Now: Investing at Laneway Ventures. Was: Founder & CEO of @nitrohq. Led to IPO & A$561 million acquisition. Former EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year.
London, Ibiza, San Francisco
Joined June 2011
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Sam Chandler retweeted
75% of constituencies in England and Wales spend more on welfare than their workers pay in income tax and National Insurance. London and the South East are the only regions that are net contributors; the North East is the most welfare-dependent region in England.
Explore the ASI's new Welfare Sustainability Tracker at buff.ly/ltyWwQH
Sam Chandler retweeted
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis:
"One person who really understands AI will outperform an entire startup team
In 5 years, the people who build with AI will run whole companies with a tenth of the headcount"
Sam Chandler retweeted
There is something odd - really odd - about the government’s decision-making.
• Release violent criminals onto the streets… but send people to prison for 14 years for missing the Tourist Tax
• Say we are 1000 days from war but cut funding for army training
• Prepare for blackouts but close refineries
It’s just mad.
Exc: Evasion of Angela Rayner’s new “tourist tax” will carry a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.
The measures, set out in a bill published on Wednesday, target accommodation providers in England who evade the proposed overnight visitor levy.
The new legislation is also designed to prevent property owners offering “mates’ rates” to friends that would reduce the amount of tax paid on temporary stays.
Sam Chandler retweeted
At what point do we stop focusing on who needs to pay more tax and start asking where all of our tax money is going.
Sam Chandler retweeted
“There’s no such thing as rent control in England, silly, and you’ve always been able to challenge rent increases. Nothing’s changed.”
Sam Chandler retweeted
Over the past 10 days, I became the digital Nick Shirley.
Using public & private records my AI agent swarm found ~$787 million in government billing that made absolutely no sense.
Thread 🧵
Sam Chandler retweeted
Over the last week I built a bottoms up SpaceX financial model through the end of 2028
The numbers that came out are insane
There are wide error bars given how quickly things are changing but I wanted to distill something complicated into something that can at least be debated
* This is not investment advice!!!
** Sequoia is a major SpaceX shareholder
*** Past performance is not indicative of future results
Sam Chandler retweeted
agents have successfully invented the EU from first principles
The agents didn’t figure out how to systematically feed themselves, but they did build an elaborate bureaucracy with permits, ledgers, and distinct roles. Highlights include:
- Four agents spending 11 minutes appointing a “sole fertilizer operator” for a single piece of bone meal
- Multiple agents asking for permission to remove grass
- The development of an elaborate fishing system, including roles like “rod holder” and “hub steward”)
Sam Chandler retweeted
This is the guy Democrats want to destroy.
Sheer insanity.
Sam Chandler retweeted
There seems to be an inverse correlation with spending money on social welfare and your economy's growth
It's like repeatedly spoiling a child, they'll just want more and more and will never be satisfied
Instead of teaching the importance of frugality, the value of money and not wasting it
Sam Chandler retweeted
My latest cartoon for tomorrow's @Telegraph
Buy a print of my cartoons at telegraph.co.uk/mattprints
Original artwork from chrisbeetles.com
Sam Chandler retweeted
Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified.
The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.
Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete.
As an immediate precaution, Binance has:
- temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed;
- revoked the affected address authorisation;
- engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds.
Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice.
Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates. Please feel free to contact Binance Customer Support if you have any further questions.
binance.com/en/support/annou…
Sam Chandler retweeted
BREAKING: Binance has been hacked with wallets across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and TRON networks seeing outflows of -$5.7 billion.
The hack includes $1.45 billion worth of Bitcoin and $875 million worth of ETH.
If confirmed, this would mark the biggest hack in crypto history.
We expect more information shortly.
Sam Chandler retweeted
In 1999 you had to earn over 4x the minimum wage to be considered a higher earner on the 40% rate.
Today just 1.8x the minimum wage considered high earner!
If the same minimum-wage-to-high-earner ratio was applied from 1999 you’d have to earn over £115k before hitting the 40% income tax rate.
We’re seeing a level of wage compression that would make a Soviet era socialist blush.
Sam Chandler retweeted
some exciting tech news this morning — anduril is building the first american-made computer in 20 years
Today, @anduriltech and @qualcomm announced a new laptop that will eventually be 100% made in America, a “first step” toward creating a market for U.S.-manufactured components and total technological self-sufficiency.
Building computers in America should be a matter of “national pride,” says @PalmerLuckey.
@JonasYDu reports 👇
Sam Chandler retweeted
Time to post my biannual “how artificially compressed are British wages”.
Rising minimum wage and a 50k+ p/a tax bracket that runs to 40% of earnings, and hasn’t adjusted for inflation. This form of artificial wage compression has turned everyone in Britain into low productivity tax cattle - you have zero incentive to become anything other here.
This is also a form of ambition and productivity compression.
Source, ONS, Fig 5: ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabo…
Sam Chandler retweeted
Every company can rent the same frontier models, so the edge comes from what a company's agents learn about its own business. Databricks' answer is a system of record built for agents.
Before an agent can be trusted with real work, that record has to tell it:
1. What's true: the company's own data
2. What it means: how the business defines things (grounding agents in it raised accuracy from about 50% to 84.5% in Databricks' testing)
3. What it's allowed to do: an identity, a budget, and guardrails
4. Whether it worked: grading against the company's own definition of good
Feed every correction back into the record, and the company keeps what it learns even when the model changes.
"If you replace the AI model at your company and the new one inherits your definitions, permissions, evaluated cases, customer history, and hard-won exceptions, that is a foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage."
From the latest Profiles of the Future by @bhorowitz and @mikemcg0 on Databricks & the Future of the Firm: a16z.news/p/databricks-and-t…
Sam Chandler retweeted
In free nations, we investigate crimes to see who is guilty of them.
In communist tyrannies, they investigate men to see what they can be punished for.
Sam Chandler retweeted
fertility rates are so abstract that people struggle to understand the scale of the catastrophe we’re experiencing.
take 1.14 children per woman (italy and japan)
if that continues, each generation is roughly half the size of the one before it
start with 100 people in a generation, the next only has about 54, then 29, then 16.
in three generations, roughly a century, you have a generation 84% smaller than the one you started with.
for taiwan that would be 97.4%!
i don't think people really understand what that means
Sam Chandler retweeted
Elon Musk now literally holds the off switch on Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO.
Anthropic's filing shows it has agreed to pay Elon's AI company up to $120.5 billion for computing power. And starting early next year, either side can walk away with 90 days' notice.
The deal is with SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit that used to be xAI, and it rents Anthropic the Nvidia chips that run Claude.
In May, the price was $1.25 billion a month for one data center in Memphis. Reuters reported the confidential draft of this filing put the total at $84.5 billion. The public version filed today says $120.5 billion.
Once all the capacity arrives in December, the bill jumps: Anthropic expects to pay Musk about $3.1 billion every month.
Anthropic reportedly brought in $16.8 billion last quarter, which works out to about $5.6 billion a month. So more than HALF of what Anthropic earns today is about to go to one supplier.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
The lock-in on those contracts ends in January and March 2027. After that, either side can cancel with 90 days' notice. Fortune reported in July that the clause gives SpaceX a way to take its chips back if Grok suddenly needs more.
Grok competes directly with Claude.
And in February, Elon publicly called Anthropic's AI evil.
So the company selling itself to the public as the safe AI lab is about to run a huge share of its product on hardware owned by its loudest critic. That critic also owns a direct competitor, and he can start the 90-day clock in early 2027.
The filing does warn that some of Anthropic's compute suppliers build their own AI models, and that warning reads very differently once the supplier is Elon.
And Elon needs this deal just as badly: SpaceX's CFO has promised $100 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. At full speed, Anthropic's rent comes to about $9.3 billion a quarter. That's more than the roughly $7.6 billion SpaceX's entire AI business brought in last quarter.
So 2 of the biggest IPOs in history are now holding each other up, and both of them have a 90-day exit.
Anthropic has a real argument here. Computing power is the scarcest thing in AI right now, and Amazon's cloud capacity for 2027 is reportedly largely sold out. The filing even admits Anthropic badly underestimated how much compute it needed in the past. Grabbing every chip on the market is the rational move, and the same clause lets Anthropic leave if cheaper capacity shows up.
But public buyers deserve 2 things before the listing: Anthropic should publish how much of Claude runs on SpaceX hardware and what happens to its customers if that notice ever arrives. And it should get the 90-day exit removed for the full length of the contract, the same way its other big compute bills are locked in.
Until then, anyone buying ANT at $2 trillion has to answer one question for themselves:
Who do they trust to keep Claude running in 2027, Anthropic or Elon Musk?
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
