Emal Alwis

🇺🇸🇺🇸 Happy 250th Birthday, America! 🇺🇸🇺🇸 250 years ago, a handful of founders made a radical bet: that ordinary citizens, given liberty and a stake, could govern themselves. That wager built the most dynamic civilization in history. Now, at the dawn of AI, Robotics, and The Age of Abundance, the bet renews. When the machines do the work, will ordinary people own a piece of them, or only consume what they produce? The answer is the same one America has always reached for: make more founders. More owners. More people placing the bet instead of living inside someone else’s. Full piece, 250 years forward to the 500th: x.com/Emal/status/20… 🧵

Think of startup sales as a doctor/patient relationship. If you just walked into the doctor's office and they said "here take this prescription", you wouldn't trust it at all. They don't even know what problems you have yet! Sales is the same. You are the doctor/expert that has to ask lots of questions to understand your customer's problems before you earn the right to show how your product can help. (shoutout @ryanRneu for teaching this to many founders)

7/ last one. i think most people arguing against capitalism want what i want, less poverty and more dignity. i just think the receipts point one way. bring your data, i’ll bring mine, and we leave the strawmen at home.

6/ the strongest objection i’ve heard: is a desperate worker really free to say no? honestly, fair. capitalism’s answer isn’t that every deal is fair. it’s that you can leave. quit, switch, undercut your boss, start your own thing. a planned economy gives you one employer and no exit.

1/ every argument about capitalism i see on here is actually an argument about what the word means. so let me define it and then defend it. capitalism = private ownership + voluntary trade. that’s it. prices coordinate, profit and loss keep score. taxes and regulation are settings, not a different system.

@benshapiro Congrats!

With immeasurable thanks to God, we’re proud to announce the addition of baby number 5 to the Shapiro family this morning!

Don’t be mean online. Life is too short.

Obsession is the only path to greatness

Big shoes to fill, but I’m confident Optimus will not disappoint!!

@sama 💯 There will be more net new jobs, and folks will feel busier than before, but old jobs will churn. That is the human cost we have to address with new job creation, training, reskilling, etc.

so far at least, i'm pretty sure AI has been net job-creating. this was not what i expected--although i was much less pessimistic than others, i thought by this level of capability we'd have seen some impact. it is possible this direction keeps going!

@JakeFleshner PhysicalAI Infrastructure avala.ai

Pitch me your company in 2 words Angel invested in 40+ companies and always looking for more

At Waymo, the robotaxi fleet IS the data source. No customer cars, so every mile of learning comes from vehicles they operate (and simulation but that’s a different story). Expanding the fleet and geofence literally is expanding the dataset. Rollout and data collection are the same act, which is why growth there is city by city. Tesla decoupled those two things. Data collection scales with cars sold: millions of owner cars hitting home driveways, Costco lots, snow, and unmapped roads every day. Robotaxi is a few hundred cars in a geofence. It can’t move the data needle; the owner fleet dwarfs it by orders of magnitude. So the FSD jump isn’t the rollout. It’s the long tail of that owner data maturing, multiplied by auto-labeling models in the data center that keep re-mining old footage for new training signal. Same video, more value every quarter, etc. Robotaxi’s role at Tesla is the exam, not the teacher. It sets a hard bar (clean pullovers, nobody in the seat to save you) and generates dense labeled failures in one small area. That polish merges to main. But the driving was learned from owners doing it millions of times a day.

For example the workflow to handle parking or pulling over at the destination feels it was polished for Robotaxi then pulled back into main

How much of the rapid FSD improvement we are seeing is due to Robotaxi rollout vs an expected rate via AI+data tailwinds? I realize it’s both and that they compound, but my guess is the former is a big factor in the phase change improvements.

@drewpusateri One thing I’ve learned in tech: Everything will be found in discovery so you might as well work each day with 100% integrity and do the right thing. Your reputation is everything.

@claudeai thank u ❤️

We're extending access to Claude Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12.

My grandfather told me this: "You’ll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary." You can get pretty damn far in life by just being someone that people can count on to show up and do the work. I'll never forget that.

If you can choose where to work, work somewhere that will help invest in your Trump account. $5k/yr will leave you with $13M at 55. Sorry, but that’s a huge amount of money. If you have this choice but don’t want that because it’s called a “Trump Account”, you’re a retard. 100% irresponsible retard. That’s your kids speaking btw.

❤️🚀