cross-border payments are deeply personal. In order to support loved ones, fund education, or pay for services abroad, millions depend on remittances: the transfer of funds from the country of work back to a home country. In 2024, remittances accounted for 3% or more of the GDP for over 60 countries.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
Many of these capabilities are not achievable through incremental improvements to banking’s current correspondent rails. That means these changes require the traditional correspondent model to evolve from a static infrastructure to a dynamic network that can support programmable, transparent transactions.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
Each regulated financial institution is independently responsible for compliance, which means that every intermediary in a payment chain, from the originating bank to the final beneficiary’s institution, is required to perform its own anti–money laundering (AML), counter-terrorist financing (CFT), and sanctions screening checks. In practice, this means the same payment can be reviewed multiple times using different rule sets and data standards, multiplying cost and delay across the network.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
To guarantee that payments clear smoothly, banks must pre-fund foreign accounts (known as “nostro” and “vostro” accounts, where a nostro account represents an account held in a foreign bank, and a vostro account represents the same from the perspective of the foreign bank) in multiple currencies.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
SWIFT’s data shows that while roughly 90% of payments reach the recipient bank within an hour, the actual crediting of funds often occurs much later
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
cross-border payments can often take anywhere from one to five business days to settle
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
The World Bank estimates that average remittance fees are around 6.5% as of March 2025, far above the UN’s global target of 3%. These high and variable costs also burden businesses, which struggle to effectively manage liquidity and reconcile payments across jurisdictions and currencies in real time.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
Moving money internationally is expensive. Each intermediary bank charges processing and conversion fees, while FX rates fluctuate across corridors. These costs compound, making some transactions too costly for low-value transfers and raising total expenses for large corporate flows. Taken together, these inefficiencies add an estimated $120 billion in annual costs to the global financial system.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
According to the Financial Stability Board (FSB), cross-border payments continue to be constrained by four main challenges: high cost, low speed, limited access, and poor transparency. On top of that, inconsistent regulatory requirements make it even harder for businesses and individuals to transfer and use money efficiently across borders.
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
Here’s how a typical cross-border payment flows through the system today: Payment initiation: A sender requests a transfer (often in their local currency) through their bank or a cross-border payment company. Conversion and funding: The originating bank converts funds to the required foreign currency and draws on a reserve account it holds with a foreign partner bank. Routing through intermediaries: If the foreign partner bank does not have a direct relationship with the recipient’s bank, the payment passes through one or more correspondent banks, each charging a fee and conducting compliance …
Understanding Cross-Border Payments & Global Payment Networks | Circle
“And if you’re moving large volumes, it really matters that you get a good exchange rate. There was a period of about two hours where the GBP to INR rate spiked and we broke all records in the company’s history by some order of magnitude for transactions that were processed. Aspora is dealing with a customer that is sophisticated, excited, financially aspirational, and heavily engaged—and I’ve never seen that before.”
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital
Critically, Garg’s ambitions coincided with the emergence of a new technology: stablecoins. Aspora’s infrastructure is built on stablecoin rails, which allows remittances to be transacted without intermediaries and to be settled instantly. Compared to SWIFT rails, which remain the dominant system for financial messaging, stablecoins offer a faster, less expensive and more transparent system for transferring money internationally. Transactions via stablecoin have exploded in the last few years, with the weekly trading volume of stablecoin USDC growing from $5 billion in 2022 to $23 billion in 2…
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital
“That was the best choice we could have made early on,” he says. “It naturally forced us to get licensed across those seven key developed countries, form relationships and build rails with them, and be multicurrency from day one.”
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital
“The seven biggest diasporas are 90% concentrated in seven developed countries,” Garg says, “the U.S., Canada, Europe, the U.K., the UAE, Singapore and Australia.
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital
Garg noticed competitors in the cross-border finance space—companies like Wise and Remitly—were going after broad audiences: immigrants of many backgrounds transferring money to many countries. “We realized our competitors were actually catering to hundreds of ideal customer profiles,” Garg says. “That’s because every immigrant group is very different in terms of cultural nuances and needs. We felt it would be virtually impossible for us to go after a wide population like our competitors and succeed at deep product integration into users’ lives.”
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital
“We read a lot about the early strategies of Wells Fargo and Nubank and learned that if you want to make a consumer financial platform work, you need customers using four to five products with you. Otherwise you’re not going to be able to build a sustainable business from a customer acquisition cost and longevity perspective,” Garg says. “And to get people using four to five products, you need hyper-specific product roadmaps for each ideal consumer profile.”
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital
“I ended up going into this deep rabbit hole of cross-border finance, and I spoke to over 100 people around the world who, like me, were dealing with this broken system,” Garg says. The global diaspora is estimated to be around 281 million people, approximately 3.6% of the world’s population, and the majority of diasporans who work in another country make 10 times the amount of their counterparts back home. In 2023, the World Bank reported $656 billion in remittances globally and that in more than 60 countries, remittances represent 3% or more of GDP.
Aspora: Cross-Border Banking Takes Center Stage | Sequoia Capital