Alex Pall

After a lot of conversations with various folks at companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that in-house Legal teams might have the most frustrating jobs of anyone at a company…

They are some of the most talented and hardest working people within an organization, but they have to spend half their day digging through Slack threads, rewriting the same doc for the fifth time, or chasing down some random contract buried in someone’s inbox.

I also know the other departments rely on them, and then when the bottlenecks begin and the work slows down… the company’s progress does too.

That’s what it’s like for a lot of in-house legal teams right now, and that’s exactly why we backed Sandstone.

They’re building the home base legal teams have never had that actually reflects how work gets done in 2026.

AI when you need it, workflows that live inside the tools companies already use (Slack, Salesforce, email), and smart systems that save legit time and brainpower. It's not just a tool, it is an AI-native platform - a "Legal Home."

We are very lucky to be working with Jarryd, Nick, and Liam as they’ve built this from the ground up, and it’s been awesome to watch them combining legal judgment, real operational experience, and world-class engineering into something that just makes sense.

It’s also one of those teams where every resume makes your jaw drop a little… ex-McKinsey, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and more.

Even crazier, this team was in the office at 2:30AM on a Monday. How do I know this? Because we did a Zoom then.

They are bringing this level of intensity and dedication to everything they do, and they’re already partnering with dozens of teams, from growth stage to F500. So if you're interested in learning more about them, let me know.

Today, they’re officially launching with a $10M seed round led by Sequoia Capital.

It’s also Gaurav Bhogale’s 40th birthday today (our fund's AI Wizard), so if you want to make his day, go check out what Sandstone’s doing.

Big congrats to the whole crew. This one’s gonna be fun.

Mantis Venture Capital

The first two gigs Drew and I ever performed as The Chainsmokers happened on the same night, and they could not have been more different.

First show was Terminal 5 in New York. 3,000 people, sold out, iconic venue. We were opening for Timeflies, who had a huge college following at the time and were kind enough to bring us on. (Side note - Cal from Timeflies wrote Ordinary for Alex Warren.)

We played a 15-minute set - all edits and remixes we'd made of popular songs - and the crowd went absolutely wild.

I remember walking off that stage thinking "Holy crap, this is it. This is our future.."

And then we went to our second show.

This was at a nightclub called WIP, which the day before had been the site of a huge fight between Drake and Chris Brown that was all over the news. The place was basically shut down because of it.

When we showed up, there were 10 people in the room. I'm not exaggerating - it was actually possible to count every single person there. And we had to play for two hours.

The vibes were... not great.

But here's what that taught us: you're going to have massive highs followed immediately by humbling lows, and you can't get too caught up in either one.

We didn't do any of the work to fill Terminal 5 - that was all Timeflies. They built that crowd. We just got to benefit from it for 15 minutes.

And at WIP, we were nobody. Just two kids trying to play a set in an empty room after a club got destroyed by Drake and Chris Brown LOL.

Throughout our career, pretty much every high has been closely followed by a low, and vice versa - I could name 50 times this has happened.

You have an incredible show one night and bomb the next. You release a song that does huge numbers and then the next one tanks. One post goes viral, then you're cancelled. That's just how it goes.

The goal is to not get too caught up in either moment. Stay level. Keep working. Don't let one great show convince you you've made it, and don't let one bad show convince you you're done.

Neither tells the full story, and you’re the one who has to keep the perspective through it all.

For seven years, everyone who Zoomed with me saw the same angle - me working out of my kitchen.

I raised three funds from that kitchen table, helped run The Chainsmokers, closed 200+ deals...all while sitting in the same spot where I'd eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And really, it worked. We were successful. But I definitely sensed some people were skeptical.

I think those little signals inherently change how people take you seriously, even if they don't mean for it to.

The bigger issue was that the kitchen was my office, so anytime I was in the kitchen, it still felt like work - and no joke this was the best and only location in my house for this all.

My girlfriend would never know if I was locked in or just grabbing coffee. It's hard to disconnect when your workspace is the same place you make dinner.

Now I've got an actual office in my new house, and while the setup isn’t even that different, the mental shift is huge. You can see the difference in these two photos alone.

When I'm in the office now, I'm locked in. It's like putting on a tuxedo - you just get into the right headspace faster because the space tells your brain "we're working now."

And when I leave and shut the door, I can actually disconnect. I'm done for the day. My laptop stays in there. I'm not in the kitchen wondering if I should be checking email.

Took me seven years to figure this out, and honestly there was something valuable about the scrappiness of it all early on, like "look at this guy raising money from his kitchen" kind of had its own charm.

But at some point you have to grow up and professionalize. That said, the golden photo of Mooshu in the background always worked like a charm. The Golden gang out here gets it.

I'm glad we're finally here! And I need a haircut - badly!

Back in November, there was this song called “I Run” by Haven that started going viral, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw something explode that fast out of nowhere.

It was everywhere on TikTok - super short, super catchy, drum-and-bass inspired, very PinkPantheress-adjacent.

It wasn’t even really a full song, just a 15-second hook repeated for two minutes.

And yet it hit #11 on Spotify, every creator was using it, and the clip was all over my feed.

So naturally I clicked through to learn more, and that’s where things got weird.

There was no real artist presence. No history. No trace of where it came from. I couldn’t find a single thing about this person online, which for a song blowing up that fast is super unusual.

I started asking around - publishers, labels, people who would usually know something. But nobody knew anything. And at that point, I started wondering if the whole thing had been AI-generated.

It honestly made sense. The vocal sounded a lot like Jorja Smith. There was already speculation that it was her, that she was shifting into electronic music, maybe releasing a new project.

The theory kind of sold itself. There were even videos of her boiler room set playing the song (see my other recent post about this trick new artists are using).

And then the song got pulled.

It looks like it was AI - likely trained on Jorja’s voice - and whoever was behind it ran into legal trouble pretty quickly.

But here’s the part I keep coming back to… people liked the song before they knew any of that.

There was no artist story. No press. No identity. Just a sound and a wave of creator momentum that made it feel inevitable.

And once people realized it was AI, they turned on it not because it suddenly sounded worse, but because they felt tricked.

I find the whole thing fascinating. In the end it looks like they found an amazing vocalist and re-cut it properly, but at that point was it too late…

It shows how much context shapes what we’re willing to engage with, and how quickly simulated demand can turn into real success, even if the foundation was never “real” in the traditional sense to begin with.