i first read the Nomad letters when i was 17, and they changed my life. this is an embarrassing admission to make about a collection of hedge fund letters that primarily circulated as a stolen pdf in value-investor circles, and have now become enough of a meme to enjoy a second life of their own. but on the occasion of their republication in beautiful form by Tammy and the team at Stripe Press, i thought it was worth reflecting briefly on the impact these letters had on me. Sleep and Zakaria’s fundamental truth (truke?) is often, and incorrectly, remembered as “scale matters.” everyone knew this when Sleep was writing. the real insight was that scale is most powerful when its benefits are surrendered directly to the consumer. the thing i remember most from Sleep is his wonderfully strange “robustness ratio,” which measured the amount the customer saved against the value retained by shareholders. value escaping the firm to the consumer, rather than being captured by it, was the metric of a great business. a great business is a lossy one. this places Sleep in an interesting position opposite the other greatest anglo-investor of his generation, Chris Hohn. Nomad and TCI look similar from a distance: concentrated portfolios, long holding periods, indifference to benchmarks and, eventually, the conversion of their private fortunes into large philanthropic efforts. they differ not merely in the fact that Hohn decided to continue (and even convert to Hinduism so that he could manage his portfolio in the next life, as reported in the FT), but in that their ideal businesses are exact mirror images. Hohn loves an irreversible asset that can extract a tax on its customer. in Hohn’s world, if a company possesses pricing power, it should, and must, exercise it. rather Sleep’s ideal company possesses pricing power and repeatedly and consciously declines to use it. the emergence and now total dominance of the labs makes this distinction newly urgent and would, on its own, be occasion enough to republish the work, quite apart from how beautiful and important the letters are. our instinctive response to a discontinuity in technology is to invest at the frontier. Sleep’s letters are at least some reason for caution. technical leadership can be copied or simply made irrelevant by the next advance, and capital floods towards visible scarcity just before technology eviscerates that very same scarcity. god knows Sleep was never hostile to technology. he made more money on Amazon than almost anyone else. but, at least in my reading, he was skeptical of technical novelty as a moat in its own right. what mattered to him was whether that technological step had been converted into a self reinforcing relationship in which the customer privatized the gain. in Nick’s frame, and he's welcome to correct me (although my sense is requiring him to lift a hand off of the wheel of a f450 in the hills of northumberland at this point would be a step too far) the enduring AI business may therefore be the one that passes declining costs on most aggressively, not one that preserves scarcity, bombs its own customers margins and tries to eat as much of the application layer as possible. i find it increasingly useful to use the pair trade between totemic-hohn, and totemic-sleep actions as a frame in which to view the actions of the frontier. my guess is, in the fullness of time, or at the very least in this life (hohn is welcome to prove me wrong in the next), that Sleep might have won this bout. very glad to see these letters in print.

a very smart friend of mine inside the intelligence trade has a great riff on this: you can always tell what is scarce in the moment based on who is putting dollars, rather than equity, in their pocket. many more in-hand dollars to the capital as such, rather than to the labs

its still so underrated the degree to which our intelligence supercycle was as much reliant on innovations in capital formation as it was innovations in the technology itself. europe is losing not only because they can't built it, but primarily because they can't finance it

there are very few decisions that you'll make in your life that actually matter. if you're lucky, maybe 2-3 every decade. joining drf was one of them for me. cursor, dandy, amp, the best friends i'll ever have, all in an ±18 month period with the same 40?ish people. insane

i basically could have replicated my best investing decisions by going insanely long anyone picked up a call on the first ring and passing on every ceo that scheduled calls and would have done a lot better than I actually did

Today, we're announcing @thatch_ai raised a $108M Series C at a $1B valuation from @thegp, @IndexVentures, @generalcatalyst, @a16z. The idea we're betting on: healthcare serves whoever controls the dollar. For 80 years that's been the employer. We think it should be you. Employers typically choose one health plan for everyone. We think there's a better model: give people a health budget and let them choose the insurance and care that fits their life. That is the idea behind Thatch. ARR has grown nearly 7x in the last twelve months, and more than 5,000 employers now use Thatch. None of this happens without our team, or without the employers who believe that their people know what their families need better than they ever could. We're building a healthcare system people love by changing how we fund it.

its weird to observe how uniformly peoples time preferences are shifting shorter across every aspect of life. ex: anti ai policy is decidedly stupid on a long time horizon, but very practically good on a month(s) horizon. scamming is bad in the fullness of time, but good today

🏛️Peter Thiel is coming to Nashville to deliver his four-part lecture series on the Antichrist. As the war for AI rages and parties push for regulation to ward off Armageddon, his thoughts have never been more pertinent.

Mark, by @colossusjeremy. This is a story about the head of history's largest nonterritorial empire, who nonetheless remains a prisoner of his rivals. Has he finally found a way out? The profile has been nearly a year in the making. Stern interviewed three dozen people, including Zuckerberg, his MMA coach, and his critics and competitors at the frontier AI labs. He spoke with his parents, Karen and Ed, and watched their son get punched in the face. The story spans Meta HQ in Menlo Park, the Zuckerbergs' homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe, and a party in a Manhattan warehouse with Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet. There is also a sneak peek of Aaron Sorkin's forthcoming sequel about Zuckerberg, sourced via a Hollywood fixer Stern first encountered in Russia. The result is a profile unlike one you've read before.

Q: Have you ever used AI yourself? Trump: Yeah, I use AI. Q: How do you use AI? Trump: You can use AI for a lot of things. Q: What do you use AI for? Trump: I don’t want to tell you that.

if you said the word "nationalization" in certain rooms over the last year you could pretty safely guarantee you'd be blackballed or at least no longer taken seriously but its really hard to not imagine this idea becoming somewhat mainstream outside of certain bay area zipcodes

the people who have been very smart about the nature of the coming intelligence curve tend not to be people that understand how poorly documented human systems like “firms” and “markets” work. expect most high trust business to go in person only- Internet banking was a blip

there’s many reasons to be skeptical that “finance culture” as such is a good/healthy thing, but there’s not a single day where i didn’t wish that tech would adopt its wasp norms around basic decency, discretion, and eschewing this gross vulgarity. really low class stuff.