John Loeber 🎢

I've been thinking and talking about this a lot Historically when you saw $1B+ liquidity events in Silicon Valley, everyone won -- early investors, employees, etc. You'd have lots of these little events and they'd feed the whole ecosystem. In the next year, we'll see the biggest liquidity events ever -- OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX (X/xAI) going public for 10X+ of what had ever been imagined as possible before. But the wealth generation is remarkably concentrated: there's not a single pre-seed or seed fund in any of these companies. A very small number of larger investors will win big. Even though the ecosystem is going to generate more wealth than ever -- answering all the 2022-era questions of where the returns will come from -- most firms will be without returns. This windfall will create many new rich individuals; a whole new cohort of angel investors. But as insiders to the big labs, they will be more jaded about software than angels of the past, since ~every startup will effectively be on the roadmap of the big labs as we approach AGI. => We'll probably see a thinning of the number of professional venture investors as the power law gets even more aggressively skewed. Only larger funds will be able to capture ever further-out tails. And I'd expect that the new generation of angels will invest much more outside the traditional domain of software. It's going to be a good time to work in the capital-intensive world of atoms.

Sooooooo excited to return to Chicago this week Someday in really old age, I am looking forward to keeling over from the beauty of it all when viewing the Impressionism collection at the art institute

Rippling launched its AI analyst today. I'm not just the CEO - I'm also the Rippling admin for our co, and I run payroll for our ~ 5K global employees. Here are 5 specific ways Rippling AI has changed my job, and why I believe this is the future of G&A software. 🧵 1/n

It's interesting that most Democratic machine hubs (NYC, SF, LA, maybe Chicago) survive as a nexus for deal-making, but the industrial activity that the deals were originally about moves as far away as possible.

Production days in LA are down nearly half and the entertainment industry is feeling it. A friend, who has been working as an editor for over 25 years, compared it to a coal mine shutting down.

Figma got crushed on this one :/ Anecdotally seeing more companies task design work to the product team already.

Jensen sweater costs $178. Worth it?