benchmarcᵐᶠᵉʳ

My cocktail of choice, @noat_future , an espresso, and some adderall

if you're building consumer on solana and have non-farmed traction, I am writing angel cheques get a warm intro to me and send a loom demo

@noat_future sponsor me and I will tweet to the public about how I use your product to convert nicotine abuse into barely passable life outcomes too.

NOAT Fleece: Made without microplastics.

Salesforce didn't hire any engineers or service agents in FY2026, says @benioff. But it increased its number of sales hires by 20%, because the company now has "more demand than ever." From his February appearance on the show.

I think the biggest issue in financial markets today is the lack of honest marks for positions, vc and pe are industries effectively built on this concept and I’m not sure how long it gets to persist

@tbpn @buckymoore inference is where its at

"Inference, if you look at it as a market, will be much, much bigger than cloud computing was pre-ChatGPT." Lightspeed’s @buckymoore says inference is an underrated investment category in AI, and expects the market to break up into large, specialized platforms for each modality: "The GPU supply crunch that we're seeing right now is largely, as @dylan522p has said on the show before, due to the fact that not only these consumer products, but also B2B products like Claude Code and Codex are just really taking off and creating insane demand for inference." "We're talking hundreds of billions in spend every year. And if that's true, I think there will be very, very large inference platforms built in each modality." "So there will be an inference platform for real-time video models, there will be an inference platform for open-source and custom language models, there will be an inference platform built specifically for long-running agents." "So I think we're just going to see that industry, which today looks like one industry, break up into many because of how big it is and how much room for specialization there is."

Lightspeed partner @buckymoore says early stage investing has gone from getting 15-20% in seed rounds to investing in a basket of companies from seed to Series A, and ending up with ownership in the low teens: "Right now I think early stage is in this tricky place, where for a seed round, you're generally getting around 10% ownership for the most competitive rounds." "As a result, if you go back to what kind of made the early stage model work, it was owning somewhere between 15-20% of companies that become really valuable." "So the way you have to play this now, as a multi-stage firm, is you get the 10% in the seed, then you effectively have to be in a position to buy up in the Series A. But at the same time, the Series As are also ballooning in price, and there's really not a lot of de-risking because the velocity is so fast compared to even a couple years ago." "So right now what you see a lot is: you get 10% in the seed, the Series A happens somewhere between like 150 and in some cases 300 post, and then you end up trying to lead or co-lead that, and then you end up in the low- to mid-teens." "It's just a different time, but that's what it takes nowadays...I think what that means is you're building a basket of companies that tend to be in that low- to mid-teens ownership more often than not."

Alberta leaders are asking Ottawa to make nicotine pouches easier to buy and offer stronger options - aiming for harm reduction, retail consistency, and fewer black‑market sales. daily-pouch.com/alberta-nicoti…

Get. Things. Done. Many years ago, in one of my earliest board roles, I was assigned to the board’s marketing committee. Every meeting followed a similar pattern: the head of marketing advised us on what he was doing, and my fellow board members and I would tell him what he was doing wrong and what he should do instead.  But quarter after quarter, none of it ever seemed to get done.   Looking back, I now see that our meetings were basically drive-by-shootings.  Show up, pepper the VP with ideas, and leave. Figuring out what the organization needed to do was easy.  The hard part, I leaned, was figuring out how to actually get it done. That simple insight has not only shaped my approach to every board I’ve sat on since, but it has also shaped my approach to my start-up work as well – and particularly to the way I treat the people working for me. It’s simply not enough to know what to do – the harder part is figuring out what it will take to get it done – and then making sure that the resources are there and the roadblocks removed. In the movie Oppenheimer, Lewis Strauss informs one of his advisors that  “Surviving in Washington is about knowing how to get things done.”  It’s no less true in Silicon Valley.

Sony just ran the most valuable marketing campaign in entertainment history. The cost of the entire operation was a sunrise and some two-second clips. Here's the record progression for most-watched trailer in 24 hours. It (2017): 197 million. Avengers: Endgame (2018): 289 million. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021): 355 million. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024): 365 million. GTA 6 (2025): 475 million. Spider-Man: Brand New Day: 718.6 million. It didn't just break the record. It beat the previous all-time holder in eight hours. By hour twelve it had passed GTA 6. The final number nearly doubled Deadpool & Wolverine. Now run the cost comparison. Deadpool's trailer dropped during Super Bowl LVIII, where 30 seconds of airtime cost $7 million. The broadcast reached 123 million viewers. Disney paid for that launch pad, and the trailer still only hit 365 million total views. Some portion of that 365 million came from the 123 million who saw it live on television, meaning the organic online pull was significantly lower than the headline number. Sony paid for zero TV airtime. Instead, they gave influencers across every time zone 2-second snippets of the trailer, timed to sunrise in each region. A Peruvian sports influencer got the first clip. Then Asia. Then Europe. Each fragment was too short to satisfy but too tantalizing to scroll past. Fans started stitching grainy clips together across platforms, collaborating across countries and languages to reconstruct the trailer before the official release. Sony didn't build a marketing campaign. They built a behavior loop. Check for new clip. Share clip. Debate what it shows. Wait for the next one. Every cycle was another impression, another share, another person recruited into watching the full trailer the second it dropped. The scavenger hunt ran for 24 hours before Tom Holland revealed the full trailer from the top of the Empire State Building at dawn. A Super Bowl ad costs $7 million for 30 seconds of passive attention from 123 million viewers. Sony manufactured 718.6 million acts of active attention, where viewers chose to seek out, assemble, and share the content themselves, for the cost of coordinating influencer DMs. No Way Home grossed $1.9 billion off a 355 million-view trailer. Brand New Day just doubled that trailer reach four months before opening day. If the conversion holds, this is a $2 billion movie. Sony stock is down 21% year-to-date. Their entire 2026 theatrical strategy is riding on one character. Every studio in Hollywood will study this launch. The lesson is the same one every platform learned a decade ago: engineered scarcity drives more engagement than engineered spectacle. You don't need the biggest screen in America. You need the smallest possible piece of content that people can't stop themselves from sharing.

Jensen Huang just told every AI leader in the room to grow up. Stop scaring the public with science fiction. Start communicating like the weight of civilization is on your shoulders. Because it is. Huang: “AI is not a biological being. It is not alien. It is not conscious. It is computer software.” That single statement dismantles half the panic surrounding this industry. The mainstream conversation is dominated by people projecting human malice onto math. Alien consciousness onto code. Existential dread onto a software architecture we built, we trained, and we can read. Huang: “We say things like, ‘We don’t understand it at all.’ It is not true. We understand a lot of things about this technology.” When builders tell the public they don’t understand their own creation, the public hears threat. The state responds with control. That is already happening. Palihapitiya asked Huang what he would have told Anthropic during their regulatory clash with the Department of Defense. Huang didn’t attack the technology. He attacked the communication. Huang: “The desire to warn people about the capability of the technology is really terrific. We just have to make sure that we understand that the world has a spectrum, and that warning is good, scaring is less good because this technology is too important to us.” Warning shows risks, mitigation, why upside overwhelms downside. Scaring says we might be building something that destroys us and we can’t stop it. One builds trust. The other invites regulation written in panic. Huang: “To say things that are quite extreme, quite catastrophic, that there’s no evidence of it happening, could be more damaging than people think.” Projecting catastrophe without evidence is not caution. It is sabotage. When your technology is embedded in national defense, the financial system, and healthcare infrastructure, your words carry structural weight. If the architects act terrified of their own product, the response is predictable. Governments step in. They restrict. They seize control of something they don’t understand because the builders told them to be afraid. Huang: “There was a time when nobody listened to us, but now because technology is so important in the social fabric, such an important industry, so important to national security, our words do matter.” Most tech founders have not internalized this. You are no longer a startup founder disrupting an industry. You are running infrastructure that nations depend on. Your statements move policy. Your framing shapes legislation. Your tone determines whether governments treat you as partner or threat. Huang: “We have to be much more circumspect, we have to be more moderate, we have to be more balanced, we have to be far more thoughtful.” Huang did not ask for silence. He asked for precision. The leaders who cannot tell the difference will not be leading for long.

@Trace_Cohen yeah BAC was $3 lol

2009 was a different time We invested in Pinterest (tote) 2009 at a $3M post too. Some people thought it was too high for a seed round 😅

WE'RE SO BACK BABY

@gauravahuja Publics cheaper but will continue getting cheaper

One of these two groups is mispriced Private AI labs: OpenAI valued around $840B, Anthropic north of $600B on secondaries. Both at 30x+ ARR. Public giants: Microsoft at ~$3T on 23x forward earnings. Amazon at ~$2.3T on 28x. Microsoft likely owns ~25% of OpenAI. Amazon likely owns ~15% of Anthropic and ~5% of OpenAI If private investors are pricing these labs for a $5T+ venture-style outcome then… Microsoft’s implied stake in a $5T OpenAI is $1.25T embedded inside a $3T company. Amazon’s combined stakes embed roughly $1T inside a $2.3T company. Publics too cheap on Al exposure? Or privates/secondaries in bubble territory? Which breaks first?

@DividendTalks Not Ackmans wheel house at all

Bill Ackman went $2B long $META at $625. Now it’s down ~30%. His view: “Deeply discounted. Huge AI upside.” Market today says he’s wrong. History says don’t bet against him. Who’s right this time?

After YC, Airbnb raised $615k at a $3M post-money valuation. We were the highest valuation in our batch.

trust replaces attention as the new currency

this is what an “air pocket” in cash flows looks like say goodbye to buy backs for a couple yrs campbellramble.ai/p/the-air-pock…

💀