Sean Costello

Aspiring to be radical. Building, designing, operating. Ready to party

[Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein]

The full data center segment of my discussion with @RepEricBurlison

Highlights
- The benefits of data centers are enormous: life-improving AI, national security, prosperous communities
- The hazards of data centers (electricity, water, noise) are all either solvable or imaginary

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

"Oh you want to have a coffee chat? Let me check my calendar real quick"

The cal:

[Sean Costello @spkcostello]

@jack_watson_hfw Gotta fill that funnel!

[Erik Bruckner @E_Bruxxx]

Been thinking about how the definition of a “technical founder” is changing. Ten years ago, being technical was largely synonymous with writing software. Today, it means someone who understands the complexities of manufacturing, supply chains, physics, materials, controls, AI, systems engineering, government procurement, and operations. The modern founder is becoming extremely multidisciplinary. And that’s a win for humanity.

[Erik Bruckner @E_Bruxxx]

One thing that drives me crazy is when founders sell hires on changing the world yet give them table scraps on the cap table. If someone is joining before the product works, company has revenue, and before certainty the next round will happen, they are taking genuine risk. If you’re asking someone to take startup risk, give them startup upside. Treat them like owners.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Investment bankers sending you Claude generated diligence responses

[Casey Jacobson @401Casey]

You’re one Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme away from reaching your summer goals

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

“Thanks for doing months of diligence on this opportunity. We have selected to go with another buyer instead”

[nic carter @nic_carter]

A fully loaded AI datacenter with the latest GPUs costs around $300 million per acre. There are 900 million acres of US farmland. Converting just 0.01% of that into DCs would cost $26 trillion dollars

Imagine thinking this could possibly deprive us of farmland. How utterly incurious do you have to be

[Sean Costello @spkcostello]

Midas whale rip a few heaters if that’s the case 🚬

[New York Post @nypost]

Breathing NYC's smoky air is equal to puffing 10 whole cigarettes, expert warns https://t.co/7znoARIY8o

[Sean Costello @spkcostello]

Agreed. Common at a union shop circa 2000. Walk the floor during shift change, and the hour before/after, nothing happening. Ask for help moving material, reprioritizing work for a desperate customer - “not my job”.

Obv, not the case everywhere… but the do nothing, “talk to my union steward” culture only encouraged business leaders to look offshore.

[Sean Costello @spkcostello]

@jimmygards Pretty sure it was Celestial Seasonings, babe

[Zack Kanter @zackkanter]

If you mentally replace ‘data center’ with ‘big computer’ it helps crystallize the stupidity.

[Atoms Not Bits @AtomsNotBits]

America is attempting a $100 trillion industrial buildout. The financial infrastructure to support it does not exist yet.

@Melt_Dem, GP at @CrucibleCap, explains why new commodity markets, credit markets, and derivatives are the missing layer of American reindustrialization, and how they let hard tech founders hedge risk at scale.

She also names the two commodity markets she wants built in America: ocean freight and space payload.

[Sean Costello @spkcostello]

@zck Lots of man horn action here

[dex @dexhorthy]

ask yourself not "what did i ship today" but instead:

"what new out-of-distribution knowledge did i extract from the aether into markdown slop"

[TBPN @tbpn]

"@naval said this thing like, 'It's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful. It's also really hard to build a billion-dollar unicorn.' They're both going to be 80-hour weeks."

@alexhormozi on his advice for young people:

[Rose Celine Investments 🌹 @realroseceline]

The myth of luck

People love talking about luck. Someone builds a billion dollar company and they were “lucky.” Someone bought the right stock at the right time and they were “lucky.” Someone met the love of their life by chance and they were “lucky.” Looking backward, life often appears random. Looking closer and thinking deeply, it usually isn’t.

What we call luck is often the delayed byproduct of consistently putting yourself in good positions. It has far less to do with predicting exactly what will happen and far more to do with making decisions that slowly improve the odds in your favor. Most people don’t notice this because the compounding is invisible while it is happening. By the time the outcome finally arrives, the years of preparation have been forgotten.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is believing life is a game of certainty. They spend their time asking whether something will happen instead of asking whether they are positioned if it does happen. Great investors, entrepreneurs, athletes and leaders understand this difference. They know they cannot control the future, but they can absolutely control how prepared they are for it.

Every decision changes the probability distribution of your future. Reading one more book probably won’t change your life. Neither will one workout, one conversation, one dollar invested or one networking event. The power comes from stacking those decisions year after year until the probabilities begin to heavily favor you. Eventually people call the outcome luck because they never saw the thousands of small decisions that produced it.

This is why people constantly confuse the harvest with the seed. They celebrate the company after it becomes worth billions but ignore the decade spent learning, failing, reading, improving and taking intelligent risks. They admire the investor after the stock has increased tenfold but rarely appreciate the thousands of hours spent studying businesses before making the investment. The harvest is obvious, but seeds were buried underground where nobody was paying attention.

The fascinating thing about life is that good decisions do more than increase your odds. They create optionality. Every dollar you save gives you another opportunity you can say yes to. Every relationship you build opens another door. Every skill you develop creates possibilities that simply did not exist before. Wealth is not just money. Wealth is having choices when opportunity finally knocks. Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.

Looking backward, these moments seem almost inevitable. Looking forward, they are almost impossible to identify. Nobody knows which book will change the way they think forever, which conversation will lead to a business partnership or which investment will transform their financial future. The goal is not to predict the exact opportunity. The goal is to keep putting yourself in positions where opportunities are more likely to find you.

One of the reasons I love investing is because it constantly reinforces this lesson. You do not need to predict recessions, elections, interest rates or tomorrow’s headlines with perfect accuracy. You simply need to consistently buy wonderful businesses at sensible prices, avoid permanent mistakes and allow time to do most of the heavy lifting. Positioning is usually far more valuable than prediction.

The same principle applies almost everywhere else in life. Healthy people are rarely transformed by one workout. Great marriages are rarely built because of one romantic vacation. Exceptional careers are rarely created because of one brilliant meeting. Extraordinary lives are usually nothing more than ordinary decisions compounded for an extraordinarily long period of time.

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