​Take the dive

Very busy week with a lot cooking include a teaser for a new project. More to come soon.

Venture Grounds

I had a lot of fun on the Rho podcast talking about the second order effects of AI (what happens AFTER we token max) and the right way to back seed founders (give them money and don’t fuck it up).

If the development and, increasingly, deployment of AI is the most important thing in the world, then the most interesting questions are what happens after we’ve done it (to the extent that it’ll ever be “done”).

I’m extremely bullish on and interested in the second order effects of AI:

AI amplifies volume until existing filtering/routing mechanisms collapse and need to be rebuilt.

• Deployment: more apps, faster releases, more integrations, etc. SIs are critical chokepoints and will become very powerful this cycle.

  • Slow company: Stealth, Stealth, Stealth

• Hiring: Applications are free to send. Volume explodes. Recruiters can’t distinguish candidates. Resume screening stops working. The whole funnel breaks.

  • Slow company: Phoebe, MeritFirst, Tofu

• Outbound sales: Sophisticated campaigns available to everyone, flooding channels. The well gets poisoned and new GTMs replace it.

  • Slow company: Memelord, Stealth

• Code collaboration: Git was built for scarce, human-written code. Whatever replaces it will be built for abundance.

  • Slow company: Atomic

• Trust and security: Everything on the internet is fake. Content, identities, credentials. Systems that assumed human-scale production and human-verifiable authenticity stop working.

  • Slow company: Outtake, Sublime Security, Stealth

But broadly speaking, there are a huge number of spaces where attention (abundant) and production (scarce) will flip to devastating effect.

And simultaneously there are greenfield opportunities that would have previously been impossible or unimportant.

Cliff Club: Take The Dive

We love getting together to hang with operators and builders early/earlier in their journeys, whether or not they wind up building companies. I find that much/most of our best network comes organically by hanging out and jamming with people months or years ahead of a transactable opportunity. But we only earn the right to your time if we can be of service.

Introducing Cliff Club: a community exclusively for early employees at venture-backed companies, starting in NYC.

We’re gonna bring in great early operators and subject matter experts to talk about questions like:

• WTF is QSBS?

• How should I think about early exercising?

• How should my role evolve as the company scales?

• How should I feel about getting layered?

• Should I specialize into a role?

Really excited to work on this with my friends Charley and Leeor.

Take the dive.

Drink the Haterade

• For all my Fallon haters: Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror. But it isn’t a monster lurking in the shadows; it is the manic, unblinking insistence that actually, there are no shadows at all.

• For my Stephen Miller haters: Stephen Miller is surely the most powerful unelected person in America. The 40-year-old’s official roles — he currently has the dual titles of deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser — vastly understate the influence he has had in shaping Trump’s most hardline anti-immigration policies and rhetoric for the past decade. Whenever the president says something particularly inflammatory or offensive about immigrants in a speech, there’s a good chance Stephen, his director of speechwriting during the first term, told him to say it.

• For my Iran war haters: Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

For Lovers

• America is experiencing a productivity miracle and we basically don’t know why. It’s not because of AI (at least not yet) but it is really good news.