John Brewton

Companies are becoming tech stacks. We are all becoming companies. Operator and Harvard economics nerd decoding the future of companies.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

The essay: https://t.co/qJRgddD7RY

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Every week brings a new headline about AI and job losses.

What I see inside companies: the excuses are disappearing first. "We don't have the people" and "that would take a quarter" are getting harder to say.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@StockMKTNewz The Nasdaq 100 fell 2.9% today and OpenAI is raising $30 billion at $1.25 trillion as a bridge to a 2027 IPO. Every bridge round is a bet on the weather at the far end.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@lennysan Twenty years from now, the customers, the hires and the kids all remember the same thing: whether what you built is still standing.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@tbpn @eastdakota The internet got through COVID partly because people sleep. Agents don't. Peak load stops being a spike and becomes the baseline.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@Polymarket Starlink beat the carriers by skipping the towers. Becoming the fourth carrier means renting the same towers they do.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Shou Zi Chew says a video ad that cost a brand $100 to $1,000 to make can now be produced for $1 to $10 with TikTok's Seedance model. He also says most short dramas are already AI-produced.

When making the ad costs almost nothing, the work moves to knowing what to say.

🎥 via @firesidealpha, from DBS Asia Future Forward

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@arnavsawantt Nailing it. Love it.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Purchases made by AI agents are growing about 43% a month, per BrightEdge in the WSJ. Only about 3% of its e-commerce clients let an agent finish checkout.

Nobody has decided who pays when the agent buys the wrong thing.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@lostwillee So true. Beautifully put. Couldn’t agree more, William.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Marc Andreessen thinks robotics could be the biggest industry in the history of the planet, with hundreds of billions of robots that someone has to design and build.

The factory floor is where that gets decided.

Marc Andreessen with Joe Lonsdale on American Optimist, via @linasbeliunas

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@FreeTokns @Polymarket Agreed. But early days. Massive new market.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Mark Zuckerberg was ready to write a $100B or $200B check before Meta had seen the models. His question to Alexandr Wang: "Are you sure this is going to work?"

You don't get to meter a frontier bet. You commit first and find out later. That takes a different kind of operator.

🎥 via @guilleflorvs, from Cheeky Pint with John Collison

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Masayoshi Son says SoftBank has more than 30 robotics companies in its portfolio, "very quietly preparing." The target is tiring work like doing dishes, so people can do something more interesting.

Start automating with the work nobody wants to keep doing.

🎥 via @firesidealpha, from Inside Blackstone with Christine Anderson

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@FirstSquawk The cheapest gigawatt is the one you never have to build.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@StockSavvyShay $82 billion in cash and an AA rating, and CDS still hit a record. Bond buyers aren't asking what Meta has. They're asking what it has promised to build.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Every agent you deploy is another employee with keys. Somebody still has to own the keys.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

If you wanted to know all the jobs that AI will produce, look no further than cybersecurity. This is going to become one of the biggest investment areas for enterprises going forward.

And even as the work becomes more agentic and autonomous you will need more talent to point the agents at the most critical work, review findings, patch systems, respond to incidents, and more.

Lots of opportunity right now for the systems that protect data and enterprises, as well as the professionals that are deploying them and protecting organizations.

It’s going to only get more wild out there.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

The most valuable thing in a service business is what the 30-year technician knows. Now it doesn't retire when they do.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Keeping over a million elevators and escalators running smoothly is no small task.

Today in Cologne, I heard about how TK Elevator is using our tech to help provide its service technicians access to decades of shared knowledge, streamlining the process, so they can spend less time searching for answers and more time keeping people moving.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

20 years of deals, distilled: https://t.co/zdpm8mrlGo

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Over 12 years we grew a distribution company from $27.5M to $75M+. Along the way I negotiated $250M+ in contracts.

The lesson Harvard didn't cover: you usually have to operate the deal after you sign it.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Before you concede on one variable, create more.

Client can't do $25K and offers $15K? Don't just ask whether you'll take less. Ask what less buys: smaller scope, a different timeline, a group format.