Strong disagree. Lattices have juicy mathematical structure, ripe for AI to attack. And the succinct versions based on module SIS are too new -- only around since 2012. I recommend waiting another 3-5 years for AI to kick the tires, before entrusting serious $ with it. DYOR; stay safe.

Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week: 1. Austin is a serious f*cking city. SF is still the center of gravity. LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials. But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate. People I've met here seem to have one primary objective: Build. Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor. Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work. Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality. 2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage. Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week. Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion. When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography. When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table. Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution. Texas understand that speed matters. 3. The coastal migration isn't over. SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages. But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working. Now you need 100,000 square feet. Power. Testing. Manufacturing. Suppliers. Technicians. Hundreds of employees. Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive. And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume. 4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here. Historically the playbook has often been: Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas. I think that increasingly becomes: Texas → Texas → Texas. More technical founders will move here before starting the company. More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here. More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1. And that's when the flywheel gets interesting: Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups. Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop. 5. Austin feels significantly less distracted. There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit. But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here. Less worrying about who raised what round. Less optimizing for appearances. Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to. More: Does the thing actually work? That cultural difference matters more than people realize. 6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument. Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane? It's 2026. If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane. Great companies don't travel to capital. Capital travels to great companies. Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds. More capital will follow the companies. It always does. 7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been. Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure. Factories. Energy. Robotics. Defense. Space. Advanced manufacturing. Data centers. Industrial systems. Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world. And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed. Texas has a lot of all six. SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine. But Austin doesn't need to become either of them. It may be building something fundamentally different: A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it. That's a much more interesting proposition. Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem. Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated. Ingredients are here. Talent is coming. Capital will follow. Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here. That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸 Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!

last week @KashRazzaghi showcased how private assets will be deployed/managed on Arc by this time next year, over 30% of assets deployed will be private privacy will be a key driver for unlocking latent demand

Less than 48 hours until @arc comes to life with support from leading wallets, DeFi primitives, infrastructure providers, and institutions on day one. 9/16 will mark a defining moment not just for how value is moved on the internet, but for the financial system as a whole. The economic operating system will be live for the world to build upon. This is the culmination of over a decade of work, learnings, mistakes, relationships, and so much more — not just from @circle, but from hundreds of partners and users. The real work begins on 9/16, but it is incredibly special to recognize in real time that this is truly the crescendo of over a decade of progress moving value across internet rails, setting up the next century and beyond for both humans and agents alike. Spending the last 4+ years at Circle and working on Arc since last summer has had a lasting impact on broadening my time horizon and confidently doubling down on opinionated bets. @arc is amazing for today, but it will be even more incredible for the future — we’re thinking in decades, and this endeavor’s value proposition and impact will only strengthen in the fullness of time. Circle set out to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value, and we finally have a world-class, bespoke operating system to supercharge that mission. Here’s to the future, built on the economic OS 🏌️‍♂️

It’s wishful thinking that authoritarian governments will play by our self imposed rules if the progress of AI is rapidly advancing to the point where it will “cause significant harm” to the human race

Doug is a long-time colleague and extraordinary at what he does, and this was a terrific conversation. Toward the end of the interview, he recalled hearing me turn down a company and said, “The founders are going to walk away from this thinking they won the lottery. I was always an admirer of how he (Jim) could do that.” I’ve always tried to pass on companies with as much grace and thoughtfulness as possible, as well as give the reasons why. The founders we meet are so often universally high-quality people taking on something incredibly difficult. Like many of the very best Venture Capitalists, we have always felt that they deserve respect, whether or not we ultimately invest. There’s also an important element of humility in saying no. Investors get things wrong, companies evolve, and circumstances change. If I missed something, I always want to be able to revisit the conversation with a founder and, hopefully, find a way to work together down the road. This has occurred many times, and with some of our best deals.

Circle 🤝 @ChelseaFC USDC is coming to global football. Circle is proud to partner with Chelsea FC, one of the most recognized football clubs in the world. Beginning with the 2026/27 season, Circle and USDC will appear on the front of Chelsea’s Men’s, Women’s, and Academy shirts. The global game. The global digital dollar.

Launching out of stealth Drop started as a side project around a simple idea make it easy for anyone to sell food. 1. Cook + post 2. Customers purchase through a link 3. Get paid in stablecoins + customers pick up their food But there’s a bigger shift happening underneath it. Food has gotten expensive. Restaurant prices are up, the Uber Eats / DoorDash tax adds another layer, and the cost of living keeps going up. At the same time people are buying incredible food directly from home cooks and small sellers they discover on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace and WhatsApp. The problem is these sellers are running their businesses through DMs, spreadsheets, Venmo/Zelle and a patchwork of tools designed for traditional restaurants. They need something much lighter. I think there’s an opportunity to build the operating system for the next generation of mom and pop food businesses, starting with payments, pre orders and CRM, and eventually becoming their neobank. We’ve have ~30 sellers use Drop while in stealth. It’s now getting to the point where I want to take it much more seriously. I’m looking for a pre idea startup of exceptional people who have experience in payments + restaurants/food and want to take this over and apply to Alliance

Time to head to Texas or Nevada. Staying is adding unnecessary risks for your shareholders. You should act in your shareholders best interest and flee Delaware. Delaware is no longer consistent. They are targeting companies they don't like.

CT missed the most important earnings call of the week. It wasn't a crypto company. It was @Cloudflare Everyone caught the wallet announcement. The real alpha was in the call itself. Today Cloudflare monetizes the internet through subscriptions: security services, AI platform spend, pools of funds. A mix of SaaS and IaaS economics. The CEO was explicit that AI agents are about to break that model. Cloudflare sits in front of roughly 20% of internet traffic. Here's what that traffic looks like from the call: - AI agent requests up 1,700% YoY - Agents crossed 50% of total network traffic this quarter. First time in history non-human traffic is the majority. Management admitted it happened faster than their own models - Their projection: if trends hold, non-human traffic outnumbers human traffic 1000x within 5 years The monetization shift is the key part. The ad-supported internet doesn't work when the visitor is an agent. Cloudflare's CEO answer: block malicious bots for free, charge good agents a tiny fee per request. Fractions of a penny. They want to be the ones defining that layer. Now the throughput math here: - Cloudflare handles ~500M requests per second - They estimate 1 to 10% is monetizable via micro/nanotransactions - That means 10M TPS on day one, scaling to 100M TPS Visa peaks at ~20k TPS The CEO's framing: "we're building this while others compete with Visa." Three to four orders of magnitude beyond card rails. No existing payment network can settle this. It has to be something new. Two conclusions I keep coming back to: - Being short L1 throughput is being short agentic workflows. If agent traffic gets monetized per request, the settlement layer needs to scale orders of magnitude beyond anything live today. - The fee math for L1s flips. Base fees have collapsed across ETH, SOL, everywhere. MEV is getting internalized by apps. Hard to build a base fee revenue case at human scale. But at 10M TPS and $0.001 per transaction, you're looking at ~$315B a year in base fees alone. At 100M TPS the number gets silly. Stablecoins and crypto are the end-game here for Agentic finance @jerallaire @circle