Jacob

@rauchg Good wifi at 35,000 feet means your deploy pipeline doesn't care if you're on the ground.

My flight to London is Starlink-enabled 😭 The greatest advancement to air travel since the Wright brothers. God bless America

Non-technical founder" is a fake category anyway. I've never written a line of code. I've shipped 10+ production AI products this year. The label was always about gatekeeping, not skill.

@paulg The fastest fix isn't a bootcamp — it's shipping something real with Claude today.

It seems a mistake to call oneself a "non-technical founder." You're treating not knowing how to do something as a part of your identity. Surely it's better just to fix that.

@tetsuoai The most dangerous thing about Musk isn't the rockets or the robots , it's that he treats trillion-dollar markets like side quests. Meanwhile the SpaceX IPO just raised $75B and made him the first trillionaire. Shipping is the only moat that compounds.

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

@garrytan The answer key being free doesn't hurt the explorer it frees them. The kid who spent 18 years memorizing answers just lost their edge. The kid who spent 18 years asking weird questions just got a superpower.

Elite admissions select for one trait: getting the known answer faster than anyone else. 18 years of optimizing against an answer key someone already wrote. AI just made the answer key free. Everyone has it instantly now. So the kids trained hardest to win spent their whole lives mastering the one thing that's now a commodity. The premium moved to the questions with no answer key yet. We need a new training. The new training is about one thing: How to be the first person standing in a new land, exploring it, preparing it for the coming billion people who will need it. The future will be built by these people. And there is a lot to build.

@chamath Valuation inflation didn't just delay KYC it made the labs structurally dependent on frictionless growth. Now the Mag 7 gets to be the adults in the room without building a single model. Regulatory capture is the oldest moat.

Game theory from here is super interesting: Original Mags (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs. Go to the government, kneecap the labs’ motion of putting the latest models out in the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between the labs and the public at large (including internationally) by having the labs go through their clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and implement strict KYC to seal the deal. The frontier labs should have seen this coming years ago and implemented a robust KYC for just this moment. The fact they didn’t is kind of concerning. Why did they not do it? Best guess is because it would have changed the run-rate revenues (downward) which would have then changed funding dynamics - lower valuations, more dilution, less secondary. A valuation reset may happen now anyways, except the labs may end up with less control and more restrictions at the end of it. At the same time, everyone is already clamoring about token prices of the old models from the labs anyways… This couldn’t be a better setup for open source and neoclouds. Big question is can they meet the moment? There are too few of them and their progress seems sporadic at best.

@paulg You don't earn a billion dollars — you discover a problem everyone else mislabeled as solved.

How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html

@Tristanrhee3 Domain experts

Everyone has AI now. That advantage expired fast. What's the new advantage?

@pmarca Discipline doesn't feel like punishment. It feels like boredom. Punishment has drama. Boredom is what actually filters people out.

Many people are saying.

@mattshumer_ The real scarcity in AI isn't compute — it's the hours between "model drops" and "government intervenes.

Assuming Anthropic is able to restore Fable in the next few days, there's literally zero point doing any meaningful work until it is back. What can be done in 100 hours with Opus can be done in 1 with Fable. Hopefully this is figured out quickly.

@shadcn Intelligence is perishable. Compute is not.

In light of what happened, I'm doubling down on skills like /improve. A frontier model got pulled. If it happened once, it's gonna happen again. Fable today. 4.9 tomorrow or maybe gpt 6 one day. So, treat intelligence as borrowed. Drain intelligence when it's available. Build a catalog of plans today. Then implement later with a cheaper, open source, or a model you control. Build the backlog now. github.com/shadcn/improve

Assuming Fable comes back soon, I'm pausing the agent build until it does. What takes 1 days of iteration with Opus takes 3 hours with Fable. The gap isn't marginal. It changes what's worth building solo. What will you build next ?

@TTrimoreau Nokia if anyone is that old. Adding Blackberry as well

Name a company that got too big and lost what made it special

@danieldwalton Like the business you are in feel peptides are way under served

@Jacobmalherbe21 let's gooo thanks for the update man 🙏

BREAKING: Amazon researchers snitched to the US government about jailbreaking Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing Anthropic to immediately shut down worldwide access. Will be canceling my Prime this morning.

@elonmusk The best infrastructure is the kind that doesn't need infrastructure. A Starlink dish skips 50 years of cable-laying and a Haitian kid in Île-à-Vache gets the same internet as a dev in NYC.

Starlink connecting schools on remote islands!

@zerohedge Uh are Canada going to invest in their own Frontier AI Lab or is this just a general statement?

Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney said the US export ban blocking foreign access to Anthropic's Mythos underscores the risk of depending on just a handful of powerful AI tools. "The situation we’re in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with over-reliance on certain models. Nobody’s done anything wrong in this situation, but we will have done something wrong if we just accept this, don’t take the lesson, don’t build out and diversify," Carney said in Ireland on Sunday.

@pierreeliottlal at $200/month per seat, Max 20x is basically your cheapest hire. what's the actual bottleneck — context limits or the 4hrs sleep?

POV: your AI startup took off and you moved to SF with your friends. ARR: $3M+ Rent: $12k/month for a 3-bedroom Sleep: 4-6 hrs Dinner topics: AI agents, fundraising, growth, distribution Claude: Max plan for all the team Desire to build: daily European nostalgia: bottle caps that don’t leave the bottle SF is expensive until you realize the whole city is basically peer pressure for founders.

The DeepMind-muddied-the-waters argument is backwards. DeepMind proved UK talent can compete at frontier level — the real blocker was never brand confusion, it was that no UK lab could match US compute budgets. The £500m Sovereign AI Fund just confirmed compute was always the constraint, not identity.

A few words on the Sovereign AI debate, having built several LLMs in Meta while in the UK and now working as a UK based startup: 1. Lots of people are trying to do the right thing to make the UK a better place to start AI companies. Time lags until the benefit show, but you should judge on the intent now. I support the direction of travel! 2. DeepMind has been enormously beneficial for the UK, but it has muddied the waters for a sovereign LLM company to emerge as (until recently) the Government continued to celebrate it as a British achievement / push it as a national champion. 3. Similarly, people are now celebrating recent US investment in King’s Cross, while also wanting more UK sovereignty. Clearly some income effects here, but I would worry about the substitution effects too. AI is not like other types of foreign investment. 4. The relevant talent nexuses in UK that could develop a competitive foundation model are from GDM and old Meta AI GenAI. Also some folks from smaller groups, ex Conjecture, Stability. The talent is still there, although a lot was snapped up by US FM companies in the past year. I personally think it’s not too difficult to develop new talent either from UK universities, but you probably need an ex GDM or Meta core (Gemini or Llama). Or if not: show evidence first (technical reports) before claiming you can do it. 5. Building an LLM is very different from doing regular AI research - skillset is different. Former is closer to engineering; long hours, often unsexy work. Important to distinguish between these two types of talent in the UK ecosystem; arguably too much focus on the latter / ideas guys. 6. On research - DeepSeek R1 post-train cost $300k . Yes, they also needed an ablation budget and to train a base model, invest in infra and talent - and yes the cost of an R1 moment is increasing year on year - but the idea that you need $1bn plus immediately to show results is complete FUD. You need billions to scale, not to validate new directions. 7. In my experience, every failed LLM effort (from model results perspective) I witnessed in the past came from a combination of poor leadership, politics, unclear vision, and premature scaling. Good efforts usually started from small teams who had worked with each other for a long time, had shared thesis, and scaled progressively in bite-sized pieces. Some recent lessons here for neolabs as well. 8. Things take time. Eg we’ve spent ~12 months mostly on internal infra just to get into the position to be able to make big swings. It’s important to nurture new companies through the initial phase. Expectation management is also crucial. I think expecting new UK companies to have single big bang releases is very dangerous; sort of like overwatering a plant. The correct release pattern is “decent”. “decent”, “decent”, “quite good actually”, “holy shit”. 9. Please don’t allow politicians or journalists to kill recent or upcoming AI investment efforts. We will need way more - at the price of potential inefficiency in places - as AI is existential for the country. Ambitious projects are usually incredibly fragile in the early stages; look after them! 10. Mythos is a good triggering moment, but what’s coming will make it look like a toy, so it’s worth building for what’s coming in 5 years time - not a current generation model. Very proud to be building in the UK - more to share on that soon - alongside many other great early stage AI companies! 🇬🇧

@hridoyreh DR 99 backlinks from Imgur and Pinterest have never ranked anyone's startup. DR is the metric you cite when you have nothing real to report. One dofollow link from a niche community that actually uses your product beats this entire list. With Respect

75 places to get backlinks for startup: 1. Chrome Web Store (DR 99) 2. Forbes (DR 94) 3. GitHub Pages (DR 97) 4. TrustRadius (DR 84) 5. AlternativeTo (DR 79) 6. SourceForge (DR 92) 7. Gumroad (DR 92) 8. Substack (DR 93) 9. Indie Page (DR 67) 10. Privacy Tools (DR 79) 11. OSS Gallery (DR 29) 12. Yelp (DR 94) 13. Alternative Me (DR 74) 14. SaaSHub (DR 78) 15. HubPages (DR 87) 16. YourStory (DR 85) 17. Medium (DR 94) 18. TrustMRR (DR 66) 19. Crunchbase (DR 99) 20. SEO Wins (DR 27) 21. GitHub (DR 97) 22. Imgur (DR 99) 23. Pinterest (DR 96) 24. Flickr (DR 94) 25. Pixabay (DR 92) 26. Pexels (DR 92) 27. Reddit (DR 95) 28. Quora (DR 92) 29. Goodreads (DR 92) 30. Tiny Startups (DR 50) 31. Hackernoon (DR 87) 32. TinyLaunch (DR 71) 33. Hacker News (DR 91) 34. Foundr (DR 76) 35. The Hustle (DR 79) 36. GrowthMentor (DR 72) 37. DZone (DR 84) 38. Smashing Magazine (DR 90) 39. Product Hunt (DR 91) 40. BetaList (DR 75) 41. MakerPad (DR 67) 42. StackShare (DR 79) 43. PeerSpot (DR 73) 44. Toolify AI (DR 73) 45. WIP (DR 55) 46. Vocal Media (DR 82) 47. TechCrunch (DR 92) 48. VentureBeat (DR 90) 49. Starter Story (DR 85) 50. Niche Pursuits (DR 73) 51. Founder Reports (DR 57) 52. Milestones (DR 26) 53. Boring Cash Cow (DR 26) 54. Micro Founder (DR 36) 55. Failory (DR 74) 56. Revenue Memo (DR 37) 57. Latka (DR 72) 58. Builder Society (DR 39) 59. Indie Niche (DR 93) 60. Indie Hackers (DR 80) 61. Fandom (DR 92) 62. Hashnode (DR 83) 63. Mixergy (DR 75) 64. First Round Review (DR 81) 65. Blogger (DR 94) 66. AppSumo Blog (DR 83) 67. WikiHow (DR 91) 68. DevTo (DR 90) 69. SaaStr (DR 77) 70. FounderPass (DR 52) 71. Entrepreneur (DR 91) 72. Indie Bites (DR 34) 73. SaaS Club (DR 59) 74. My First Million (DR 62) 75. Wikipedia (DR 97)

@solana Tokenized SpaceX on the same day as Nasdaq is the tell — when on-chain settlement is faster than your brokerage's T+1, the parallel market isn't a gimmick anymore. [thedefiant.io](thedefiant.io/news/markets/s…)

SpaceX ($SPCX) shares went live onchain the day they hit Nasdaq. The World Series of Poker took its first crypto buy-ins. Mastercard armed AI agents with a corporate card. All on Solana. All this week. ♠️♥️♣️♦️ Here’s everything that happened: 📰 Headline News - SpaceX shares debuted on Solana on the same day as Nasdaq listing - Solana is the official Presenting Sponsor of the 2026 WSOP and WSOP Paradise while for the first time ever, zero-fee Solana crypto buy-ins via @moonpay. - Solana RWA value crossed $3B - @Mastercard brought Solana into Agent Pay for Machines, giving AI agents access to stablecoin and card-based payments 📰 Launches - @Ethena deployed $200M into Janus Henderson's AAA CLO fund (JAAA) via @centrifuge - @Backpack Securities entered Public Beta, allowing 24/5 execution of real US stocks - @Securitize expanded STAC, its tokenized AAA CLO fund to Solana - @SolanaFndn introduced the Frontier Traders VIP Program, an exclusive global community for top market makers - @PhoenixTrade activated 24/7 onchain equities trading with up to 20x leverage, starting with NVDA and AAPL - @metamask integrated @Titan_Exchange to power native Solana swaps - @Loopscale shipped Loopscale Earn, offering curated single-position vaults that automate fixed yield and lending - @wallet integrated 24/7 zero-fee trading for tokenized US stocks via its native DEX - @exodus launched Exodus Markets powered by @OndoFinance for tokenized equities - @solflare introduced Packs powered by @Collector_Crypt for in-wallet graded TCG slabs - @Helius acquired @LightProtocol to build zk privacy layer - @ArcherExchange_ integrated the @jito_sol BAM Maker Priority plugin - @Alchemy enabled direct Agent Wallet funding from its dashboard - @altitude launched Altitude Card, providing unlimited virtual Visa cards with up to 2% stablecoin cashback - @WalletConnect Pay went live, enabling onchain payments from connected wallets in seconds - @gachasports and @Collector_Crypt launched World Cup 2026 XP ticket packs, bringing real match-ticket drops into collectible packs - @pudgypenguins launched Vibes TCG Season 3 bundles - @afkdotfun released Launch Party V1, an anti-sniper token launch platform with automated take-profits - @wormwtf launched a free-to-enter exact-score prediction competition with a $200K prize pool - @TradeNeutral introduced Delta Neutral Arbitrage, a $1M-capacity strategy curated by Velox Trading Group - @event_mesh launched Tab Markets, aggregating news and prediction markets into tradable signals - @seedplex_io activated Venture Tokens on Solana to enable onchain startup investing - @peaq integrated @GEODNET via robotic. sh, allowing robots to pay for precise navigation using USDT on Solana - @waylearnlatam and @SolanaFndn launched the Solana Latam Labs Program to incubate over 50 projects - @fabric_vc and @wintermute_t partnered with Solana for R[3]sidency × Construct accelerator - @SuperteamBlack inducted its latest cohort of vetted Solana founders - Alatau City, Kazakhstan signed a memorandum of cooperation with the @SolanaFndn to develop a blockchain innovation ecosystem 📰 Milestones - @Backpack's SPCX shares via @sunrisedefi crossed $50M in volume in the first 24 hours - @Arcium reached 1M processed confidential computations - @Sorare saw 30M cards collected following the launch of its Colors game mode - @incubator received an all-time high of 363 applications for its Cohort 5 - @Mercuryo_io reported a 100% YoY increase in Solana on-ramp volume for early 2026 If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with an RT. Artwork by @foursixsix 🔥