“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will." — Suzy Kassem
"If a company has at least three of these five properties, they should at least be considering their own AI models. As an investor, if you can identify these companies first and invest early, you can benefit from the improved economics the company will announce once those AI models start to impact the bottom line.
For now, do not invest in a company just because it announces a custom AI model. Invest if they possess captive data to train it better than anyone else, captive distribution to force its adoption seamlessly, and the scale to make the economics work."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-owning-phase-of-ai-part-1-what
2."A bigger risk I see is macroeconomic. Despite soaring revenue, investment spending has been absolutely enormous, and the possibility of an AI bust can’t be ruled out. A lot of commentators still expect some sort of a crash in the next couple of years.
That crash wouldn’t stop the rise of AI, but it might shift its locus. Anthropic and OpenAI probably wouldn’t die in a crash — Amazon and Microsoft didn’t die in the dotcom crash of 2000 — but they would almost certainly be forced to make deep cuts in their research budgets for at least a year or two. Amazon and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft certainly were, back in their day — Amazon’s capex went from $287 million in 1999 to just $46 million in 2003.
Chinese companies, on the other hand, would doubtless be state-subsidized to maintain capex through any AI bust. There would be no equivalent bailout in America — the chances that American taxpayers would subsidize the fortunes of companies where even the regular engineers are centimillionaires, after that industry caused a general economic crash, and especially after AI companies spent years proclaiming that they would render most human beings economically obsolete, just out of geostrategic concerns, are probably nil.
So while the AI boom has so far favored America’s free-market system, China’s state-subsidized system will probably perform strongly in a bust."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-is-still-beating-china-in
3.Always very great global macro conversation. Louis Gave has really excellent and balanced takes on geopolitics: US, China and EU. Resilience, less interdependence and sovereignty are a focus for every country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZoV6Nd_wNc&t=74s
4.The case for robotics as the next big thing. Really educational discussion for investors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk10elQiazg&t=7s
5."When a lender like that steps into a seaglider round, it is making a claim: American defense manufacturing has become creditworthy. Factories, contracts and backlog are now things a regulated bank will lend against, not just things a venture fund will bet on.
This is a maturation marker. Equity funded the experimental phase of defense tech, the years when nobody knew whether a startup could win a program of record or build at scale. Debt funds the industrial phase, when the questions shift from “will this work” to “how fast can you build it and how do we finance the plant.” The arrival of credit does not replace venture capital. It sits on top of it, and it only becomes available once the venture bets have been proven out. It also does something subtler. It lets a founder scale production without selling more of the company, which protects the equity that the earliest believers already own. A debt tranche is a vote that the collateral is good and the business will be around to repay it."
https://newsletter.newnorthvc.com/p/defense-tech-learns-to-borrow
6.I find Raoul Pal's takes on AI and Crypto really interesting. Maybe because he has a strong traditional global macro background like Jordi Visser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1a4lXqHHGo
7."The book is an Asia 1990s version of The Market Wizards. It features 16 interviews with famous fund managers at the time, as well as a profile of an insurance company operating in Hong Kong at the time (I left this part out of my review below as I thought it didn’t add much value).
What makes the book special in my view is not just the historical perspective, but also the fact that it was written right before the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Some cautious investors saw the crisis coming and hedged themselves appropriately. Others bought into the hype.
I also tried to track down every investor featured in the book by Bloomberg, Google and other public sources to see where they are today. Some investors remain successful even today. And many of those who suffered excessive drawdowns didn’t live to see another day.
This is the story of 16 investment prophets on the cusp of one of the greatest financial crises the world has ever seen."
https://www.asiancenturystocks.com/clairebarnes/
8.This is an enlightening and at the same time, horrifying discussion on the history of China under the CCP. If you think an American led order is bad, a China led order will be much worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mSj7mBMmqY
9.Geopolitical takes from Michael Every. Canada is playing checkers while America is playing harsh geonomic chess.
Trump admin 2.0 directionally is correct but they are doing it poorly & like a--holes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0IOl9arPfA&t=14s
10."This is leading to a little bit of investor anxiety, because it’s leading to them feeling a bit lost. I meet so many investors who I think are just jaded by seeing what’s happening in the market. The big AUM funds, especially with the recent acquisitions, can keep pointing to it and saying, like, hey, we can deliver IRR faster than ever before, and AI is the biggest tailwind in the world. Whereas a lot of funds are feeling like either you play the game that’s on the field by paying up, or you try to go to reality. But those companies that you might think have reality are just not consensus. And so then they can’t raise capital. Everybody claims they want to do non-consensus rounds, but they’re actually not doing it.
So, what I keep coming back to is, we live in crazy times. Fundamentals do still matter. The size of the opportunity that AI has is massive. There is inflation but I am convinced we’re not in a bubble. But the divergence is real, and it’s getting harder and harder to figure out what part of this lasts."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/divorced-from-reality
11.Lots of AI news this week. The pace in Silicon Valley is exhausting and hard to keep up with. This show helps here a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ioSi39yjJQ
12.Visser and Pal come from the Trad-fi Global macro world but have come around to tech: Crypto, AI are where things come together for America. Very helpful for the private investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNHJSVbjCpk&t=293s
13.Back to the future. Learning from history on chokepoint capitalism and end of globalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpdSO-boHq4
14.My favorite weekly global macro conversation. Lots of great takes: long term bullish on BTC & AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzc3tBB9pLg
15.This is an extremely educational discussion on geopolitics and America and rising new powers.
Lessons from history. Provides us a frame to understand the world we used to be in and the new world that is emerging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-2BdiL6r74
16.Always plenty of contrarian & controversial takes on energy and geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBcIDuAMoxQ
17.From Rules Based Order to America First. Massive implications for geopolitics and the new multipolar world. US empire vs. multipolar world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoIwpsOB9O0
18.An interesting conversation with the Dutch former head of NATO. Europe needs to wake up to the Russian threat. It's real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMw-KdgcAZs&t=88s
19.It is a dark conversation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is going into a more dangerous phase. Russian innovation is progressing fast. We need to up our support for Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNtevnJe_8k
20."The tragedy of Yemen is that north and south cannot live together but they also can’t live apart. Ansar Allah cannot be dislodged out of their northern mountain redoubt, and now they have broken out of it, taking the entire red-sea coastline. They are mobilizing now to march on Marib, the last PLC stronghold in the north. They don’t have tanks, but they do have their famous battle Toyotas. It seems like they will at least complete the consolidation of the north.
A return to the Cold War divide seems superficially plausable, but ultimately this is not acceptable to the players that matter. Ansar Allah refuses partition as balkanization. As for Saudi Arabia, permanent civil war in Yemen might be preferable to legitimating Iran-aligned Ansar Allah on its border.
Is a protracted, violent stalemate Yemen’s dark future? Or could we be seeing changes previously thought preposterous as the balance of power continues to shift in the region?"
https://taipology.substack.com/p/deep-dive-into-yemen
21."Side quests are nothing but a collection of the things you devote your free time to. Questing for knowledge, for what makes you feel alive and purposeful. This helps you experience new things and understand their value and importance. Side quests indirectly help you escape mediocrity and become a better human being."
https://theunintuitive.com/p/the-side-quests-are-antidote-to-a-mediocre-life
22.Obviously these folks are talking their book but it's a good convo re: where the Venture capital asset class is in this age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsdJd2VeLvg
23."The expected arrival of mass-producible, low-cost cruise missiles that combine long range with fairly high payloads will have substantial implications for Europe’s deterrence architecture.
Covenant aims to produce 1,000 Anthem missiles in 2027 across its German and U.S. sites, scaling to 5,000 at both facilities by 2028. Comparable four-digit annual outputs appear plausible for other systems in the segment, provided political backing and funding materialize. European states could then fill their missile arsenals quickly, including in the deep-strike segment, which is deemed increasingly crucial to deterring Russia."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/the-european-lower-cost-cruise-missile
24."Judging the decisiveness of a particular battle or operation is not just a philosophical question, but a useful framework to study the underlying dynamics at play. Assessing the asymmetric payoffs forces us to consider the overall balance of forces, the options available to opposing sides, and the role of chance in the larger picture.
More practically, it offers a study in decision-making, as the asymmetric decisiveness of a particular battle or operation closely reflects the risk/reward balance for either side. It is easy to see why the Union would risk battle at Gettysburg or the Soviets at Stalingrad, but why would their enemies be so obliging when the expected payoff was stacked so far against them? We get a sense of how desperate the Confederacy’s situation was in summer 1863 by how much of a gamble Lee was willing to take; German plans at Stalingrad meanwhile reveal a certain obliviousness to the stakes amidst their own deteriorating situation."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/asymmetric-decisiveness-the-unequal
25."Our longstanding view is that the European Union’s (EU) bungled energy policies sit upstream of all other hot-button issues befalling its member states. Lo and behold, losing heavy industry, paying more for basic needs, and being lectured to that these real-life problems rank lower than various foreign policy adventures, is deeply unpopular. Even more so when said adventures make energy realities worse.
Doomberg came of age during the 2021–2022 natural gas crisis, and if we had been asked back then how likely it was that a repeat performance would develop five years later, we certainly would have laughed off the prospect. It would have been inconceivable that such basic lessons of physics would not be learned, that such poor planning—both in Brussels and in the national capitals—would still be tolerated, or that the carousel of incompetence would still be spinning in the halls of European power.
And yet, here we are, watching the weather while the Merz administration gives the wait-and-see approach the benefit of time."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/apricity-or-bust
26. "For startups: rent until the data says otherwise, but design the product so every interaction becomes a training example you can use later. For enterprise executives: audit API spend by workload, not in aggregate; two or three loops probably account for most of it, and those are your ownership candidates. For VCs: gross margin trajectory now depends on whether a company can graduate from renting to owning, and that belongs in diligence.
The pragmatic answer is hybrid. Rent frontier APIs for the long tail of edge cases and anywhere reasoning breadth beats specialization. Own distilled, specialized sub-models for the high-volume core loops that define your product and your margin. The companies that get this split right will look like software businesses again. The ones that don’t will look like resellers."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-owning-phase-of-ai-part-2-when
27.A masterclass on management and building efficiency & performance into your organization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCbHnlpwZf0&t=844s
28.A view from an endowment LP and you get a good global macro and asset allocation take too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_ManIWISzw
29."Every prior generation of Americans faced a defining competition and chose to win it. The U.S. built the foundations of the biotechnology century—the science, the capital markets, the regulatory gold standard, the alliances—and it retains every advantage required to lead. What is needed now is not capability but decision.
The nation that led the industrial and technological age set its terms—its standards, its trade, and its norms. The nation that leads the biological age will write the rules of life itself. That nation must be the United States of America."
https://thebenslens.substack.com/p/the-biotechnology-century
30.The recent history of finance and the new financial reset that is happening right now. A solid global macro discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP71xynXhm0
31."China’s main AI bottleneck right now is its semiconductor industry. Time is actually what the Chinese need to win the AI race outright. So let’s play this out. China might agree to the slowdown, but only to continue building up its compute capacity. There’s no world where they don’t attempt to come out on top in the end.
China will only agree to the pacing if the standard is universal and everyone gets to be at AI parity. Meaning everyone’s AIs will roughly match each other. China already has way more industrial capacity than the U.S. Giving them AI parity would mean they almost automatically come out on top. They would be able to design things with AI and produce them so much faster and cheaper than anyone else. Usually, the U.S. does the designing and China does the building. Think of your iPhone or your Stanley cup, designed in the U.S. but built in China. They could build industrial robots faster than we can and offset their current population crisis. Every day of the pacing, the U.S. would be accepting that the CCP might end up on top and will be around for a long, long time. Why would people in the U.S. defense and foreign policy community accept this?
Again, this stuff sounds good to a layman, but it breaks down as soon as you put an expert eye on it. There’s no way the race doesn’t continue, either outright or in the shadows."
https://www.globalhitman.com/p/the-lack-of-wisdom-in-the-us-ai-community
32."Technology development and adoption follow surprising paths. Confident predictions about the future, whether in economics, technology or even science, quite often fail to come true. We see through a glass dimly. The world is simply too complex and the future too uncertain. It is precisely that complexity and uncertainty that may confound the high-modernist attempt to predict where AI is taking us—and burn investors caught in the same overconfident, model-driven vision of how the future will unfold.
The monuments to our own high-modernist experiment may someday dot the American landscape: dark data centers, obsolete GPUs and commoditized AI models that play small roles in human workflows but never achieve the superintelligence the technology’s boosters are so confident they will achieve."
https://mailchi.mp/verdadcap/ambiguity-hubris-and-ai?e=7d2d38e1b3
33."Brotherhood is more than companionship. It’s a forge where one’s character is tempered. Men thrive when tested against each other in healthy ways and when they are reminded they aren’t alone in the struggle. Proverbs reminds us, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” Fraternity provides accountability and encouragement, grounding men in difficult times and keeping them humble in moments of success.
For a historical reference, consider Ben Franklin’s Junto Club. It was a small circle of men who met weekly to discuss questions of morality, politics, and philosophy. This group pushed one another toward self-improvement and civic duty, and left a legacy that helped shape America. I argue that every man today needs a circle of his own, a council of trust. There he can be honest and he can be challenged."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/dont-go-it-alone-the-gentlemans-call-to-brotherhood
34."The consistent theme in luck destruction is: rigid, linear, comparisons and low self-awareness.
By being linear and rigid, surface area is reduced. By burning time with comparisons you simply lose time and attention.
All of these are common “deadly sins” for Lady Luck.
Put It All Together:
You don’t need to do more work. You need your brain to acknowledge that you did all the right work. After that you’re going to put yourself in a position to make hundreds/thousands/millions of loose connections until the right one crosses your inbox."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-get-lucky-by-doing-less
35."Inception-stage consensus investing is a viable but vanishingly narrow path. Let me start with consensus investing. The key here is to distinguish between pure gold and fool's gold. We’ve all seen the decacorn exits and the trillion-dollar IPOs of the AI era. We all know these outcomes are possible. Over the past several years, entry valuations for every round type in every sector in every geography have crept up - and there is always a bigger and more expensive seed round lurking in next month's headlines.
While it’s generally good advice not to pass up on a “generational opportunity” because of price, the reality is that every remotely consensus opportunity is being priced to perfection. There are “N of 1” founders out there, and when a seed fund (including Angular) sees one, it should invest. We’ll pay that very high price in those tiny handful of cases where doing so makes sense because we are convinced the founding team is truly pure gold “N of 1” and (crucially!) that the downstream fundraising challenge (the central obstacle to exit viability in this era of consensus) has already been overcome.
The crucial thing, however, is to remember that the majority of companies that raise expensive inception rounds are fool’s gold, not pure gold and not gold at all. Just a shiny object glinting in the sun and drawing in a ton more capital than it deserves. The vast majority of the venture market is systematically paying pure gold entry prices for fool’s gold companies. The bar for “paying up for quality” has never been higher."
36."A huge gap has opened up between US commitments in Asia as it stands today and America’s true capabilities in the Pacific. I’ve heard it whispered for years now that modern missiles will render aircraft carriers a lot less potent when it comes to force projection and render America’s unhardened above-ground military bases vulnerable. Before the war in Iran, all this lied in the realm of speculation. However, after witnessing how Iran was able to hit US bases all over the Middle East with impunity, theory has become undeniable reality. American operations have been pushed so firmly out of the Middle East that the Iranian operation is getting supplied out of Diego Garcia base in the middle of the Indian Ocean and even as far afield as Singapore.
If people wanted an example of Americans letting an ally down, they don’t even have to use their imagination, just scroll a little down their timeline. Saudi Arabia, America’s strategic defense allies and buyers of billions and billions of dollars worth of American military gear, recently called Washington for help fending off Ansar Allah attacks on Saudi interests in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. America declined Saudi appeals, saying they need to focus on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/retreat-from-the-first-island-chain