Kasey Kumaran-Stark

yes we over-hired during covid because i incorrectly built 2 separate company structures (square & cash app) rather than 1, which we corrected mid 2024. but this misses all the complexity we took on through lending, banking, and BNPL. and that we’re now targeting $2M+ gross profit per person, 4x our pre-covid efficiency, which stayed flat at ~$500k from 2019 until 2024. we have and do run an efficient company... better than most.

U.S. Bitcoin merchant adoption keeps growing. This is what you should be paying attention to.

🌍 Top 10 contributors to global real GDP growth (2026) 1．🇨🇳 China — 26.6% 2．🇮🇳 India — 17.0% 3．🇺🇸 United States — 9.9% 4．🇮🇩 Indonesia — 3.8% 5．🇹🇷 Türkiye — 2.2% 6．🇳🇬 Nigeria — 1.5% 7．🇧🇷 Brazil — 1.5% 8．🇻🇳 Vietnam — 1.6% 9．🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia — 1.7% 10．🇩🇪 Germany — 0.9% 📌 China + India alone = 43.6% of global growth 📌 Asia-Pacific accounts for ~50% of total growth Source: IMF

Vital Farms confirmed that its pasture-raised hens are routinely fed a supplemental diet primarily made of corn and soybean meal

"California’s wealth tax is only on billionaires!" That’s how the income tax started too. Only for the ~1%… until it wasn’t. When you allow the government to introduce new taxes, they never shrink, only expand.

Running bitcoin

Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares. Each own ~3% of Alphabet's stock, worth about $120 billion each at today's ~$4 trillion market cap. But because their shares have 10x voting power, the SEIU-UHW California billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder's taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion. A 5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each. That's 50% of their actual Alphabet holdings—wiped out by a "5%" tax. Section 50303(c)(3)(C) of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act states: "For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer's percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights." This means if a founder holds shares representing only 3% of economic interest but 30% of voting control (through Class B supervoting shares), the tax would presume their ownership stake is at least 30% for valuation purposes, not 3%. The wealth tax is poorly defined and designed to drive tech innovation out of California.

Introducing: The New Pyramid

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

two big themes of AI in 2026 will be enterprise agent adoption and scientific acceleration