Carson Wang

finance + data science @wharton

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

@soatto @sequoia ur unreal

[Alfred Wahlforss @itsalfredw]

Introducing Claude Code for research.

Listen’s Research Agent lets you analyze data, quantify insights, and generate research deliverables all in Listen, much like how developers use Claude Code.

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

There's a world where agentic commerce could reduce decision-making/interactions with the chatbot. I'm sure model providers are thinking of this.

In that case the most effective ads shift up the funnel to "brand-building campaigns." i.e. Superbowl ads, marketing stunts, etc.

Excited to see how it plays out!

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

$TEAM showing no slowdown in adoption

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

$AMZN AWS revenue is growing the fastest since '22...

...but $GOOGL (48% YoY) and $MSFT Azure (39% YoY) growing 2x faster

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

Hyperscaler capex for '26:

$GOOG ~$180B
$AMZN ~$200B
$META ~$125B
$MSFT ~$100B

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

$GOOGL's YouTube vs. $NFLX revenue

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

Had to remove granola from my dock because of this

[Granola @meetgranola]

New look. Same notepad.

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

If you read one thing today make sure it’s this

[Spencer Peterson @spencermpeter]

I've been reflecting on ten years of privates investing & my first 18 months at Coatue. 11 thoughts:

1/ Idea size > everything: Lots of funds talk about “big swings” but few operationalize it. I'm of the mind that idea sizing should be the atomic unit of consideration for every fund/stage.

2/ Think about the Trends: Transcendent companies ride massive secular shifts. Internet; Mobile; Cloud; LLMs. Great investments often sit at a convergence of multiple trends: the further out you zoom, the clearer trends become.

3/ the Path to Platform: the greatest source of privates alpha is identifying a platform company *before it's a platform. Every investment thesis is really just "the path to this being a Platform"... what’s wild is how compressed the timeline has become: platforms used to take a decade to emerge, but now signals show up in just a few years (why some Series B valuations are so high!)

4/ Avoid Losing: You don’t need to win deals -- you just need to not lose! In the interest of winning deals, not going to share more on how to avoid losing with peers on X (:

5/ Privates are far more zero-sum than publics: There's a tech narrative that we’re all in it together. Like Teletubbies, with Ramp cards. In reality, privates are much more zero-sum than Wall Street. But you can still choose to be nice! It helps you avoid losing (:

6/ Great founders share a trait, rate of learning: the best founders are, without exception, learning machines. They just keep getting better in a way that almost runs away from you (especially if you're a schmuck investor like me)

This is the one signal effectively impossible to fake -- and why investors actually want to meet CEOs well ahead of a fundraise; “we just want to get to know you” ;p

7/ You cannot make money on a spreadsheet: the alpha in spreadsheet investing was competed away years ago. People understand gross dollar retention now. To understand the Platform-anatomy of a company: help you, excel spreadsheets will not (Yoda)

8/ "Pattern Matching" is overused, but underrated: Investing is an exercise in reducing complexity: "the best models have fewer rows" .. Pattern matching is an overused term -- but the act of "seeing simplicity" is evergreen underrated.

9/ Diversification is a tax: concentrate winners! Diversification is not your friend: this is a known fact in venture (and increasingly true in publics)

10/ Decision Quality > everything: for all the hustle culture, busy calendars and "value add resources" at funds .. all the leverage is in decision quality. Great decisions compound. Avoiding losing compounds. It feels bad (but is correct) to say 95-99% of "passes" don't matter in power law investing. Know when you're around a BFI and get the decisions right!

11/ the Future is built by weird people, doing things that are obvious (in hindsight): if you’re not at least a little weirded out, it’s probably bad, actually!

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

Bullish on ChatGPT ads! 🚀

[signüll @signulll]

obviously this didn’t factor ads. let’s talk about ads cuz ads inside chatgpt will be insane (i have posted about this on my substack).

meta made ~$58 per user in 2025 purely from ads.

now imagine openai hits ~1b free users in 2026 (800m weekly right now, so this is conservative). if they monetize at just 9% of meta’s arpu, that’s ~$5b in incremental revenue. 18% gets you ~$10b. full parity is ~$57b/year from ads alone.

can ai companies ever match or exceed social media arpu?

likely! ai sits closer to intent than feeds ever did. ads in a feed monetize attention.. ads in an ai convo monetize decisions.

it’ll take time but if ai becomes the default interface for thinking, searching, buying, & choosing, social media arpu may end up looking like a floor, not a ceiling. given they have many many many facebook veterans, it looks very likely that openai has the potential to build one of the greatest ad businesses of all time (esp because they know your secrets & fears).

openai is essentially building “facebook 2.0” & all of the old facebook peeps are doing it.

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

@ellisp_osborn Beast!

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

@itsalfredw Congrats to the team, this is huge :)

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

6/ ElevenLabs makes voice a bundled feature; premium TTS dies as a standalone wedge.

ElevenLabs keeps pricing power only by becoming the reliability + trust layer for enterprise. Their voice marketplace will be particularly crucial.

If this thesis does not play out, they will get priced out by 2027.

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

6 predictions for Voice AI in 2026, and why this year is make-or-break for ElevenLabs

1/ The only widespread voice AI interface will be Gemini on iOS 27

[Carson Wang @_carsonwang_]

5/ Creator audio will not be a moat.

YouTube/Instagram won’t outsource their biggest end market to external voice APIs. They'll only use internal modes.