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Top pick: USV's thesis essays, via Fred Wilson
Wilson shared The Next Chapter of USV, the post announcing the firm's new funds. He told readers to look past the headline that "we have filled the gas tank again at USV and this tank is bigger" and to "scroll down to see the four areas we want to invest these funds into" . USV is his own firm, and the post announces $900M in new funds .
The four theses, each linking to a longer USV essay:
- Obliterate Don't Automate: AI will reshape markets completely rather than just make them faster . In USV's companion YouTube conversation, a speaker who isn't named calls Wilson's 2014 post "probably the best articulation of the thesis USV has always had": moving value to end users and away from "the centers of power in the middle" .
- Data at the Edge: the most valuable data is data that couldn't be reached until now, gathered through physical intelligence, robotics, sensors and similar tools .
- The Rebel Alliance: buyers want more powerful intelligence but closer alignment on trust, security, memory and cost .
- Energy: USV's dedicated energy fund is being folded into the core fund .
Jaan Tallinn's reading and viewing list (The Generalist)
Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype, an early DeepMind investor and the lead of Anthropic's first round . The show notes for his Generalist episode give his complete reading list as one book: Roger Penrose's Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness . The notes don't name Penrose; that credit is added here, and no reason for the pick is given. His listed favorite movies are The Odyssey, On the Edge, Limitless, Ex Machina and Colossus: The Forbin Project . Other resources in the notes include "The Bitter Lesson," AI 2027 and The Glass Bead Game . Listen
Chamath Palihapitiya: a16z on powering AI growth
Chamath quoted a16z's post linking @rmcentush's essay on Texas and data centers. The post says the US grid plans to add 86 GW this year, including 43.4 GW of solar, 24.3 GW of batteries and no new nuclear . Chamath's takeaway: solar and batteries are becoming "hugely lucrative markets." He expects them to consolidate the way natural gas did in the late 2010s, with "many new big energy companies" emerging .
Elad Gil: Hone's "Closing the Gap"
Gil reacted to Hone's launch with "Exciting" and pointed to its blog post. What he singled out was "the self-improvement" .
Garry Tan: two endorsements
- Pope Leo XIV's homily. The quoted passage argues that intelligence "must draw on memory" and recall lived experience, not "simply compile data" . Tan's comment: "This is why I made GBrain" .
- Elena Verna's clip on Lenny Rachitsky's account. Verna argues that if AI is changing work, "ICs should get paid more than managers" . Tan called it "Logical" and said ICs with agents will outperform equivalent managers from earlier eras .
Bill Gates: contrails (Gates Notes)
Gates linked his own piece on the "mind-blowing impact" of fixing contrails . His case: persistent contrails cause about half of aviation's warming effect, and getting rid of some could eliminate "up to two percent of all global warming" .
Elon Musk: Artificial Analysis's legal benchmark
Musk shared the Harvey LAB-AA v1.1 results with "Grok 4.7 ranks first in legal matters" . xAI is his own company. The lead is narrow: 9.4%, against 8.9% for Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 and 8.6% for GPT-6 Astra on the new hallucination-gated metric . The report also says more than 60% of otherwise passing results contained a material hallucination .
Shorter mentions
- Naval quoted Amjad Masad's post on AI decompilation, which ran in the last brief via Chamath. His one-liner: "Turns out the 'Open' part refers to your code" .
- Sarah Guo promoted Baseten's All-Gather research conference in San Francisco on November 18. She called a day of researchers arguing about inference "my idea of a good time" . She is also listed as a speaker .
- Jason Lemkin promoted his own 20VC x SaaStr episode with MongoDB's Dev Ittycheria. The episode covers OpenAI's $70B run rate and agents picking vendors . On the show, a panelist called a Wall Street Journal piece on a withdrawn IPO "a good piece" .
An unidentified USV speaker praised Fred Wilson’s 2014 blog post “Obliterate Don’t Automate” as the best articulation of USV’s longstanding thesis: use new tools to restructure markets and shift value from centers of power to end users.
- Jaan Tallinn, an early investor in DeepMind and Anthropic, includes Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness in his complete reading list; no reason for the selection is stated.
- Tallinn’s listed favorite movies are The Odyssey, On the Edge, Limitless, Ex Machina, and Colossus: The Forbin Project; the listing gives no rationale for these favorites.
Balaji promoted free online viewing of Network State Conference 2026 via YouTube @nspodcast, and later linked to the full conference online. The conference featured Balaji and Curtis Yarvin debating what follows the pre-Internet order: Balaji argued for decentralization, while Yarvin made the case for centralization.
Garry Tan shared a video post featuring Elena Verna’s argument that, if AI changes work, individual contributors should be paid more than managers because they can have greater impact than managers in the pre-AI system . Tan called the point logical, adding that future ICs working with agents will be more productive and create better outcomes than equivalent people managers from prior eras .
Balaji invited viewers to watch the Network State Conference 2026 online and shared its broadcast link: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qKVmyeOlzZxB. No reason or takeaway was stated.
Bill Gates shared a link, describing it as showing the “mind-blowing impact” of solving the persistent-contrail problem. He says persistent contrails cause about half of aviation’s temperature increase, and eliminating some could eliminate up to 2% of global warming.
Chamath amplified an a16z post linking to @rmcentush’s article on how America can power the next wave of growth: https://www.a16z.news/p/why-texas-is-making-data-centers. His takeaway was that solar and batteries are becoming major, lucrative energy markets, likely to consolidate, and could produce many large energy companies.
A 20VC panelist called a Wall Street Journal piece about Aura’s withdrawn IPO “a good piece”; in the discussion, the panel considered a pending M&A as one possible explanation for the withdrawal and raised the risk that overly optimistic IPO pricing pitches can lead to a withdrawal when investor offers come in lower. The speaker, article title, and byline were not identified.
Garry Tan linked to @deedydas’s X post about OpenAI’s math release and recent AI progress, adding that agent swarms are real and will bring “incredible advancement across all human understanding”—a positive signal of support for the linked discussion, though not an explicit instruction to read it.
Sarah Guo recommends BaseTen’s All-Gather research conference in San Francisco on November 18, saying a full day of researchers arguing about inference and the future is her idea of a good time. The conference is described as a day of debate among researchers, founders, and engineers about pre-training, post-training, infrastructure, model performance, and emerging fields; apply here.
Elad Gil recommended Hone’s blog post, saying he especially likes its self-improvement angle.
Elon Musk pointed to @XFreeze’s post explaining SpaceX’s goal of making life multiplanetary, replying “This is why” and linking to the post. The post presents reusable rockets, Starship and orbital refueling as steps toward a multiplanetary civilization, arguing that expanding beyond Earth can help life and consciousness survive and evolve.
Jason Lemkin shared a YouTube video of a discussion with Dev Ittycheria, Harry Stebbings, @rodriscoll and Lemkin; his recap emphasizes that developers and executives switch quickly and AI agents are choosing vendors, making visibility in AI-generated answers important. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAwiGfk_sCY
Jason Lemkin promoted a new 20VC x SaaStr feature with MongoDB’s Dev Ittycheria, teasing discussion of OpenAI’s $70B run rate, a CRO moving to a direct competitor, and agents choosing vendors; the post does not give a separate reason for recommending it. Link: https://www.saastr.com/20vc-x-saastr-with-mongodbs-dev-ittycheria-openai-reaccelerates-to-a-70b-run-rate-a-cro-jumps-to-a-direct-competitor-and-agents-start-picking-your-vendors/
Elon Musk pointed followers to Artificial Analysis’s Harvey LAB-AA v1.1 benchmark report, writing that “Grok 4.7 ranks first in legal matters” and linking to the report . The report’s headline result was Grok 4.7 (xhigh) at 9.4% Hallucination-Gated All-Pass Rate, narrowly ahead of Muse Spark 1.3 and GPT-6 Astra .
Garry Tan shared Pope Leo XIV’s passage arguing that intelligence should draw on lived memory rather than merely compile data, and said, “This is why I made GBrain,” presenting the passage as a rationale for creating it. The passage is from the Vatican homily: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2026/documents/20261008-messa-univ-pontificie.html
Elon Musk endorsed Andrew Warner’s guide to connecting Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions to Grok Bot, calling the setup “As easy as asking” (guide). Warner’s guide says to ask Grok Bot to connect the subscriptions using Claude Code and Codex; it then installs both command-line tools and asks the user to log in.
Elon Musk linked @XFreeze’s Starlink post/video, whose explainer says the service is for people without internet access or with poor or expensive service—not a replacement for fiber or local telecom networks. Musk said Starlink connectivity for the least-served enables self-education, prosperity, and selling products worldwide.
Clement Delangue pointed followers to the Hugging Face Space “reachy-mini-yo-its-your-boy” to make their own Reachy Mini dance, in the context of a playful post asking what Reachy Mini cannot do; he gave no specific reason for recommending the Space.