A global community of lifelong learners open to all who wish to explore the joys of compounding together.
Anna Maria, FL
Joined May 2023
- Tweets63
- Following28
- Followers2.2K
- Likes531
Pinned Tweet
Bending Spoons began in 2013 with about $40,000 saved from its founders' failed first startup. Today it is worth about $28 billion.
It buys proven software businesses, runs them on its own platform with small teams, and uses the cash to buy more.
It has acquired Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, and most recently Airtable and Miro.
It's an example of what's possible when you build for true duration with first-principles thinking and A+ talent.
Here is Paul's conversation with Bending Spoons co-founder and CEO, Luca Ferrari –– one of our favorite conversations yet.
Enjoy!
@PaulBuser @RickBuhrmanSGH @luke10ferrari @bendingspoons
Joys of Compounding retweeted
What an incredible learning opportunity to sit down with @luke10ferrari and get to the core of why @bendingspoons has a shot to get even better as it scales its AI-native operations, incredibly talented team, and M&A machine.
We've rarely seen a company build in this way from first principles and with an unlimited time horizon.
Bending Spoons began in 2013 with about $40,000 saved from its founders' failed first startup. Today it is worth about $28 billion.
It buys proven software businesses, runs them on its own platform with small teams, and uses the cash to buy more.
It has acquired Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, and most recently Airtable and Miro.
It's an example of what's possible when you build for true duration with first-principles thinking and A+ talent.
Here is Paul's conversation with Bending Spoons co-founder and CEO, Luca Ferrari –– one of our favorite conversations yet.
Enjoy!
@PaulBuser @RickBuhrmanSGH @luke10ferrari @bendingspoons
Links
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2d9…
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Joys of Compounding retweeted
Warren Buffett told Charlie Munger, late in Munger's life:
"It's so interesting now. I would like to stick around for another 30 years if I couldn't participate. If I could just watch."
Sarah Guo gets to participate, and that's why she works so hard.
(From our first conversation with Sarah, Aug. 2024)
My second conversation with Sarah Guo (@saranormous), founder of Conviction.
Sarah's been early to many of this generation's defining companies, and is constantly ranked at the top of the managers LPs most want to invest with.
She knows the small group of 250 people pushing the AI frontier and we discuss what she sees from that vantage point:
- What the people building AI actually believe right now
- How close we are to robots in the home
- The case against an AI monopoly
- Why she's bullish on bio x AI
- Building Conviction
@domcooke wrote the definitive profile of Sarah and Conviction for @colossusmag: "Sarah's Wager". Link in comments.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:08 Investing Through the AI Boom
12:06 What AI Researchers Believe
15:44 Compute, Capital & Robotics
24:03 How Sarah Makes Investments
39:24 The Case for Open Source
49:01 America’s Compute Independence
51:32 AI’s New Investment Markets
59:36 Finding Truth & What’s Next
Joys of Compounding retweeted
My second conversation with Sarah Guo (@saranormous), founder of Conviction.
Sarah's been early to many of this generation's defining companies, and is constantly ranked at the top of the managers LPs most want to invest with.
She knows the small group of 250 people pushing the AI frontier and we discuss what she sees from that vantage point:
- What the people building AI actually believe right now
- How close we are to robots in the home
- The case against an AI monopoly
- Why she's bullish on bio x AI
- Building Conviction
@domcooke wrote the definitive profile of Sarah and Conviction for @colossusmag: "Sarah's Wager". Link in comments.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:08 Investing Through the AI Boom
12:06 What AI Researchers Believe
15:44 Compute, Capital & Robotics
24:03 How Sarah Makes Investments
39:24 The Case for Open Source
49:01 America’s Compute Independence
51:32 AI’s New Investment Markets
59:36 Finding Truth & What’s Next
Joys of Compounding retweeted
Neil Movva (@neilmovva) started his career at Nvidia, working on GPUs and kernels, and has an unusually deep understanding of inference, from software to chips to power.
We spend a lot of time on each of those layers, how they connect, and where the important tradeoffs are.
What makes this conversation special is how detailed it is (like a 401-level class), yet Neil makes it remarkably clear and easy to follow.
Today he runs Sail Research, a company building infrastructure for agents to make tokens as cheap as possible.
We discuss:
- Latency versus throughput
- Why there are no bad chips, only bad pricing
- The end of kernel engineering
- Buying chips and power no one else wants
- New chip architectures
- Nvidia lore + his contrarian view of the company
- Open source and the frontier labs
I learned a ton. Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:38 Building a “Token Factory”
4:21 The Future of Background Agents
13:09 Nvidia and the GPU Stack
23:27 Chips, Memory, and Transformers
36:14 The Future of AI Training Data
44:32 Chip Scarcity and Compute Arbitrage
52:44 Reinventing the AI Data Center
59:01 Power and the “Scavenger Strategy”
1:10:10 Open vs. Closed AI
Joys of Compounding retweeted
My conversation with @benthompson. Ben has been writing Stratechery for over a decade and remains one of my favorite business thinkers.
We covered a lot. Every important company in the industry and the forces acting on all of them.
- Why he thinks it would be problematic for the US to win the AI race
- Will we run out of money to fund AI
- Google becoming Berkshire Hathaway
- Why ads are amazing
- TSMC, Intel, and Samsung
- Nvidia's invisible price cuts + biggest competitors
- Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Meta
I love talking to Ben about everything happening in markets and technology. Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:59 America and the AI Race
8:26 AI’s Funding Problem
15:31 AI’s Capabilities and Limits
20:30 Aggregation Theory, AI, and Ads
31:10 Compute, TSMC, and Intel
47:31 Amazon and Apple’s AI Moats
54:43 The Frontier AI Players
74:07 Nvidia and Commoditized Intelligence
82:52 What Survives an AI Bubble?
A.J. on how a fascination with storytelling drove him to deal-making:
"My mom was a behavioral psychologist. I always got a lot of doses of that at home, and I was very keenly aware of different people's motivations.
Combining all this energy I had with that psychological piece, with these interesting personality types of the '80s and the storytelling, it sort of wove into a cocktail of deals."
"It sounds sort of lame, but I used to watch the movie Wall Street all the time when I was a kid.
And Michael Douglas was not a hero, but it was interesting that people would talk that way and think that way. There was this whole ecosystem of people.
Being a super competitive guy, I always remember being like, 'I have a lot of energy. I have a reasonably good way of putting it all together. I could do that, but be a better person.'"
Our conversation with A.J. Rohde.
A.J. Rohde is a Senior Partner at Thoma Bravo, the world’s largest software-focused investment firm.
We cover how a tennis background can predict good investors, why the software selloff was really just a duration trade unwinding, and the single number a whole company can rally around.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Intro
0:00:34 Why Thoma Bravo Recruits Tennis Players
0:17:16 Drumming as an Outlet
0:26:44 The Spirit of Philadelphia
0:37:08 Buying Licenses for Air
0:48:09 Constants Across Five Decades of Software
1:12:45 Data That Survives Hype Cycles
1:33:15 How Range Makes a Better Investor
Joys of Compounding retweeted
One of the most fun JOC conversations I can recall.
Loved learning from AJ about what makes @thomabravo able to sustain its greatness, why lots of software still wins in the age of AI (and why tennis is the best sport on earth)
@eightsleep @portraitanalyst @colossusmag
@PaulBuser
Our conversation with A.J. Rohde.
A.J. Rohde is a Senior Partner at Thoma Bravo, the world’s largest software-focused investment firm.
We cover how a tennis background can predict good investors, why the software selloff was really just a duration trade unwinding, and the single number a whole company can rally around.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Intro
0:00:34 Why Thoma Bravo Recruits Tennis Players
0:17:16 Drumming as an Outlet
0:26:44 The Spirit of Philadelphia
0:37:08 Buying Licenses for Air
0:48:09 Constants Across Five Decades of Software
1:12:45 Data That Survives Hype Cycles
1:33:15 How Range Makes a Better Investor
A.J. Rohde on the influence being in a band has had on his career:
"It was creative in a way that everything else I was doing at the time was much more structured.
It was a cool bonding moment amongst the guys in my band, and they were different kind of guys because I was used to playing sports and other things."
"So another great thing I can talk about now later in life, and it makes me more relatable to people that aren't just in finance.
And I think it's a wonderful thing to have when you're trying to bond with people to do deals, or just to be empathetic to different kinds of people and the way they think."
Our conversation with A.J. Rohde.
A.J. Rohde is a Senior Partner at Thoma Bravo, the world’s largest software-focused investment firm.
We cover how a tennis background can predict good investors, why the software selloff was really just a duration trade unwinding, and the single number a whole company can rally around.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Intro
0:00:34 Why Thoma Bravo Recruits Tennis Players
0:17:16 Drumming as an Outlet
0:26:44 The Spirit of Philadelphia
0:37:08 Buying Licenses for Air
0:48:09 Constants Across Five Decades of Software
1:12:45 Data That Survives Hype Cycles
1:33:15 How Range Makes a Better Investor
Our conversation with A.J. Rohde.
A.J. Rohde is a Senior Partner at Thoma Bravo, the world’s largest software-focused investment firm.
We cover how a tennis background can predict good investors, why the software selloff was really just a duration trade unwinding, and the single number a whole company can rally around.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Intro
0:00:34 Why Thoma Bravo Recruits Tennis Players
0:17:16 Drumming as an Outlet
0:26:44 The Spirit of Philadelphia
0:37:08 Buying Licenses for Air
0:48:09 Constants Across Five Decades of Software
1:12:45 Data That Survives Hype Cycles
1:33:15 How Range Makes a Better Investor
Our conversation with Nilam Ganenthiran (@nilamg).
Nilam is building Beacon Software, an AI-native holding company acquiring and growing mission-critical software and services businesses.
He is backed by General Catalyst, D1 Capital, @patrickc, @collision, @t_xu, @ScottWu46 and many more.
Ask any of them what makes Nilam special and you'll hear the same answer: an unusual ability to build trust and inspire exceptional people.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The morning Amazon bought Whole Foods
- Turning down the Instacart co-founder role
- Buying a business every 10 days
- How AI is transforming Main Street businesses
- The power of permanent capital
- AI, trust and judgement
In many ways, this conversation is a guide to building an enduring company at massive scale.
We hope you enjoy!
Spotify / Apple links below in comments.
@RickBuhrmanSGH @PaulBuser
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1QL…
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Joys of Compounding retweeted
We're coming out of stealth.
We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised.
Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads.
Our first racks ship this summer.
We were super-inspired by the description Jan Mohr gave of how he views new 'co-founders' in each step of the multi-decade journey at CHAPTERS Group
@PaulBuser @buhrman_rick
Our teacher today is Jan Mohr, CEO of CHAPTERS Group, a publicly traded, serial acquisition holding company on its way to becoming one of Europe’s technology champions. 🏆 🇪🇺
CHAPTERS originated from a small software startup near Frankfurt in 1998. After selling the core business to a strategic buyer in 2018, the company pivoted to create a preferred home for mission-critical businesses across Europe. Over the past five years, CHAPTERS has founded four distinct acquisition platforms, acquiring around 60 operating companies. This impressive M&A machine has resulted in CHAPTERS’ stock appreciating nearly 10X during this period. 📈 🚀
At the crux of our discussion is the rise of artificial intelligence, which is reshaping the business landscape. Companies worldwide are now considering AI's threats, opportunities, and implications. The software industry, in particular, is experiencing vibrant discourse around AI's transformative potential, driving efficiencies, expanding total addressable markets, and delivering tangible customer value.
We also explored several important topics:
- Leading in times of accelerated change by empowering everyone in the organization to become "teachers, preachers and implementers" of AI.
- CHAPTERS is backed by a concentrated group of long-term, strategic investors, including Mitch Rales, Daniel Ek, and Will Thorndike. Their support provides a critical permanent capital base alongside ongoing strategic value. Jan shares insights on how his team and board have fostered a winning culture through their Manuscript Method, while maintaining a decentralized, entrepreneurial spirit.
With that, we hope you enjoy this session with our good friend, Jan Mohr!
Links in comments.
@PaulBuser @buhrman_rick @portraitanalyst @joincolossus
