Ben Tan 笨蛋

Say something smart and witty

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Just a reminder about the importance of compounding

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

@abigbluebird Bro I just want to catch up with you since it’s been a while since we last met. Not trying to sell you anything.

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

With Berkshire’s 350bn worth of cash, they can easily do the whole cap raise for SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI if they wanted. Kind of crazy to think about it given these are gonna be one of the largest cap raise in history of markets.

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

@VivianBala @Gavriel_Cohen @karpathy Why no link to sign up for your skills future course to help others upgrade the vibe coding skills

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

@JapanDeepValue1 @CCM_Brett Nice chart

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

The realisation of this unspoken truth hits pretty hard

[Ethan Kho @ethanrkho]

"Once you're off the track, you're done." — a fund manager with an 18-year track record on what nobody tells you about a career in money management:

Derek Pilecki (@gatorcapital) runs a financials-focused fund, 21%+ annualized, entire net worth in his own fund.

Derek explains:

"It's harder for small funds. A lot of the seats are quant based versus fundamental based. It's a more difficult industry."

"You have to love investing. You have to want to wake up and read the Wall Street Journal as soon as you wake up."

"If you lose your job anytime after the age of 32, it's hard to get another job. The business doesn't hire mid-career analysts."

"There's a lot of people who get into the business and then in their thirties or forties have to go find another career."

"There are things that people don't talk about. I've had a lot of friends who lost their job in their late thirties or forties and weren't able to find a new seat."

"While the rewards can be great on the upside, it can really mess with you mid-career, midlife."

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

My observation for AI in finance is that it’s not replacing existing tools like Bloomberg or Excel. If anything, everyone is asking for AI to connect these existing tools.

Excel plugin to update my model. Bloomberg API to pull sell side research for deep research

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

@pukimarx This looks like a good first draft. When can we expect the final version

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

In the 1970s we had opec oil embargo, a watergate scandal and the Nixon shock where US dollar was no longer pegged to gold

Today we have the Iran war, the Epstein files and a world where people have doubts about the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

Scary times

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Thinking I should just buy what worked in 2022 Ukraine war.

Fertilizer, shipping, defense

Nutrien, CF industries

Cosco, Maersk, Mitsui osk, nippon yusen

Lockheed martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Why are O&G stocks not going up more

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

@orrdavid

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Basically Druck is the finance equivalent of Rick Rubin

[Morgan Stanley @MorganStanley]

Watch Hard Lessons, as legendary investor Stan Druckenmiller sits down with Morgan Stanley’s Iliana Bouzali, sharing how he would construct a portfolio if he had to start over today, why contrarianism is overrated, and which stock he regrets selling too early.

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Oh no, what have I done 🥲

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Okay I can’t believe it but I’ve officially become a SaaS bro. Pls pray for me

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

“Service as a software” = turning human labor into a repeatable, scalable product

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

The new saas is service as a software.

It sounds awkward but hear me out.

“Service as software” = take something humans used to do as a service and encode it into software so it behaves like SaaS.

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Legal review → AI contract analysis
Equity research → AI copilots
Customer support → AI agents
Marketing agencies → AI campaign generators

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

What people misunderstood was raw compute was just the base layer. The large scale cloud providers enabled ecosystem lock in with services on top on the infrastructure. Data, AI/ML, security. Reliability with 99.99999%.

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

It’s interesting to note that there was a time people thought that cloud computing aka IaaS was a commodity biz and all the value would accrue to the SaaS biz. The argument was anyone can provide compute/storage. It all sounded very logical at the time

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Still think about this even five years later

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

@rollothomasi123 I don’t know man. The sentiment is bad but it feels pretty hyperbolic to me. Maybe some will die and some adapt. We went from software is eating the world to software is dead. We went from Google is dead to Google is back in a blink of an eye. It’s all just vibes.

[Ben Tan 笨蛋 @bentan__]

Okay I can’t believe it but I’ve officially become a SaaS bro. Pls pray for me