Weighted Engagement

The people who get rich in a downturn are the ones who were already building when nobody was watching. Leverage compounds quietly, then all at once. You cannot start compounding the week the market turns.

Stripe processed more volume in the last 24 hours than in all of 2014. Most of it from businesses that did not exist in 2014. The compounding is the point.

Gemini 3 is rolling out to everyone today, starting with Search. The biggest quality jump we have shipped since the original. Go try it.

0:40

gpt-6 training run finished last night. eval numbers in the image; the one i care about is the curve bottom-right, which did not flatten. more soon.

Breaking News: Unemployment among recent college graduates rose to its highest level in a decade, a shift economists increasingly link to AI adoption in entry-level white-collar work.

The most common mistake in YC applications is describing the market before the user. Tell me the one person who desperately wants this. If you can't name them, the market size is zero.

a 20-min walkthrough of tokenisation from scratch. no libraries, no slides, just the byte pairs. this is the part of LLMs most people skip and it explains more weird behaviour than anything else.

20:14

Our updated Tesla model puts robotaxi at 88% of enterprise value by 2030. Walked through the assumptions in this clip; the full open-source model is on our site.

0:42

OpenAI in talks to raise at a $1.2tn valuation, people familiar with the matter say, in what would be the largest private funding round on record.

The tri-fold phone review. Spoiler: the crease is gone, the battery is not.

14:02

New essay: The Adolescence of Machines. On what the next three years of capability gains will and will not change, and what we are doing about the parts that worry us.

5.6 sol growth is insane. the inference team has done heroic work to be able to support demand. we are going to move mountains to continue to scale, but it is possible there are some hiccups soon.

AlphaFold 4: every protein complex in the human body, open to all. Paper, weights and the database are live. Proud of this team.

The Federal Open Market Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate. Statement and projections: federalreserve.gov

2026 summer reading list, one chart per book. Rates, energy, semis. Most of it is boring. That is the point.

I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet. This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease. I’m excited that @koraykv will be stepping up to lead GDM as SVP, alongside @joshwoodward and our exec team. I could not be more excited and confident about our amazing next chapter! 🚀

Copilot is now in every Windows install. A short walkthrough of what that means for the 1.4 billion PCs out there.

1:05

See you on September 9.

Sold the puts. Not because I was wrong. Because I was early, again, and early is the same as wrong in this business.

Principle of the week: pain + reflection = progress. I have updated the long-term debt cycle chart below with this quarter's numbers. We are later in the cycle than most people think, and the adjustments ahead will be larger than the ones behind us.

Today's agreement lowers tariffs on both sides and opens markets for American manufacturers and farmers. Details from Treasury this afternoon.

Nobody is impressed by the investor who did nothing for ten years, even though that is usually the one who won.

New RCT: 1,200 consultants, half with AI. The gap is bigger than last year, and it is widest on the tasks managers thought were safe. Paper linked.

Every enterprise software category is about to be re-founded. Again.

no, you don't need kubernetes.

California has the ultimate privilege - a monopoly on all of the warm, dry coastline in the most powerful empire in the world.

at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker. reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people.

shipped 3 features before breakfast. the trick: no meetings, no standups, no roadmap doc. just a list in a text file and a deploy button.

Make something agents want

Recorded a quick one on why the best founders I backed this year are 24 and have shipped ten things nobody used. Reps beat pedigree.

1:12

Agent 4 building and deploying an app from a voice note, unedited. Six minutes, zero prompts typed.

6:04

1/ the network state thesis, one year later. what held, what didn't, and the three things I got wrong.

we made Gumroad free for the first $10k/yr. here is why that is not charity: the creators who cross $10k stay for a decade, and the ones who do not were never going to pay us anyway.

As Elon suggests, AI is likely to create an entrepreneurial explosion. The disappearance of entry level jobs in corporate America is a blessing in disguise for new graduates. Start your own company to solve a problem, with AI as your only employee. Only 10% of startups survive,

I love agentic coding harnesses, but they shouldn't be primarily terminal-based. The terminal is great for quick and precise commands, but information density is extremely low and UI affordances are minimal. Maybe provision of TUIs is worthwhile for occasional use (when establishing a tunnel is too annoying, or something), but it feels very strange for this to be the default modality. It took a long time for dynamic language REPLs to break out of the terminal (Jupyter notebooks and similar); I hope we don't have to wait as long for the harnesses.

New episode: three hours with the person who runs the chip export controls. Why the rules look the way they do, what they would change, and the one question they would not answer.

2:58:10

v0 now ships full apps with a database. A thread on how we got here, and why the hard part was never the UI.

The IPO window is open. A reminder of what the bankers will not tell you: the pop is your money, the lockup is your risk, and the roadshow is theatre.

OpenRouter is joining Stripe. As anyone who uses it knows, @OpenRouter is a truly delightful developer tool. It is by far the best way to use new models and manage multiple inference providers. OpenRouter is also playing an increasingly important role: in the future, every business will have to manage both revenue flows and token flows. OpenRouter is the world's leading token marketplace, helping businesses effectively allocate the new currency of intelligence capital. We think that there's a lot to build together.

New memo: The Calculus of Value. When everyone is certain the cycle is over, that certainty is usually the best information you will get about where we actually are in it.

if your app's invite flow has more than two taps you have already lost

My letter to the board is public. A company that spends more on buybacks than on its own product is not being run for shareholders; it is being run for the stock.

What 40 PM leaders told me changed most in the job this year. The short version: less writing specs, more writing evals.

We have taken a new position. The thesis fits on one slide, attached. The market is pricing a business that no longer exists.

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else does in ten years.

I was thinking about how I recognize AI writing, and one big tell is excessively colorful verbs. A handful of journalists might write that a proposal "drew" 100 votes, but any normal person will just say "got".

what's the word,

It's time to build. Still.

Code is mostly solved, but design isn’t. Introducing Tastelint! An agent that runs on every PR and surfaces design feedback. Reply below if you’d like to try it.

This Week in Startups E2140: the agents episode. Three founders who replaced their first ten hires with software, and one who tried and went back.

1:22:40

I have data on this Being without gf (home alone) decreased my recovery by 17%, my sleep by 4% and my resting heart rate by 1% But it also increased my productivity by 31% Kind of expected, gf keeps me healthy and if I'm alone I work harder The more data I collect the more it sticks out though that flying long haul to conferences is the worst thing I can do to my health!