AJ Dye

I'm a founder who sold a company for $1B+. But the job market my kids enter will look nothing like the one I did. Anthropic just released a critical report on AI and the labor market. Here are 10 insights everyone should understand about the future of work: 🧵

Sharing this publicly––hope it's not needed but helps you if it is. Lux team sent this memo to all Lux family founders yesterday "We send notes like this not because something is wrong, but because the COST of preparation is trivially LOW and the VALUE of being positioned well is asymmetrically HIGH. This isn’t a macro call. It’s a set of observations about correlated risks that are worth your attention. And a set of practical suggestions regardless of whatever happens next."

The Claude plugin in Excel is a game changer for finance pros. Built a couple schedules in a financial model in 20 minutes that would've taken 2-3 days previously. 🤯

What an incredible athlete and person Mikaela is. She represents Colorado in such an authentic way. True role model for my daughters

Can confirm that “6 7” is officially dead with the utes. $6.07 order at Starbucks in front of both kids…CRICKETS

It’s not often that venture capital thinks about the credit markets. I remember becoming a venture capitalist three months before Lehman fell, when mortgage securities topped the news of the global financial crisis. Recently Oracle’s bonds have been weighing on my mind. AI’s capital expenditure in 2025 represents about 1.6% of US GDP. In 2026, that number should top 3% of US GDP according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Google, Microsoft & Amazon do not have the capital necessary on their balance sheets to fund this buildout without debt. So, they have been issuing bonds. Oracle is no different, aside from operating at a much smaller scale with a far smaller bank account & a bigger proverbial mortgage. In 2025 alone, hyperscalers issued $121 billion in bonds, more than four times the five-year average of $28 billion. Oracle led with $61.5 billion total across 2022-2025, driven by its $28.5 billion Cerner acquisition financing & $18 billion AI infrastructure raise. Meta’s $30 billion October offering was the largest corporate bond sale since 2023, while Alphabet raised $25 billion in November. Microsoft remains the only hyperscaler not tapping debt markets recently.

@avidan Congrats Avidan!

We have a new coffee grinder (and $190M fund). I rebuilt the electronics to add grind-by-weight and Wifi/BLE. The firmware is also running a server to announce our new fund: rootventures.coffee ☕️🚀🤑

@mattbettis Followed by a sugar crash nap?

Watched a woman bring a large cookie and a cup of frosting to dip it in as a snack to a business meeting today and that's the exact energy I hope to bring.

LOVE THIS. Amazing

The Trouble with Tariffs via @jonathanmiller

65 ideas from over 200 Colossus episodes this year: 1/ Work ethic eliminates fear. — Michael Jordan 2/ Only dead fish go with the flow. — David Ogilvy 3/ Scale is information, information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. — Michael Ovitz 4/ All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity. The less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything. — Napoleon 5/ Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. — Vanderbilt 6/ Rolex watches are sold to people who climb mountains. Patek Philippe watches are sold to people who own mountains. — Patek Philippe 7/ As an investor, only two states exist: you're either humble or about to get run over. That's it. — Katie Koch 8/ Relentless is really hard to compete with. — Jay Bilas 9/ You won't conquer the oceans if you stay within sight of the shore. — Oliver Thomas 10/ The most important ingredient is the one that's left out. — Sean Feeney 11/ Find what feeds your passion. Align your personality with your purpose. Now, no one can touch you. — Oprah 12/ Life and business is a repeat game. — Ken Langone 13/ I don't wait for things to cross my desk. I go out and look for them. I made 250 calls a day. — Michael Ovitz 14/ Patek Philippe's greatest competition isn't Rolex. It's Patek Philippe from the past. — Patek Philippe 15/ We have evolved to walk and make stuff. If you don't do those things, problems tend to surface. — Tim Ferriss 16/ People perform to the degree of inspection, not expectation. — Dev Ittycheria 17/ The best leaders are exothermic. Every atom jiggles faster around them. There is no chance for stasis. — Tobi Lütke 18/ Even today, the CEO and CFO sleep in the same room when they travel. It sends a message from the top down that you should act as an owner of this business. — Fastenal 19/ When most people give presentations, they try to squeeze two megabytes of data into a pipe that carries 128 kilobytes. — Steve Jobs 20/ The best predictor of your mental and physical well-being, even how long you will live, is the quality of your five closest friends. — Robin Dunbar 21/ We got a letter in the mail from KFC rejecting us as franchisees. They said we had no money, no experience, and were too young. Other than that, they loved us. — Matt Perelman & Alex Sloane 22/ How many days of your life do you have a sense of calm, peacefulness, purpose, and are in a good place? To me, that's what really matters and the pursuit of more robs you of that. You can't take it with you. — Ric Elias 23/ Everything is a choice. I try to not let the world happen to me. It's taken a long time to get good at saying no, and it still feels painful, but I've gotten better at it. — Bret Taylor 24/ I will never build a purely digital business. They're too hard. Your failure rate is astronomical. I like things that are messy and complicated because the average person can't tolerate the pain. I like that barrier. — Adam Sandow 25/ It's too easy to be cool and hedge your bets, but true greatness requires being all in. — Glue Guys 26/ There are two error types in Venture Capital but only one of them matters—missing the big one is the whole game. — Bill Gurley 27/ Venture Capital is like taking the best Olympic athletes, giving them money, and saying 'See you at the Olympics.' That's crazy. — Dave Fontenot 28/ If people come at you with anything but love, remember, it's not about you. — Cyan Banister 29/ Marketing is our core competency. We're going to outsource everything else. Red Bull has no production facilities or warehouses. — Dietrich Mateschitz 30/ The market determines how big the company can get, and the people determine how big the company will get. — Pat Grady 31/ Rules are opportunities, not constraints. — Gabe Whaley 32/ As a leader, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. A business achieves long-term success by continuously replenishing leaders inside the organization. — Robert Kierlin 33/ Once you accept and embrace that you're not perfectly rational, that you are a little insecure, that you do have a little bit of an ego, then you can manage decisions around that reality rather than pretending they don't exist. — Morgan Housel 34/ If you don't stop repeating a mantra, you won't survive. — Haruki Murakami 35/ There are only two reasons companies behave well: because they want to and because they have to. Our preference is to invest in those that want to. — Nick Sleep 36/ I learned this from Schwarzman. People don't give money to the investors they think are going to make the most money, they allocate to people they like. — Eric Serrano 37/ Most investors are more willing to pay a lot of money for something with no problems than to pay the right amount of money for something with problems. — Ali Hamed 38/ If you want to get to the promised land, which is 100x on your investment, you need 20 to 30 years to do it. And if you can't get to 10x in 10 years, you have no chance to get to 100x in 20 to 30 years. — Mitch Rales 39/ The willingness of markets to continually put multiples on temporary surpluses is a constant source of confusion. — Modest Proposal 40/ Natural gas is this incredibly versatile little molecule... if you shut this off overnight, we're going to be fighting the next war with sticks and stones very quickly. — CNX Resources 41/ The trouble with this business is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface. If it were near the top, there wouldn't be any trick to it. You've got to drill deep for oil. There's essentially an inexhaustible supply of people who want to get the most for doing the least, and so in my own life, I want to get the most by doing the most. — Monty Moncrief 42/ A person can have the greatest idea in the world but if they can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter. — Steve Jobs 43/ Every great creator is sharing their DNA and experiences with the world. Some spread it through art, some through music. For me, it's through product. — Ronnie Fieg 44/ The first rocket that went into orbit cost $1 million per kilogram. We're now talking about a rocket that might be commercially active in five years, which will cost $10 per kilogram. That's the same price the post office charges. Think of what is possible if space launches are as cost-competitive as the post office. — SpaceX 45/ Every time public markets and regulation fail to provide an adequate solution, private markets step in. — Armen Panossian 46/ The dirty secret about owning a sports team is you go into it assuming you're going to make money and then you find out that if you want to win, you've got to spend all the money. — Marc Lasry 47/ Japan today is basically what the U.S. market was in the 1980s. — Japan Activism 48/ My five-word business book for Japanese internet entrepreneurs is: please don't go to America. — Rakuten 49/ Where do you want me to spend my time as CEO; on a conference call with analysts or finding the next market? I've never met a shareholder who doesn't want me to spend my time on the business. So we don't do a lot of IR and no analyst calls. — Winmark 50/ You talk about the economy, you can write, you can have beautiful charts, you can wax away poetically, you can study stuff and post on Twitter...If you don't put capital at risk, I don't care. It just doesn't matter. — Eric Golden 51/ InterDigital's technology has been licensed to more than 7 billion devices over the last decade. For every iPhone that's sold, they get 60 cents. — InterDigital 52/ Vulcan has 400 quarries across 22 states. That gives them about 16 billion tons of aggregate reserves, or 60 years worth of supply. — Vulcan Materials 53/ I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta. They said, come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs. That would cost billions of dollars and take 5-10 years to get from Nvidia. — Aravind Srinivas 54/ Since the Mendelsons took over HEICO in 1990, sales have compounded annually at 15%, net income at 18%, and that's driven a 21% annual return in the share price. Not too shabby. — HEICO 55/ Accounting for the cost of failures and inflation, the pharmaceutical industry now spends about $2.5 billion per approved drug, compared to $40 million (in today's dollars) in 1953. — Alex Telford 56/ Patek Philippe sells around 70,000 watches annually and earns about $1.2 billion. But, interestingly, the secondary market for Patek watches does about $8 billion in turnover each year. — Patek Philippe 57/ In 2011, 3i invested ~£106 million into discount retailer, Action. It has since received back £2.9 billion, or 25 times what it put in, and the value of its investment today is £14 billion, a return of over 100 times the original investment. — 3i 58/ If the world wants to keep the Olympics, the most rational way to do it is to have one designated site to host the Summer Games every four years and another to host the Winter Games so we don't have to rebuild the entire Olympic infrastructure every time. — The Olympics 59/ Chase Coleman had a really interesting statistic. He said ChatGPT, which launched in 2022, was to AI as Netscape Navigator was to the internet in 1994. Less than 1% of current global internet market cap was founded in the 2 years after Netscape Navigator came out. — Gavin Baker 60/ Hans' vision is still being executed at Rolex on a daily basis despite the fact that he passed away more than half a century ago. How many people can you think of that build a world-class business and 50 years after they pass away, the company keeps going as if they were still running it? — Hans Wilsdorf, Rolex 61/ It's a literal rags to riches story, founded by circus performers in the Great Depression as a rag cleaning business. Today it is America's largest uniform rental business and its growth, profitability, and shareholder returns are among the highest in the S&P 500 over virtually any time period. — Cintas 62/ I was not willing to listen to other people's ideas. I wanted everything to be my way. I fought for many years to make sure no one could tell me what to do. — George Lucas 63/ Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability. — The Lessons of History 64/ Everybody just assumes you want to be part of a growing market, but there are different ways to go about it. Just look at AMETEK, TransDigm, HEICO, Motorola, or Axon. — Matt Reustle 65/ If you take the top five energy companies in the world and the top five technology companies, the tech names are spending twice as much on Capex today. — Michael Mauboussin

GO HEELS!

My latest for @5280Magazine: I spent 18 consecutive hours in and around Denver's Union Station as a way to tell the story of a downtown that's still struggling in the years after Covid. 5280.com/inside-the-pla…

If you’re a golfer and excited about the Open this week, this video is for you. The narrator’s accent puts it over the top. youtu.be/SFHmya9Y9lM?si…

Incredible piece..."a loss like this has a blast radius, and we're closer than we'd like to be." Just devastating. US Open 2024 Rory McIlroy golfdigest.com/story/us-open-…

A certain ... malaise has slipped into SaaS. A dourness, a resignation that nobody is buying anymore, that maybe SaaS is sort of "over". I get it: - public SaaS companies' average growth has slowed to < 20% - buyers are still asking for reductions at renewals - many buyers are wary of adding more apps to stack - multiples remain not just well below 2021, but well below historical averages (see @jaminball 's weekly chart below) - VC capital has dried up for many that are no longer outliers What I think is really fueling the dour vibe though is the >length< of the “downturn” in SaaS buying cycles, in SaaS multiples, and SaaS valuations has been the longest of my career.   Going on 2.5 Years now. 2022, 2023, 2024 now. What’s to be done?  I can’t magically change enterprise buying patterns or customer appetites.  But I can suggest leaning into what’s working: 1⃣First, go all-in on driving true efficiency gains for your customers We’ve always sort of faked the efficiency of business software with ROI calculators and such.  Now is the time to do it for real.  If you can truly eliminate half the headcount in the support department, or half the SDRs, or truly make an engineer 2x as productive, now is the time.  But prove it.  For real.  Nail this. 2⃣At least be at “AI Parity” with the competition Does AI today magically change every category?  Maybe not.  Is AI not quite there in some parts of SaaS?  Maybe so.  But no matter what, customers want improved efficiency from AI.  There's huge momentum there.  So at a bare minimum, don’t lose deals due to not having competitive parity here. 3⃣Close every customer For the past 18-24 months, we’ve been leaning in hard on the existing base.  Raising prices multiple times.  Forcing upgrades.  Etc. Etc.  Maybe that worked for you in the short term, maybe it didn’t.  But it doesn’t work forever, and it doesn’t make customers happier.  The best way to ensure a brighter future is literally to close every single prospect you get that you can make happy.  Does that mean a cheaper edition?  Maybe do it.  Does that mean making your free edition … more free?  Do it.  Does that mean letting folks downgrade instead of leave?  Do it.  Does that mean not forcing everyone to go through a qualification process if they don't want to?  Then don't make them.  Go long here.  What’s most important is that you increase your new customer count 20%-50% a year.  That’s your future. 4⃣Grow usage faster than revenue This is somewhat related to the prior point.  Growing revenue at the end of the day is what matters.  But if your usage isn’t growing even faster than revenue, your future looks darker than your present.  Pick your top 1-3 KPIs for usage, and make sure they are growing faster than revenue.  MAUs, DAUs, revenue under management, API calls, records, whatever.  Pick a core usage KPI or two and make sure their growth is even faster than revenue growth. Times are tougher for many today, but not all.  You can’t fix everything.  But there is a lot you can do to invest in the future, right now. At the end of the day, SaaS spending has grown > 10% a year every year, for … forever.  Even now in 2024+, per Gartner, it still is , even if it doesn't feel like it.   Even at $200 Billion+ a year in SaaS annual spending already, and $1 Trillion in overall software spend, customers are still spending far more each year than the last. They just at the same time, looking to spend it on fewer overall new vendors, and earmark more of it for AI promises of efficiency.

Professional golfers are welcome to chase whatever payday they can get, but so many forces within the sport seem ignorant of how disinterested fans are becoming when they realize golf's overall message: Fans do not matter. nolayingup.com/blog/jon-rahm-…

Incredible piece about one of our all-time great filmmakers: gq.com/story/martin-s…

A Few Laws of Getting Rich collabfund.com/blog/a-few-law…

Inside the Denver Nuggets’ Plan to Build a Dynasty theringer.com/nba/2023/10/16… via @ringer