Asternomic

Living in fear of cringe is not living

Did you listen anon?

@daytonmills This is so great, congrats Dayton!

At 27 I finally own a home and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. My family always rented and we moved around every year. We got evicted a lot, lived in motels, and lost everything in unpaid storage units several times. When I started making money I just kept renting because you know “it’s better to keep your money in the market.” I decided to do the opposite and left my overpriced SF victorian rental and bought a house 90 minutes out in the country. All cash. The psychological relief I feel knowing I never owe anyone rent or a mortgage payment ever again is immeasurable. Banks and boomers can kiss my ass. I can finally buy furniture without thinking about what it will cost to move to the next apartment. My wife painted her room pink. I stopped checking my portfolio because I’m living in it. We’ve been cooking more, cleaning has become enjoyable, and we are planting a garden knowing it will never be uprooted. I just love this sense of permanence. I’ve never felt this before, it’s so peaceful.

@thkostolansky @bridge__harris @Miles_Brundage @tszzl This is Claude though

@bridge__harris @Miles_Brundage @tszzl contamination

I am Tarun now

@goodalexander @mongo_lassi Bro skipped the croissant and ascended

@mongo_lassi I am Alexander the Good. The empire never ended. I have Codex and telegram. I'm going to skip the croissant, lose the girl but escape the permanent underclass

You’re not Alexander the Great. There is no empire. You have a hybrid car and Slack. Keep the girl. Get the extra croissant

Amazing exit for founders. The $6.4B was an all cash transaction in Oct'21, before any AI. Mgmt sold in peak SaaS hype at an ~16x LTM rev multiple (20% growth) Now, it's hard to prescribe any long term value in incumbent customer experience and employee satisfaction SaaS

Thoma Bravo nearing agreement to hand over Medallia to creditors, wiping out ~$5B in equity. Thoma Bravo bought the company for $6.4B in 2021. Medallia has 3B of debt held by Blackstone, KKR and others which has been marked at ~70-80 cents on the dollar. Blackstone says Medallia has been "underperforming, ​not because ⁠of anything related to AI, but due to what we believe to be execution-driven issues."

@Willob So well deserved. One of the coolest companies I’ve seen lately. Will is also world class

Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism. We are building The Ocean Company. The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told. It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that powers our world. And the key to the health of our planet. This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it. We are building it. And we need more builders Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers

@Jason I'm in

We started an AI founder twitter group... reply with "I'm in" if you're a founder and want to be added

@MerriamWebster Gen Z doing way too much

choppelganger | noun | a less attractive version of someone or something

@AnjneyMidha @CS153Systems @bhorowitz @SpiritStAI spiritstreet.ai/share/17fbbdc5…

@AnjneyMidha @CS153Systems @bhorowitz You can do way better than that Anjney @SpiritStAI

The swag for @CS153Systems has arrived Also, today’s session with @bhorowitz was one for the history books - we covered a lot

@ItzSuds bro is moggin @jzlegion

When this founder looked like he was 13 years old (2 years ago, 0 stress) he invested a trivial portion of his net worth into Anthropic at $4b Anyways, he’s buying us a $400/person dinner tonight and will be at $250k/day of revenue in the next 4 months…

@0xrwu Yes but on 4. I think it’s more of a breakup fee since it’s one or the other. Cursor is bound to win bigly either way x.com/byte721/status…

The structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what’s happening is: 1. xAI is having trouble training a SOTA coding model (hence cofounder departures), bunch of idle GPUs 2. Cursor doesn’t have capital to blow on a $5B training run to compete with Codex/Claude 3. xAI says to Cursor: use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a SOTA coding model, as long as we have an option to buy you 4. Cursor also gets a free option: train a model better than Opus and get bought out for $60B, or get $10B that pays for all the GPUs you rented Win win

@MartinShkreli @BenjaminDEKR $3B ARR at $60B is a 20x btw guys… not the most unreasonable numbers if you take it at face value and still growing

@BenjaminDEKR might be the billion+ in revenue

What exactly is valuable inside Cursor here that justifies $60 Billion? Or is it an acquihire, using Cursor staff to build back the gutted xAI?

Another way to think about this is that the $10B is a breakup fee if SpaceX does not end up buying Cursor for $60B The nuance here is that $10B/$60B is 17%, where the typical breakup fees are ~5% or less. This is extremely generous and huge for Cursor

The reason why image gen in ChatGPT is so powerful is because of its reasoning and capability to iterate back and forth in an easy UI/UX ChatGPT Images 2.0 takes it to the next level with more accurate typography, web search, and more robust intelligence

@puppyeh1 Greatest gain in an investment of all time came from Masa's bet in Alibaba! Arm, Nvidia (sold too early), ByteDance, and OpenAI are also bangers OFC the goal has always been to compound NAV. The guy owns ~30% of SoftBank

Just finished the Masa Son biography, Gambling Man, by Lionel Barber. Worth the read for some of the details: the sections on Wework and the vision fund, in particular, are absolutely insane. Hard to know what to make of Masa tho. I feel I know no more about what truly drives him having read the bio than not. What’s clear is he has no consistent investment strategy or method. Frankly he’s both a wildly overrated investor; and a wildly underrated operator. The same guy who lost $10bn backing WeWork on zero due diligence is the guy who restructured Japan Telecom/Vodafone into a behemoth. Very hard to square those two outcomes. At the same time the book is full of tales of Masa getting bent over a barrel by literally everyone - Sheldon Adelson, Kingston Tech, Rajeev Misra, Nikesh Arora, Marcelo Claure. And yet he’s had more comebacks than anyone in modern business despite it all. Truly an insane story.

@jxck_eth That’s right!!!

@byte721 byte mode

@KenWattana Wow you're a fast reader! Yes it has - not many people know its origins, that it came from its Chinese counterpart Jianying

@byte721 Great history, CapCut has been cooking too

Wow very impressive numbers by @perplexity_ai Credits to @FinancialTimes