Best rec for founders podcast ;-)
I knew nothing about Agassi.
Senra's episode on him, made his life journey unforgettable for me:
"Tortured Into Greatness: The Life of Andre Agassi"
This is hilarious. Mark Normand discovers Founders podcast:
“It’s this crazy guy named David Senra. This guy is a nut but he’s a file cabinet of information.
He reads autobiographies and then tells you the greatest hits.
I listened to the one on Agassi, and Henry Ford and all these guys are unbelievably interesting.
So he just breaks down the best parts.
I listened to the Roger Federer one. The Rick Rubin one is great too.
But the Christopher Nolan one woah! I had no idea.
@marknorm’s recall of the Christopher Nolan episode is incredible:
A founder backed by OpenAI and a16z says the money-making opportunities in AI right now are unlike anything before, 5-10x faster, 5-10x bigger.
She shared what kinds of people will have the biggest advantage, and what she's seeing on the ground in Silicon Valley.
Full conversation in the video. Follow the guest speaker: @quxiaoyin
The following 7 documentaries have shaped my thinking and changed my behavior over the last several years. I revisit them often.
1. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. I deeply appreciated the nuanced portrayal. The archival and outtake footage alone make it well worth watching. Tony’s story is inspiring, incredible, and tragic, and this film does an admirable job of capturing all three.
2. Searching for Sugar Man. I’ve had dozens of friends recommend this over the years. It’s SPECTACULAR. The film’s accolades include 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, and an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, just to mention a few.
3. Bird by Bird with Annie. I’ve loved @ANNELAMOTT and her work for more than a decade, and ever since I had her on the podcast, I’ve gone even deeper into the Annieverse. This documentary had just the right blend of humor, humanity, and insight to help me with some difficult emotions this week.
4. Sour Grapes. This film scores ~95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and both the story and its cinematic telling are simply fantastic. This is a hilarious and nearly unbelievable case study in factors that make humans vulnerable to deceit, hubris, and more.
The cure for low engagement is high authenticity.
Tell your story.
Reveal your mistakes.
Share pictures of your life.
Don't filter out what you believe.
If you're not willing to share your full self, you're not ready for high engagement.
Nvidia has long been known as the smart guy selling the picks and shovels in the AI gold-rush, but now it has a new name - the “central bank of AI.”
Why?
@nvidia is now helping finance almost every layer of the economy that buys its chips:
• More than $30 billion committed to @OpenAI
• Up to $10 billion committed to @AnthropicAI
• Investments in cloud providers, data-center operators and energy infrastructure
• A $1.5 billion investment in SB Energy
• A $500 billion financing partnership with Wall Street to make AI compute more accessible for AI companies
• Roughly $43 billion in private-company holdings, plus about $30 billion in marketable securities.
Nvidia has also made big bets on publicly traded companies and non-listed ones that later went public!
That includes $5 billion worth of @intel stock that Nvidia bought last fall as part of a data center venture, a stake now worth about $22 billion. (great returns!)
Nvidia's investment in start-ups has also been impressive - such as SpaceX and CoreWeave.
Its total marketable securities stood at about $30 billion in the first quarter, up more than double from the previous quarter.
A real central bank creates liquidity, influences the cost of capital and acts as a lender of last resort when the financial system needs support.
Nvidia cannot literally print dollars. But it can “print” something extraordinarily powerful: high-margin chips, enormous cash flow and highly valued equity.
So in the similar sense - Nvidia can then recycle that financial firepower back into the AI ecosystem:
Nvidia sells chips → generates cash → finances AI companies and data centers → those companies buy more Nvidia chips → Nvidia generates more cash.
If AI demand and productivity keep growing, this becomes one of the most powerful industrial flywheels ever built.
But if Nvidia is financing customers that could not otherwise afford its products, the same flywheel begins to resemble circular vendor financing - where investment creates purchases, purchases create revenue, and that revenue appears to validate the original investment.
But the deeper question to ask here is - is Nvidia accelerating real demand - or increasingly financing the demand that validates its own valuation?
And if Nvidia has become the central bank of AI, what happens when the AI economy eventually needs a bailout - and its "central bank" is also its largest supplier? That might be a bit tricky for the investors and the bigger economy...
What do you think? Are you bullish about $NVDA ? 😇