Round Robin

JUST IN: Polymarket traders are pricing SpaceX's IPO closing market cap at $2.17T, implying a 23% day 1 pop.

Et à côté tu as Apple qui n’arrive même pas à nous sortir un modèle 😩

A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name. He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping. His name is Fabrice Bellard. Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built. Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code. In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years. Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it. He was not done. In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth. He kept going. In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real. In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory. Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links. A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet. He is still shipping.

$OCC Earnings June 8th. This Monday. One of the more interesting disconnects in the AI infrastructure trade. It’s 5x in one year with ongoing losses, who’s to say it can’t 10x from here with backlog orders ramping. Here I am reminding you of this company again. Repost. Bookmark. Subscribe to support. Everyone talks about $NVDA, $AAOI, $GLW, optical transceivers, fiber shortages, and AI data center buildouts. Almost nobody talks about $OCC. That’s what makes it interesting. At roughly a $109M market cap, Optical Cable Corporation remains one of the smallest publicly traded ways to gain exposure to the ongoing fiber and connectivity buildout happening underneath AI infrastructure. The market currently values OCC like a legacy cable company. Management increasingly sounds like a company positioning itself for the next phase of data center expansion. The numbers aren’t explosive yet, but they’re quietly moving in the right direction. Q1 FY2026 revenue grew 4.4% YoY to $16.4M. Gross profit increased 16% YoY. Gross margin expanded to 32.7%. Net losses continued narrowing. Most importantly, backlog jumped to $10.4M, up more than 50% YoY and significantly above prior quarter levels. That backlog growth matters because it suggests demand is accelerating faster than reported revenue. The market tends to focus on reported sales. The smart money watches future sales. That’s where backlog becomes important. The bigger catalyst may be the company’s partnership with Lightera, which not only invested in OCC but also provides access to advanced high-density fiber solutions designed for enterprise and data center deployments. Management isn’t trying to compete directly with hyperscale giants. Instead, they’re targeting Tier 2 data centers, enterprise deployments, multi-tenant facilities, and specialized connectivity projects that still benefit from the AI infrastructure boom. That market is massive. The global data center market is expected to grow at roughly 10-15% annually through the decade, while AI infrastructure spending is growing substantially faster. Fiber connectivity, optical networking, and high-density cabling remain critical components regardless of which AI model ultimately wins. This is where the valuation disconnect starts becoming noticeable. $APH carries a market cap of 170B $GLW carries a market cap above 150B $AAOI trades around $15B and receives premium multiples because investors view it as a direct AI optics winner. $CLFD $LUMN $CIEN $SIVE $OCC sits at roughly $109M. Not $1B. Not $10B. Just over $100M. The market is effectively assuming OCC remains a niche player. The bull case is that OCC successfully converts backlog into revenue, leverages the Lightera relationship, expands further into data center connectivity, and eventually scales toward a $100M+ revenue business with improving profitability. At roughly 1.5-2x sales, investors are paying a fraction of the multiples often assigned to communications infrastructure companies benefiting from AI tailwinds. That’s why some investors see asymmetric upside here. Not because $OCC is currently executing at $AAOI’s level. Not because it’s competing directly with Corning. But because the valuation gap is so large that even modest execution could create significant multiple expansion. Earnings on June 8th matter less for the headline quarter and more for what management says about backlog conversion, data center demand, new project wins, and the trajectory of the Lightera partnership. The company remains highly speculative. It’s still small. It’s still unprofitable. And execution risk remains substantial. But at a ~$109M valuation, the market isn’t pricing in much success. If management proves OCC can become a meaningful participant in the AI fiber and connectivity ecosystem, the current valuation could look very different over the next few years. That’s the disconnect worth watching.