Chris Muscarella
Brooklyn, New York, United States
3K followers
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3K followers
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Chris Muscarella reacted on thisChris Muscarella reacted on thisIs anxiety we see around AI, whether slowing down or speeding up, a form of grief over losing determinism? Just a thought for the weekend.
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Chris Muscarella reacted on thisChris Muscarella reacted on thisWe started Alfred believing technology would change the resident experience. We were wrong. It took years inside actual buildings to understand why. The interface was never the constraint. Property management hadn't fundamentally changed in decades, and no amount of software layered on top was going to change that. You cannot redesign an operating model you are only observing. So we did the thing nobody expects technology founders to do. We started buying property management companies. And once we were actually responsible for the outcome, a lot of our assumptions fell apart. Processes we thought were inefficient existed for a reason. Features we thought mattered often mattered less than the basics. The real opportunity was in how the work itself was designed. People called it a detour. Eyebrows were raised. It wasn't easy. Every assumption we had about where change actually comes from got revised by talking to our teams and watching what people do all day. I think this is the part of the current AI conversation that gets missed. There's a lot of noise about autonomous buildings and software owning the operating layer. It's not the full story. Someone still has to run the building, and automation makes the people who do that more valuable, not less. We're building this at Arqline. Legacy systems, inherited processes, mixed with new tech, AI, real teams, and real communities depending on us this week. I wrote more about how this thinking developed for Bizwomen. Read more about it here: https://lnkd.in/g8P5zCDxIn Her Own Words: Jessica Beck transforms property management from the inside out - The Business JournalsIn Her Own Words: Jessica Beck transforms property management from the inside out - The Business Journals
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Chris Muscarella reacted on thisChris Muscarella reacted on thisI'm excited to share Tutor's next generation of robots, pushing the frontier of robot capabilities in real customer deployment. Meet the newest generation of Cassie, a mobile general warehouse and factory worker for bulk tasks. Customers from family-owned manufacturers to Fortune 50 distributors trust Cassie in their critical operations, from palletizing to induction to full case-picking automation. Cassie is picking the first day of most deployments, with a ~40 day median from signed paperwork to robots in production. We're also sharing our first deployment-ready Sonny robot, a human-inspired robot worker built for our Ti-series VLA. Sonny is deploying later this year into e-commerce fulfillment operations. Turning models into a complete labor solution is only possible by building our own hardware: our customers don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want the quarter-inch hole. Owning the embodiment means full control of the harness for our models and the experience for our customers. Sonny video and full blog post on Cassie and Sonny in the comments.
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Chris Muscarella liked thisChris Muscarella liked thisNew Yorkers! I'm really excited for this collab. ✨ This weekend, In partnership with the iconic Sara Bareilles, The Strangers Project will fill Lincoln Center Theater’s Christopher Lightfoot Walker Lobby at the Vivian Beaumont with hundreds of handwritten stories from our collection. There will be beautiful music from Sara and lots of stories to read and write :). Learn more & RSVP (it's free!) : https://lnkd.in/gZki2Z7S ❤️
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Chris Muscarella reacted on thisChris Muscarella reacted on thisToday, August 20th, 2026, is the 20-year anniversary of me working at CollegeHumor / Dropout. At 42, that's nearly half my life. I know how rare it is to spend an entire career at one company, let alone a "new media" company. My LinkedIn is pretty sparse. I've spent most of my life committing hard: - I still play video games with my grade school friends; - I got married to my summer camp sweetheart; - I (inadvisably) took over the failing company I had been hired by 14 years prior. With apologies to Brennan, I sometimes worry it gives me a "homeschooled" vibe. But all this staying put has turned out to be one hell of an adventure. When CollegeHumor hired me at 22 - at 4 days per week, as a video team of one - I never could have imagined collaborating with so many people in so many contexts to create so much art for so much audience. Let alone having a show or two to call my own. The author and naturalist Annie Dillard once wrote about an eagle found with a weasel's skull embedded in its neck. She suggested we should all "live like weasels": bite into the neck of something meaningful to us, then go wherever it takes us. This life has not been without sacrifice. Doing this, while fun, is stressful. The body keeps the score. It is also fiercely dominant, which perhaps also explains why the rest of my life remains so simple. But, as the internet itself - my sandbox - yells "choice!" a little louder with every passing year... I both rue to think, and cannot imagine, what my life would be without committing to these few things I love so deeply. So tonight I toast my job of 20 years, with my partner of 27 years. Here's to all the weasels out there.
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Chris Muscarella liked thisThanks, Ashlee Vance, for coming north and checking out what we're building in the Arctic!Chris Muscarella liked thisOut on a frozen lake in Canada, an upside-down cell tower is collecting data on the local fish population. The device is called Echo, and it’s just the beginning of what Dominion Dynamics hopes to build for the country’s growing defense industry. Our northern brothers have been agitated to the point of action, thanks to President Trump declaring that they’re nasty people we should perhaps conquer. Threatening Canada is not unlike kicking a puppy, but it turned out to be the final straw. The country counted its beans and concluded the situation was loony — 70 cents of every dollar Canada spends on military hardware goes to American companies. Realizations like these pushed Dominion founder Eliot Pence to move back home after 20 years in the States and get to work on renewing Canada’s awesomeness. “I want to compete with Lockheed, with Anduril, with Northrop,” Pence told me. “I want to put Canada and Canadian defense back on the global map. That’s the ambition, and we can do it.” Before Dominion, Pence spent four years at Anduril Industries as one of its earliest business hires. The lessons he gleaned from that experience are what he hopes to return to Canada, which has a maddening history of building world-class defense technology and immediately tossing it in the trash. “We’re trying to change history here and build back what Canada was,” Pence said. Since its founding in June 2025, Dominion has raised $169M CAD, reportedly at a $570M CAD valuation. They’ve been hard at work on all sorts of cool gadgets like Echo, which is meant to find adversary submarines under the ice, plus a communications network called AuraNe, and an unmanned drone that flies alongside fighter jets called Scout. In the latest episode of our Canada series, we spent some time with Pence to figure out why Canada would even need a robust defense industry. We got a tour of Dominion’s new factory, which will likely never make a camera appearance again because, ya know, top secret defense stuff. We took a skidoo across the lake to see the tech in action and bribe a local fisherman with beer. I almost kiss a pike and jig like my life depends on it. If you aren’t Canada-pilled by the end of this video, perhaps there is no hope left for you. https://lnkd.in/gyA778CVAnduril And The US Face A New Rival From The NorthAnduril And The US Face A New Rival From The North
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Chris Muscarella liked thisChris Muscarella liked this🚨🚨🚨 HOT JOB ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 Join me at The Farmlink Project as COO. A new role for the next chapter‼️ If some part of you has been waiting for a problem worth solving with everything you've got, we'd like to talk. https://lnkd.in/gwr7ivJr Please comment for reach.
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Chris Muscarella liked thisHad a blast filming this one with you Taylor Avakian! Big fan of your show as well. Highly recommend to listen to learn all about different facets of real estate.Chris Muscarella liked thisHe started with a fourplex in Bakersfield in December 2008. No real estate background. Just an eBay business that sold 200,000 items out of a dorm room. Today his firm has acquired around 11,000 apartment units. They still own roughly half. Close to $2 billion in real estate. Keith Wasserman is the co-founder of Gelt. Private capital. Deal-by-deal syndications. Never a fund. And one number that stopped me: They have never lost a dollar of principal for an investor. Not once. No capital calls. It started small. Bank-owned, boarded-up fourplexes. FHA loan on the first one. Family and friends on the next. Then a 78-unit syndication that raised $1.3 million. One investor at a time. One property at a time. They sold 49% of the early deals to recycle capital and scale. Brought in gray-hair partners to qualify for bigger loans. Stayed lean. About 20 people running a multi-billion-dollar platform because they outsource property management and stay on top of it. What stuck with me from the conversation: 1. Transparency compounds. Full transparency on the good deals and the soft ones is why capital keeps showing up even in hard fundraising environments. 2. Start when things feel worst. Clean slate in 2008 meant no legacy problems. The best time to begin is when others are frozen. 3. Deal-by-deal still works. It is harder to raise, but it protects the promote and lets investors 1031 for decades. Their gold standard is the operators who have done it for 40 years. 4. Never lose sight of offense. While putting out fires on the current portfolio, keep buying. The ones who only play defense miss the next cycle. 5. Skin in the game and patience. Average net IRR around 22% across sales. Long-term greedy. Boring and unsexy still wins. Most people would have stayed in the eBay business or waited for a safer entry. He bought the fourplex when the market was on its knees. That one decision compounded into thousands of units and a track record that still brings capital in the door. Full episode live now.
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Chris Muscarella liked thisChris Muscarella liked thisTwo years ago, I told Henry's founders they shouldn't build their company because of a historically tough market. Last fall, I led their $16.5M Series A. I wasn't wrong about the history... in CRE, labor was the software. What I got wrong: that was a fact about the products, not the market. The moment AI could do the work instead of organizing it, everything changed. The trail didn't get safer, the vehicle got a generational upgrade. What I also got wrong was underestimating the sheer grit and horsepower of Sammy Greenwall and Adam Pratt. Two years later, they've built the first product this industry treats like a teammate instead of a tool: → 150+ firms, spanning four of the five largest brokerages in the U.S. → 20,000+ client-ready deliverables behind $150B in deal value → 15 hours of analyst work down to 30 minutes of review My favorite detail in Alex Konrad's piece is a top Marcus & Millichap broker admitting, "Part of me now is like, 'I don't want too many people to know about this.'" When customers start trying to keep your product a secret, you must be doing something right. We watched it happen in Big Law and on Wall Street, CRE is next, and Henry is out in front. Leading this round is my favorite way to admit I was wrong. Proud to back Sammy, Adam, and the whole team, alongside Thomson Reuters Ventures, Susa Ventures, 1Sharpe Ventures, Y Combinator, Coalition Operators and others. Full coverage in the comments 👇
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Daniel Dart
🚨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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Graham Locklear
💥 this one's for the operators.. special edition of the ai market memo just dropped PE or VC, which actually creates more wealth for operators? this one’s special because I’m in these conversations weekly with GTM execs, VC partners, and PE sponsors. and most operators are making a huge financial decision of their career using wrong napkin math. It’s cap table math. and the math decides whether “0.2% equity” becomes $0 or millions. so in this special edition, we broke it down in parts: 1. the real equation wrong napkin math and the actual payout formula that determines outcomes. 2. the two wealth engines broke down the two operator wealth models: - VC = power law (home run derby outcomes) - PE = manufacturing (timelines + transaction probability) Milad Alucozai gave some great advice on participating preferred. 3. cap table terms before we touched the math, we got the vocabulary straight: common vs preferred, pref stack, dilution, vesting, acceleration, Polina Karachentseva explains single-trigger vs. double-trigger acceleration really well using the windsurf deal as an example. 4. the ‘right’ math. why pressure-testing these four variables: dilution, preference stack, timing and eligibility / acceleration are critical. 5. scenarios then we ran real scenarios both VC and PE including the good and the brutal: - the home run - the “decent exit” - common gets smoked - the acqui-hire trap (headline exit, $0 payout) - the PE leaver clause haircut 6. due diligence checklist finally, the questions operators should take note on. and some wise words from Colin Lernell's stuff. link in the comments.
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Dr. Jacob Mahaffey
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Sunil Nagaraj
A fun thing about deeptech that almost nobody talks about: THE GOVERNMENT MIGHT MATCH YOUR SEED ROUND. Ubiquity Ventures-backed WindBorne Systems closed its very first round, then secured nearly as much again through SBIR awards. More than ten grants later, from federal weather agencies and the military, EVERY SINGLE ONE has turned into a recurring revenue contract. WindBorne CEO John Dean thinks most founders get grants wrong because they treat them like free R&D money instead of the beginning of a customer relationship. If you missed it yesterday, the full session and a writeup of John’s key points are up on Ubiquity University, where our founders teach the parts of company building nobody has written down yet. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gPmGpb7u Or straight to the Ubiquity University module here: https://lnkd.in/gqwsSDn2
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