“Hard work beats talent if talent doesn’t work hard”--Tim Notke
“Garbellotto had always been prudent with cash, holding more reserves than they strictly needed. There was slack in the system because they understood that survival sometimes demands resources that look inefficient on a balance sheet.
The cash was one element of their survival, but the deeper belief in what they were doing — and the courage to keep spending it in the face of total uncertainty — was another. And really, what made that courage rational was the nature of who they were protecting. These were not interchangeable laborers on a payroll. They were master craftsmen whose families had spent decades, sometimes generations, accumulating knowledge that existed nowhere else. The manufacture of barrels, as the family has always maintained, is an art that can only be transmitted from master to apprentice, generation to generation, through proximity and patience.
Lose the people, and you lose the company. It’s that simple.”
“The core similarity between the internet boom and the AI boom is the same six-word assumption: build it and they will come. Warren Buffett, quoting Benjamin Graham, put it best: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” Today we are in the AI voting phase. The weighing phase has yet to arrive.
I am not predicting that the AI mania will end the way the dot-com mania ended. But the similarities are striking, and for investors, and particularly for retirees, the possibilities of what might lie ahead deserve serious attention. Because there is always the other side of mania. And almost no one in today’s market has experienced what that other side looks like.”
“I am not saying you sell everything and hide in cash. I am just highlighting what is possible because it’s happened before.
The dot-com bust is not ancient history. It happened within the working memory of anyone over 45. It destroyed portfolios, delayed retirements, and forced people back into the workforce years after they thought they were done. The retirees who were concentrated in technology stocks in March 2000 did not get a do-over. There was no reset button. The capital they spent on the way down was gone permanently, and the 20-year recovery was 20 years they didn’t have.
The next time your financial adviser tells you to stay in “for the long haul” or repeats that old adage “it’s time in the market, not timing the market,” show them the chart above and ask how much time they really mean.”
Two very interesting interviews: Pippa Malmgren’s optimistic take on world economy and geopolitics counterbalanced by Jim Bianco’s more pessimistic take, especially on outcome from the Iran war and lack of resolution of the Hormuz gulf blockage.
Worth a listen.
Japan is rising and is a credible military & trade challenger to China. Albeit still an underdog without its allies.
Learning from one of the best in the investing biz: Bill Ackman.
I was pretty impressed by this interview. Good to understand what OpenAI’s strategy is and some great details.
I learned a bunch about one of the most exciting sectors: Robots!
AI is what will supercharge the rise of robots.
Latest weekly business news takes.
This was as always a great conversation on the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley and AI & VC. Insightful as always.
This conversation is super relevant and helps folks understand what’s happening in Silicon Valley.
“Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur whose philosophy is “don’t die,” spends $2 million a year optimizing for longevity. Each day, he tracks hundreds of biomarkers, adheres to a strict vegan diet where every calorie that enters his body “must fight for its life,” uses shockwave and red-light therapies, and hangs out in his home sauna and hyperbaric chamber. He ingests a stack of prescription drugs and dozens of supplements, and exercises up to 90 minutes a day — without rest days. Bedtime is 8:30 p.m., sleep temperature is strictly regulated at 65° to 68°F, and he wakes up between 4:30 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. without an alarm. My Pivot co-host Kara Swisher, who interviewed Johnson for her CNN series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, observed that Johnson has an “obsession with measurement.” I’d add he has an aversion to “l-i-v-i-n,” as Matthew McConaughey famously put it in Dazed and Confused.
Our obsession with metrics, says journalist Derek Thompson, is akin to a modern religion that’s making us miserable. “Modern life is awash in statistics,” Thompson wrote in March. “Often, the quantification of modern life makes us play the games we can easily measure rather than the games we deeply value.” When we do this, we’re succumbing to “value capture,” according to University of Utah philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen. “Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle,” Nguyen wrote in 2024. “They enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning.”
Coatue does the best presentations on the technology business. This is a must watch.
No one is better than the British SAS and special ops in general. Still are. (up there with US Delta, Canadian JTF22 & Polish GROM)
This was surprisingly interesting. One of the last podcast shows I ever expected to listen to: Trae Stephens on Goop.
“The early years were minimal from a value-creation perspective, but necessary to get to the scaling years where value creation is strongest.
For entrepreneurs, when reading headlines or stories about wealth creation that imply a linear rate, know that the framing is incorrect. By and large, almost all value creation for entrepreneurs occurs in the latter years of the business.”
https://davidcummings.org/2026/06/06/the-backend-loaded-nature-of-startup-value-creation/
“Power is the root of all success. In the Middle Ages that is no different, whether it be political power, military power, cultural power or anything else in between. Power is what builds kingdoms, empires and dynasties. Power however is not so easily attained; it requires sacrifice. Those who want power must sacrifice blood, sacrifice money, sacrifice honor—or die trying.
The Valois Dukes of Burgundy sought power not for its own sake alone, but because in a fractured medieval world, power was the only guarantee of survival, security, and lasting influence. Without it, even the greatest houses could be reduced, divided, or destroyed by stronger rivals.
Burgundian power was not created through conquest alone, but through a calculated blend of dynastic marriage, political opportunism, and calculated extreme violence. These methods secured immense influence while the dukes sought to master their region of Europe. To the Burgundians, power meant control over wealth, control over land, and ultimately control over their own destiny.
This is the story of how the Burgundians rose to riches through trade, marriage and murder. Their story matters not simply because of what they achieved, but because it reveals a broader truth of the medieval world: that power was fragile, contested, and always demanded a cost, and that those who pursued it changed the course of history.”
“The company claims it delivers 125 petaflops of peak AI performance and is up to 15–20x faster than competing GPU-based systems on inference workloads, with 250x more on-chip memory and 2,625x more memory bandwidth than Nvidia’s B200 on certain configurations.
For most of its existence, Cerebras was a company ahead of its market. It sold to national laboratories (Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia), sovereign AI programs, and specialized research institutions. It basically targeted buyers who valued raw speed and didn’t mind immature software.
The backlog is the more telling figure. $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations against $510 million in annual revenue is nearly 50x forward revenue coverage — an extraordinary cushion that, if converted at healthy margins, represents the core of the bull case.”
Drone tech: Israel vs Hezbollah. It’s a big learning curve for the IDF.
IPO Comeback. A discussion of Space Compute.
“Palantir’s Karp said it without the spin: don’t rent your capability from a lab that “doesn’t care about you at all,” own the means of production. Obviously, he’s selling something when he says it. But he’s also right. A model is raw material, like bar stock. You don’t hand a competitor your bar stock and your tolerances and ask them to run the job for you.
And here’s the thing: you already own the means of production. The machines, the floor, the people, the quoting/ops logic in your head. That’s the reason a shop in Shenzhen can’t copy you overnight. The stakes just doubled. You used to win by owning the factory. Now you win by owning the factory and the AI that runs it.
So treat AI like infrastructure, not magic software. Capture what’s in your people’s heads before it walks out the door. Keep your data on something you control. Buy cheap where it’s throwaway, own it where it’s you. Skip that and you’re not cutting costs. You’re building someone else’s advantage.”
Secondary markets versus going public.
“The ultimate status symbol is a highly profitable platform that looks like it was coded in 1998. It signals to the world that the data, the product, or the access provided inside is so lethal that the consumers willingly tolerate zero luxury packaging just to get a piece of it. While others are paying UI/UX designers, the Sovereign is Packing Shipments.”
Moving from the asset light era to capital intensity era. This also means the Critical Minerals era.
Drones being launched off naval drones. The new world of war is scary.
“If you’re an investor… know the old hardware vs. software divide is obsolete. The best companies meld both.
If you’re an entrepreneur… understand all the physical industries frozen in time, like energy manufacturing, construction, defense and mining, are now being unlocked by cheap intelligence. There’s at least one Silicon Industrial in each of these sectors.
If you’re a parent… make sure your kids and grandkids know the frontier is opening again. Make sure your children know not to take on $100k in debt to go to college without learning any real skills. Have them try to intern at an emerging Silicon Industrial.”
A solid perspective on AI and cybersecurity. A view from Palo Alto Networks.
“We need youth for energy and openness, age for pattern recognition and patience. When markets get crazily overvalued and the zealots promise “This time is different,” the old-timers’ skepticism serves as a vital counterweight. Many audacious new ideas succeed and transform society. But distinguishing the pepper from the flyshit, as a friend puts it, requires the wisdom that only time and experience can impart.
We all die. Philosophical traditions from Stoicism to existentialism remind us that finitude is what makes life precious. The inevitability of death encourages creation before time runs out.
Recognizing our own mortality fosters humility and gratitude for our brief span of time on the planet. The dinosaurs aren’t here to block the future. We’re here to remind everyone that patience, skepticism, and a keen nose for nonsense have their place — especially when the music is loudest and the valuations most absurd.”
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/this-time-is-different/
“The only wild part is that Cash/fixed income has practically never been a great investment. Unless you look at pure recessions (2008) or market down turn years, the idea of holding cash/bonds long-term isn’t great. Unless you’re in your 60s, you’re better off just shoving money into anything else (Real estate, stocks, commodities etc.). This is because one of the other markets will go through a bull market and you’ll outperform the low returns of AAA fixed income.”
“To reiterate, the inability to come to a deal immediately between Trump and the IRGC ultimately leads to higher oil prices. The higher oil prices anger voters because shit is more expensive. At that point, the only hot-button issue Trump has agency over is data center build-out and AI regulation/taxation. Therefore, the only path to victory is turning on the AI tech bros. If the market falls 50% between now and November, that is a small price to pay not to face an endless stream of House Democrat subpoena requests.
Trump knows that once the election is over, he can walk back any of the anti-data center build-out and AI rhetoric, and it’s back to business as usual … and hopefully S&P 500 to 10,000! The problem for your portfolio is that things are path dependent, and watching one’s portfolio dump will permanently change future expectations for AI stock returns. You can never unsee the impact progressive taxation and regulation has on the AI complex; and as such, you will not invest with such insouciance as before.”
“When I zoom out, I think model providers, whether closed- or open-source, will be the primary beneficiaries of single-user software applications; budgets for those products will be capped (no more tokenmaxxing) but still available, provided the application is, in fact, valuable.
I also suspect that support and maintenance will become more important as the sheer volume of machine-generated code will mean that fewer humans will really understand any company’s codebases or the decisions made by coding assistants or agents. Keeping these applications up and running and up to date with the latest advances in AI will continue to be a challenge. There will still be money in the software business, just perhaps not as much and not at the same margins that we’ve become used to as investors and founders.”
Some good frameworks on AI and tech adoption in general. Using S-Curves.
“That is the whole game. Not more intelligence or more nerve, just better questions asked a little earlier, on the few decisions that actually shape the rest.
Most of your life is reversible. Life itself is the one door that never opens twice, so save your best deciding for the things that truly cannot be undone.”
An Important company for America. General Matter & The Nuclear Renaissance.
“The wider lesson is that a country can now build a competitive, export-grade defence industry fairly quickly, and that it is a strong business to be in. These are high-value products that carry years of maintenance, training and political relationships with them. Israel sells more than $19B of weapons while under diplomatic pressure, because the systems work. South Korea moved from a minor supplier to one of Europe’s leading sources in under five years.
That points to an ever more competitive market rather than a settled new order. Almost every region is trying to depend less on foreign, and particularly American, suppliers, and wants to build its local champion. The likely outcome is a more crowded field.”
“Institutional investors, including pension funds and insurers, continue to expand allocations to infrastructure and private debt in search of yield, duration and diversification.
Yet despite both technological readiness and capital availability, many hardtech startups face a familiar problem: once their technology works, early customers are secured and unit economics are proven, the financing playbook for transitioning to large-scale deployment is unclear.
Most turn to the familiar allure of venture capital and the equity markets, rather than recognizing the similarities between the assets they are trying to fund and the trillions of assets (such as real estate and cars) that are already funded through the debt capital markets via securitization structures.”
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/06/asset-based-finance-scale-technology/
“So don’t shed a tear for the strivers. Think of the rules, norms, and strictures that you feel most suffocated by. Enumerate every if only in your life, all the things you’d do if you were brave enough, if nobody was judging. What would you do if you were barred from the rat race? Now is your chance!
The thing about crisis is that it makes the world topsy-turvy. Consider the following provocations:
Freelancing is as secure as employment
Founding a startup is as secure as a big tech job
Young people know as much as seasoned professionals
Physical labor is valuable; cognitive work is cheap
Nothing is sacred; everything is fallible
Some insist that touching AI will leave your soul forever stained, while others insist that tokenmaxxing is the only way out of the permanent underclass. I think both are wrong, and we should learn from the economists. What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence? These are the qualities to lean into most.”
Dissecting this week’s news in tech. Love this show if you want some blunt and insightful takes.
