The serial entrepreneur and Lightspeed venture partner took over the product lead role in July 2025. He wrote Wednesday that, while in the role, he oversaw the launch of 30 new products while 'protecting the integrity of the town square.' Of course, Bier was also head of product during a number of scandals at X. Just a few days after he took the product lead role, the chatbot Grok ' made by xAI, which was then a separate company owned by Musk ' started calling itself 'MechaHitler.' Grok has also been used by X users to generate nonconsensual nude imagery, including child sexual abuse material, which has gotten the platform in legal trouble....

Good morning & happy Wednesday! Today, we're diving into Visa's $2.4 billion all-cash acquisition of BioCatch (what this deal is really about, why it's not a fraud play but a bet on owning the trust layer for agentic commerce, how it stacks with Visa's other M&As + bonus deep dives into Visa's agentic payments challenges, their new stablecoin platform & the AI Monopoly Playbook inside), Cloudflare, which just gave AI agents their own stablecoin wallets to hold and spend USDC autonomously (what Cloudflare Wallets actually do & why the 14-month two-sided infrastructure stack they complete matters, how Google already won the consumer protocol race but Cloudflare is playing a completely different game with x402 + bonus deep dives into Building an Agentic OS with Claude Fable 5 & the ultimate list of stables resources inside), and AI giant Kimi that just turned a credit card into an AI distribution channel (what this play from Moonshot AI is all about, why it matters & what to expect next + bonus end-to-end guide into Kimi K3 inside). So let's just jump straight into the finnovative stuff ''...

That's according to a study of more than 1,000 people hospitalized with the disease that is published today in Nature1. The analysis finds that this reactivation of pathogens is linked to especially intense bouts of COVID-19 and to the development of long COVID. If further research reveals that reactivated viruses can cause people to become seriously ill, it could open the door to new treatments for COVID-19 and even long COVID, says Esther Melamed, a physician-scientist who studies neuroimmunology at the University of Texas at Austin and who is a co-author of the analysis. Although the study didn't dive into how COVID-19 prompts viruses to reawaken, Melamed says that the disease 'probably induces the stress that triggers the reactivations, and then these reactivations further amplify the inflammation' caused by COVID-19. In these cases, she adds, 'COVID is not really acting on its own.' Nearly everyone is infected by a variety of viruses throughout their childhood and adolescence. A handful of these pathogens are never fully cleared from the body. Instead, they hide quietly inside cells for a lifetime, kept in check by a healthy immune system....

The fund intends to raise as much as $200 million, Reuters reports, and use that money to invest in startups founded by current and former Y Combinator participants, should those startups agree to sell their shares. While any retail investor can buy shares in the fund, they will not directly hold any shares in the startups. Investors will be able to trade their shares in the fund, but it's unclear how much profit they can expect to make should the YC companies manage big exits. The fund intends to pay the 2/20 fees typical in the VC world to another entity owned by Robinhood, plus tack on extra fees. That means Robinhood's unit will collect 2% of the net returns as a management fee, plus other fees, taking the total to just over 4%, the company said. The fund will also pay the Robinhood unit 20% 'carried interest' (commonly called 'carry'). That means if enough Y Combinator companies have good exits for the fund to make money, that Robinhood unit will get 20% of the resulting returns. But RVII doesn't appear to have an end date for returning its remaining profits to investors, unlike VC funds, which typically tend to run for about 10 years. Nor does RVII appear to promise regular distributions of cash profits. It may issue such distributions, but investors may largely have to bank on returns from the fund's rising stock price. (We've asked Robinhood for more information about this.)...