Vacation report. Hello from Seattle. Watching everyone talking about Kimi and startup school. But I fell asleep quite a few times as our robot drove from San Jose to Seattle. Without stopping to sleep. This was something that killed a good friend in high school. Instead my Tesla woke me up and gave me a strike. Five strikes and the robot refuses to work anymore. Luckily I only have three. Other than those I didn’t touch the car in 900 miles. And I read on @markgurman that Apple is scared about putting cameras in glasses. That is the real startup lesson. Startup founders have to find customers so need to do something new. Big company employees need to worry about market share, so resist doing new things that could piss off some of its customers. While my robot drove, we passed several scenes like this one. Notice I still have a robot that hasn’t wrecked. Even though I fell asleep several times with my kids in the car. Maybe doing things a new way is the better way? Like putting datacenters in space? Visiting @Starcloud_ tomorrow to learn how that is done. Today gonna have our robot take us to see a volcano or two. Thanks to @tesla we probably will make it. I hope Apple gets the message that cameras save lives. If they don’t someone else will. Probably in China where they don’t worry about privacy so much. Oh and the real startup school is here on X. Tens of thousands of founders doing something new:

19 years ago yesterday I bought the first iPhone at Steve Jobs’ store. When I arrived at the store with my son Patrick (who officially was first in line), there was nobody there. We set up our chairs and waited, and 45 minutes later, somebody else showed up. By the time the store opened, there was about 1,000 people behind us in line. It was one of the most remarkable Silicon Valley events I have ever been a part of. In line with us was the original Macintosh team, along with so many entrepreneurs and people who are running the tech industry today. Brian Solis took this photo, for instance, and he is now a storied executive. One thing I remember clearly was Andy Hertzfeld showing up with a wood model of the iPhone. He was the guy who invented major parts of the Macintosh and HyperCard, and he is largely seen as one of Apple's best engineers of all time. He wanted to hold the iPhone to dream about how the world would change after they got it. It is that dreaming that I think is indicative of the spirit of Silicon Valley: a dreaming of a better future. It keeps me going because I have the same dream. After that, I went around Silicon Valley taking pictures of people holding their iPhones. Those pictures are still up on Flickr. People were so happy to get this new device. It was much better than the Nokia phones everybody had before that, or the Palm Trios, or the Blackberries. It was a time of hopefulness, a feeling that the world had changed. Now we are going into a period where technology is changing at such a rate that it is hard for everybody to get that feeling back, but it is still there. The thing people forget is that the iPhone really wasn't that big a seller at first, even though there were a thousand people in line at the Palo Alto store and lines at other stores around the world. At the time, Nokia had far more dominance. For three years after the iPhone shipped, Nokia's CEO kept reminding me that his phones had better radios and better cameras. That was true, but the company was doomed from that day because the iPhone simply let you use the phone in a much nicer way. I still have a drawer full of Nokia phones; they were just so hard to use and lacked a good developer platform. Neither did the iPhone, for that matter. The first iPhone developers camp only had one Apple employee at it, and there was no App Store on the original iPhone. The platform we know today showed up much later. It is interesting because my boss at Microsoft eventually left for Google, where he funded Android. I have watched the iPhone versus Android rivalry play out from the very beginning. Today, the iPhone doesn't have nearly as much market share (it is around 10%), but it still has the affluent users and the best developer ecosystem. There is a reason Apple is the most profitable company in the world today: it is all due to the iPhone. If you bought one the first day, do you have any cool stories?

Being at the launch of Cybercab two years ago was magic. A decade from now there will be millions of these things rolling around the world. The war over autonomous vehicles is on, as everyone in San Francisco knows. But if you add up everyone who has been in ANY autonomous vehicle, whether from Waymo, any of the Chinese, the NVIDIA, any Tesla, it is only a few million people out of eight billion. When I first saw autonomous vehicles at Stanford University about 20 years ago they were so crappy I thought I'd never be alive to see them. I have the first video of the first Waymo on the freeway, and I've been blessed to have been able to watch the development of these up close (got the first ride in Mercedes' AI car, for instance). So many engineers spent so many hours developing them, many going down bad paths. Which happens with innovation. They will save millions of lives. Ford's head of safety told me that what kills people in a head-on wreck is the steering wheel. Now we can see a path to getting rid of the steering wheel totally. Congrats to Tesla and @elonmusk for getting here. Still a lot of work to go and many fights with many communities who will try to ban these to protect jobs. I'm very bullish on Cybercab and will buy one if sold to private citizens, as expected. Why? I never touch the steering wheel in my vehicles already and this will be the lowest cost vehicle with the most safety. And a great big screen and a great sound system to watch whatever I want. When I met the engineers at the launch they said they made many decisions to make it quieter inside, so we can do things like listen to music, video calls, or watch the World Cup. This vehicle is the iPhone moment of autonomous vehicles. One I've been lucky enough to survive the 20 years it took to see.

Most robots you see are trained to walk on pristine concrete floors in air conditioned San Francisco labs with gigabit wifi. That is not the real world. That is a sandbox. The moment a robot leaves that grid, into a mine, a jungle, or up a mountain, the cloud becomes a luxury it cannot reach. Zero connectivity, massive latency, zero margin for error. This week a humanoid named Pemba became the first to summit Chimborazo at 6,200 meters, the highest a humanoid has ever gone. It walked autonomously on the moderate terrain and was carried on the technical sections. The climb is the proof. The real story is the infrastructure that makes it repeatable. Eastworlds, the technical partner to Geologic Dome, is building Starlink fed portable edge units so a humanoid keeps running on cloud inference where there is no wifi and no power. That is the moat, and the whole reason Everest is next. Up there, there is no signal to fall back on. Solve the infrastructure and you solve the mountain. This is the frontier we track at AlignedNews. Follow the journey at @pabloberlangab. Technical partner: @eastworlds_io

Open Source's big problem. Last night I went to a Y Combinator party in San Francisco and met an entrepreneur who is making a top Open Source AI model. He told me it is very hard to make money in open source. Yeah, it is cool being popular, he told me, but figuring out how to make a business out of it is proving to be very difficult. The Chinese are pounding the price into the ground with their open source models. Which makes it tough. In the old world of Open Source you could make money with them by consulting, service, etc, like RedHat did. But in this new world, he told me, it's much harder to make a good business out of it. Is anyone making a good business out of open source? What would your advice be to the businesses that are trying to support Open Source?