Rett Wallace

More questions than answers

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

"The human species hasn't changed since Cro Magnon man, and in terms of evolutionary time we're not going to change much in the next 100 or 200 years. The critical problem of our survival is going to have to be settled long before 100 or 200 years. Now, where is the source of intelligence going to come from?
There is something that's happening already today, you might say a "mechaniarchy" or whatever the word would be. The love that we have now for machines. The smell and the feel of a beautiful camera, or a tape recorder. There is an aesthetic, an almost sensuous aesthetic about machines.
I'm sure it will be useful for them to know what human feelings are because it will help them understand us.
We do now obviously need some sort of intelligence of a magnitude considerably greater than seems to exist at the moment. And you could say that man's survival depends on the ultra-intelligent machine.
I can't think of any reason why it's a frightening prospect because intelligence seems to me to be something which is good, and so I can't see how your ultra-intelligent machine is going to be any worse than a man.
At the moment, the problems of the world appear to be problems only because man seems to lack the intelligence to think his way out of the present trap that we seem to be in."
--Stanley Kubrick, 1968

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@beffjezos "Meritocratic UBI" is a contradiction in terms. Either Meritocratic or Universal but can't be both

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@DimaZeniuk There are Simulation Tells everywhere for those with the eyes to see

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@TheStalwart The Wright Brothers beat all the competing teams to 'controlled powered flight' by focussing on control first, not power.

Mastering the glider was the ballgame, adding power to the Wright Flyer was just the capstone

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@DavidSacks Jcals' summary comment that "the power law rules our lives" is super true for *venture* investors!

But the brokenness of capital-allocation and liquidity systems focused only on power-law companies is that the vast majority of companies are NOT power-law companies

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@TheStalwart What does willingness to wait in long lines in the rain tell us? Is line-length correlated to quality, or flavor uniqueness, or price, or IG followers? Surely there's discoverable math in this equation

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@Camp4 Totally get it. Flagging what I think is a big shift in U.S. culture from a small-business entrepreneurial headspace to a wage-slave headspace. Rank-and-file employees who need their vacation approved by HR would never ever have done what the Wrights did in a billion years

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@TheStalwart Everything I hear out there from real humans points to pain. Jobs not offered, projects not working out, deals not closing. Uniform

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

What SpaceX tells us about drift in the definition of a "public" company

At Triton our thesis has been that public offerings are going away.

And the SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI deals are exceptions that prove the rule.

If a company isn't as big as a nation state or a federal cabinet department it's challenged in accessing the regulated "public" market. A "public" company is increasingly part of the public-sector bureaucracy.

But it wasn't like this even very recently.

When Triton covered tech IPOs up to the Covid crash, the sum total of proceeds from all the deals we covered over years didn't add up to a SpaceX.

A normal year for tech new issuance was around $7b over 10-20 deals. Companies like ZScaler and PagerDuty and Zoom and Dropbox and DocSend and Atlassian and and and went public in the normal course. No longer.

From a '33 Act perspective, "going public" meant putting a disclosure wrapper around shares so individual investors could buy them safely. That worked for 80-90 years and was a great way for founders and early investors to build capital and get liquidity, and for a broad base of investors to have a broad base of stocks to pick.

Now going public means having the scale and heft to withstand:
- The plaintiff's bar in all its forms
- Activist investors
- Short sellers
- Congressional show trials
- 27 flavors of "compliance" burden
- Activist regulators on four continents
- Diminished research coverage
- Indexed passive markets

Going "public" once meant listing shares that individual members of the public - however small and obscure - could buy.

Now going "public" seems to mean entering a company into a dense, complex wrapper of common public control.

"Public" used to refer to individual humans, and now refers to the state.

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@TheStalwart Maybe "packets" in mobile telephony was a step on this path...

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

https://t.co/uc54xAYksi

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@p_m_robinson Once again an hour with @p_m_robinson saves countless hours of hysterical axe-grinding of dubious clarity.

Amazing stats:
Change in % of global GDP, 1980s -> 2026

US: 25% -> 25%
Europe & UK: 30% -> 17%
Japan: 18% -> 4%

So China's 20% came from where?

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@p_m_robinson Once again an hour with @p_m_robinson saves countless hours of hysterical axe-grinding of dubious clarity.

Amazing stats:
Change in % of global GDP, 1980s -> 2026

US: 25% -> 25%
Europe & UK: 30% -> 17%
Japan: 18% -> 4%

So China's 20% came from where?

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

https://t.co/vyaMOMJr5U

Another example of AI catching blame for everything.

There was a lost generation of startups before the ChatGPT launch - blamed on "over-funding" but perhaps more attributable to fast growth but intrinsically unprofitable business models

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

https://t.co/o08AH2eZOX

One more way Anthropic is not representative of "Private Markets."

There is so much demand for secondary shares, the company has its own transfer process.

This is true for maybe 20 private companies.

For the others there is hardly a market at all

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@leecronin Humans can, or at least some of them. But how many?

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@heyitsnoah Is there terminology for people who know AI can do their jobs much better than they can, and are in paralytic denial about it?

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@HarryStebbings It's only $5 trillion of NAV locked in liquidity jail. No big deal

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@netcapgirl onlyfans

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@_djpn @EvaLovesDesign And it's so corporate inauthentic

[Rett Wallace @rettwallace]

@TheStalwart AND the returns in private markets are paper returns with made-up marks and no actual liquidity...