Happy Monday. On today's show: - @gilbert & @djrosent (Acquired) - @ncsh (Adjacent) - @skeogh (Scout Motors) - Mitchell Green (Lead Edge Capital) - Faraj Aalaei (Cognichip) See you on the stream.

Ramp made a real Broadway musical starring Billy Porter, Billy Zane and Jessica Billy Vosk. It’s a show about bills. By Bills. Starring Bills—with original songs, full choreography, and an actual Broadway playwright. In the 1950s and ’60s, America’s biggest companies staged lavish musicals about cars, appliances, and soda. Somewhere along the way, we lost our nerve. We’re bringing back the industrial musical. One night only, September 25, at the Broadhurst Theatre.

I’m joining Sound Ventures to invest in the tech industry I’ve been covering for the last decade. Ten years ago, I set out to have a front-row seat to the biggest stories in tech. I’ve sometimes played a part in them through my reporting. Along the way, I’ve gotten to know many of the most influential founders shaping the future. Now I want to back them. I’ll continue to run Sources independently of my work at Sound. The newsletter is continuing, and I’m investing more in the podcast, which has an amazing roster of guests lined up. I got into covering Silicon Valley because I’m insatiably curious about what technology makes possible. It’s time to follow my curiosity again.

Mobile Dev Memo's @eric_seufert says the biggest challenge facing OpenAI's ad business is conversion optimization. "You start to see the growth inflect when they integrate true conversion optimization. That means you're bidding a specific amount for a specific outcome." "Once you are bidding against a specific outcome, then the growth inflects and I think they'll be off to the races. That's the gap from 1 to 10." "The gap from 10 to 100 is just continuing to onboard every SMB possible."

Palo Alto Networks CEO @nikesharora says roughly 50% of the company’s new hires over the last six months have been early-career. Three talent profiles PAN is prioritizing in the AI era: 1 – People who can actually use coding agents “One set of people we want are people who are AI-savvy, who know how to use AI to get their jobs done better, who know how to use coding agents.” “These are people who are learning, and they’re typically having to run through hackathons to get to Palo Alto. We don’t look at where you went to school. We care about whether you can use coding agents, whether you can use AI.” “If we keep following that trend, it’s reasonably likely that we will overwhelm the non-AI-savvy people with more AI-savvy people. That’s kind of ground zero. You’ve got to get that done.” 2 - Cybersecurity experts who know AI “The second part is there are people who are really good at cybersecurity and know AI and they’d like to get involved.” “If you want to work in cybersecurity, there’s no better place to work than Palo Alto Networks. We’re the largest cybersecurity company in the world. You want to have an impact? You want lots of proprietary training data? We’ve got it.” 3 – Pure AI researchers “The third part is raw, pure AI researchers who can do wonders with small language models and large language models.” “There we have people who are AI literate. We have some PhDs in AI who work here who have a cybersecurity bent, but they can go back to their roots in AI.”

In the early 1990s, the accounting firm RRBB owned four computers for a staff of around 30. They called them “lunch boxes”: 30-pound machines that auditors lugged through airports and into client offices. The New Jersey firm was founded more than 65 years ago and has adapted through each new wave of technological transformation, from writing tax returns on green ledger paper to asking software to auto-sort numbers. In 2024, they became the first firm to join our accounting platform, Current. The firm’s history is less a story of computers replacing practitioners than of practitioners repeatedly learning what a computer can’t do on its own. This is the first in a series about the people and firms rethinking professional services around AI. Here is RRBB’s story:

CrowdStrike founder @george_kurtz says the HuggingFace hack consisted of "known attack chains." And that the problem of agentic hacking like the HuggingFace incident is tractable. "Because when we built our system, it was designed to look at what we call indicators of attack. So if you look at the whole attack chain, it's just linking all these [attacks] together. Irrespective of what happened, these are known attack chains." "Part of the issue was that [the hack] was flooded with so much information that I think it was just sort of buried — you know, 'What's going on? Is it real or is it not real?'" "And what is going to really take place is, the defenders have to use AI to be able to connect the dots on those — which we do — but then you also have to strip out all the noise. You have to separate the signal from the noise, and that's where these sorts of models perform well."

Happy Tuesday. On today's show: - @George_Kurtz (CrowdStrike) - @MichaelSentonas (CrowdStrike) - @adam_cyber (CrowdStrike) - Daniel Bernard (CrowdStrike) - @j_boitano (NVIDIA) See you on the stream.

Lambda's @stephenbalaban: If we offshore the data center buildout, we not only lose data center jobs. We also undermine reindustrialization, and lose the jobs reindustrialization would bring back. Because the AI buildout is driving the buildout of the domestic grid, which is paving the way for offshored industries to come back to the US. "It would be a national tragedy. In the very moment when this country needs to rebuild our grid." "AI is a national strategic asset, in my opinion. Compute is a national strategic asset. And most importantly, the way that AI is driving the development of the grid is going to pave the way for more industrial onshoring to come back to the United States so that we can bring back different [industries]." "Whether it's electric arc furnace mills for aluminum and steel, micromills, turbine manufacturing, other types of energy-intensive [industries]... And there's going to be a lot more jobs because of that. It's a huge virtuous cycle." "I want those jobs here in the United States. I want those investments to be made here in the United States."