Christopher Chang

the industrial revolution made goods abundant. ai will do the same for services

Fred Wilson is one of the greatest VCs of all time. He is also my new partner at @USV and I'm lucky to say that. We've known each other for years, but becoming partners felt like a reason to get to know him even better. So a few weeks ago, we walked around Union Square and caught up about what @fredwilson has learned over nearly 40 years of VC, how AI may be making the profession obsolete, how to build an investment thesis, why he believes the Knicks will win the NBA title this year, and a few of his long held grudges. Here's a video of that conversation, set at Union Square, Madman Espresso, the USV office, and Leon's on Broadway. Chapters: 3:22 - That time Fred wrecked Mike on Twitter 6:01 - Pre-Internet VC in NYC 9:50 - Early Internet Investing and Raising for Flatiron Partners 11:59 - The Dot-com Crash Killed Fred’s First Firm 14:28 - Fred’s Grudge Against Coffee Shop 16:35 - How to Pick the Right Team at Right Time 18:28 - AVC blog, Gawker’s Nick Denton, TypePad.com 20:44 - Jim Kramer invented Tweeting 21:46 - Why Fred Bet on Twitter Early 23:39 - Building Agents on Claude Code and Tasklet 26:20 - Claude Mythos and Doomerism 27:27 - The Original USV Thesis 29:19 - Network Effects and Brad’s Thesis 31:29 - Coinbase: Thesis, Investment, Outcome 33:18 - Investing in Decentralized AI 34:59 - Open Source AI 36:55 - AI Kill Zone: Legal AI is Dead, Energy Investments 42:37 - USV Agents Will Replace Its Partners 47:00 - Are VC’s building themselves out of a job? 48:30 - Leon’s, NYC’s New Tech Watering Hole 50:52 - Generative Art 53:18 - SOLIENNE: AI Artist trained by Kristi Coronado 54:25 - What About AI Scares Fred 55:40 - Societal Backlash to AI 58:10 - Advice to Early Career VCs: There’s More Risk in Not Doing Deals 1:00:48 - Fred’s Biggest Regrets: Saying No Because of Price 1:04:17 - Fred’s Bold Prediction for the Knicks and the Mets

Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital. Cette phrase change tout. L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ? Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible. Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur. Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé. Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire. L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants. Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution. Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain. Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée. Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien. La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose. Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins. Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires. La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.

pretty crazy how five years ago vaccines were the most devastating thing you could ever do to your body but nowadays its fine to inject chinese peptide from Temu because you cant stop snacking after dinner

Early-stage hiring can be a lot like venture investing: It's power-law driven: a few people contribute most of the value. So it’s far more important to hire the best people than it is to avoid making bad hires. Which means you’re not making mistakes, you’re likely not taking enough swings. It's also people-focused rather than process-focused or role-focused. When you’re looking for venture investments, you’re not pre-defining everything at the outset. You're not saying something like “okay, I have 15 companies I'm going to invest in, 5 will look like this, 5 will look like that, etc. They should have this kind of product, have these kinds of metrics, have these sorts of strengths." Instead, you meet a lot of companies, and occasionally you meet one where you’re like, “Wow, these founders are GOOD. We need to invest in them, because they are generally putting it all together in some unique and differentiated way, that we never could have pre-defined a priori, but when you see it, you absolutely know. Once you identify that company, then you do whatever it takes to get them; doesn’t matter whether there is a “slot in the portfolio” for that kind of company, you just do it and you regret nothing. The best hires do not come from pre-defining “Mission, Outcomes, Competencies” and then searching for people who fit those requirements. The best hires are much more likely to come from a process where, everyone at the company gets together and says, “Okay, who are the two dozen absolute best people we know, and how do we hire those people, for some role.” You identify those people, you spend a lot of time with them, and then the minute they become available on the hiring market, you are ready to make them an offer immediately; and you just figure out a job for them. The parallels to VC don’t end there, the toughest part about hiring a superstar is not the diligence process, but the winning. The best candidates are in extreme demand. The close process must similarly be tailored to that person. Make the process fit the candidate vs the other way around. To be sure, this analogy is most relevant when it is in a value-creation role at a hot company that can attract elite talent, not a value-preservation role or for non-elite talent. What distinguishes these rare and exceptional people is that, in addition to doing a great job at what they’re known for, they will also reach into all of these corners of your company and tie off every loose end and fix every broken pipe and tune up the whole machine way beyond what any job description could ever have anticipated, or any hiring manager could assess for. Great people like this are just absolute risk-killers inside your company; just like great founders are. They will just sit at their desk for hours and crank through fix after fix after fix for the pure love of the game and for the good of the team, and after the fact you’ll look back on the work they did and think, “wow, the impact they’ve had is so beyond anything we could’ve articulated.”

Tableside Caesar exists for one reason: the dressing has a 10-minute chemistry window. After that, you're not really eating a Caesar anymore. Crushed garlic releases allicin, the compound that creates the sharp pungent bite Caesar is built around. Allicin peaks 1-10 minutes after the cell walls rupture, then degrades into duller sulfur compounds. Pre-made Caesar sitting in a walk-in for 12 hours has zero allicin left. That's why every bottled version tastes flat compared to one assembled in front of you. The egg yolk does the heavy structural work. Lecithin molecules wrap individual oil droplets and suspend them in lemon juice acid. A single yolk can emulsify well over a cup of oil. The dressing has body because the emulsion is intact. Once it breaks, you get pooling oil and watery acid. Most pre-made versions use xanthan gum or modified starch to fake the texture, which is why bottled Caesar coats your tongue differently. Then the umami stack: anchovies, parmesan, and Worcestershire all deliver free glutamates. Three sources of the same savory amino acid hitting your tongue at once. Caesar is the only common salad that activates umami receptors at a level closer to a steak than a plate of greens. The reason it pairs so well with red meat is the dressing is already speaking the same chemical language. Cold lettuce, warm dressing. The temperature contrast fires the trigeminal nerve before flavor processing even starts, which is why a tableside Caesar registers as more "alive" than one that came from the kitchen 8 minutes ago. Caesar Cardini invented this in Tijuana in 1924 during a Fourth of July rush when his kitchen ran low on ingredients. He assembled it tableside because the dressing degrades in real time and there was no way to plate it in advance. Every steakhouse charging $21 for one is selling you a 10-minute window of chemistry that nobody has figured out how to bottle.

something i've noticed: AI agents create a weird new kind of burnout. esp for young people. a lot of ambitious 22 year olds are going to think the answer is simple: - spin up more agents - ship more code - sleep less - outwork everyone and for a while, it will feel incredible. you can keep multiple agents running, feed them tasks, review outputs, fix mistakes, make decisions, and keep the whole loop moving. the problem is that the work no longer drains you through typing. it drains you through judgment. More attention. More context switching. More verification. More decisions per hour. so instead of 8-10 normal productive hours, you might get 4-5 extremely intense hours before your brain is fully cooked. and you feel numb until you sleep properly and reset some of my friends are already burnt out. they don't say it out loud but i can tell. the agent can keep working 24/7. the human still has a hard limit

Ceramic ashtrays designed by artist Gab Bois, inspired by swimming pool tiling.

The trophy for the Cadillac Championship next week + the idea behind it

Today we announce Thrive Eternal, a permanent capital holding company that will be concentrated in a small number of assets that we can own and steward over many decades. Across Thrive Capital and Thrive Holdings, we are building and investing through a moment of exponential change; backing emerging technologies, the infrastructure that powers them, and the businesses they can transform. Increasingly, we see a fourth category. These are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology. Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience. In a world shaped by abundant intelligence where creation scales and distribution fragments, we believe they will matter even more. Thrive Eternal is built on the belief that the most enduring of these assets share common characteristics: they benefit from long-term stewardship, they compound through cultural resonance, and they are enhanced by technology rather than displaced by it. Our work at Thrive has always been informed and inspired by a deep appreciation for product, brand, and the ways in which consumers form lasting relationships with the things they love. We have been building towards this for a long time. Our first partnership is expected to be with the San Francisco Giants - an institution built on more than a century of shared identity and community, and among the most iconic sports franchises in America. We have reached an agreement, subject to league approval, to acquire an ownership stake. We feel privileged by the opportunity to be long-term partners to the Giants.

Been drinking pretty much only Diet Coke to save water for Claude

AI bois be like:

Nick Saban's 5 Enemies of Greatness. Tack them on a wall.

I have built a spreadsheet. It has 847 rows. Each row is a community bank in the United States with a market cap below $200 million, a price-to-tangible-book ratio under 0.85, a non-performing loan ratio below 0.4%, and a CEO who has been in the role for at least twelve years. I update it every Sunday from 6 AM to 11 AM while my family attends church without me. I have visited the headquarters of nineteen of these banks in person. I have eaten a complimentary lobby cookie at each one. The cookies are how you can tell. A bank with a good cookie is a bank that respects its depositors. A bank with a stale cookie is a bank that will be acquired within 36 months at a 40% premium. I am never wrong about the cookies. The cookies have never lied to me. The cookies are the only thing left that tells the truth.

Mount Fuji, Japan

Benchmarks are saturated more quickly than ever. How should frontier AI evaluations evolve? In a new paper, we argue that the AI community is already converging on an answer: Open-world evaluations. They are long, messy, real-world tasks that would be impractical for benchmarks.

The weird thing right now is the public markets don't have access to the growth side of software. Right now the trade is to sell SaaS and buy semis (the raw material of AI). What you don’t have yet in the public markets are the AI native software companies and therefore, you’re comparing the practical values of owning say a Salesforce vs the mythical value of owning a company that’s growing 10x (without having seen the actual financials). And everyone is always going to want the myth. These SaaS stocks aren’t going to trade in a sane fashion until the next generation of AI companies go public and investors can decide how to price a 10% revenue growth company with 30% cash flow vs 300% revenue growth company with negative 100% cash flow and SBC that will blow your mind. Until then, you’re walking hand in hand with your significant other looking over your shoulder. You know the meme.

Truth, love, and beauty are all pursued for their own sake, even if they make us worse off.

There is no big market and revenue pool that the big foundation labs won't go after. I think we have to think in terms of market size thresholds when considering whether a new company can compete with them. If the prize is big enough, the labs will go after that prize. They are prioritizing big markets over smaller ones. By the same time next year, if these labs think they can reach $250M in revenue in that market, they'll launch a copycat product (or maybe even a better one). It probably doesn't cost much for them to build a product (R&D costs go down), and they have much bigger mindshare and S&M budgets. It's not safe anywhere - it's maybe a couple of years out.

HRT’s 2015 winter internship might be the greatest intern class of all time. 4 of the 10 have gone on to build companies worth over $80B combined Jeff Yan, Hyperliquid ($40B FDV) Alexandr Wang, Scale AI ($29B) Scott Wu, Cognition ($10.2B) Jesse Zhang, Decagon ($4.5B)