ankitp.eth

Software is eating the world! PM @ Amazon Echo (Alexa)! Big Manchester United fan. MBA@LBS

[Kevin Pietersen🦏 @KP24]

Rory doubles up at The Masters
PSG doubles up Champs League
RCB doubles up IPL
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻��🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[Brandon Carl @brandonjcarl]

Earnings Before Tokens

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[ankitp.eth @ankitp]

@sachinrekhi @ankurnagpal +1. How many of the investments listed on the portfolio page are via secondaries, and are they trustworthy? It'll be incredibly useful to list the investment vehicle (primary, secondary, 3P fund) on the portfolio page for each company, given the heterogenous nature of USVC.

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Whatever can be done with local LLMs, will be. It’s just a matter of time. A tipping point in adoption of local AI capabilities is just a use case or two away.

[Sachin Rekhi @sachinrekhi]

@ankurnagpal Is USVC's investment in Anthropic via one of the mentioned vehicles?

[spidey @lochan_twt]

The day a blind man sees. The first thing he throws away is the stick that has helped him all his life

[ankitp.eth @ankitp]

@AngelList @usvc_ I have a basic question. How will USVC get on the cap table of the private companies it is promising exposure to? Is it buying secondaries of these companies through this fund?

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

Idea-
There should be a “login with GPT/Claude/gemini button” that any AI app developer can embed in their signup flow

It would:
- make it easier for devs to focus on the app layer not billing and repackaging tokens
- that is, collapse API keys, billing, auth into a single primitive
- turn models into identity + wallet rails (who you are + who pays)
- models could explicitly get data, usage, etc from the app layer shared back
- interesting new configurations where there’s model exclusivity if app devs implement only their button, etc

Thoughts?

[Shivani Patel @shivanijpatel]

At CES, every Chinese company is trying to crack the US market. The products are incredible - better engineered than half the American booths. But they keep failing because despite massive R&D budgets, they’re penny pinching on everything that happens after the product ships: branding, channels, and support

US consumers actually buy confidence. that if something breaks, someone will help & the company will still exist in 6 months

This shows up everywhere. Suspicious websites, brand messaging that reads like google translate. distribution only through Amazon because building retail relationships takes effort.And when something goes wrong support reps take forever to respond and have no idea what they’re talking about.

American companies with objectively worse products win because they are invested in the full experience - the brand feels coherent

My recommendation: If you want to win in the US: stop treating brand, channels, and support as cost centers. They’re not optional extras, they’re the difference between a one-time sale and actually building market share

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Holy shit

[Hiroo Onoda @OnodaCapital]

Remember who they’re actually playing though

QQQ
2010: 13.6x
2011: 10.2x
2012: 9.4x
2014: 6.3x
2017: 4.0x

[Shay Boloor @StockSavvyShay]

The biggest long-term threat to AI data center trade isn’t AI demand slowing but it's edge AI.

Once your phone can run a “good enough” model locally for free then inference shifts from always-on to only when necessary. 

Data centers get called for the hardest problems while everything else runs on the device you already paid for.

[Panos Panay @panos_panay]

AI devices haven’t found their next form factor yet. Builders are still testing and learning to weave intelligence into life as naturally as the internet is today. Big thanks to #FortuneBrainstormAI for having me this week, and to @DelRey for the great conversation.

[Puru Saxena @saxena_puru]

Fed officials should just set policy at FOMC meetings and then keep their mouths shut!

This will greatly reduce market volatility.

These daily flip flop chirps in the media aren't helpful.

[simple investing @simpleinvest01]

What a sick image $GOOG $GOOGL

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

When I stay out a little too late with the boys and try to make it up to my wife by doing the dishes before she wakes up

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Remove this phrase from your vocabulary

[prachi agarwal @pagarwal5]

Tonight is Sharad Purnima (शरद पूर्णिमा), the most powerful full moon of the year. Spending just a few minutes basking in its radiant moonlight is believed to heal the body and soul.

[Rajasthan Royals @rajasthanroyals]

Jeet ka Tilak! 🇮🇳🔥