More or Less Pod - A Met-Techlash-Moment?
The gang minus me — so it is met-gala techlash, AI layoff anxiety, Dave says it ‘doesn’t matter’ that I am traveling… jess goes with ‘somewhat’ — and I learned jess re-did our closet while I was gone
HOT TAKES
- Gamma Squeeze to Infinity — no one knows where the world is going, shorting anything narrative driven is far too expensive and scary & call options for if things go great (either in reality or narrative) make all the sense in the world. Pay a tax today just in case Anthropic really does pass Google. So what? So epic epic Gamma Squeeze where number goes up because structurally number has to go up. When you scope out, this entire game is people financially saying, ‘this probably won’t happen, but if it does we need to be in… and instead of ‘buying’ we can just do a call option for less money and more leverage’ — which then means, NUBMER GO UP… and financial prophecy become liquid dollars. We live in a belief based stock market. How does this end?
- And then there is xAI-SpaceX / Anthropic — hours before this got announced I was talking to a relative about this situation… and to Elon’s credit here is the brilliance… xAI was a total failure, but if you raise cheap capital at near zero cost, buy hard-ish assets, cover investors loss by taking from SpaceX shareholders (no worries tho because you can just make number-bigger on SpaceX) … and then after all that shut down the company and resell the infra you bought very cheaply to the person facing huge shortage? …. and THEN flip the story (whether or not reality) on the anvil weighing down your space narrative — This is Thomas Crown level business… this makes Barbarians at the Gate look like a sweet bedtime story. This is Jack Sparrow taking the interceptor times 100. Slow clap. Also I have no idea if this stratigery is true... but it sure is a great story before..., or after the fact.
- Speaking of narratives — founders, your story MUST MATTER… Investors just don’t care about your triple, triple, double, double right now… if you want to work in your corner, don’t need capital, and don’t need talent… g-d bless and compound out something great… but if you are playing the main-line tech game right now, story matters more than anything… There simply is no series A market for stories which are ‘blah blah, yada, yada, doing fine’ — people buy things that either (A) have a legitimate shot at infinity / near that in terms of speed of scaling and importance or (B) whatever one of 5 company leaders tweeted about yesterday simply because exiting to someone ‘scaling to infinity’ narrative wise is the only other way (valuation-by-tweet)… what does it do / what does this all mean for traditional VC? Well either as some whisper it is dead, or the world will re- raltionalize at some point… only time will tell!
- AI Shepards vs. AI Farmers — Cain vs. Abel — being around Israel this last week… it is hard to not think of tribes and the conflict between the birth of agriculture and herders / herding culture (trading culture?) un-tied to a specific land. Farming is super boring, and super inflexible (some might even biblically say a curse) — but boy does the infrastructure of staying in one place compound in times of peace and without drought. Herding / trading, etc. have their benefits especially in times of disruption where you can just ‘move’ and in certain eras are better (i.e. the internet was initially a big herding / trading innovation!) … but the wheel seems to continue to turn… will the next era be a ‘farming’ era or a herding era? Will the people and organizations that win be the fixed capital-heavy super-AI-infra-farming cultures… or will it be the nimble untethered herders of the world who are super-empowered?
- The Cost of Verification vs. Production in Science, Media and LLMs, and Everything — years ago I wrote a bunch about the crisis of ‘verification’ we face in media… in this brief window of the last 150-or-so years… truth could come from anywhere because it was cheap and easy to take a photo, make a recording, etc. but unbelievably expensive to fake it… so ‘verification’ was a fraction of the cost of production. Same with citizen science / the home-science revolution in the 1700s and 1800s… anyone could be a scientist because discovery could come from anywhere, and verifying results by others / decentralized was cheap and easy… Talking with smart people — this same reality is coming from LLMs, more formal work etc…. The cost of ‘verification’ is approaching the cost of ‘production’ of new work — and that is a HUGE crisis— because in a world where verification costs as much as production… you MUST go back to trust based networks for everything (which is what I talked about years ago with media) — and this is a VERY different, somewhat undemocratic, certainly not open world vs. what we live in today / expect.
- Refreshing Fin — when really should have documented fin even better when we ultimately shut it down. On the consumer side, I find myself basically re-implementing a lot of the interfaces, threading, etc. we figured out when building it (as well as things like the request composer, how we handled voice, etc.)… Even more humorously, nearly a decade ago with our internal tools we were doing full clickstream logging, etc. for operations work for up to 10,000 human operations agents clearing tasks, etc. and using the data-set to improve workflows / find errors, etc. … priceless data in 2026 :) — I am not bummed we were too early AND as I will tell folks, on the consumer side I don’t actually believe that ‘assistant’ service businesses will work for reasons unrelated to tech… but on the operations side / logging and optimizing human work (and shaving off steps with automation), there is real leverage and LLMs do make a big difference. We had the data-set and the insight, but the painful part was the ‘consulting’ of how ops teams could ask questions of the data… and that is where LLMs shine. I sill wouldn’t back businesses doing ‘fin analytics’ again… I don’t see the return on scale / infinity story BUT it is for sure a thing.
- HT Dan Fader — congrats on people noticing :) … and funny they even only know part of the part of the story (I am sure I know only part!)
Regards,
Sam
P.S. Arrows of History vs. Wheels of Time I was brought up in an era which firmly believed in an ‘arrow of history’… the 1990s story of ‘the end of history’ appealed a lot… and science and tech would deliver us there in a some what messianic form. It is a great story, and maybe we will be able to ram on through with ‘mars’ and ‘robot-capital-as-power’… / that is the science fiction dream… but there is a more frightful take on all of this, which is that over the centuries history tends to be a wheel… and demographics are destiny. And demographics don’t look very good for liberal society right now at all… so it might be that for all the aspiration liberal western society (which is the best ever) is just not designed to survive.
P.P.S. -- I am sure you saw it but HT to half cash, half stock... this feels unintentional, but in a world of narratives where no press is bad press -- well well done.