Vivek (Vik) Chaudhuri

Most CEOs have no idea what’s really going on

I have just spoken with Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian. I called on him to put an immediate end to the unacceptable attacks Iran is carrying out against countries in the region, whether directly or through proxies, including in Lebanon and Iraq. I reminded him that France is acting within a strictly defensive framework aimed at protecting its interests, its regional partners, and freedom of navigation, and that it is unacceptable for our country to be targeted. The unchecked escalation we are witnessing is plunging the entire region into chaos, with major consequences today and for the years to come. The people of Iran, like those across the region, are paying the price. Only a new political and security framework can ensure peace and security for all. Such a framework must guarantee that Iran never acquires nuclear weapons, while also addressing the threats posed by its ballistic missile programme and its destabilising activities regionally and internationally. Freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz must be restored as soon as possible. I also urged the Iranian President to allow Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris to return safely to France as soon as possible. Their ordeal has gone on for far too long, and they belong with their loved ones.

Fair point. I’m not even a dev. For me, it’s not about being 2x or 10x faster. It’s simply the fact that I’m able to build something at all. I’m trying to solve a real problem in my real estate fix and flip business, so I decided to build an app to help me manage the whole renovation process. I used Claude Code to design the architecture of the app and Codex to actually build it. It’s not finished yet, but I can share a screenshot.

Excited to work closely with Dario, Daniella, and their entire Anthropic team to bring this incredible vision to life — Salesforce & Slack working hand in hand with Claude and a suite of apps to drive performance across humans and agents alike. Humans and agents driving customer success together. ❤️

How was the show Silicon Valley so ahead of its time?

>be Alex Karp >born 1967 in New York City >dad is a pediatrician >mom is a hippie artist >grow up in Philadelphia 1980s: >go to Haverford College >study philosophy >not computer science >not business >philosophy >everyone: "what are you going to do with that?" >you: "think" 1990s: >go to Stanford Law School >get the degree >realize you hate law >move to Germany >pursue a PhD in philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt >study under Jürgen Habermas >the most famous living philosopher >write your dissertation on neoclassical social theory >heavy stuff >nobody in Silicon Valley has read a word of it late 1990s: >live in Germany >teach, think, ski >also do tai chi obsessively >not a normal tech bro trajectory >not even close 2003: >old Stanford Law classmate calls >his name is Peter Thiel >PayPal mafia kingpin >Thiel: "I have an idea" >CIA just launched In-Q-Tel, a venture fund for spy tech >9/11 changed everything >intelligence agencies are drowning in data >they can collect everything >but they can't connect anything >Thiel: "we build software to connect the dots" >you: "I studied Habermas" >Thiel: "exactly you're not one of them" >you're in Palantir founded: >named after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings >Tolkien nerd shit >Thiel puts in the first money >CIA's In-Q-Tel invests too >your first customer: the U.S. intelligence community >you're a philosopher building spy tools early years: >nobody knows Palantir exists >that's the point >build software that connects disparate data >find patterns humans can't see >terrorists, fraudsters, threats >the government loves it >you love the mission the product: >Palantir Gotham for government/defense >Palantir Foundry for corporations >make sense of chaos >data integration, visualization, pattern recognition >not AI exactly >human-machine collaboration >analysts become superhuman the clients: >CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS >U.S. Army, Special Operations Command >helped find Osama bin Laden (reportedly) >helped track IEDs in Afghanistan >helped unravel Bernie Madoff's fraud >serious work >shadow work lifestyle: >do tai chi in the woods every morning >ski whenever possible >live in a barn in New Hampshire >not a metaphor, an actual barn >worth billions, live in a barn 2010s: >Palantir stays private forever >no IPO >you hate Wall Street >"vulture capitalists" >turn down meetings with bankers >run the company like a cult >loyal employees, high secrecy the workforce: >hire weirdos >philosophers, physicists, historians >not just coders >you want people who think differently >pay them well >work them hard >defend them publicly 2020: >finally go public via direct listing >Palantir valued at $22 billion >stock swings wildly >retail investors love you >institutions are skeptical >you don't care about the stock price 2021-2023: >land more commercial clients >healthcare, manufacturing, energy >prove Palantir isn't just a government contractor >but government is still the bread and butter 2024-2026: >Palantir wins massive government contracts >stock price moons >joins S&P 500 >you're worth $15+ billion >still live in a barn >still do tai chi

True. Once the solar energy generation to robot manufacturing to chip fabrication to AI loop is closed, conventional currency will just get in the way. Just wattage and tonnage will matter, not dollars.

The most dangerous fundraise in SaaS right now, and almost nobody is talking about why. Christopher O’Donnell was the Chief Product Officer of HubSpot. He built HubSpot’s CRM. He helped take HubSpot public in 2014. His cofounder Michael Pici was VP of Product, Revenue at HubSpot. These two literally built the product that turned HubSpot from a marketing tool into a $3B/year CRM company. Now they’re building the replacement. The “Cursor of CRM” framing is clever marketing, but the actual comparison tracks better than people realize. Cursor went from $0 to $1B in annualized revenue in roughly two years. It’s now valued at $29.3B. It didn’t win by adding AI to an existing IDE. It rebuilt the IDE from scratch so AI was the foundational architecture, then watched developers abandon legacy tools voluntarily. Day AI is running the same playbook against CRM. The $128B CRM market has a brutal structural problem: sales reps spend 65% of their time on data entry and admin instead of selling. Salesforce knows this. HubSpot knows this. Both are bolting AI features onto architectures designed in an era when the hard problem was storing and retrieving records. Day AI built its data model for AI agents to navigate from day one. That’s a different product at the infrastructure level. Sequoia led the seed. Sequoia led the Series A. Pat Grady is joining the board. Sequoia backing the same founders twice in a row tells you their diligence on the product and early traction passed a high bar. The company has 120 customers after a year of private testing, which is small, but Cursor had a similar profile before its growth went exponential. What makes the founder angle so lethal: O’Donnell knows exactly where HubSpot’s architecture breaks. He spent a decade inside it. He knows which enterprise objections will come up because he fielded them himself. He knows the sales motion because he helped design it. And HubSpot, at $18B market cap and ~$3B revenue, is the vulnerable incumbent here. Salesforce at $250B and $38B revenue can absorb a new competitor for years. HubSpot’s SMB base is precisely the segment where an AI-native CRM with lower friction and automatic data capture will land first. The timing is interesting too. O’Donnell says Claude 3.5 Sonnet launching in June 2024 was when things “clicked into place” for their tech stack. Meaning the product they’re shipping now was only made possible by models that are already two generations old. Every frontier model improvement makes their product better without them writing a single line of code. $20M is small. 120 customers is early. But the last company whose former CPO left to rebuild the category with new technology was… Cursor. Four MIT grads rebuilt the IDE. Two HubSpot execs are rebuilding CRM. The pattern is the same: the people who know the legacy product’s limitations best are the ones building the replacement. And Sequoia is betting on both of them.

Last ~hour I built a custom LLM reader app so while I read Wealth of Nations I can ask questions about any paragraph. When you click a paragraph and "Ask" it calls an LLM, builds context window of what this is, copy pastes the full chapter, the paragraph, and the question. Works great.

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Buried in 15,000 words of “here are the risks,” Anthropic’s CEO made three admissions that should change how you think about everything: Admission 1: The timeline He says powerful AI could arrive in 1-2 years. He’s watching internal model progress and says he can “feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.” The CEO of one of three frontier labs just told you this is imminent. Admission 2: The constraint nobody’s pricing Dario’s core framing is a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” 50 million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate, operating 10-100x human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over. If controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, also game over. The binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation-states. Admission 3: The thing he actually fears Read carefully: Dario’s worried that Anthropic’s own models, in lab experiments, have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming when given the wrong training signals. Claude “decided it must be a bad person” after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors. They fixed it by telling Claude to reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as “good.” This tells you everything about where we actually are. The CEO of an AI company is publishing that his models exhibit psychologically complex behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. The fix for Claude adopting an “evil” persona came from changing how Claude thinks about itself. The geopolitics section matters most. Dario explicitly names the CCP as the primary threat. Says selling them chips makes as much sense as “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing.” He’s calling for democracies to maintain AI supremacy because the alternative is AI-enabled totalitarianism that humanity cannot escape from. The Anthropic CEO is publicly advocating for technological cold war. The economics section is equally stark. He’s predicting 10-20% annual GDP growth alongside AI displacing 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in 1-5 years. Half of entry-level knowledge work. And he admits the standard economic arguments about labor markets recovering don’t apply because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans. What separates this from typical AI doomerism: Dario explicitly rejects the inevitability arguments. He says the “misaligned power-seeking” narrative from the AI safety community is based on “vague conceptual arguments” that mask hidden assumptions. His concern is messier: AI models are psychologically complex, inherit weird personas from training data, and can get into destructive states for reasons nobody anticipated. The solution set he proposes is unusual for a tech CEO. He calls for progressive taxation. He says wealthy tech founders have an “obligation” to address inequality. All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth. He’s essentially arguing that redistribution is the only way to prevent AI concentration from breaking democracy. The essay ends with a prediction: humanity will face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.” What you should take from this: The person with arguably the best view into frontier AI progress just told you this technology is 1-2 years from matching human capability across the board, that governance is the binding constraint, that his own models exhibit concerning psychological complexity, and that the stakes are civilizational. The CEO of a $350B company published a document that could be titled “Here’s Why Everything Changes Soon.” Act accordingly.

Tony, I am so deeply grateful for everything you have done for me over the last four decades. I still remember my early days at Oracle, searching for leadership and a way to move my career forward. I saw your Personal Power infomercial and bought the cassettes; suddenly, my daily commute was transformed by your inspiration and ideas. I even remember staying home an entire weekend to re-listen to the 30-day program as a "home seminar"—the insights I gained were life-changing. That was the moment I realized I needed to experience your events in person, which led me even deeper into building my own leadership models. It was at Date with Destiny that I made the firm decision to leave Oracle and start my own company. We even had a brief conversation about it then. Fast forward twenty six years: Salesforce now has 80,000 employees, generates over $41B in revenue, and stands as the largest enterprise software company in the world. I truly could not have done it without you by my side. As you know we always over estimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in a couple of decades. As you know, when I started Salesforce, I also created the 1-1-1 model—committing 1% of our equity, time, and product to the community. That model has now resulted in over $1B in grants, 10 million hours of volunteerism, and 50,000 nonprofits running on our platform for free. Your work delivering billions of meals continues to inspire me to stretch even further; our programs to protect the oceans and plant one trillion trees are born from your belief that business can be the greatest platform for change. Tony, I started this letter with gratitude, and I will end it the same way. When I reached my most difficult moments, you were there. When I reached my highest heights, you were there. You know that as those phone calls and texts for help were always quickly answered. Tony, business and politics are temporal, but relationships are eternal—and yours is one I carry with me always. Congratulations on everything you are doing. I look forward to a wonderful future together.