The Knicks Made a $2 Billion Founder Wrap Tefillin for the First Time in over a Decade
I DM’d @yext Founder @bdistel asking to wrap Tefflin with him
He responded “If the Knicks win a chip, happy to do a celebratory wrap!”
So after the Knicks won the championship this week I reached out again and told him Bill is now due.
He said let’s do it and today I came by the office wrapped with him for the first time in over 15 years and thanked hashem for the Knicks win
And end up wrapping another 4 of his employees @trywindmill
in markets, to go long on something is to bet it grows more valuable over time. much of the conversation today is short on humans, wagering that ai makes people redundant. we believe the opposite is true for the industries @ThriveHoldings operates in.
we are long humans.
life update: i joined @trywindmill !!
the default AI bet is subtraction. flatter orgs, fewer managers, smaller teams
windmill is making the opposite bet: when AI gives every person the leverage of an entire team, people decisions matter more. a misaligned hire or a siloed org
@LorimerVentures 4th annual hashtag #NYTechWeek event might've been our best one yet! Our community of 200+ founders, builders, investors, and friends came together for a night of live demos, drinks and great conversation in a beautiful gothic refectory in Chelsea.
Special shoutout to our portfolio companies🐎@zocomputer and🧠@GammaApp as well as our friends from🍃 @trywindmill for the amazing live demos.
Huge thanks to @VanderbiltU for opening up their stunning refectory on their brand-new NYC campus, and to @_nicolealonso for capturing the whole evening so beautifully.
If you're raising a pre-seed or seed round, we'd love to chat.
A big thank you to everyone who came and made our first NY Tech Week event a blast!
Everyone got to meet the Zo team and learn more about Zo, in our new office 🏡
We have 6 more NYTW events coming up this week and would love to see everyone there. Sign up on the link below!
What if every employee at your company had a world-class coach in their corner?
In a world of AI, human employees become more important than ever. On this episode of Inspired, @alexavontobel sits down with @_maxdshaw and @bdistel, two of the three co-founders of @trywindmill, the AI-powered people platform replacing the broken, once-a-year performance review with something employees actually love. Brian previously founded Yext, taking it public in 2017, and now the team is building what may be the most important missing system in every company. Inspired is proud to have led Windmill's recent seed round.
In this conversation, they talk about why performance management is so broken, how AI is going to make managers dramatically more effective as their teams grow, and why the companies that win the next decade will be the ones that invest in their people, not automate them out.
Listen to the full episode:
Apple: bit.ly/4tMszSA
Spotify: bit.ly/4dUj6Un
Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=vpv8YM…
Such a treat to have @_maxdshaw and @bdistel on Inspired this week. While everyone debates how many jobs AI will replace, @trywindmill is focused on putting the best people in the right roles and helping them grow. At @InspiredCap, we are so proud to back Windmill!!
What if every employee at your company had a world-class coach in their corner?
In a world of AI, human employees become more important than ever. On this episode of Inspired, @alexavontobel sits down with @_maxdshaw and @bdistel, two of the three co-founders of @trywindmill,
every headline right now is about AI replacing workers.
@bdistel thinks that's the wrong bet.
@yext co-founder. $1.3B IPO. 10,000+ people through companies he's built.
now he's building @trywindmill — the AI context graph for your people. shows you who's growing, who's stuck, and who makes everyone around them better.
100+ customers. $12M seed announced last week.
the day after he presented at our showcase.
this is shortlist nyc.
After their first cycle on Windmill, managers asked to do it again.
What started as one review cycle became RetailNext's continuous-feedback infrastructure. Not because HR mandated it, because managers asked for more.
Full case study 👉 to.gowindmill.com/ARPpmYV
RetailNext wanted to move from annual reviews to continuous feedback. The problem is well-known: it only works if managers engage, and most won't, because they don't have the time.
We solved that by bringing the context to managers, making continuous feedback actually possible.
Under 4 minutes. That's the average manager check-in time at @RetailNext after they moved performance management onto Windmill.
Their CPO Andrew Golden on the difference:
"I really love Windmill's pre-read reports. They're super condensed. We were using a different tool before and I'd get six-page summaries…which isn't a summary."
I spent the last year talking to partners at most major VC funds and hundreds of founders across NYC/SF.
The conversation is always the same.
The #1 bottleneck for founders today is ... talent.
Startups are having trouble finding top engineers, heads of growth, marketers, salespeople, and more.
Because these people aren't spending their time scraping job boards or scrolling LinkedIn.
They're heads down at their company – building
... and the best way to reach them is through someone they trust.
So, a year ago, we started building the event format we wish existed:
@TheShortlistNYC Founder Showcase.
100 operators in the room. 6 founders on stage, their only job is to convince the people in the audience to work for them.
Last week, the co-founder of a billion-dollar company, Yext, (NYSE: YEXT), even brought $5,000 in cash to convince founders to pitch him on the spot.
Thank you to our founders for putting on an awesome show!
– @reganjayne_ from @rediemco
– @bdistel – previously cofounded @yext, now @trywindmill
– @0thernet raised $28m to build @zocomputer
– building personal cloud infra – @ndrewpignanelli raised $10m to build @intelligenceco – the infrastructure for fully autonomous businesses
– @akashmagoon just closed his Series C for @AdonisRcm
– Daniel Kahn raised $7m for Sparrow to help financial institutions build personalized digital relationships
The companies that win the next decade will be the ones who can hire the best talent.
And if you're hiring or you're the kind of person founders want to hire, you'll want to be at our next event.
Follow @TheShortlistNYC for more.
I've taken the last two products at Merge from 0→1.
Nothing matters more in that phase than your first customers. The ones who give you raw feedback, push you through every edge case, and help you build something that actually works.
@trywindmill was one of those customers for Gateway.
They migrated from OpenRouter in a single PR and are now saving over $10K/month on LLM spend. Their engineer put it plainly: "Merge Gateway offers better LLM routing, cost control, and observability than OpenRouter."
What they're running:
- Intelligent routing across Claude Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5, Kimi K2.5, and GLM-5
- Spend caps and alerts so finance stops getting surprised
- Centralized governance and request-level logs
Seeing a customer go from launch to scaling and saving real money. That's the most rewarding part of building.
I recommend checking out how Windmill took a bet on us and started seeing the dividends immediately: merge.dev/case-studies/w…
📣Meet Windmill AI Tool Analytics.
Native integrations with Claude, Cursor, and Codex can pull usage per person, per day, and incorporate these stats directly into performance reviews and 1:1 meetings.
What gets tracked:
- Claude: conversations, claude code sessions, commits, edit acceptance rates, office agent usage
- Cursor: agent edits, tab completions, messages by model, MCP tool usage
- Codex: threads, turns, credits, token consumption by client
AI adoption is finally visible and measurable, without any extra effort.
224 Followers 747 FollowingMade in Miami, home is Maryland. Mom, Wife, CEO of the Sheer Household. I dig great food, sports #gocaps, having fun and making things happen!
528 Followers 6K FollowingI don't just post the moment — I post what the moment means.
Sports. Technology. Lifestyle. Culture(Yoruba).
The thing nobody told you. 🌍
18K Followers 17K FollowingRetailNext optimizes the shopper experience for retailers, brands, and malls with industry-leading advanced analytics. #retail #inspiringretail #analytics
3K Followers 101 FollowingGeneralist fund leading Pre-Seed, Seed, + Series A rounds. We back fearless founders solving the hardest challenges facing humanity.
3K Followers 787 FollowingBuilding something new @AshbyHQ. Prior @PlanGrid, https://t.co/AYy1PmULrc. In search of better ways to build software products and companies.
74K Followers 4 FollowingI am a proud IT Unprofessional with 25+ years of experience turning computers off and on. Did you try blowing on it? IT support @deel
39K Followers 3 FollowingTips from the darkside of HR. VP of HR for 10+ years. Employees are chesspieces, I am a grandmaster. I also like hot dogs and @deel
192 Followers 95 FollowingThe intralogistics AI co-pilot. Real-time warehouse visibility and actionable insights via autonomous drones and MHE vision. See clearly, act quickly.