recently spoke to a bigtech board about the data center backlash i opened with a poll: “how many directors here have visited one of your construction sites in the last 12 months?” zero hands went up they understood the problem immediately

@pdotcv I have done a tour of duty at all of BigTech: engineers & designers have more autonomy here to execute than any place on Earth. In fact, the environment is the opposite of what you’re suggesting: the people most successful here are the ones most comfortable debating decisions.

Interview in PC Magazine. I had a nice chat with Chris Hoffman about some of the choices we make at @Vivaldi, not least when it comes to AI, Crypto and data collection. #Vivaldi# #Linux# #Windows# #Macos# #Android# #ios# #ai# #BigTech# #Crypto# #Technology#

Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch on open source AI and why no company will want its intelligence running on someone else's grid: "If you assume that the entire economy is going to run on AI systems, enterprises will just want to make sure that nobody can turn off their systems." "It's the same way if you have a factory and you connect it to the grid. You want to make sure that nobody's going to turn off the grid because they don't like you... that's one of things that open source technology can bring." "It's also the only way you can create systems that use the folklore knowledge of your employees." "That's the knowledge you've accrued for decades. The only way to turn it into an asset that nobody else gets access to is to create your own models based on those open source models." "This is a technology which is so important that you don't want to be locked into a single vendor." @arthurmensch on @BigTechPod (January 2026)

Startups regularly underestimate how difficult hiring gets, especially after an expensive Series B/C. 1. Mission matters more. The people who join you at Seed/A might want to build a sales intelligence tool because they like seeing 0 to 1. They know that once this gets big, they’ll take home a good chunk of change. After a B/C, they think “is this really what I want to be working on?” 2. Financial incentives are lower. You easily see a path for a $30M valued startup to 10x. Usually this means going from $0 to $10M in revenue. Seeing a path for a $1B valued startup to 10x is far harder. It can mean going from $10M to $200M+ in revenue. And given the incrementally lower equity employees get, they’re counting on that 10x. 3. You attract a very different persona. They’re usually more risk averse and riding on the coattails of the success and name your company has already built. Culture can easily dilute if you’re not careful. The builders get replaced by the certain kind of BigTech person who wants “startup experience” without taking on the risk. They might still be smart, so it’s tricky to catch in any sort of technical interviews. 4. Culture degrades with size. It’s almost by law. In the beginning, you’re under 50 people. You’re all working on a startup you stood up from nothing. This builds a strong sense of camaraderie. As you go to 200 people, your early builders become managers. You start seeing more and more unfamiliar faces in the offices. At some point, you don’t even know everyone in the company. Everyone is eager to do “new” things and leave their mark, but what needs to be done is quite straightforward. The sales team feels like a different kind of person that takes up half the office. You’re eagerly watching the revenue, and your emotions ride on the back of it now, not the joy of creating. Management is in disarray. Now, projects keep getting killed. People keep getting roped into a new “customer issue” and can’t do their main project. New employees feel like this isn’t the culture they signed up for. Old employees feel like they work as hard as they used to from day 1, but the new employees treat this like a “job”. You get your first set of departures. Morale is low. Lunch banter shifts to “what if we just went to instead?” Keeping the company from tearing apart at the seams seems like an insurmountable task. Growing past these rounds can be very challenging and many founders are left blindsided. The awesome company they once had can quickly become a shadow of its former self. And it’s a stage which often separates the elite founders from the great ones. The answer here is usually having a mission worth going the distance for or a culture worth fighting for.

Big tech has never been bigger. The 2 largest S&P 500 companies, Nvidia, $NVDA, and Apple, $AAPL, now account for 15% of the index’s market cap, an all-time high. This comes as $NVDA represents a record 8%, while $AAPL accounts for 7%. By comparison, the combined weight of Exxon Mobil, $XOM, and Apple, $AAPL, peaked at ~8% in 2011. During the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble, Microsoft, $MSFT, and General Electric, $GE, topped at ~9% in 1999. Before 2020, the 2 largest stocks never accounted for more than 10% of the index’s market cap. The US equity market has never been this concentrated.