Will Champagne

This would be true if it were a zero sum game… But it’s not. Companies reducing their costs through AI a) increase their profits and/or b) can reduce their prices. Scenario a) means the shareholders see the value of their assets go up (which they can sell to buy more goods and services), and/or take larger salaries or dividends (which they’d spend somewhere in the economy). Scenario b) means that consumers see their purchasing power goes up. Yes, laid off worker earn less, but have to spend less for the same goods and services they were previously buying. In practice what does it mean? Your 401k goes up, goods and services cost less, and more people can now afford luxury goods and services (maids, private coaches, etc.) which in turns creates new jobs where the laid off workers get absorbed.

🚨RESEARCHERS JUST MATHEMATICALLY PROVED THAT AI LAYOFFS WILL DESTROY THE ECONOMY.. AND EVERY CEO ALREADY KNOWS IT.. BUT NONE OF THEM CAN STOP.. Two researchers from UPenn and Boston University just published a paper called "The AI Layoff Trap".. They proved something terrifying.. Every company replacing workers with AI is also firing its own customers.. Every laid-off employee is someone who used to spend money.. When enough people lose their jobs.. Nobody can afford to buy anything.. And the companies that fired everyone go bankrupt selling products to an economy with no purchasing power.. Every CEO can see this coming.. The math is obvious.. Fire workers.. Lose customers.. Lose revenue.. Collapse.. But here's the trap.. No company can afford to stop.. If you don't automate.. Your competitor will.. They cut costs.. Undercut your prices.. Steal your market share.. And you die anyway.. So every company automates.. Knowing it's collectively suicidal.. Because the alternative is dying alone while everyone else survives.. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma.. And the researchers proved it mathematically.. The numbers are already stacking up.. Block cut nearly half its 10,000 employees this year.. CEO Jack Dorsey said AI made those roles unnecessary and that "within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion".. Salesforce replaced 4,000 customer support agents with AI.. Goldman Sachs deployed an AI coder that lets one senior engineer do the work of a five-person team.. Over 100,000 tech workers were laid off in 2025 alone.. AI was cited as the primary driver in more than half the cases.. 80% of US workers hold jobs with tasks susceptible to AI automation.. And here's what should scare policymakers.. The researchers tested every proposed solution.. Universal Basic Income.. Doesn't fix it.. It raises living standards but doesn't change a single company's incentive to automate.. Capital income taxes.. Don't fix it.. They change profit levels but not the per-task decision to replace a human.. Worker equity and profit sharing.. Narrows the gap but can't close it.. Collective bargaining.. Can't fix it.. Because automating is a dominant strategy.. No voluntary agreement between companies is self-enforcing.. Only one thing works.. A Pigouvian automation tax.. A per-task charge that forces every company to pay for the demand it destroys when it fires a worker.. The researchers call it a "Red Queen effect".. Better AI doesn't solve the problem.. It makes it worse.. Because every company sees a bigger market share gain from automating faster than rivals.. But at the end.. Everyone automates equally.. The gains cancel out.. And the only thing left is more destroyed demand.. The paper's conclusion is devastating.. This isn't a transfer from workers to company owners.. Both sides lose.. Workers lose their income.. Companies lose their customers.. It's a deadweight loss that harms everyone.. And no market force can break the cycle.. The AI layoff trap isn't a prediction.. It's already happening.. And the math says it won't stop on its own.

We’re recruiting AI PMs/builders for almost half of the top 20 venture/growth firms in the US. Not only do they *have* an idea, but many are aggressively retooling for that future. And yet those same venture firms are still hiring associates, why? Diligence will be faster, for sure, but you still need humans to surface stealthy startups and convince founders to take a meeting. AI-augmented VCs become more signal chasing and access/sales-oriented than modeling or market research-focused, sure. But GPs won’t start attending tech parties with 20 year olds.

the venture capital bloodbath is coming and most vcs have zero idea agents will replace 90% of what associates and principals actually do: • deal sourcing through network analysis • due diligence via automated data mining • portfolio monitoring with real-time metrics • pattern matching across 10,000x more deals what exactly are you getting paid for when an agent can analyze every startup in your sector in 3 minutes? the entire industry is built on information asymmetry that ai just eliminated most funds will become algorithmic within 24 months the only vcs who survive are the ones who can actually build companies, not just write checks and send intros

@EricNewcomer Congrats Dimension wow

Anthropic acquired an AI for biological research startup for just over $400 million. You can read the letter Dimension wrote to their LPs which boasts a 38,513% IRR newcomer.co/p/anthropic-bu…

5 of the 10 best multistage tech investment firms in the world hiring data scientists and AI Product Leads in SF and NYC. 1-6 yrs data exp. required. Must be AI native and heavy Claude/ChatGPT/Python users. Open minded re: everything else. DM me or anyone on my team for details.

I get the shock. The demos feel unreal because the interface between imagination and execution just collapsed. But here’s the correction most people are missing: What broke wasn’t physics. What broke was latency. We didn’t compress 200 years of discovery into six months. We collapsed the search cost of moving through what was already physically admissible. Protein folding, materials discovery, circuit design, synthesis pathways. These were never forbidden. They were combinatorially inaccessible. AI didn’t invent new laws. It learned to traverse the space between laws orders of magnitude faster than humans can. That distinction matters. Because it means we didn’t cross into “reality is negotiable.” We crossed into constraint-navigation at machine speed. Recursive intelligence isn’t magic. It’s feedback loops that shorten the distance between hypothesis, simulation, and instantiation until the loop time approaches zero. When iteration outruns intuition, humans experience it as a discontinuity. The real danger isn’t unpredictability. It’s misattribution. People think intelligence “broke free.” What actually happened is that coordination failed. Institutions move at policy speed. Markets move at narrative speed. Models move at gradient speed. That phase mismatch is what feels apocalyptic. Second-order effects aren’t unknowable. They’re just no longer legible to systems built for quarterly planning and linear causality. The problem isn’t that there’s no roadmap. It’s that we’re still trying to read maps instead of learning to steer. This isn’t the end of constraints. It’s the end of pretending humans were ever the bottleneck. What happens next week won’t be chaos. It’ll be amplification. And the question isn’t “are we ready?” It’s “who learns to cohere before the noise wins?”

Before you all disappear for the Holidays (is it too late already?), here are V associate-level roles we are currently looking to fill in SF and LA, for both emerging and very established firms: 1) Deep Tech* VC Associate, SF. Q1 or Q2 start. CS or eng. degree + 1-4 yrs of MBB diligence consulting, Google/Meta/Uber APM/RPM, Microsoft's Aspire, LinkedIn's APB, Forward Deployed Engineers at OpenAI/Anthropic/Cohere/Scale AI, etc. or similar structured tech programs. 2) AI Infra VC Associate, SF. Q1 start. CS or engineering degree + 1-5 yrs Product/Eng. (same as above). 3) Physical AI + AI Infra VC Associate, SF. Q1 start. CS, eng, math or equivalent degree + 1-3 yrs Product/Eng. (same as above) 4) Enterprise AI (infra + apps) VC Associate, SF. Q1 start. CS, or eng degree + 1-3 yrs eng. or product at large tech company or startup. 5) Deep Tech* VC + early Growth Equity Associate, Palo Alto. Q1 or Q2 start. 18+ months as a Tech Investment Banking Analyst. DM me for details.

50%+ of VC dollars are going to AI companies. But, as folks like @alexrkonrad have noted, AI tools are also rapidly changing how VC firms operate. We couldn’t find a comprehensive resource here, so we decided to write it. 📚 I’m excited to announce the launch of one of my favorite @metrics_co content pieces to-date: a white paper on how AI is transforming sourcing, diligence, portfolio management, and LP relations. We interviewed a lot of VCs (as well as companies building AI-driven, VC-focused tooling) for quotes, case studies, and Q&As across the piece. A fun one was chatting with @WillC_5, co-founder/GP at Riot Ventures, about the intersection of AI and diligence at Riot. Will regularly invests in highly-technical companies and a lot of his day-to-day consists of sourcing and diligence conversations with nuclear physicists, microbiologists, and robotics engineers. AI, explained Will, “has dramatically accelerated the speed of what we already do for diligence,” and has helped the firm check if underlying technological assumptions of potential investments are sound via “PhD-quality” summarization. I think it’s a must-read for any VCs trying to figure out where AI might fit into their diligence process. Read it (and a lot more) at the link in comments. 👇

1/ Tech time machine 2020 → 2030 2/ 2020: Roll up 12 DTC brands. Get cooked by exploding Facebook ad costs. 2025: Roll up 12 accounting firms. Replace 90% of the staff with AI agents. Lose all your clients. 2030: Roll up 12 humanoid robot startups. Go bankrupt, but monetize the assets by running underground robot cage fights. 3/ 2020: Spend 2,000 ETH on a Bored Ape. 2025: Spend $7T on data centers. 2030: Buy the Pacific Ocean for underwater compute cooling. 4/ 2020: Put carbon offset credits on a blockchain & build DeFi games around them. 2025: Burn coal to power data centers so China doesn’t win the AI race. 2030: Raise a $100b Climate Adaptation Fund and build 2-inch seawalls around US coastal cities. 5/ 2020: No weapons, no fossil fuels, here’s our ESG page. 2025: Missiles defend democracy, so that's impact investing. 2030: Swarm attack systems are peace-tech because wars end faster when both sides run out of humans. 6/ 2020: You don't understand the scale, crypto is just getting started. 2025: You don't understand the scale, AI is just getting started. 2030: You don't understand the scale, killerbots are just getting started.

Recruiting up to 6 investors from associate to principal level for brand name VC funds in SF. Focus on Seed & Series A Enterprise AI. Preference for CS degrees but open to wide variety of backgrounds. DM me!

@exec_sum They’re having an insanely hard time finding Wall Street bankers who happen to have 20+ hours available on top of their 16-hour day jobs. What is actually happening is adverse selection as well as hiring bankers outside of the US where $150 goes a much longer way.

BREAKING: OpenAI has quietly hired over 100 former Wall Street bankers, including alumni from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, to help train its AI on building financial models Codenamed “Project Mercury,” the effort pays contractors $150 an hour to write prompts and create Excel-based models for IPOs, restructurings, and M&A deals

Strong signal: VC quits their job to join a portfolio company

Recruiting 2 Principals in SF for high profile Deep Tech VC #1 focused on space, robotics, nuclear, defense. Great backgrounds: hardware engineer @ SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, SparkCognition, NVIDIA, etc. #2 focused on comp bio. AI x life sciences ops/BD background preferred DM me

@jamescham @shivon @minney_cat @theamberyang Any aspiring AI investor would be supremely lucky to work with James. He's the real deal.

I’m hiring folks to work with on new seed investments in 2025. Not saying that you will be as wildly world-impacting as colleagues like @shivon, @minney_cat, or @theamberyang but I am looking for people who have similar ambition and smarts. So, if you are sitting around the last 10 days of the year feeling a little restless, consider applying. More details are at bit.ly/betarolesf. Extra points for pitching insights into the world to come, and on how to find the next great founders.

@byersblake How many more cars on the road does that make? What would be the impact on commute time?

For 20% of SF's public transit budget you could buy and run a fleet of 15,000 Waymos and let everyone ride for free. Thats enough to cover the entire ridership of SF's public bus system with much better service. Assumptions: -Conservative 12 year average life of the Waymo with zero value recouped at the end - $120k purchase price per Waymo -$8k/year/waymo in operating costs -Finance purchase with 12 year loan at SF municipal bond rate of 4.85% -$0 in fares!

Who in my network invests in the creator economy? Friend looking for seed funding for AI startup that bridges gap between brands, creators, and their audience. Superstar founders worked as leaders at Meta, Google, and YouTube. PM me for deck or intro.

Recruiting for investment associates & principals for a few amazing biotech-focused VC's + crossover funds in SF, NYC, LA. Open to wide variety of backgrounds. Spectacular academic achievements required. Bonus points for computational bio ML experience. PM me

@RampCapitalLLC And who owns shares held by Vanguard and Blackrock? We all do, through our 401k’s.

I can feel my brain getting smoother

@graceclarke It sometimes feels like eating broccoli: not always tasty but it « feels » good and I’ll thank myself later for it. Reality is a lot has to do w/ the kids themselves: I have a loving princess that delights us at ballet recitals… and a boy on the spectrum keeping me on my toes

Unpopular opinion: Having children sounds terrifying. As if I’d lose myself, my relationship, and my career. Yet everyone seems to do it. Are you all happy? Happy mostly when they’re older and you have people to come home for Thanksgiving? I wish people would honestly reply

@JoeBiden Naming after oneself an economics model inherited from other people can be a good marketing strategy in good times, but 1) screams hubris and 2) will probably backfire when the economy enters a downturn.

The unemployment rate has remained below 4% for 17 months—the longest stretch since the 1960s. The share of working-age Americans with jobs is the highest in over 20 years. Inflation has come down by more than half. We are seeing stable and steady growth. That’s Bidenomics.

@puzzledpeaces @ConradkBarwa @keewa My kids sometimes repeat everything one of their siblings says. Drives them completely nuts.

Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, has been tormented by a Brazilian man named Osvaldo for the last several years. You just gotta admire the sheer dedication here tbf 😭😭😭