Simon Vance

ex revenue ops. I rate airports by their bookstores. everyone's watching AI demos I'm watching pricing pages, earnings calls, and gross margins.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

while you're watching AI demos.
i'm watching pricing pages, earnings calls, and gross margins.
this account breaks down:
• earnings reports
• ai monetization
• saas pricing
• enterprise spending
because revenue tells a much more interesting story than product launches.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

productive pauses. they engineered a $17 billion product to be maximally addictive, and now the fix has a ux team-approved feature name like it's a wellness app update. the line item that should've been the whole lawsuit, please stop making children's brains do this, got laundered into a press release with cute typography.

[Variety @Variety]

Meta will enforce a two-hour daily limit on Instagram and Facebook for children as part of a record $17.1B settlement with 29 states over social media addiction claims:

• The “Productive Pauses” for children include mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling

• “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.

• Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year

• Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users

• Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying, content promoting eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm

• Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls

• Limits on social comparison features, including beauty filters and visible “like” counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in kids and teens

• Both the implementation and effectiveness of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states

https://t.co/ZKTxeuIV8p

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

sure, and I'll achieve financial independence by the end of year too. every lab says this every year. is basically their version of a new year's resolution. talk to me when it can consistently do my taxes without hallucinating a deduction.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: OpenAI says it will achieve AGI by the end of this year.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@omfuze he really said step 1: dream big. step 2: lie bigger, and called it career advice

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@tim_cook another september, another iphone. groundbreaking.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

that's the bet. not the cash burn, the conversion rate.
stock's already back above pre-earnings levels, so the market's siding with "it converts."

i'd rather own the backlog risk than the margin risk. contracted demand is easier to underwrite than a pricing story.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

alphabet's free cash flow went negative last quarter. first time ever.
capex outran cash by $45b.

here's the number i actually care about: their cloud backlog is $514b, and they say just over half turns into revenue in the next 2 years.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

read half a book during a flight delay yesterday.
it made me realize airport lounges have become my favorite place to read.
no slack. no inbox. just occasional proof that the flight is still delayed.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@gabsmashh finally, representation for people who click send and pray

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@peegzy1 some of these jobs have outlived the manager who posted them

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

keep rereading no cloud dependency like it's gonna stop being true if I look away. one of the more impressive things I've seen shipped this year, not just teased.

[Perplexity @perplexity_ai]

Today we’re launching Portable Computer on @NVIDIA DGX Spark.

Portable Computer is a fully local version of Perplexity Computer, where the entire runtime: orchestrator LLM, subagent LLM, agent harness all run on your local hardware. No cloud dependency.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

Perplexity's revenue tripled from under $250M to $750M+ in about seven months, credited to perplexity computer. a valuation bump from a new outside investor would be one thing, but a bigger check from an existing one, this soon after the last round? reads more like nvidia pricing in what it's seeing on its own infrastructure

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

that’s over 50% higher than a year ago.
another thing - $NVDA is already an investor here, and chip suppliers don't usually double down on customers unless they're watching usage data most outside investors can't see.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Nvidia reportedly in talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30,000,000,000.00.

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@mrgracemugabe abuse: yes
astigmatism: absolutely not on our watch

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@Polymarket wendy's beef with quality control finally caught up with them

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

turns out cutting training costs also means cutting the please don't do crimes budget

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Researchers warn DeepSeek has become the “AI of choice” for Chinese hackers because of its low cost & relatively weak cyber guardrails. — Bloomberg

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@OrevaZSN tongue said outside. HR heard it too

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@feyiszn that's not insomnia, that's origin story material

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@OpenAI pushing the frontier and cutting prices in the same line...okaaay👀

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

@bhoomikacodes the job title nobody put on likedin: translation layer between an llm's output and what a manager will actually accept. that's most of what using ai at work means right now

[Simon Vance @SimonV_Global]

zuckeberg bought a 440 acre gothic castle in ireland, $23-35M, off-market. third tech billionaire to grab a big irish estate since 2021. meta cut 8,000 jobs three months ago.