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Will Manidis's The Commanding Heights
Will Manidis released The Commanding Heights, the result of what he calls a year of "writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power." His framing line is that "the benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco." Three investors shared it:
- Chamath Palihapitiya: "I like Will's writings - I always learn something that helps me refine my mental models."
- Scott Belsky: "A lot of ideas backed by observations and data in this outlook, beautifully written as always."
- Patrick O'Shaughnessy replied with a list of companies, "Stripe, Meta, ICE, Shopify, Coinbase, Ramp, Cloudflare, WorkOS, Circle, Hyperliquid?", and then "Or, just Meta". It reads as a joking guess at the work's thesis.
Martin Casado: a systems talk on agent harnesses
Martin Casado admits he is "a tad biased." Still, he calls this YouTube talk "the best systems talk on agent harnesses," covering "what it means to be self improving and bitter lesson aligned." His verdict: "a must watch." In replies to @SeizeEndowments, he said the talk "shamelessly cribbed many of the ideas and the naming from your Exo Kernel work." He also pointed to the main section at 20:13.
Vinod Khosla: "How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World"
Vinod Khosla called @jsnnsa's X article "Impressive." The author says Spawn is ten people who "spend 30x payroll on AI tokens." The company reports shipping 77,000 substantial changes in 30 days and spending $3.1 million on tokens in a month. Its "fleet" is a set of permanent agents. Each has a name, a memory and real system permissions, and each owns one area, such as the engine, finance or bug triage. The author says they wrote it down because other founders wanted to know how Spawn thinks about this.
Shorter picks
- Sarah Guo called Mike Schroepfer's new Field Trips series a "super fun format with an uber-engineer." Schroepfer says touring factories and labs is one of his favorite parts of his job. The series opens with RhodaAI, Arbor Energy and Harbinger Motors.
- Tim Ferriss shared Pavel Tsatsouline's "Basic Tenets for Strength," such as "Lift heavy, not hard" and keeping reps at five or fewer. He singled out "Training is something that should be enjoyed" as literal advice: after a maximal-strength workout you should feel better than when you walked in, because "there is a huge neural component."
- Garry Tan shared Nancy Rommelmann's monograph The Gloss of Good Intentions: How Portland Blew a Chance to Become the Next Great American City. She re-posted it after Portland's Royal Sonesta Hotel reportedly sold for $6.83M, down 93% from its 2016 price. Tan called Portland "a cautionary tale" of what happens when no one pushes back on people "using national politics as a reason to destroy your local government."
- Chamath promoted his firm Social Capital's deep dive, Memory chip profits are exploding, so why are stocks below their highs?. It notes that big memory stocks are still down roughly 22–65% from their highs while profits climb. The question it asks is whether memory is becoming a franchise or heading into another boom-and-bust cycle.
- Tobi Lütke said he "Really enjoyed" his conversation with Alex Heath. Last edition covered his Cryptonomicon comment from this episode. Topics include why Amazon blocked Meta's Muse while Shopify welcomed it, who pays when agents make purchases, and his GPU wine cellar. It's on YouTube and Spotify.
Guillermo Rauch said he likes Tesla’s four-point master plan as a model for balancing a focused niche with mass-market ambition: begin with a world-class Roadster for a limited audience, then expand into adjacent markets; he cautioned that a niche needs a credible path to further expansion. Interview
Sam Altman endorsed Emmett Shear’s description of an ideal AI collaborator as “a really thoughtful and challenging, but still respectful, senior coworker,” saying he had not heard a better brief encapsulation.
Guillermo Rauch praised the immediately preceding talk at the event as insightful, highlighting the idea that human attention is a critical, precious resource; the excerpt does not identify the talk’s speaker or title .
- A 20VC participant praised a recent episode featuring Nadella as a “great show,” calling him a “fantastic guest.”
- A participant called an unnamed cartoon/graph about investors’ market understanding “brilliant.” It depicts a career arc from initially thinking one knows the market, through a middle period of thinking oneself an intelligent investor, and back to where one started; another participant agreed that it was “so true.”
Sarah Guo pointed followers to a fresh No Priors episode featuring Serval CEO @jakeserval, framing it as a discussion of “seeing the future and the road ahead” for Serval. The episode covers why systems of record have not been replaced in the era of AI code generation and Serval taking on ServiceNow (episode post).
Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) recommends his Social Capital deep dive, “Memory chip profits are exploding, so why are stocks below their highs?”; read it here. The article examines whether SI-driven memory profits signal a durable franchise or another boom-and-bust cycle, tracing the question through memory fundamentals, industry power, suppliers, demand, and signals to watch. Chamath frames it as Social Capital research and a guide to the signals they are watching next.
Sarah Guo (@saranormous) praised the Field Trips format shared by @schrep as “super fun” and featuring an “uber-engineer.” The linked YouTube channel begins with factory and lab visits to RhodaAI, Arbor Energy, and Harbinger Motors.
Jack called @goose_oss’s X post “excellent.” The post describes an unspecified item as “minimal by design,” saying it is 235 tokens and has the chart’s lowest context tax; it links to a post by @nathanhabib1011.
Vinod Khosla shared DeryaTR_'s post about Claude and Divergence Labs generating roughly 35,000 antibody designs in about a month, adding that advances like these depend on entrepreneurs with imagination and agency. The post said some designs performed better than Xolair in specific lab tests, while noting the results were early and still required development, validation, and clinical trials.
Sarah Guo recommends “listen to Ilya” while urging people to pursue interesting missions and outcomes rather than personal recognition; the post does not specify a particular work or identify which Ilya.
Tim Ferriss highlighted Pavel Tsatsouline’s “Basic Tenets for Strength,” including practicing strength as a skill, lifting heavy rather than hard, and keeping strength-training reps to five or fewer (post). He explicitly endorsed Tsatsouline’s view that training should be enjoyable, explaining that maximal-strength workouts should leave you feeling better than when you started, in part because of a substantial neural component.
Jason Lemkin shared Harry Stebbings’ post about a tech podcast, adding “We’re back!!”; Stebbings pitches the podcast as smart and funny, with “no politics, no egos, just tech,” and says the notes include Lemkin and Rodrigo Driscoll discussing Anthropic’s S-1 and the economics of fast-changing AI models. Harry Stebbings’ post
Chamath Palihapitiya endorsed Will Manidis’s writing, saying he likes it and always learns something that helps refine his mental models; he linked Manidis’s post introducing The Commanding Heights (https://Commanding-Heights.com). Manidis describes the work as drawing on a year of writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
Alexandr Wang quote-posted Sy Taylor’s post about an AirOps team study of Meta Muse, adding that Muse is “built different” and its team is “anti-slop-text.” Taylor says Muse’s answers cite more sources while using fewer words and tables, and do not ask follow-up questions, compared with ChatGPT and Anthropic.
Vinod Khosla shared and praised Salar’s video/post, calling it a “real world deployment” with “insane complexity” and highlighting that robots did 100% of the brickwork. Salar’s post describes the robots building in Almere with curved walls, different brick types and bonds, and indented text.
Vinod Khosla called @jsnnsa’s article “How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World” “Impressive,” linking to @jsnnsa’s post sharing the article; he offered no further rationale.
Vinod Khosla endorsed Elon Musk’s X post, agreeing that breakthroughs across fields are accelerating exponentially and that exponentials initially look small; Khosla added that such breakthroughs are unlikely to come from big bio companies.
Tobi Lütke endorsed Alex Heath’s podcast conversation, “Tobi Lütke on the AI agent revolution and future of Shopify,” saying he “Really enjoyed this conversation.” The episode discusses AI agents, agentic shopping, AI’s effect on starting businesses, and advertising; Lütke’s stated reason was that he enjoyed the conversation. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/71xOycjYFjWEVSqhTpYPv8?si=rtVJne2kSr6L6QnAZWRGYw
Jason Lemkin promoted a new 20VC x SaaStr article, “Anthropic’s S-1 Shows $16.3B in First-Half Revenue, Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 27% of Its Staff, and Chinese Open-Weight Models May Be Done in the US” , linking to it here: article . His teaser highlights Anthropic’s $16.3B in six-month revenue and its five years to IPO versus SpaceX’s 24 .
Scott Belsky praised Will Manidis’s The Commanding Heights, an outlook about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power, for its ideas backed by observations and data and its writing; he linked to the outlook.