Rex Salisbury

1/ Excited to announce the launch of @Cambrian_HQ 's inaugural $20 million fund to back the next generation of fintech founders! Incredibly grateful for my time at @a16z, and, now, exited to share how I ended up as a solo capitalist by way of community building. 🧵 👇

@CharlesFLehman @grok how related are jobs that are WFH eligible and AI exposed?

A major talking point for those who think AI will cause mass unemployment is the recent slowdown in junior-level hiring. Lambert and Schindler, in this new working paper, point to a different culprit: work from home policies. Using data on ~250 million hires across four countries,they show that AI exposure strongly correlates with a role being work from home. So you have to disentangle the two to get a clean estimate. Which is the driving variable? They find that the effect of exposure to AI on junior hiring ~vanishes when you control for WFH, whereas the effect of WFH remains ~unchanged when you control for AI exposure. In other words: it's WFH, not AI, that is slowing junior hiring. Why? Their theory: "WFH makes supervision, monitoring, and on-the-job learning harder, all of which hit junior-workers more. Firms less willing to invest in junior talent when these frictions rise." I think that makes sense. WFH involves a certain degree of trust and makes management harder. If an employee is less experienced, all else equal you're less likely to prefer them for a WFH position. Bigger takeaway, though: if AI is going to take all our jobs, it's sure not there in the data yet!

wealth taxes exist. they don't fund the state. they pay for your advisor's yacht ;)

@paulg same ignorance explains the entire wealth management industry. "1% fee on assets" sounds a lot better than "20% of your returns net of inflation"

How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax: paulgraham.com/winc.html

"we have 800+ million users on a free tier. ads are now live."

@mattyglesias In EU: ~75% of EU gun deaths are suicides (and 9% of all suicides are w/ guns). In US US 60% of guns deaths are suicides (and 55% of all suicides are w/ guns).

comparison is even more stark b/c should exclude suicide from Gun deaths here. most gun deaths in US are suicides (~60%). The availability of Guns in the US does likely increase the suicide rate, but the overall suicide rate in the EU is 10 per 100k versus 13 per 100k, so EU is not dramatically better here simply b/c they don't have guns.

This is a fun fact, but the EU-27 also has ~120 million more total people than the United States and we are surely losing a lot more life-years

@sama Disease. Energy scarcity.

what problem do you most hope AI will solve in the future? maybe we can help!

@gilbert what's this look like for 2/20? asking for a friend...

Good take. Bad UIs for trading deliver unparalleled user value.

@amyecheetham Depends how big the fee pool is…

how many bankers does it take to go public....

@mattyglesias @pmfreedm is an ex tech founder who started the Oakland B's after the others left. B's games are cooler, more fun and more community oriented.

This is of course light years away from highly cost effective charity, but I think it says something not great about the tech elite’s conception of their civic role that the Oakland As and Raiders were not retained in the Bay Area.

@ankurnagpal @mercury @immad 🙌

New USVC Investment: We just invested $5M in the @mercury Series D with a16z, Sequoia Capital, TCV, CRV and others This investment was directly on the cap table with no underlying fees or carry Here's why we are so bullish on @immad and team:

@mignano Capital. There is a lot more of it in SV than elsewhere. Even a non-profit doing something interesting gets made into a for profit.

Many of the great open source AI companies are outside of Silicon Valley: Mistral Hugging Face OpenRouter Nous Why is that? And what’s missing from this list?

@mattyglesias also need to build data centers that are 100% for low income agents and financed w/ "Low-Income Agent tax Credits" that don't show as government spending and can be purchased by large multinationals at a discount to reduce their taxes.

Allow data centers but only if 20% of the GPUs are set aside as “affordable” compute for low-income agents.

Anthropic has just passed OpenAI in Ramp's dataset (represents 50k+ businesses doing $100+ billion in spend). Ara is the chief economist at Ramp and he gets into what that means and why Ramp's dataset is an interesting tool for seeing the trends in spend for early adopters. Ara also has some really interesting data on how companies w/ the highest level of AI adoption are growing faster than others (regardless of if they are venture backed). Great conversation with someone with a unique lens. (0:00) Who is winning the enterprise AI war? (1:08) How do we actually measure AI adoption? (4:02) Which sectors are adopting AI fastest? (7:17) Why are CFOs panicking over token budgets? (10:35) Are unlimited token budgets the new norm? (12:23) Is AI creating a K-shaped economy? (17:08) How did Cursor unseat GitHub Copilot? (19:24) Are Anthropic's incentives misaligned? (21:18) What is Answer Engine Optimization? (25:03) Is Figma actually dying to AI design? (29:15) Is AI really replacing software engineers? (31:07) Are 1099 freelancers already obsolete? (33:59) Why is new business formation spiking? (36:30) How do interest rates blur AI's impact? (40:58) Private sector vs academic economics? (43:53) Is Anthropic overrated right now? (46:01) Are AI wrappers actually underrated? (47:45) Is 996 work culture returning to SF?

@pmarca meh. Every era of US job growth has been carried by one or two sectors. 1950s-60s: manufacturing. 1980s-90s: finance & business services. 2002-05: housing (83% of growth!). 2020s: healthcare "subtract X and we're negative" line works in literally every business cycle...

Yikes.

@Firmcap @kevinhartz @ncsh @pitdesi @mattturck @semil @ileri @cyantist @chrija its BTV... and @iamjakestream is the legit one ;)

Proven GPs and future legends in the making A* @kevinhartz Adjacent @ncsh BTC @pitdesi Firstmark @mattturck Haystack @semil Hummingbird @ileri Long Journey @cyantist Point Nine @chrija

@henrl this is a bad idea unless you are familiar w the bay: - wind, routinely blows > 20mph after 1pm on TI this time of year. - tides (1.5+ kt peak during ebb / flood) and need a marine radio.

Nothing is stopping you from buying a board from Costco and paddling to treasure island. Only takes half an hour!

Narrative violation -- SF real estate is not hot. at least not uniformly. Zillow data shows hot SF neighborhoods are up nearly 10% YoY. But lot of SF neighborhoods are not hot and therefore not experiencing a price surge (yet?). And some other bay area communities have price declines. Oakland is down 8.5% YoY. my take -- prices converge across bay area in medium to long term, but if a surge of ppl try to move back in a short period of time to a few neighborhoods, creates a false sense of pervasive scarcity.

Treasure Island as Venice. yes please!