18 Oct 2025Jack and Jill raise $20m, Oura hits $11bn, UK IPO Market, IPO push for Nscale, Waymo announce London
Jameson Seidel Announces The Engine Room
Jameson Seidel, GP at early-stage fund Chapter One, joins and announces The Engine Room, a one-week sprint giving eight teams £5,000 to turn side projects or PhD ideas into companies, with mentors from ElevenLabs, Anthropic, DeepMind and Coinbase. She explains the name came from Zoe after her earlier Phoenix Club idea, the program grew out of their AI Engine hackathons, and applications are open for engineers with velocity and people commercializing specialized knowledge.
Poker Nights: Vegas Upbringing and London Games
Jameson explains her poker roots: her father is a professional poker player, she grew up in Las Vegas and has played since age 12, later joining a game run by Uber engineers in San Francisco. She now hosts monthly low-stakes £50 buy-in games in London, and the group discusses why poker beats stiff networking happy hours for actually meeting people.
Twitter Years, Bots, and the X Algorithm
Jameson recalls her five years at Twitter from 2016 to 2021, where she was technical lead on the platform manipulation team building bot-detection and election-interference algorithms. She weighs in on Nikita Bier as X's head of product and his TBH/Gas background, the algorithm's shift toward short video and polished launch videos versus the old community-driven timeline, and notes her data-sourcing systems skew toward US founders because fewer Europeans are on X.