@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#

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 news today that CME launched single stock futures - these will trade 23hrs/day, weekends, cash-settled leverage, on the 55 most liquid equities names in the US market! But this is actually not the first time CME has tried to do this. In fact, they made a huge effort in 2002- and failed fantastically. It's worth studying what happened, what's different now, and what this means for the frontier of finance. Time for a side quest- That story starts with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This was the ugly byproduct of a 20yr reg turf war between the SEC and CFTC (sound familiar guys?), in which margin rules/short sales/reporting requirements were so complicated that even after approval broker dealer compliance framworks had no idea how to handle it. Most people don't remember this brief glitch in history because this was in fact just a big sideshow for what was actually the bigger/$$$ gamble of a darker legacy - exempting OTC derivatives from regulation altogether; this would in turn allow the CDS market to expand without oversight, and we all know what happened after that... But perhaps more practically speaking in fairness to the regulators, the more obvious reason why SS futures failed at the time was probably that there was just no genuine economic advantage over existing tools- because you can in fact get most of the leverage via listed options! Maybe you got slightly better capital efficiency for directional bets, but it wasn't good enough to otherwise offset the biggest reasons why most financial products fail: fragmented liquidity. So why are they attempting to do this again? There are many factors you can point to, but the single biggest difference now is that the retail market structure has changed enormously. American retail is more comfortable with leverage than ever in history, zero commission trading has brought in surplus liquidity beyond wildest dreams, levered ETFs and 0DTE options cant grow fast enough, and crypto perps have demonstrated that there is a ton of appetite for this kind of risk that simply just didn't exist before 2008. If you look at what the CME has been doing, the "retailification of leverage" has been happening for a long time already, starting with micro bitcoin futures called "BFFs" (Bitcoin Friday Futures lol) and the cringy Gen Z social ad that followed for those that are still scarred from seeing it. It's why CME launched for SS futures standard contracts (100 shares) but also micro contracts (10 shares). Honestly - who needs 10 shares futures contracts? The other reason, and probably more critically important, is to pursue a defensive posture. The CME doesn't compete in a vacuum anymore - with exchanges like Coinbase, Robinhood (+ a JVs between Susquehanna for predictions market), Hyperliquid all going after the same retail customer, the race to become the "everything brokerage" is just as much about distribution as much as it is about product design. And we know distribution is everything in finance because the beauty of Reg T + futures based margining is at its most competitive with scale and diversity, for the physics of money operates like a gravitational field: the larger the mass, the stronger its pull. So what does this mean for you? The single stock futures is not the product. You are the product. YOU are the yield. You are the currency that feed these HFTs, market makers, "big finance" just like you were the data currency for social networks, marketers, "big tech." Your intent to trade, the order book you create as makers, the tape you paint as takers, your inability to discriminate for best price when there are tens of seemingly fungible but slightly variant risks being offered, is their profit. And while it may all sound really dire when I frame it like this, but there is actually a way to win. And it goes back to the first principle of why the single stock futures failed to gain traction back in 2002. You must trade OPTIONS. Of course none of this is actual investment advice and you must always do your own research. But as I've written many times before on X already, options are the best tools retail investors have to protect against big finance. That's because options have the greatest asymmetric leverage embedded in the physics of its product that allow great convexity with great duration. When CME's Duffy says "perps are bad products for retail" he is not necessarily wrong- perps have the potential to be the most dangerous products for retail because they have no assurance or guarantee to control their own outcomes, especially given retail is so small- institutions can liquidate you (or each other, and you're just an ant caught in a stampede of bulls) where you have no agency. The reality is that the commodities futures market since the beginning of time has been found useful because it combines speculators WITH natural hedgers. And there is no natural hedger on earth who would take perps risk to hedge their long term business. Duration is an asset. Duration deserves a premium. Term structure exists because there is in fact a market for time. And when you own an option, it means you have the choice, but never the obligation, to meet time where and when you demand it. As I write this, I'm reminded that history has a peculiar sense of humor, delighting in the ironies of fate. The same bill that allowed then failed single stock futures market in 2000 is the same bill that gave us the reg vacuum for the CDS market that basically is the single biggest proximate legal cause of the 2008 financial crisis. And twenty years later yet again now as we head into CLARITY posturing for the next two weeks, on another epic settlement for a CFTC vs SEC battle, there are public debates occurring on various salient features that the crypto industry cares about. But you would all be wise to take note that if the past precedence holds again, the most consequential thing that will happen will actually be interpreted as a footnote, just like the "the Enron loophole" (aka. the OTC swap exemption) and it WILL involve offshore derivatives just as it did last time. And that footnote is what is going to let crypto industry expand again, bigger, stronger and faster. Because that is the other physics of money beyond a gravitational field: the harder you try to confine capital, the faster it leaks across borders.

Big tech companies branded “freeloaders” for trying to force banks to cover costs of accessing banking data. “Big tech already makes billions of dollars each year. These companies can afford to pay their share.” - @stinchfield1776

Big week coming up 👀 Pay attention to these Key Events to guide your trading: 1. Big Tech Earnings - Tesla, Google, and Intel report earnings this week. Expect shockwaves from any over- or underperformance. 2. Clarity Act Signing - The Act is stalled in the US Senate, with odds of it being signed into law dropping to 39%. 3. Mixed Crypto Sentiment - While $BTC continues to hover near $64,000, altcoins are falling. Leaders like $HYPE and $SOL are dropping. Meanwhile, $ETH has found some life. Can tech earnings provide direction this week? Trade crypto perps now on Everything:

Big Tech’s dominance is unprecedented: The Technology, Media, and Telecom (TMT) sector now accounts for a record 49% of the S&P 500’s market value. This is ~9 percentage points above the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble peak and ~20 percentage points above the late-1960s high. The tech sector now carries a larger weight than the financials, cyclicals, and defensives sectors combined. By comparison, TMT accounted for just ~19% of the S&P 500 during the 2008 Financial Crisis. The US stock market has never been this reliant on tech.