Thrill McDermott

Tech - Alea iacta est

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

$snow will accelerate all year, first product cycle as a public company and new logos will support nrr acceleration into 2H looking into FY27

Snowpark, dynamic tables, iceberg tables, cortex - few businesses with this type of product roadmap and revenue realization

Top of funnel really strong with product migrations upcoming

Sridhar product thesis playing out…

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@michaeljburry My brother in Christ, you own adobe and FISV so you don’t really know what you own either

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@TMTLongShort Dude you need help

[Hard Pass @HardPass4]

Good morning and happy 4th of July.

Best country in the world.

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@hoseakidane_ @zoink The proclaimed self importance of people who work at anthropic is truly fucking exhausting

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Reminded every day how lucky we are that Biden and Kamala aren't writing AI policy. Often reminded by Marc Andreessen's clip w/ Joe Rogan.

A team up with Dario and they would think a handful of people should dictate AI behind closed doors and dictate what the world is allowed to have.

Pretty totalitarianism in my view.

It also gives a glimpse into the populace that's gone anti-AI. I think they're wrong. But they're right if the worldview is the one we just saw with Mythos launch.

The man pretends to be a white knight and then plays both sides.

Says AI is too dangerous for open competition, so fearmongers Washington to regulate it so no new entrants.

Says AI is going to destroy jobs at scale no one has ever seen before. Most tech CEOs disagree with him and say it's conflating outcomes (at least near term, obviously labor will adapt and evolve).

But then he goes on to release the strongest model ever. Gate keeps it with the tech oligarchs and makes sure they consolidate power, while the average person effectively is left in the dust.

Anthropic's own written goal: give those players an "asymmetric advantage." Dude is actively rigging the market to kill new founders, small businesses, while empowering the incumbents.

What scares me the most is that he thinks it's for the greater good? A form of effective altruism.

Dude wants to be the AI dictator.

You can't be left to your own whims. So let me be king and I will decide what's best that aligns with my view for a perfect society.

Wants to decide what actions the government can take in wartime usage. His cleared employees get to decide whether the military can even use it in a strike. A private company, vetoing the United States military.

He says fear corporate power. While he builds the biggest corporate-state lock on a technology in history.

Who gets the model. Who gets compute. Who gets security. Who gets an export license. Who gets to deploy.

All of it routes through Anthropic and a dozen approved friends.

This man is building the AI cartel. OPEC of the Magnificent 12. They call it Glasswing.

And then he thinks we are morons with a neutered version of Claude Fable 5 that's literally tampering with workflows deemed a threat and outright blocking any breakthroughs at a consumer level.

A handful of people in San Francisco now decide what you're allowed to learn, build, and know.

They burned books for less. They told women they couldn't read for less.

This is the biggest consolidation of power tech has ever pulled.

Yann LeCun calls it regulatory capture. Says it ends with a few companies owning AI.

David Sacks called Anthropic's playbook regulatory capture built on fear-mongering.

Jeremy Howard and Nathan Lambert watched the Fable launch and called it what it is. Throttling outside builders to widen the gap. Anti-science.

Little Tech sees it. Founders locked out so the incumbents win.

I'm pro capitalism. I'm pro technology. I'm pro every builder this man is trying to lock out.

The answer isn't to trust the king.

Open models. Open weights. Real competition. The frontier in everyone's hands, not behind a velvet rope for a dozen approved friends.

Founders, builders, every lab told to wait your turn. This fight is yours.

Don't let one man decide what humanity is allowed to know or do.

Surprised open-source Chinese models are less totalitarian than what we get from Dario and Sam.

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

AI maxis: There is unlimited demand for compute!

Also AI Maxis: Open AI starting a price war for users and compue means nothing from a demand signal

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

I kid you not, this was the exact day Karl K downgraded ServiceNow. The absolute bottom

[Wasteland Capital @ecommerceshares]

Pretty much all SAAS stocks bottomed on April 10, which was a full 10 days after the ceasefire market lows. They had continued to fall until April 11, when the bounce started.

Do you remember the catalyst?

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@matt_slotnick I assume this is sarcasm

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

Where are they going to get their oil, Harry. Critical thinking ATL

[Harry J. Kazianis @GrecianFormula]

America's aircraft carriers are near Iran, in shipyards, or sailing around Africa. If China moves on Taiwan right now, the Navy has what looks like none available. That's a problem

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@bobspaysubstack Cash flow a better comparison here fwiw

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@BucknSF Trash margins and terrible execution. Seems like move to AI working great

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@dalibali2 I do agree for consumers - though for AI/agents, crypto might finally have a use case that gets people concerned on core rails at some point if tasks off. Agents with a crypto wallet feels like it would actually be a better technology experience

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@matt_slotnick @zoink Neither did cursor, lovable, Replit or any other AI first app. New TAMs are being created. Have seen some very interesting apps built internally at several of our businesses and FIG can win this over time given current enterprise penetration and product set

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

Can expand seats and usage outside of the product org into other disciplines, ie. Finance, sales, hr. Figma owns the workflow/assets/brand and can support broader product design across the whole enterprise. Every team should have a designer/product leader teaming with the operating teams to build, like we did with data team buildouts 5-10 years ago. No reason make can’t win this market over time

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@ThinkingUSD Kashi is probably doing over $1b rev run rate but sure

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

This is the best written pushback of companies staying private too long and has been truly a massive wealth transfer to a limited few in the valley

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Thanks for the thought-provoking piece.

My main critique is that you are overemphasizing flashy but low probability events like “left-handed bacteria,” while merely giving lip service to the risk of extreme economic concentration of power, which is very real and materializing as we speak.

Anthropic is reportedly raising funds at a $350B valuation, and the wealth created thus far has been concentrated into a few hundred (perhaps more like dozens) high net worth individuals / institutions. It’s looking increasingly likely to me that none of the leading AI labs will IPO until they reach valuations in the trillions, at which point retail investors will finally be able to get shares. In order for retail to get a 100x return on these investments, which was achievable for Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, the valuations of the AI labs will need to reach hundreds of trillions of dollars, meaning it’s likely too late for a more equitable redistribution of wealth.

Simply put, you are currently exacerbating the problem. The consequences of this are that voters may take matters into their own hands and push for either or both 1) more aggressive / nonsensical forms of redistribution — the CA Founders’ Tax is just the beginning or 2) a drastic knee-capping of the AI industry in America, which make the CCP dominance scenario more likely.

The solution is to enable retail ownership now, increasing the number of Americans with economic exposure to Anthropic and other AI labs from hundreds of people to millions.

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@TheStalwart I’d kill to see the risk model

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@TheStalwart Algos. Selling pressure in credit cards yesterday makes the algos think that there’s a credit issue and sell anything related to it

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

ChatGpt has a $9,600 target for Uber. Quality work here

@BillAckman if you thought your Uber bull case was good before, wait until you see this!

[Thrill McDermott @Thrillmcdermott]

@BucknSF @buccocapital @treiner5 Given most restaurants hate the fees on DASH and don’t want to be single threaded seems like a challenging motion. Probably more impact to XYZ/Clover/Legacy since Dash won’t do full service well