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Joined January 2021
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Martin retweeted
Intel -25%, Google -13%, Amazon -7%.
@BillAckman explains why today’s market punishes earnings disappointments so brutally.
"It used to be that a really high-quality business that somehow disappointed the stock might drop 3-4%. Today's stock could drop 30-40% on a miss."
"I think that's driven by the increasing kind of indexation, which is reducing float, and the increasing amount of leveraged capital, short-term capital invested in markets that is creating a lot more volatility."
"And what that has done is it's made the occasional amazing high-growth durable company available at a discounted price for a period of time based on a short-term disappointment."
"So our portfolio today is filled with businesses where we have enormous respect for the people running them. They don't need much in the way of an activist. We're happy to be a you know a quiet owner that occasionally has an idea."
Binance readily having $6.34B to cover the hole is a huge flex.
Hypothetically, at ~$10B in cash, it would rank 56th among US-listed companies by cash, excluding banks. That puts it level with Exxon and PayPal.
At $15B, it would be 35th, alongside Cisco and Visa.
Binance has begun recovering affected assets for users and continues to work with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace, freeze and recover additional funds.
The company has already publicly committed to cover losses through company funds in the prior announcement.
Binance has already reserved over $6.34B of company funds to cover this incident. $5B of these funds are already held in the exact token assets that were impacted. We are completing the purchase of the remaining amount by buying token assets through market channels and OTC channels. We are doing this to match the format of the remaining token assets and address any asset shortfalls. This step can take longer because some tokens may have low liquidity and OTC settlement also takes time. We will share more progress as soon as we can.
These figures do not include frozen or protected assets, which remain subject to ongoing recovery and verification. Currently, $3bn has been frozen, with thanks to our industry partners. We are working with partners and law enforcement to recover the frozen assets.We will continue to use company resources to cover confirmed shortfall and will provide further verified updates as recovery efforts progress. Ultimately, all user funds will be verified publicly through our Proof of Reserves.
We will weather this storm. Thank you for the support.
Martin retweeted
Bill Ackman on how he uses @X to make better investment decisions.
"I use X in kind of an interesting way. I try in every issue to find the most articulate, thoughtful person on one side of the issue and then the same on the other side of the issue. And I think it's very difficult to read."
"So I don't know that there's any media property where their intent is, let's just come out with the absolute truth. Usually, the owner has a political bias or agenda, which is why it's actually quite powerful to have an open playing field where you can select who you want to listen to."
"Now, most people, I think, psychologically like to hear from people who agree with them. I like to hear from people who agree with me. I also like to hear from people who disagree. So I've actually found it, from an investment perspective, it's been one of my best sources of ideas, understanding what's going on in the world."
"And then from just being a citizen of the world, understanding important issues and hearing different perspectives. So I like it, and I'm now part of the conversation."
@BillAckman @NicolaiTang1
Bill Ackman wants an opposing argument button on @x
"I've encouraged Elon on Twitter a couple times, maybe I need to push him a little more privately. I do think there should be a button on every time you read a tweet, you should be able to push a button to find the best argument"
"you know, who's the most followed person who's had the most articulate or maybe the most liked alternative argument for the same subject so that I think it's very helpful to people to hear people make the case for the other side."
@BillAckman @NicolaiTang1 @elonmusk
Martin retweeted
Why haven't AI agents gone mainstream? Sam Altman says they aren't reliable and seamless enough, yet.
"What will be true of the winning personal agent? It's like intelligence, context, tools. I think no one has yet figured out the the thing that people like. People like these, but this is not something that people are like, I cannot imagine my life without this thing."
"In a way that when people talk about coding agents or even ChatGPT, they do say. And someone soon is going to figure out what that looks like. I think this is like a small number of ideas away from a super mainstream thing."
"I think it'll look a lot like the current DOTS or user, Grokbot or whatever, but it'll just work. Like it'll just work. It'll be reliable. You'll just like give it more complex tasks and we'll do all of those things."
@collision @sama
Martin retweeted
Revolut co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky says a lack of a banking license keeps platforms like Cash App from becoming a large business.
"It's like there are pros and cons. To build a large business, it's a must. If you want to really compete with banks, you need to get trust from customers. They need to put salaries in. They need to put a lot of their wealth in their accounts. They need to start trading stocks with you, ETFs, and so on. They need to trust you, and in their minds, they trust banks."
“To build a very large business and capture large market share, it's just unavailable. In the US, a lot of companies started like Chime, Cash App, Simple, 10 or 12 years ago. They never went for a banking license. I think it's a big mistake. They could never become a large business.”
"They can target certain niche audiences, certain cohorts of customers, I don't know, low income and so on. But they can never go to the prime audience, and they can never become a primary bank account without the banking license.”
“Early adopters, 10 to 20% of the population, will try them. Maybe they move from early adopters to their friends, family, and another 2%, so 4% of the population. But you want 40, 50, 60, 70%. For example, in Ireland we have 80% market penetration."
FT @davidsenra @NStoronsky
Martin retweeted
Sam Altman says a new model kept him up at night after he saw what it could do.
"There was one weekend when we got a new model. And in, I'm actually probably not supposed to say this, but I will, since we're drinking. And people were just throwing that at the hardest problems they could."
"And people just, like, didn't think the model was going to do these things. And we had this collective experience of people's, like, hardest research problems from their academic career. The model was just knocking down one after the other. Many different fields."
"It was incredible to watch. And kind of two nights in a row, I was up most of the night because I was so excited I couldn't go to bed."
"And it was like, it was many of those problems that we published. Many other things. And I was tremendously excited and happy."
"But I also had, like, much more sadness and melancholy and, like, a feeling of, like, something ending than I was expecting."
FT @collision @sama
Martin retweeted
Revolut co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky on why banks fail to innovate:
“They’re stuck in limbo of professional management who are extremely risk-averse. As a result, there’s zero intention to innovate.”
"And then all the resources are spent on protecting what they already have. For example, you can have a very old legacy third-party core banking system. Obviously, you need to change it to your own or to some new provider. But banking management will never do it because it introduces risk: you need to migrate customers, something might go wrong, and they never take a risk."
"Plus, a lot of them aren’t technical, so they don’t really understand how to do a lot of technical things. As a result, the default choice is to do nothing."
"Doing anything is risky in an industry where you lack certain technical skills. Banking isn’t only about regulation; it’s also about building tech. And I think all these people are very bad at building tech."
FT: @davidsenra @NStoronsky
VCs pissed off Revolut co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky so much that he started his own fund to compete:
“I had this fight and then I was extremely pissed off, and I thought I also need to compete with VCs in their business because they are so bad.”
“And out of my frustration, I started the fund as well.”
“The idea was basically to invest not based on human judgment, but based on data science and machine learning models. Statistical investment is number one.”
“Number two, actually help founders with operational advice. Playbooks that we developed at Revolut: how to hire people, how to do performance management, how to do product expansions.”
“And then finally help them sell their product as well, because we are a large enterprise. We are buying from a lot of vendors. Having us as a client helps to sell into other enterprises, or potentially sell to our customers as well, our Revolut customers.”
“Plus my personal advice, obviously. So I thought overall the package was so much better compared to purely financial players, VCs.”
FT: @davidsenra @NStoronsky
Full episode:
teapawt.org/davidsenra/status/2114…
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Revolut co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky on building a full-stack AI employee with today’s technology:
“I think we’re just in the beginning. We automated customer support, so 90% of all customer support team is automated now. Before, it used to be 5,000 people plus. Now it’s much less.”
“Obviously, engineering is automated as well. We increased speed of engineers by 30%. Translation, cross-selling as well, done by LLMs now. A lot of things.”
“I think the ultimate goal, or at least a bet for us now, is to be able to build a full-stack AI employee. I think it’s completely doable with current technology.”
“It’s not like a chat tool or another interface where you tell what to do and then it produces something.”
“No, it’s more like an AI employee which can join calls with you, which has email, which has a Slack account, which has access to all internal back-office systems and can do work.”
“I think that’s kind of the ultimate goal that, sooner or later, the majority of companies will come to.”
FT: @davidsenra @NStoronsky
Full Ep: teapawt.org/davidsenra/status/2114…
Nik Storonsky is one of the most hardcore and competitive founders I’ve ever talked to. He’s the founder of Revolut, a $115 billion company, and wants to be the number one bank in 100 countries.
When someone asked Nik if he was coming for Jamie Dimon's lunch, he said “I’m coming for his dinner.”
“We want to dominate, otherwise what’s the point?”
He removed every VC from his board, and when one investor pushed him too far, he started his own fund to compete with them.
Nik has a lot of ideas on talent, product design, marketing, constraints, and what makes founder-led companies special.
This is a fascinating conversation about competition, speed, and building a machine-like company.
0:00 Coming for Jamie Dimon's dinner
2:04 Building the #1 bank in 100 countries
6:12 Why founders beat professional CEOs
8:45 Revolut's biggest mistake
12:47 Why legacy banks can't innovate
17:20 Running a company like a machine
20:28 Funding winners and cutting losers like a trader
23:31 How AI is changing Revolut's team structure
25:23 50 direct reports and spreading innovation fast
29:59 Hiring self-guided missiles
33:31 Too much money makes founders weaker
37:38 What Europe's constraints taught Revolut
41:08 Why VCs are like football cheerleaders
49:28 Starting a fund to compete with VCs
54:28 From zero marketing to buying Europe's airports
1:00:21 Funding moonshots like a global tech company
1:03:58 Building an unstoppable machine
Includes paid partnerships.
Lots of apprehension in the markets with FOMC and mid terms coming up. But BTC has been holding up relatively well against equities which is always nice to see.
Rory O'Driscoll, Partner at Scale, on how big the inference market could become:
“You look at the four or five key inference providers and you add them all up, and maybe they’re plus or minus $5-6 billion in run-rate revenue, which is a lot. But if you think about it, they’re all serving all the open-weight models in a world where the sum of the OpenAI and Anthropic revenues is probably north of a $100-110 billion right now.”
“So by dollars, it’s less than five percent. So it just points to the opportunity here. Do I want to give money to Claude Code and give them a 70% gross margin for this token? Or do I want to buy it on Modal and give them 30% gross margin for this token? Well, if the tokens are roughly the same, you know what you’re going to do.”
“It does point to the upside there."
@HarryStebbings adds on:
"I'm constantly shocked by like the infinite expanding size of the inference market. It's the one thing that I know today that I wish I'd known 12 months ago, because I would have done things slightly differently 12 months ago, had I been more expansive around my mindset."
FT: @rodriscoll @HarryStebbings
Full episode:
teapawt.org/HarryStebbings/status/…
I get more messages about this podcast every week than anything else I do.
We all want to look and sound smart in the investment committee or all hands meeting.
This is the only show in tech you have to listen to every week.
No egos, no politics, just tech.
AGENDA:
- Venture is Broken: Trillion or Bust
- Coreweave Sell-Off Creates Panic
- Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Are Revenue Multiples Out of Control?
- General Atlantic Eyes IPO
- Modal Raises $750M at $15.75B
My notes with @jasonlk and @rodriscoll
1. Why Fundraising Is Back to Being a Numbers Game
Founders with top-decile numbers now have to meet 100 VCs, as in the old days. It will not be Benchmark, Index, Andreessen or Bessemer, but other growth investors will take the bet at a reasonable but still elevated valuation because it is the best deal they have seen that quarter.
2. Why the Big Funds Have to Have Billion-Dollar Positions to Make It Worthwhile?
A $5B plus fund needs $BN positions in everything. Without 51% ownership, which most founders will not accept, a $2B Listen Labs is not good enough, while 1% of Anthropic could still get there even with dilution.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @venkyganesan @DavidGeorge83
3. Why Are CoreWeave and Oracle B-Tier and What Does That Mean for Their Price Volatility?
With massive debt loads, CoreWeave and Oracle should be hypersensitive to any bump at Anthropic or OpenAI. CoreWeave exists because NVIDIA needs it for now, and Oracle rents out excess capacity because it cannot sell enough enterprise software.
4. Why the Best Markets for App Layer Companies Compete Directly With the Models
The fastest-growing AI apps, such as code generation, code review and legal, sit closest to the foundation models. That brings a moment of terror every six months, but it is also why companies like CodeRabbit are growing faster than ever.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @spdholakia @mmurph
5. Why Code Review Is the Single Most Important Category in Software
AI-generated code is pretty good but never production-ready, and reviewing it takes an order of magnitude more time than building it. Getting code into production matters more than generating it, so the best code review teams would be worth 10 bets.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @reidRMC @evrishria @Joshuabrowder
6. How Big Is the Market for Inference Truly?
The key inference providers add up to roughly $5B to $6B in run-rate revenue, under 5% of OpenAI and Anthropic combined. If tokens are roughly the same, Replit would rather pay Modal a 30% gross margin than give Claude Code 70%.
How do you analyse the TAM for inference today? What do people not see that they should see? @sarahcat21 @bernhardsson
7. Why Bending Spoons Is a Berkshire Hathaway of Software
Bending Spoons buys software to hold, the way Warren Buffett wanted to hold See's Candy forever. It made Vimeo and Evernote work with price increases, and with Miro and Airtable the quality of its assets is improving.
Love to hear your thoughts on this as an analogy @ncsh
(links in comments)
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on how companies can defend against AI-powered attacks:
“The ability to always rapidly understand what the offense is doing and making sure that your defense keeps up with it is going to be the key.”
"If you show people how the offense works, the defense is going to be a lot better. You’ve got to give as good or better capabilities to the defender than what the offense has. And if you’re just slightly better, just mathematically, you’re still going to have an advantage.”
“The only way to fight AI today is with better AI. And you’ve got to use the advantages you have. The defender knows their own systems. The defender has the architectural diagrams. The defender has the code.”
“So how do you put all of that into something that you can dramatically increase your probability of outsmarting the offensive AI?”
FT @George_Kurtz @saranormous @NoPriorsPod
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on the threat of AI agents to the internet:
"I think it's nonsense. Is security and what agents can do and the risks that they pose, is that serious? Of course. That's serious business. We should all look at that and go, yeah, we got to make sure that we lock things down. But is the world going to end because of these agents anytime soon? No."
"And when you look at what the agents are doing, I think there's this sort of mythical view of what an agent does. Like an agent doesn't just beam itself from your computer to another computer. It actually just does the same thing a human would do, just better and faster. There might be more lower level sort of vulnerabilities chained together and those sort of things."
" But there isn't like a unique class that all of a sudden an agent just beams itself somewhere. And I think people just get wrapped around the axle of like there's some new class of technique that's taken. There isn't. It's just been trained on what we know. It hasn't developed its own yet."
"I think some of the concern is there and it should be there. But sort of like there's a lot of kind of doomerism around some of this stuff and I just don't think it's necessarily warranted."
