Everyone gets angry with me for saying triple, triple, double, double is dead. Fine, I do not really care. Venture is about investing in unbelievable outliers. Anomalies that own markets with generational founders. @FireworksAI_HQ is an example of this. They scaled to $1BN in ARR in just 3.5 years. They also have just 200 employees making it an insane $5M revenue per head. @lqiao just raised a whopping $1.5BN at a $17BN valuation and I sat down with her. Added my notes and the episode below: 1. The Challenges That Come From Such a Fast Development Cycle for Chips Hardware innovation is moving so quickly that rapid SKU cycles now outpace traditional depreciation timelines, changing the financial calculus of building versus renting infrastructure. Founders should prioritize growth and market agility over immediate gross margins, avoiding premature optimization until customer workloads stabilize. 2. Why National Sovereignty Is Real in AI and Every Company Should Have Its Own Model Frontier models function like a society’s core electricity grid. Relying entirely on a third-party API creates the existential risk of sudden disconnection, making model ownership and infrastructure independence critical for both sovereign nations and enterprise businesses. 3. Why the Future Is Millions of Specialized Models Frontier providers bake their own design tastes and values into models, which inevitably misaligns with enterprise business logic. The future belongs to millions of specialized, “one-size-fits-one” models tailored to proprietary data, consistently outperforming generalized AGI on accuracy, speed, and unit economics. 4. The Transition From the Year of Coding to the Year of Co-Work AI adoption has rapidly evolved from engineering-centric coding tools to a diversified ecosystem of B2B co-work agents. Founders and VCs must look past crowded developer environments to capture massive value in specialized workflow automation across legal, finance, healthcare, and other enterprise functions. 5. How a 10x Cost Reduction Will Drive a 100x Explosion in Usage Temporary supply chain backlogs will eventually ease, compressing infrastructure and model-tuning costs by 10x over the next three years. This deflation in token unit economics will turn intelligence into a near-frictionless commodity, driving a massive surge in enterprise production usage. 6. Why Avoiding the Application Layer Is Essential for Platform Focus Platform defensibility requires strict focus on multi-chip agility without creating vertical hardware or software dependencies. By refusing to move up into the application layer, infrastructure platforms avoid competing with their own ecosystem and maximize their value in specialized model orchestration. 7. Biggest Lesson From Working With Jensen Huang on Leadership Leadership in hyper-velocity markets is defined by rapid judgment, not executive privilege. Because critical information degrades as it moves through layers of corporate hierarchy, leaders must stay close to ground-level technical details to maintain execution speed and avoid flawed strategic calls.

"To be great at seed investing, you have to put your ideas into the world. Sharing your thinking signals to founders what you believe in and what kinds of companies you're looking to back. Content isn't just marketing, it's a way for the best founders to find you before everyone else does." @mignano Love to hear your thoughts on this @packym @jasonlk @honam @TurnerNovak

I missed out on $100M+ by passing on the seed rounds of Suno and Granola. Mike @mignano did both. He is the single best example in the last 5 years of an operator successfully turning into a GP at a large fund. It is so hard to do. He crushed it. He has been a friend for 10 years and we shoot the shit today on the biggest questions of the day. I summarized my notes from the chat below. 1. Do You Have to Produce Content to Do Seed Well? To excel at seed, you need to put your ideas into the market so founders know exactly what you are looking for. Publishing your theses acts as a bat signal for early-stage founders before they even launch a product. Success comes down to building a great network, sharing your point of view, and betting on people. 2. Single Biggest Lesson About Venture The biggest lesson in venture is to avoid projecting your own operator ideas onto a founder. It is their company, not yours. Making investment decisions based on your personal roadmap for them leads to bad bets. Venture success requires trusting the team’s independent judgment and execution plan. 3. What Percent of Enterprise Workflows Actually Require Frontier Models Versus Open Source? Roughly 80% of non-coding enterprise tasks can run well on non-frontier models. Standard workflows like summarization and document generation are well suited to open source, which is improving quickly. This lets enterprises optimize token budgets without sacrificing meaningful performance. 4. Why We Believe Suno Has Unlimited Upside Suno has unlimited upside because it unlocks a new consumer behavior: creative entertainment. Users generate music simply for the joy of creation, with no need for distribution or monetization. Like YouTube or TikTok, platforms that democratize a creative medium can create immense, generational value. 5. Obliterate, Don’t Automate Avoid backing software that merely automates existing workflows to make old businesses slightly faster. The true generational opportunities come from completely reinventing industries, like putting an AI doctor in everyone’s pocket, rather than selling incremental efficiency to a corporate middleman. 6. The Shift From Infrastructure to Applications As the capital-intensive AI infrastructure buildout matures, massive value creation is shifting to the application layer. Similar to the internet after the broadband boom, we are entering an explosion of specialized software. Winning requires an opinionated thesis, early conviction, and exceptional speed. 7. Why Startups Must Maximize Token Spend While incumbents restrict budgets, startup CEOs should maximize token spend. Frontier models give lean teams a critical advantage over slower giants. Handing low-level tasks to agents preserves small, hyper-efficient engineering teams and keeps them moving at winning speed. (links below)

Young Companies Have To Be In Person: "In particular for a young company, I think it is very challenging to build a culture, as a remote company. It feels great to be part of an amazing team, and it's different when your connection to that amazing team is via a Brady Bunch of Zoom squares. We have rituals that we've developed that we only would have developed if we were all working in person." @claybavor Love to hear your thoughts on this @typesfast @howard @dhh @BrendanFoody

"The unfair advantage young people have coming out of university; you've just had four years to spend unlimited time ... to master of these AI tools. A thousand companies would love to have you infuse what you know into how they're doing things. I can't remember a time when a young person with no work experience, but with the right mindset and experience using some of these tools, has ever been so valued. Some of our most effective employees are 22 or 23 years old and have been completely AI-pilled and have a comfort and facility with these tools, that many of our more experienced folks don't." @claybavor Do you agree and single biggest advice to young people coming out of university today @matanSF @nikesharora @jasonlk @cory

Dario just declared war on open-source. Anthropic's message is clear: open source could destroy the entire AI business model, and Chinese open-source models are the cause. I sat down with @jasonlk & @rodriscoll to discuss it, along with the biggest news in tech this week: - Anthropic & Dario Declare War on Open-Source - Coinbase Slashes AI Spend 50%: Is the Token Bubble Bursting? - Kalshi's $40BN Valuation & Impending IPO - Bending Spoons: The Smartest IPO of 2026 & the $100BN SaaS Roll-Up Play My notes below: 1. Anthropic Is Laying the Foundation for a Deal With the U.S. Government on Chinese Models Anthropic accused Chinese open-source AI competitors of “brazen theft” through model distillation that violates its terms of service. Rory noted the hypocrisy, given that U.S. frontier models originally scraped external IP. Still, Anthropic appears to be laying the groundwork for a regulatory trade: complying with domestic access restrictions in exchange for a federal ban on distilled Chinese models. 2. Jason Lemkin’s Response to Brian Armstrong’s AI Tweet Jason dismissed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s 50% LLM cost-cutting post as “performative social media,” arguing that savings matter little if core revenue is flat or shrinking. He believes AI must actively drive top-line growth. Rory defended the move as “cost management 101,” saying cash-conscious enterprise executives will quickly emulate it to curb runaway frontier model fees. 3. CEOs Are Struggling to See the ROI From AI Massive enterprise spending on AI tokens is failing to deliver the expected revenue or productivity gains, leaving CFOs searching for measurable operational lift. Jason noted that adding millions in AI spend can still produce the same growth rates as prior quarters. Rory argued that AI spending must clearly accelerate software delivery or create definitive bottom-line savings as boards push back on reckless “token maxing.” 4. We Are All So Aligned in Wanting AI to Win Jason warned that the U.S. economy is structurally addicted to AI, with 40% of the S&P 500 tied to the boom, making society eager to prop it up to protect 401(k) portfolios. Rory countered that protectionism artificially inflates intelligence costs for the broader economy. He compared it to banning IBM PC clones in the 1980s just to protect IBM’s stock price, calling the blocking of low-cost open-source alternatives “fricking dumb.” 5. Bending Spoons and the New Playbook for B2B Revenue Arbitrage Bending Spoons’ $20 billion public valuation marks a shift toward tech roll-ups that drive profitability through price hikes and cost-cutting rather than organic user growth. Jason predicts this playbook will expand into mature B2B SaaS. By acquiring sticky but underperforming platforms like Marketo, Asana, or PagerDuty and injecting hungry talent, operators can rapidly improve retention and capture massive revenue arbitrage. (links below)

"After food, energy sovereignty is one of the most important strategic priorities for any nation. History shows that wars are often fought over access to essential resources, and today, energy is at the center of that competition. The more countries can produce reliable energy domestically, the more resilient, secure, and economically independent they'll become." What is more important energy sovereignty or model sovereignty @jameswise @vkhosla @alanchanguk @wolfejosh @traestephens

"America should be doing far more with its abundant natural gas resources. Natural gas remains the cleanest widely available fossil fuel, and expanding access to it could help countries move away from coal while meeting growing energy demand. The opportunity is to pair that energy abundance with distributed power infrastructure to deliver reliable, affordable electricity at global scale." Love to hear your thoughts on this @alanchanguk @shaunmmaguire @rabois @zebulgar

The true complexity of building a data center but why power should not be your constraint. "Building a hyperscale data center is far more complex than just securing power. The real bottlenecks are construction, cooling, copper, equipment, and the skilled labor needed to build it, making 12–18 month timelines the norm. In many cases, power isn't the limiting factor. The physical infrastructure is." What does no one know about building data centres that everyone should know @altcap @DavidCahn6 @JonathanRoss321 @andrewdfeldman

So @harmonic_ai just released their Hot 25 Report on the most in-demand early-stage companies. The top 3: 🥇 @resolveai reclaims the top spot — joining Lovable as the only two companies to top the list twice. 🥈 Salient skyrockets to #2#, up 11 spots. 🥉 @aaruHQ rounds out the podium, as rival Simile debuts at #6#. Biggest mover on the list: @BrainCo_AI - climbing 12 spots. Newcomers to watch: @periodiclabs at #7#, @sandstonehq at #19#, and @Jackandjillai at #25#. Find the full report here:

"Governments should be careful not to regulate AI so heavily that they fall behind. If one country slows innovation while others move at full speed, it risks losing both economic competitiveness and technological leadership. The challenge is finding the balance between sensible oversight and enabling innovation." How involved should governments be in the development of AI @rabois @torstenreil @AlistairPullen @Jameswise @vkhosla

In the last 24 hours, I have had 5 founders message me of varying-sized companies; some 10-person startups and one $200BN public company. All of them stated they have been able to cut inference spend by 75% or more with little effort, no performance change and better latency. The times they are a changing.

"When intelligence becomes commoditized, wisdom becomes the scarce asset. AI can provide answers, but it can't replace human judgment, empathy, or the ability to build meaningful relationships. In a world where intelligence is abundant, the people who create the most value will be those with wisdom." If intelligence is abundant, what do you think will be the most valuable asset @AnjneyMidha @omooretweets @kirbyman01 @anneleeskates

"Andy Grove's biggest management lesson was simple: talk to the people doing the work. If you walk the floor, they'll tell you exactly what's broken and what they don't understand. And once you've heard them, stop looking for someone else to give you the answers. Go figure it out yourself."

"There will always be moments when your company faces existential threats. The key is not to avoid those moments, but to refuse to let fear dominate your thinking. If you believe failure isn't an option, your focus shifts from worrying about survival to making tomorrow better than today." Single biggest advice to someone making big decisions that impact the life of their company @AlexHormozi @businessbarista @austin_rief @thesamparr

How to manage regret and learning "Don't replay bad experiences in your mind like a movie. Learn the lesson, leave the regret behind, and focus on what's ahead. Life gets a lot easier when you believe tomorrow can be better than today." Single biggest advice to someone struggling to get over a mistake from the past @pmarca @Codie_Sanchez @SahilBloom @ElishaDLong

When the smartest investor you follow puts 16% of his entire fund into a single stock, you pay attention. That is what Leo Aschenbrenner has done with Bloom Energy. The largest single holding in his portfolio, by a distance. So I had to understand why. KR Sridhar, founder and CEO of @Bloom_Energy. Former NASA rocket scientist. Worked on Mars missions. Then spent 25 years building an energy company almost nobody believed in. The numbers today: $2BN in revenue in 2025. Up 37% YoY. Market cap ~$93BN Market cap. I now completely understand why Leo is so all in. I sat down with KR, took my notes, and have shared the biggest lessons below. 1. The Biggest Management Lesson From Andy Grove The best management advice is simple: walk the floor and talk to your team. They will tell you exactly why things are not working. Do not drown in training binders when you can learn the product by engaging directly. Success requires deep empathy for every part of the business, from shop floor technicians to customers’ real pain points. 2. When Intelligence Becomes Commoditized, What Is the Valuable Asset? When AI makes intelligence ubiquitous, the rarest asset will be wisdom. AI can manufacture information, but it cannot provide happiness, judgment, empathy, or genuine human connection. Because humans are social animals, automated bots will never fully replace real interaction. 3. The True Complexity of Building a Data Center but Why Power Should Not Be Your Constraint A large greenfield data center can take 12 to 18 months to build because supply chains for copper, cooling, and specialized labor are strained. But with modular solid-state technology, power can be deployed faster than the facility itself. Energy should not remain the bottleneck when generation can move to the edge. 4. To What Extent Should Governments Act to Prevent Monopolies? Heavy regulation and government equity stakes can destroy innovative culture and block better startups from competing. Dominant positions often shift naturally over time, as Microsoft and Google show. The best path is a level playing field where free competition lets breakthrough entrepreneurs win. 5. AI Will Do More to Hurt Than Help Income Inequality AI may concentrate enormous wealth among fewer players, but technology has historically been humanity’s greatest equalizer for raising living standards. Intelligence abundance creates a non-zero-sum game that can lift all boats. Leaders still need empathy for the transition generation so they are not left behind. 6. Why Energy Sovereignty Is So Much More Important Than Anyone Thinks After food security, energy sovereignty is the most critical supply chain challenge on Earth. History’s major conflicts have often centered on water, food, and energy. Decentralized power generation at the edge can make communities more self-reliant and reduce exposure to geopolitical conflict. (links below)