Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444 (9th Cir. Aug. 4, 2026) in CourtListener, curated on eChai

More Founder Notes

• Curated from X →

  Fangchang Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Nuance Labs in Seattle, which he started with Edward Zhang and Karren Yang after the three spent years at Apple working on how machines perceive and reconstruct people. Lightspeed led the round having backed the company before, as had Accel and South Park Commons; Nvidia and Define Ventures are new. The company says a public research preview of the model opens later this year.

  Fangchang Ma 4h

  We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc!

  Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life.

  At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague.

  We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth.

  Join us!
• Vanshita Tekwani the social whiz 13h

  Last Saturday, I attended an eChai Ventures session on GTM & Distribution for Startups, and I genuinely enjoyed this one.

  What I liked most was that the session didn’t start with someone coming in and simply giving us their insights.

  It started with us.
  What are you building?
  Where are you stuck?
  What problem are you currently facing?

  And then the conversation went from there.

  The speakers shared what worked for them, what didn’t, mistakes they had made, and how they would approach some of the problems people in the room were facing.

  And I think there’s a huge advantage in that.

  Sometimes you can avoid a few mistakes simply because someone else was open enough to talk about theirs.

  Manoj Adwani, who was hosting the session, kept adding his own experiences throughout the conversation. Even people in the room were sharing what they had tried and what they had learned.

  So it never really felt like a one-way session. It felt more like a room full of people comparing notes on building businesses.

  For me, especially at a stage where I’m building, experimenting and trying to understand as much as I can about business and the market, these are exactly the kind of rooms I want to be in more often.

  You come with your own problems, hear how someone else dealt with theirs, question a few things you’re doing, and leave knowing a little more than you did before.

  Definitely a Saturday well spent😁✨

  Show more

  Originally on LinkedIn →

• 

  Curated from Colossus 13 September 2026

  Profile of Mark Zuckerberg →

  

  Image from Colossus

  Jeremy Stern, the editor-in-chief of Colossus, spent a summer around Mark Zuckerberg: a morning in the fighting studio at Lake Tahoe, the AI glasses launch in New York, a sitting with his parents, and Shabbat dinner with his family. The profile turns on what scholars call the dictator’s dilemma, the ruler whose court stops telling him what he does not want to hear, and Stern reads Zuckerberg’s habits against it: the direct reports of his direct reports, the outsiders invited in to argue, three mornings a week of getting punched. It also tells the eleven weeks after Llama 4, when he folded FAIR into Meta Superintelligence Labs and replaced a decade of AI people and strategy, and asks his competitors to steelman the case that he wins. The extract is that problem stated whole, and anyone who has been the last word in their own company for a few years will know the shape of it.

  Jeremy Stern, in Colossus

  The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.

  Read it in full on Colossus →

  Profile of Mark Zuckerberg on the reading room →

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