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Nick Stojka
@nickstojka
Joined April 2009
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Powerful message!
Focus on what you can control. Build something, anything. A product, yourself, your community, a team, a company or organization, relationships. Or help someone else do it. Don't complain or be a victim, ever. #PlayNiceButWin
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Ben Horowitz on what he expects in AI over the next 8 to 12 months.
He thinks the infrastructure for AI is wrong, and it reminds him of the early days of cloud computing. Back then, everyone thought they could put their existing software on the other side of the wire. It didn't work, and everything got rebuilt: storage, networking, operating systems, virtualization, containers.
This is why he expects the same with AI:
1. The workload. A database query is predictable. An AI query could run for a week, and the systems to manage those requests don't exist yet.
2. The chips. Nvidia's GPUs were built for video games. Ben calls them power-hungry and low-yield for what they do today.
3. The models. Training them means sucking down all the data on the internet, and he doubts that is where we end up.
His conclusion: from the model on down, everything is going to change, and there will be a lot of opportunity in that.
Full breakdown here: https://t.co/OvoWHuVAHB
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “I have never seen killing and destruction like Gaza in all my years as Secretary-General.”
According to even the most critical reports, Guterres, 70,000 people were killed in the war in Gaza, a large proportion of them Hamas terrorists.
During your years as Secretary-General: more than 600,000 people were massacred or starved to death in Ethiopia.
377,000 died in Yemen — that figure appears in reports issued by your own organization.
150,000 were killed in Sudan and 12 million were displaced.
Hundreds of thousands have been buried in Ukraine.
You didn’t see it? They died before your eyes. You simply looked the other way, because the Jews couldn’t be blamed.
As a young person if you can learn the new tools and develop the new skills needed you will be at big advantage in the workplace not at a disadvantage
Ben Horowitz says this may be one of the best times in history to be 18: you're entering a world only your generation will understand.
"I would be thrilled to be 18. I think it is one of the best times in history to be 18. It's unfortunate because I think the systems for getting people into work currently make people really nervous about their future."
"This is like Thomas Edison's time or Henry Ford's time. You're going into a world that only you will understand. People like me will have a much more difficult time understanding the world than you will, what's possible, and what you can do."
"You're going to go in at a very young age being more capable than people with 30 or 40 years of experience. That's just amazing because normally you've got to work your way up the corporate ladder, spend 20 years developing your status and credibility."
"Now you can come out right off the rip, using the new tools to solve almost any problem out there... Are we out of problems? All I read about is problems. There are problems everywhere. Now you can go out and attack them directly."
@bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
Great advice on building new companies and products. “Build something narrow that's useful to you and a small group of people. If it works there, expand.”
Mark Pincus (@markpinc) built Zynga into a $12 billion exit. Before that he started six companies. Most of them didn't work.
The thing he told me that stuck: founders don't stay with bad ideas because they believe in them. They stay because they're afraid another pivot will break their team. They know in their gut this isn't it. And they keep going.
His filter for whether an idea is actually worth pursuing is simple. Build something narrow that's useful to you and a small group of people. If it works there, expand. If you have to convince yourself it's working, it's not.
#Entrepreneurship #Startups #MarkPincus
Full video: https://t.co/PKGIGne3NS
Absolutely correct
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
The world is going to be alright, guys.
Keep having kids, loving your family, and starting and building businesses and institutions. Don’t live in fear.
Leaders have big responsibilities and challenges ahead, but it doesn’t help to scare everyone. We are on top of it.
Bill Maher nails it
Bill Maher is basically the only prominent Democrat telling the truth about what the modern left has become and how they’ve misled an entire generation of young people into believing things that aren’t true
Bill Maher is basically the only prominent Democrat telling the truth about what the modern left has become and how they’ve misled an entire generation of young people into believing things that aren’t true
Met a guy making $1.6 million/year as an LLM engineer.
I asked him how he learned LLMs from scratch.
He sent me the exact video that got him in. A 1 hour course on how LLMs actually work.
He shows how transformers inside LLMs like ChatGPT & Claude are actually built.
I watched it last night.
Halfway through, I realized LLM architecture is way simpler than they make it look.
Bookmark this and read the article below.
• 00:00 - LLM foundations
• 04:21 - LLM tokenization
• 05:43 - LLMs vector embeddings
• 22:16 - attention mechanism of LLM
• 43:42 - LLM multi head attention
It’s hard to think of a more profound and consequential glow up within a political office than going from Kim Foxx to EOB. Like a baseball team going from worst to first in a year.
We’re going to look back at the era where Kim Foxx, Brandon Johnson, and Tim Evans overlapped in office (2023/2024) as amongst the worst period Chicago has ever seen leadership-wise. Thank god it is over.
For the first time in a decade, there is a waiting list to become an Assistant State’s Attorney. Since I took office, we’ve filled 180 vacancies and have no more lawyer shortages.
The biggest opportunities right now:
1. build for solving loneliness (the more AI floods everything, the more people crave real human connection, IRL and small social)
2. build for agents that need to spend money (they're getting virtual cards and budgets, someone builds the spend controls, fraud protection, receipts)
3. build for people drowning in AI output (everyone generates infinite drafts now, the bottleneck moved to reviewing and choosing, build the judgment layer)
4. build for the burnout economy (everyone is expected to always be on and always optimizing, and the backlash toward rest, slowness, and enough is building)
5. build for verifying humans (deepfakes broke trust, every dating app, marketplace, and video call needs proof-of-human within 2 years)
6. build for the physical world (the trades, hardware, robots that AI is finally reaching)
7. build for the agent that answers the phone (every local business misses calls after 5pm, a voice agent that books the job is worth thousands a month)
8. build for the aging (70M+ boomers who want to stay healthy, sharp, and connected)
9. build for the LLM-search land grab (being the cited answer is the new SEO)
10. build for the newly automated (the paralegal, the analyst, the marketer whose job just changed and needs to reskill fast)
11. build for the seat-pricing collapse (software repricing from $50/seat to per-outcome, whoever nails outcome billing wins a category)
12. build for AI enablement (95% of businesses use nothing beyond ChatGPT, someone has to onboard the other 95%)
13. build for the agency everyone resents (businesses pay $1k/mo to agencies they hate, an agent that does 80% of it undercuts the model)
14. build for verticals on 2011 software (dentists, HOAs, contractors, all overdue for an AI-native rebuild)
15. build for reviving dead software (thousands of abandoned apps with real users, agents can maintain what a team couldn't, buy and revive)
16. build for markets too small to matter before (500 lobster fishermen was never worth a team, now it's a weekend and a real business)
17. build for agents hiring agents (a shadow economy is forming, it needs escrow, reputation, and dispute resolution for machines)
18. build for the anti-AI premium (as everything gets generated, human-made and analog become status symbols people pay up for)
19. build for distribution-first (anyone can build the product now, so the audience is the moat, media company first, product second)
20. build for the reinvention of college (what does an MBA even mean anymore)
21. build for a world with more free time than it knows what to do with (if AI takes the busywork, the question becomes what people do with the hours, and that's a civilization sized market)
note: more trends/ideas @ideabrowser (free to sign up)
22. build for the return to the physical (screens fill with slop, people crave the real world, the hands-on, the local, the analog)
23. build for the caregiving wave. The population is aging fast, tens of millions are caring for parents, and the whole burden is landing on families with no support.
24. build for the longevity shift (people want to live to 100 healthy, and a whole industry is forming around actively managing your own biology)
25. build for the housing and rootlessness problem (people can't afford to settle down, and the whole idea of a stable home base is up for grabs)
26. build for spiritual hunger (as institutions hollow out, the need for meaning, ritual, and belonging is exploding into new forms)
KEEP BUILDING
I'm not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the Intifada like it's the World Cup.
Elon Musk just said the one thing about America they made sure you’d never learn.
The one thing that should’ve made you proud, not ashamed.
Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”
One nation held a weapon no civilization had ever possessed.
Total monopoly on destruction. No rival. No consequence. No limit.
Every empire in history that held that kind of power did the only thing empires know how to do.
They took until there was nothing left to take.
America had a greater advantage than all of them combined.
And rebuilt the nations it just defeated.
Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”
Not almost unprecedented.
It had never happened. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.
The nation with the power to take everything chose to rebuild instead.
Enemies became allies. Rubble became economies. Surrender became partnership.
Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a single generation.
Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.
Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.
Into the capital of the country that just tried to end the free world.
That decision reshaped every economy, every alliance, and every trade route on the planet.
Billions of people lifted out of poverty over the next half century trace back to one moment. One nation choosing restraint over domination.
No other country in history can make that claim. Not one.
Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”
Every nation on earth has blood in its history.
But the measure of a nation was never its worst chapter.
It’s what it does when nobody can stop it.
When nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.
You’re being told every day that this country is something to be ashamed of.
By people who have no idea what the world looks like without it.
Every free market. Every open border for trade. Every democracy that took root outside Europe stands in the shadow of that single decision.
The values that built this country didn’t just shape America.
They shaped the modern world.
AI is about to hand a small number of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look primitive.
1945 was the first test.
AI is the last.
That power is going to exist. The only question left is who holds it.
The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.
It was having the power to take everything and choosing not to.
The people trying hardest to tear that story down have never built a single thing worth defending.
Palantir's Karp bashes OpenAI, Anthropic token model: 'Something has gone completely wrong' https://t.co/4KOg5iEWdK
.@friedberg explains what the Politburo is:
“The Politburo is the leaders who elect themselves to dictate the flow of the economy, the allocation of capital, what work individuals are allowed to do, and what activities they’re allowed to do in an unfree society, which is what they’re creating.
They are the true oligarchs.
And this is Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna.
This is the group that is trying to coalesce power and create for themselves a system whereby they have greater influence, greater control over aspects of the economy.
They want to seize the means of production.
They want to control education.
They want to control media.
And anytime there’s an effort by an individual enterprise, or an individual themselves, to go out and build a business and succeed and do something that’s outside of their scope and their span of control, they lose their minds over it.
And that’s what we’re seeing.
So I react to their tweeting and their bullshit, where they’re basically trying to contort things about inequality and fairness and justice, when the truth is they are the rising empire, the evil empire in Star Wars.
They are the folks who want to take from all of us what we were endowed with when this nation was started, and what many people came to this country for, which is individual freedom and liberty, the ability to build a business in peace, the ability to make decisions, to do what you want with your own assets, and to have functionally private property.
And they’re taking it all away.
And they’re trying to take it all away.
And we’re watching, piece by piece, step by step.
So they are forming a politburo where they can effectively control the economy, control education, control the media, and tell us all what we can and can’t do and say.
And it’s frustrating to me to watch it because it’s masqueraded as bullshit virtue, as justice, as equity.
It’s a bunch of nonsense words that they use to try and make themselves seem virtuous when, at the end of the day, they are fundamentally evil.”
Jamie Dimon tells NYC’s Mamdani to ‘grow and build’ or watch more jobs flee https://t.co/87m13If5I7 #FoxBusiness
Jensen Huang just told Silicon Valley it’s fighting on the wrong floor.
Every boardroom in tech is locked on the same question. Which model wins. OpenAI or xAI. GPT or Claude. Grok or Gemini.
Trillions moving on that bet alone.
Huang zoomed out and showed them the whole building.
Huang: “AI is actually essentially a five-layer cake.”
Energy at the bottom. Chips above it. Cloud above that. Models next. Applications on top.
Five layers. One war. Everyone crowded onto the fourth floor.
Huang: “This is where most people think AI is.”
He was pointing at the model layer. Every pitch deck. Every valuation. Every founder story. All packed onto one floor.
One floor below the finish line. Three above the foundation. The middle of the building.
Huang: “At the bottom is energy.”
Not data. Not parameters. Not talent.
Power.
You cannot out-code the grid. You cannot train a frontier model with a press release. The smartest model on Earth still needs a dumb turbine spinning somewhere.
The smartest engineers alive are building on top of someone else’s silicon, inside someone else’s cloud, powered by someone else’s electricity.
They own nothing beneath them.
Huang: “This layer on top ultimately is where economic benefit will happen.”
Healthcare. Finance. Manufacturing. The only floors where AI actually meets money.
Every dollar of real value lives at the top. Every physical constraint that decides who gets to play lives at the bottom.
The model sits in between. Squeezed from above and below and owning neither end.
Silicon Valley is burning hundreds of billions to build plumbing for somebody else’s economy.
The basement decides if it runs. The penthouse decides if it pays.
The companies building models think they are building the future.
Huang just told them they are the middle layer in someone else’s cake.
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