

Eran Arkin
2.8K posts

@therealarkin
Product Management Leader. @nvidia. Life Long Learner. Ex-Google/Meta/GetSentry PM Director | Longevity | AI | Dad | #productmanagement | DMs are open




BREAKING: David @friedberg says "California is functionally bankrupt" "People don't realize how screwed California is, & I worry that if California falls, so does the union. "$250 billion to $1 trillion short." "This is because for California to get rescued would be a big cost to red states, & I think it creates in the years ahead a lot of tension." "California's functional bankruptcy is a major risk to the country. & I think we need to figure out what we can change to fix it." How we got here: "California has a public pension system, & that public pension system retirees have paid into it & they get some benefits out, & the amount that they're owed back out is somewhere between $250 billion - $1 trillion dollars more than has been paid in. $250 billion to $1 trillion short. If it was the federal government, it would be like, okay, we'll just print more money. California doesn't have the ability to print money, so California has to pay this out, and you can't restructure retirement benefits. There is a Supreme Court case in California that said that once an employee has been offered retirement benefits, even if they're currently an employee, you can never restructure their retirement benefits. It has to stay forever, and the state cannot declare bankruptcy. There's no way for the state to functionally declare bankruptcy. There's no law to allow it. No state has ever declared bankruptcy, and the retirement benefits sit senior to the bonds in California. So you have to pay out the retirement benefits before you pay out all the bond holders that have loaned California the money that they use to run all their programs and services." Hill & Valley Forum 2026 (@HillValleyForum)



Silicon Valley thinks AI agents are a $20/mo self-serve subscription. Main Street is paying local agencies $10,000 just to turn them on. Everyone assumes AI will be bought primarily online like Slack or Zoom. I think they are wrong. Some of the biggest winners in the AI boom won't be the software vendors. It will be the humans installing it. Here is the reality of SMBs right now: • 54% lack internal AI expertise. • 41% have data quality too poor for AI to even work. • 41% already prefer buying AI through a local IT provider. You cannot "1-click install" a genius AI into a messy CRM or a 15-year-old server. It will just execute the wrong tasks at the speed of light. The AI software will be cheap and a lot will absolutely be bought online. Making it actually work for a messy, real-world business will be expensive. Very bullish on the "Do It For Me" economy being back.








I'm devastated by the antisemitic attack at one of our nation's largest reform synagogues. My heart is with the entire Temple Israel congregation. Antisemitism has no place in our country. We owe it to our Jewish siblings to stamp it out and ensure they can worship without fear.

prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.
