ALT No Priors (Sarah Guo and Elad Gil with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz · 45 min), Oct 22: The New Apex Predator: Adversaries Armed With AI Agents. Average attacker breakout time: 29 minutes; the fastest seen, 27 seconds. Ablated models give hacktivists what nation states had a few years ago. AI hasn’t created a new class of attack; it’s “more and faster” CrowdStrike’s model: ~3 cents per remediation vs. ~$10 for a top frontier cyber model. Its Red Tempest and Blue Solano models were built with NVIDIA, partly on Nemotron. From one module at founding to 33 today. Industry stat: ~90 AI agents per employee, which Kurtz thinks is low. Within two years, local models will run on people’s computers.

ALT Business Breakdowns (With Fraser Christie, founder and CIO of Sandstone Global · 79 min), Oct 22: Affirm: The Internet’s American Express. $50B+ of GMV, growing 30%+ a year, with ~50% of US buy now, pay later. Stock: listed ~$49, peaked ~$175, bottomed at $9, now ~$60–80. ~$25B market cap at ~20x adjusted earnings, excluding stock comp. A 100 bp rate rise costs ~$90M against ~$2.5B of gross profit. ~95% of each quarter’s transactions come from existing customers. The Affirm Card is ~20% of GMV and growing 100%+ a year. Only 75 of the top 250 US merchants use Affirm; the target is $100B GMV. Max Levchin’s salary is under $40,000, with no cash bonus.

ALT 20VC (Harry Stebbings with Rory O’Driscoll and Jason Lemkin · 61 min), Oct 22: Trillion or Bust: The New VC Game. Big-fund venture: “It’s billion-dollar positions or nothing” “CoreWeave is B-tier compared to NVIDIA… Oracle is B-tier” Anthropic Q3: $16.8B of revenue, up 45% on Q2, 85% gross margin. IPO pricing talk slips from $2T to $1.5T. Replit flipped its default from Opus and Fable to OpenAI’s Astra at a 30–40% better price. Modal raised $750M at $15.75B, led by Accel. Anduril at $90B: is it worth 40x revenue? Harvard’s ~$68B endowment got a lift from a ~$2.2B SpaceX stake.

ALT Hidden Forces (Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams with BCG’s Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak · 78 min), Oct 22: Why Younger Generations Are Convinced They Are Falling Behind. His paper: Gen Z’s median income at 28 is 25% above millennials’ and 50% above boomers’ at that age. On the K-shape: “The rich are getting richer, the poor are not getting poorer” Indexed to 2020, the bottom of the distribution has stronger incomes and balance sheets. Millennial homeownership catches up with Gen X by age 42: delayed, not denied. Real consumption is up $1T+ since COVID while sentiment surveys sit at record lows. Gen Z says success takes $600,000 a year, what 1 in 100 Americans earn. Older generations in the same survey answer closer to $150,000. Gen Z are the “guinea pigs of the smartphone revolution”

ALT WSJ Tech News Briefing (Danny Lewis with WSJ reporter Anissa Gardizy · 12 min), Oct 21: Anthropic’s Draft IPO Filing Shows Red-Hot Growth and Big Risks. Revenue hit $16.3B in H1 2026, up from $4.6B in all of 2025. Compute spend: $9B so far in 2026, vs. $7.3B in all of 2025. Owes ~$450B in mostly non-cancelable cloud contracts. Total compute commitments top $600B, with $150B more in talks. Big clouds hit their supply limits; ~$86B committed to two neoclouds. Two customers supplied about a fifth of H1 2026 revenue. No large customers locked into long-term spending commitments. Aiming for a ~$2 trillion IPO valuation.

ALT Big Technology Podcast (Alex Kantrowitz with Google CEO Sundar Pichai · 47 min), Oct 20: Google CEO Sundar Pichai: AI’s Infinite Possibilities. Gemini 4 Argon hit ~25T tokens in its first 72 hours, 3x Gemini 3.0’s pace. Google is capacity-constrained serving Argon. Compute is planned 2–3 years out; today’s reflects 2024 decisions. “Everyone is short,” not just Google. Frontier research gets compute first, even at the expense of cloud profits. ~1/3 fewer code rollbacks in the four weeks since Argon launched. TPUs sent to orbit for space data centers; a “hello world” moment expected soon. Google covers 100% of power costs for its new data center projects.

ALT Cheeky Pint (John Collison with Mercedes F1’s Toto Wolff · 71 min), Oct 20: How Toto Wolff Built the Most Valuable Team in F1. Mercedes F1 valued at £4.6B, 7x a few years ago, on ~$1B of revenue. 30%+ EBIT margins and dividends; teams used to be loss-making marketing plays. Host John Collison: about 15x EBIT. Wolff: “Exactly.”. ~$200M-a-year cost cap leaves little room for long-term R&D. 2,500 staff, ~150 at the track, under the All Blacks’ “no dickheads” rule. Wolff-backed sms.at sold to T-Mobile for 250 million within two years. Exited all nine VC investments from late ’99 through 2000, before the crash. 42% of F1 fans are women; 15–25-year-old women are the fastest-growing group.

ALT Yet Another Value Podcast (Andrew Walker with Ben Isaac of Brizo Capital · 63 min), Oct 20: The Cavalry Isn’t Coming: UK Stocks, Relistings and AI Analysts. Only ~10% of UK PLCs require directors to own equity. UK stocks trade a third to a quarter of comparable US daily turnover. Isaac: relistings like CRH, pushed by Trian, grew liquidity beyond the re-rate. Host Andrew Walker is skeptical of the relisting trade. Walker’s typical UK story: board owns no stock, pays a dividend, stock languishes. Brazil’s Selic in the low teens sets a high bar for cheap-looking stocks. Kenyan retailer at 10x growing 10%: ~20% return vs. a low-to-mid-20s cost of equity. AI commoditizes shared research; the edge shifts to trade shows and scuttlebutt.

ALT All-In (With Figma CEO Dylan Field · 41 min), Oct 19: Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?. The Adobe deal that died: Adobe’s $20 billion offer for Figma sat through 16 months of regulatory review, which Field calls punishing for any company. Growth through the Claude Design scare: After Anthropic launched Claude Design and the market called Figma dead, Figma grew 48% year over year, the host noted. Field says it’s easy to mistake model progress for product progress. Design is the new code: As coding models improve, Field says differentiation moves to design, brand, point of view and being bold. AI lowers the floor, not the ceiling: He once told Figma’s Config conference that AI would raise the ceiling. Now he says that was wrong: only humans raise it. Not all SaaS is dead: Field says neither “all SaaS is fine” nor “all SaaS is dead” is true, pointing to Cursor’s growth despite frontier labs chasing it.

ALT Invest Like the Best (Patrick O’Shaughnessy with Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo · 57 min), Oct 20: Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI. 80/80 beats 160/30: Cacioppo argues an 80%-growth, 80%-margin business beats a 160%-growth, 30%-margin one over time, yet the market values the latter at 3–4x the multiple. No markup on tokens: Customers compare any token markup against the model itself, she says, so don’t mark up. 25% of Vanta’s customers already use its agent flow; she thinks it can reach 75%. Top comp up about 10x: Her top performers’ total comp is probably 10x what it was five years ago, she says, and it should be higher. The pace is accelerating. Tenders every round: With rivals raising at 5x valuations every six months, she says you have to do a tender every time. Unhealthy? “Totally.” FDEs and custom models: She calls forward-deployed engineers mostly professional services, and says post-training your own model is about cost or marketing, not quality.

ALT Energy Evolution (Dan Testa with Constellation, CPS Energy and S&P Global · 40 min), Oct 20: How Much New Gas Capacity Does the Texas Grid Need?. Record demand, cheap power: ERCOT’s peak topped 91 GW in July and again in August, yet August day-ahead on-peak power averaged $35.52/MWh, the lowest August since 2017. The data center queue: ERCOT has over 430 GW of large-load interconnection requests, the vast majority of them data centers. Peakers before baseload: Constellation says what Texas needs for the next five years or so is peaking capacity, not new baseload. Why baseload doesn’t pencil: New baseload gas costs about $2,500/kW and is moving toward $3,000. It needs power prices north of $90/MWh, far above today’s. State money, turbine boom: The $10B Texas Energy Fund has approved about 4 GW, with 85% of its pipeline combustion turbines; nearly 40 GW of gas turbines were ordered in the first half of this year.

ALT Bogleheads on Investing (Rick Ferri with Dimensional co-founder David Booth · 51 min), Oct 20: David Booth, Co-founder and Chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors. From a Brooklyn brownstone to $1 trillion: Booth co-founded Dimensional in 1981. It now manages more than $1 trillion, with 1,600 employees. Bogle ran the back office: Before launch, Booth asked Jack Bogle to handle Dimensional’s fund administration, from NAV to trade reconciliation, for a fee. Bogle said yes. “Small cap” wasn’t a term yet: Dimensional’s first strategy was a small-company fund, before anyone called them small caps (later, micro caps). 150 bp a year for 45 years: The micro-cap fund has beaten the Russell 2000 by about 150 basis points a year after fees, Booth says. The IRS eyes ETF tax moves: The IRS is pushing back on some ETF tax strategies, including 351 exchanges and box spreads. Booth says Dimensional will submit comments.

ALT The Real Eisman Playbook (Steve Eisman with Danny Moses · 43 min), Oct 19: Big Short Reunion w/ Danny Moses: Rising Rates, AI & Private Equity. Nvidia concentration risk: Its 10-Q showed 70% of accounts receivable coming from five customers, even with revenue up 110%. CoreWeave as the weak link: Compared to WeWork, with $51 billion in debt including leases, and a mismatch from renting out GPU capacity on shorter terms. Securitization echoes 2006–07: The new Nvidia–Wall Street GPU securitization deal recalls the warehouse lines that funded subprime lenders. PE’s monetization stall: Exits that used to take three to four years now take seven, and may stretch to 10. QE is coming: One of them puts it at “100%,” arguing printing is the only way out; the dollar’s reserve share is down from 71% two decades ago.

ALT Sourcery (Molly O’Shea with Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone · 56 min), Oct 19: Apollo’s Yahoo Playbook, 5 Years After the $5B Deal. Fast-returning deal: Apollo bought Yahoo from Verizon in 2021 for about $4.8B. Verizon still owns 10%, and the deal has paid back roughly its price, one of Apollo’s fastest ever. Divestitures and cuts: Yahoo sold AOL, TechCrunch and Edgecast, and let go of over 2,000 people in February 2023 while fixing an ad tech stack built from 30-plus acquisitions. Scale vs. valuation: 700M monthly users and top five in the US, yet some companies valued above Yahoo have less than 0.1% of its user base. Yahoo Scout: Yahoo’s first search engine of its own in 17 years grounds its data in lightweight models, Anthropic’s Haiku at launch. Loyal audience: 75% of users come to Yahoo directly rather than through search, and about 75% are logged in.

ALT 20VC (Harry Stebbings with Sameer Dholakia, Bessemer · 75 min), Oct 19: You Need $1BN To Do Seed Today: The Untold Truths of Venture. $5.75B of new funds: Bessemer’s latest raise splits into a $4B fund and a $1.75B seed fund. The Anthropic bet: Bessemer joined Anthropic’s $15B-pre, $18B-post round at about 150x ARR, a deal a Bessemer partner called the lowest-voted in the firm’s history. Paying for growth: 10–15x next-12-months revenue isn’t crazy for AI companies growing this fast, he says. Bessemer led Legora’s $1.8B round at $20M of ARR. Capital is a moat: Huge rounds raised fast pull in talent, then customers, a flywheel Dholakia agrees amounts to kingmaking. The barbell: Giant global platforms or true specialists can win; the middle is “a tough place to be.” Bessemer has put nearly $200M into Waymo.

ALT The Special Situations Report (Asif and Tamanna Suria · 24 min), Oct 19: Bumble to be Acquired by Ithaca Holdings for $1.3 Billion. $6.05 a share, all cash: About $1.3B including debt. Bumble cites a 138% premium to its Oct 9 close; the price is over 90% below its $70 first-day close. The refinancing was the tell: April’s $475M of new debt came at 11.6% (vs. 5.4%), with aggressive amortization and stiff prepayment penalties. Reuters reported sale talks nine weeks later. PE is buying beaten-down software: A GTCR-led group with Elliott is taking CCC Intelligent Solutions private for $6.1B; Thoma Bravo’s Proofpoint is buying Varonis for $6.3B, a 52% premium. Supermicro’s CFO exits: With short interest near 16%, the hosts think the transition could favor the bulls. Pepsi’s insider buy isn’t one: A director’s $23.7M “purchase” was a swap out of his own irrevocable trusts, not an open-market buy.