MORE OR LESS - When APIs become two way negotiations — Would you rather be right or rich? The question of the moment watching CoreWeave, all consumer agents being ‘good enough’, and the trajectory of Anthropic revenue. We have been discussing for YEARS now that AI is an extending innovation / compounder for owners of assets and incumbents (and as it commodifies down to multiplying big numbers NOT really a startup opportunity. But as public markets start to choke and story looks more and more race to the bottom as predicted … how do we feel about it given all the assets are now correlated. Plus, for the intellectuals we go deeper on the interesting agentic API question… when APIs aren’t bundles of permissions in vs. out but negotiated access based on who is asking, trust, and who they are working for (just like Hollywood). Also peptides lol.
HOT TAKES
Nihilism… the app… when founders believe in nothing — Aaron Sittig is one of the best hangs out there… catching up with him we one-shotted our way into building a nihilism app… that of course, does nothing. People can suggest things it should do, which probably won’t get added. Like a ‘tab called surrender… which presents dialogs for every possible iOS permission and teaches users the ‘sweetness of capitulation’ … it is hilarious to me that the downloads are in the hundreds and people are using this… for nothing.
The Actual Point of Nothing — for serious tho… the bigger point from all this (the point of nothing)… with AI now completely commoditizing software, it feels from talking to founders like tech companies now generally ‘believe in nothing’— free to build things, free to pivot, so no need to have a roadmap, framework, coordination — the theory is just build stuff… companies / are becoming a loose theme, a person you trust as CEO to work hard, and then customers/revenue — what they DO is besides the point… no commitment needed.
Real companies are defined as companies you can sue and get paid — this is an old bob lessin point from talking about why you can trust the rides at Disney world but not the local carnival… applies to AI and agents now as well… I trust meta, I trust google… real businesses with real balance sheets and if you sue them you get paid. I do not trust competitors with my life (or my data) that don’t have solvency or a balance sheet.
The List of Grievances (before Feats of Strength) — claude helped me generate a compact list of Marc Andreessen’s grievances… as a reference resource.
Babel as the first Anti-Authoritarian Commentary? — torah bot continues to deliver… we are now in to babel… one of the great stories to think about in our time… / moment… bringing the world's languages to one- fracturing them to infinity (yin-yang, same tech)… very interesting … also interesting from this week that the bot points out the difference between Hamas in Arabic ( Zeel / strength ) vs. Hebrew ( violence, wrong) — Nominative determinism at its finest.
S is for Superintelligence, Just Like B is for Bitcoin — in 2018 I wrote the children's classic B is for Bitcoin… it seemed like time for the sequel. ABCs for the AI age, pen-and-ink — video in the tweet.
Bring back the priceline reverse auction… for AI agents — when I was a kid I made (and then lost) a small bar mitzvah money fortune on the original priceline… what everyone forgets is that the original (AWESOME) idea was a reverse auction — the consumer names a price and suppliers compete. that is exactly the right shape for Agentic commerce.
AI agents are going to work like hollywood agents — your firm matters, your client list matters, everything is a negotiated deal… there is no 'standard' API — my agent calls your agent.
my AI story: long alpha, neutral (or short) the beta — please discuss… and it matched what I kept hearing across a week of fund conversations: there are two parallel seed markets running right now — normal disciplined deals that still price like normal deals, and a stratospheric AI tier that is basically a different asset class.
in life you want your cell phone to be a 212 or an 808 — that's it. that's the take… 21K impressions of people quietly checking their area codes.
Best,Sam
P.S. are ‘seed’ investors actually the ‘agents’ of Silicon Valley… they might be — marginally (just marginally) better business model to own 10% first of something vs. take 10% of revenue til you get fired… but similar role reading scripts, meeting talent, matching folks together… making studio intros, etc. Maybe I am Ari Gold after all (with less Rage)
P.P.S per last week — see the Nathan Fielder movie… it is important, art.