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Almost everything people know about Facebook's founding comes from a film, and the film's opening premise is fiction: Erica Albright was written for the screenplay. What is documented is stranger — 450 visitors in four hours, a handwritten settlement, $200,000 for a domain name, and a legal fight to escape a payout that later multiplied.
Sequoia, Khosla and Coatue backed a 2025-founded company whose pitch rests on one test: general-purpose models could run end-to-end attacks and failed to defend against the same attacks.
The week of 18–24 July 2026 was read as a physical-AI story, and Atoms' $1.7 billion made that easy. Underneath it, Cathedral, Glow and Neo Security took $360m between them, which says more about where security capital is going than any sector total does.
Nearly 140,000 US tech jobs went this year, and AI keeps appearing in the explanation. But only four employers said anything specific, and the Financial Times found firms citing AI underperformed the Nasdaq by around 10% in the following 30 trading days.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma left his first company two weeks before his shares vested, ran an astrology call centre to keep One97 alive, and was dodging his landlord at dawn. Paytm didn't arrive until 2010.
H1 2026 funding held up. Q2 didn't: $4.4bn, down around 30% on both Q1 and the year before, with round counts falling too. The total survived because eight companies took $100m or more.
The wall-of-rejections narrative gets attached to Zomato often enough to read as fact. It never happened: the founders ran it as a side project for eighteen months, bootstrapped for two and a half years, and nearly bought a $10 domain instead.