AI & Data VC @FirstMarkCap, prev @ICONIQCapital, @Yale. Big Sports Guy (@USMNT, @FloridaGators, @Jaguars, @ManUtd). Unapologetic country music enthusiast
Hear me out. All of the same matches, fans, celebrations (Norway Row 🐐ed for me)….but in the iconic college football stadiums in random towns vs the big cities’ NFL stadiums
Imagine France v Norway at The Swamp (100k fans) or USMNT vs Belgium in R16 at Death Valley in July
Not to mention every fan gets to be like @FreddyLA7 experiencing TRUE America (I said what I said) in real time
@tanayj@OverEHill I’d give England ~6/10 chance (just based on the fact that they are chokers + have never beaten us in a competitive match…), based on what we’ve seen so far I think Portugal, Morocco & Brazil are all ~5/10, we should be favored against Norway, Colombia & Belgium (with home adv)
"Sandbox" is honestly a bad name for what we build.
When you hear sandbox, you instantly think test environment - something temporary and not real.
What we actually build is a composable computer for agents.
Your agent defines the machine on the fly - CPU, RAM, disk, GPU, Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
Think of it as a PC shop that assembles a machine with the exact configuration you want in the blink of an eye.
@M___Morgenstern I’ll be at Smithfield Hall in Chelsea, American Outlaws bar, was absolutely electric for the first match
Everyone belting the national anthem pregame
State of AI compute 2026: my conversation with @stephenbalaban of @LambdaAPI on the neocloud boom, data centers, GPUs and what's ahead
00:00 — Cold open
01:21 — Why GPU compute was never a commodity
02:45 — The H100 price index and what it gets wrong
04:02 — The real moat: technology or financing?
05:57 — Winner-take-all, or room for many neoclouds
06:48 — Are we overbuilding or underbuilding AI compute?
09:26 — What if AI gets 10x more compute-efficient?
10:44 — The real bottleneck: land, power, and shell
11:38 — The backlash against data centers — and the misinformation
15:00 — Opening the hood: from photons to tokens
17:11 — Extracting more value from the same chip
19:26 — Frontier inference and distributed training, explained
23:26 — What actually drives compute cost
25:21 — Lambda's chip stack and the NVIDIA relationship
26:17 — A multi-silicon world? CUDA, CUDNN, and NVIDIA's real moat
28:59 — Networking, storage, and the one-click cluster
34:46 — Renting vs. owning, and full vertical integration
36:24 — How global is Lambda? Does location still matter?
38:44 — The financing stack: off-take agreements, SPVs, and credit
41:16 — Why a 2023 GPU leases for more today
42:36 — A futures market for compute?
43:54 — Origin story: facial recognition, Perceptio, and Apple
47:03 — The Lambda hat and Dream Scope
48:59 — The $60K bet that became a cloud business
52:00 — Holding the team together through the hard times
54:30 — Bringing on a new CEO; Stephen as CTO
57:33 — Matching xAI on high-velocity deployment
59:29 — "AI won't write software — it will become the software"
01:01:30 — Neural software vs. vibe coding
01:04:25 — Do agents change the compute layer
01:06:14 — Self-assembling software inside Lambda
01:08:18 — Gigawatt-scale AI factories
01:08:57 — One person, one GPU
01:12:04 — Hot takes: overrated and underrated in AI
Guilds Summit: Where the best share how they build.
➡️ 400+ senior executives
➡️ 30+ speakers
➡️ 4 stages
One full day of non-stop learning and connection.
Already pumped for 2027!
New merch from @FirstMarkCap
They put on a great gathering of operators and tech leaders. Bullish on AI, we are very early in this wave & optimistic on where it's headed
Partnered with @firstmarkcap on their Guilds Summit. Some takeaways👇🏼
@anjsud CEO @tubi x @amishjani
1. The best CEOs aren’t the experts on everything. They hire experts, give them ownership, expect it back and get out of the way.
2. “Never waste a good crisis”, that’s often when the biggest leaps happen.
@davidneckstein CFO @wearelegora x @abimbhet
1. The best fundraising rounds optimize for value add, not valuation (yes their investors are actually getting them customers).
2. AI is pushing CFOs out of spreadsheet management and deeper into driving revenue growth.
Li Fan CTO @circle x @amankabeer11
1. The opportunity is bigger than agentic payments, it’s the agentic economy (there’s an entire stack that involves things besides payments).
2. Winning won’t come from forcing every workflow to go headless but from finding where agents create enough value to earn the right to transact. (It’s still early and no one has cracked it yet).
Thank you @mrbenwinn for hosting and leading a phenomenal production. @airwallex is proud to facilitate bringing the best forward to share how they build.