intelligence comes in many forms Steve Mandel (Lone Pine): "But one thing that we've learned, or I've learned, is people can be unbelievably smart, but if they're very linear thinkers, they will never work as an analyst. We are always dealing in shades of grey, probabilities. If somebody has to know the answer, like to a math problem or whatever, if they have to know the answer, there is never the answer in our world. And so those people can be incredibly smart and might be winning Nobel Prizes or whatever, but they can't work in our world because our world is all about probabilities and weighing outcomes. And if that makes you uncomfortable, it's just not the work for you."

Enjoyed putting together this overview of $CRWV credit earlier this week. Full slide deck is available for download in the quoted post. The backlog runoff analysis on page 14 of the deck is helpful for framing the unsecured parent-level credit bet here, which is by no means straightforward. Being long the unsecured, you have to believe that CoreWeave deploys cash flow from its active backlog in an accretive matter (both in terms of project-level cash equity investment and parent-level corporate cost spend which is significant). Equity bet is even more difficult here, as combination of (i) NPV of value created via incremental projects won + (ii) residual value of GPUs post customer contract expiries, net of (iii) dilution via any incremental equity/converts issuance, needs to be worth more than $33.4B (market cap at the time of this analysis). Can CoreWeave (and neoclouds generally) capture this much value or will their swing capacity role diminish over time? Is CoreWeave equity the best way to express a bullish view on compute? Imo, very difficult questions to answer. *Not investment advice. For educational purposes only.

We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65. We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life". You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets. I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long. My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite. TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.

I'm in my 40s. The most scared/disoriented people in my network are the ones that have the following resume => went to an Ivy League school, went into consulting for Bain or BCG or investment banking for a bulge bracket bank then MBA at Harvard/Stanford and then career progression in high income tech W2 or hedge funds/private equity. A number of these individuals in the last 5 years have been unexpectedly let go in their early 40s with 2-3 kids in private school and a burn rate they socially struggle to walk away from (kids have close friends now, business connections at the private school their kids go to, living in a high cost location makes it easier to network, etc). These are the people literally have only been told they are excellent their entire lives and now are in year 3-4 (no exaggeration) of trying to land a new job. Some are willing to "settle" for working for mid 6 figures (some even less) just to cover their burn rate with a young family. AI probably makes this dynamic happen earlier in one's career going forward for some of these perfect resumes individuals. Good chart from @Jack_Raines in his book Young Money

Gavin Baker says Grok Bot is the most impactful AI product he and his firm have had yet, and reveals he’s up to 17 Grok Bots “I mean, as a user, Grok Bot is the most impactful AI product to me and to the firm that we’ve had yet. I glued together all this stuff with Claude Code, and I’m sure it was user error on my part, you know, 50 years old. I’m doing my best." "But Grok Bot, it just makes it so easy. I think I’m up to like 17 Grok Bots. And every day I think of a new one to add.”

This is correct. The vast majority of enterprise workflows have not actually had agents applied to them in any meaningful way. The economy probably has this deployed < 1% right now. At best you have a few automated systems in a company that do a single pass of an LLM to make a decision or provide feedback, but very little real “automation”. Some of this is a statement about the adoption rates of technology in enterprises, but the vast majority of it is really just due to the capability of AI itself. That’s all changing. Now with computer use, long running agents, harness improvements and surrounding infrastructure, we’re finally at a point where we can start to apply agents at more complex workflows. We will see self-improving systems that can take any particular workflow goal and improve the execution rates over a volume of instances. And with the emerging form factor of agent swarms, you can just choose to deploy any amount of compute at a problem and agents will off and do the work. This won’t be about and users prompting agents to complete a specific task for them, but instead the organization reengineering the underlying workflows to take advantage of agents in their processes. This will have a massive impact in finance, life sciences, healthcare, and other information-heavy domains. Lots of opportunity to build and deploy these systems right now.

I think this advice is not as true anymore: 1) the durable skill behind “using AI better” Is unclear as AI gets easier to use 2) Increasingly, organizational systems bottleneck AI gains not individual workers 3) The effect on jobs is uncertain but may impact entire job categories

“Increasingly, organizational systems bottleneck AI gains not individual workers” Yup. At this point, in most every company that does ‘knowledge work’ - there are pockets of folks who are AI-pilled and know how to use these tools effectively. With the right nudges and processes, these folks could lead the charge forward. But In most orgs, they are gated by organizational inertia. It’s much easier for orgs to do what they’ve always done, because inertia is hard to overcome. Incentives are a thing, and so are engrained organizational dynamics. This is yet another manifestation of the “No one ever got fired for buying IBM." idea. This is why I’ve always believed what Mollick has written from the beginning. The only way to make this work effectively is to have a both bottoms up and top down approach. You definitely need folks at the top who understand that to make this thing work, it’s not just a technical problem. Those leaders need to know that lots of priors have to be re-thought, and lots of things their org takes for granted (processes, org structures, how folks work together, who needs to be on the ship) - had to be burnt down. Innovators dilemma on steroids