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]

@jasonlk Hire the one who still wants the quota. The title comes free.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Seven questions to answer before you build a founder brand: https://t.co/ODACMgqLAI

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

"The company needed humanity because the actual human did not scale very well. Now the human scales."

Before you build distribution, finish this sentence: I believe X. Therefore I am building Y. For Z. To produce this outcome.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@FT In the 1990s SAP sold the software and the consulting firms got paid to make it work. Anthropic just decided to keep both halves.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@FirstSquawk Amex booked $982 million for selling the travel desk. The buyer only gets paid if it runs the desk better than Amex did.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@JohnfromWNY @Polymarket Interesting. Could be right. Will check it out. Thanks for sharing, John.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

@suhelbuilds @ChetisLove Beautiful. Great questions. I’d ask them, too.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

https://t.co/Gwpco7d04K

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

If they're early in the buildout of their stack, they are often not thinking enough about the security side of the equation and protection of their proprietary data. Or, if they are thinking about that, they may have more traditional concerns that are different than what the concerns should be in this new state of things.

Additionally, if they are not dealing with one of the frontier platforms but are dealing with a wrapper that piggybacks on one of the frontier models, I often see a lack of clarity on what that means for the pricing of tokens and the cost of the overall service, and not digging far enough into the fine print on what that could mean for variable cost over time.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

It’s when the work has to move cross-departmentally or functionally that things get tricky in orgs. And when the reservoirs of data that the models / agents need to be able to access aren’t available or prepared properly that the work grinds to a halt.

The future is for the individual founder and for the startups and small businesses that use their relative small scale to become Ai-native fastest and make that their scaling superpower.

The dynamics have shifted. What a time to be alive.

[John Brewton @OperatingByJohn]

Preach. Truer words.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

"Capitalism created the possibility of the win win win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost.

The biggest mistake people make they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that @JeffBezos and @elonmusk somehow stole the money from the people.

They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound.

All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are.

Where does all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well.

This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world."

— @iamjohnmackey

[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]

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.