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Gurley: NYT profile of Dario Amodei
Bill Gurley called the New York Times piece on Anthropic's CEO "a must read for anyone associated with AI." He named corporate customers, analysts and, "most importantly," regulators of AI, because it is "critical to understand the 'why'" . What stood out to him was Amodei as a high school student who was a "Y2K worrier," which Gurley called "quite defining" . Reporter Ryan Mac says the team spent months on the piece. It describes a man influenced by rationalism, effective altruism and Ray Kurzweil, whose convictions "are being tested now as his company is about to go public" . Article
Chamath: Brandur's "slightly bearish" thoughts on Stripe
Chamath Palihapitiya quoted @brandur's "overly long (slightly bearish?) thoughts on Stripe." Brandur opens by noting that roughly half of the best people he worked with at Stripe are now at Anthropic and the other half at OpenAI . Chamath's takeaway is that "the value of being public is access to capital." Public markets let a company build a warchest in exuberant times and deploy it during contractions, which private companies find much harder to do . Because a tech company is "always one turn of innovation away from irrelevance," he argues that staying private underprices its cash flows when markets are exuberant and overprices them during declines . Post
O'Shaughnessy: Ben Thompson on the AI capital gap
Patrick O'Shaughnessy posted a clip of Ben Thompson on why "we might run out of capital before we run out of demand for compute" . Thompson argues that AI spending has moved down the capital curve, from free cash flow to debt to equity. He says that if returns don't arrive in time "we could have a big blowup," and that today's spending "all goes into compute in 2029" . Post
Casado: Exo paper and poteto on formal methods
Martin Casado shared the arXiv paper on Exo, which he co-wrote with Alex Krentsel and @ankrgyl. It tests how much a model can optimize a task when it can read runtime logs and modify and rebuild its own harness. The authors borrowed from operating systems work to make those changes safely, and Casado calls the results "surprisingly strong" . Paper
He also endorsed @poteto's post on formal methods as "exactly my long standing view" . Poteto argues for layered checks: guardrails, empirical verification, and formal verification such as TLA+ model checking for the parts that need it. He also recommends his /statechart skill for confirming that an agent understood your intent . Post
Shorter picks
- Sarah Guo shared Alex Ker's explainer on speeding up DeepSeek Flash, saying "love us some model driven model infra" . Ker says their internal harness optimized more than 80 kernels, reaching 991 output tokens per second. The explainer covers kernel fusion, programmatic dependent launch and host loop minimization . Post
- Garry Tan highlighted DeepFinance as "the first long horizon benchmark for PE/IB work," adding that "solving high finance is on the path to AGI" . It has 21 expert-built problems based on real deal data, each representing 20–40 hours of professional work . Leaderboard
- Elon Musk said Iain Banks "arguably has the best vision for the future" . He was responding to a post describing the Culture novels as a civilization of compute abundance where people choose among ships organized around different ways of life .
- Naval shared Akira the Don's new track "The Real Currency of Life," which is built on Naval's own line : "Not money, not time - but attention" . Post
- Vinod Khosla called his WSJ video interview with Sarah Krouse on job losses, capital gains and an AI safety net a "great conversation" . Video
- Jason Lemkin promoted the new 20VC x SaaStr episode on OpenAI's lower $1.25 trillion valuation, Anthropic's growth "halved," and agents bypassing DoorDash . Episode
Reid Hoffman suggested that viewers unfamiliar with his reference during a discussion of recursive self-improvement watch “the documentary” or consult Wikipedia; he did not identify the documentary, its creator, or a specific Wikipedia entry.
Keith Rabois shared Alex Konrad’s post announcing an on-camera interview with Ramp co-CEO Eric Glyman for The Upstarts Podcast, captioning it “Ramp’ng.” The announcement links to the video.
Naval shared Akira the Don’s video “The Real Currency of Life”, whose post marks it “OUT NOW,” and stressed its takeaway: attention—not money or time—is life’s real currency.
Tim Ferriss recommends watching his full conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté, titled Dr. Gabor Maté on How to Reframe a Challenging Moment; the video is available on YouTube.
A sponsor blurb for Tiago Forte’s Life in Perspective lists Sahil Bloom among people who praised the book. It presents the ARC Method—Appreciate the Past, Reflect on the Present, Create the Future—as a repeatable annual life-review ritual, but gives no specific reason for Bloom’s praise.
Garry Tan linked Jeremy Tate’s X post about declining AP-exam rigor, saying the broader watering down of standards by university education departments in the 2020s “needs to be studied.” Tate’s post points to a new Education Next piece and cites cuts to AP Biology content and other exam changes as evidence.
Garry Tan highlights DeepFinance, released by @0interestrates: a 21-problem benchmark built using real deal data for PE/IB work representing 20–40 hours of human professionals’ work . Tan calls it the first long-horizon PE/IB benchmark and says solving high finance is on the path to AGI . DeepFinance leaderboard .
Chamath Palihapitiya linked to @brandur’s post “For fun, overly long (slightly bearish?) thoughts on Stripe,” saying its generalization was worth considering. His takeaway: public-market access lets companies build a cash reserve during exuberant periods and deploy it during contractions—a harder strategy for private companies—and capital can fund compensation, product, R&D, competition, and growth. He also notes that tech-company cash flows are fragile because a single turn of innovation can make a company irrelevant. Read Brandur’s post.
Bill Gurley called a New York Times piece about Dario Amodei a “must read” for people associated with AI—including corporate customers, analysts and especially regulators—to understand Amodei’s “why”; the linked report describes his convictions and influences on AI development. Gurley said what stood out to him was Amodei as a young high-school student who was a “Y2K worrier.” NYT article
Sarah Guo (@saranormous) endorsed Alex Ker’s post about speeding up DeepSeek Flash, highlighting roughly 1,000 TPS and saying she likes “model driven model infra.” Ker’s post explains kernel fusion, programmatic dependent launch, and host loop minimization as ways to make flash models faster: Alex Ker’s post.
Tim Ferriss recommends his new podcast episode, “Lucky #888 — My Tour of Designing Luck in China, Japan, and Korea,” a nerdy exploration of the number eight in those countries, with examples including a million-dollar license plate, disappearing hotel floors, and a casino room designed around a gambler’s birthday. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1d9CpkSIYFRGlHyMbWFzzp
Vinod Khosla shared a Wall Street Journal video interview about job losses, capital gains, and an AI safety net, thanked WSJ and Sarah Krouse, and called it a “great conversation.” Watch the video.
Jason Lemkin promoted a new 20VC x SaaStr episode, “OpenAI Cuts to $1.25 Trillion, Anthropic’s Growth Goes From 12x to 2x, and Why Agents Are an Existential Risk to DoorDash”; the post highlights OpenAI price cuts, slower Anthropic growth, and the possibility that agents could bypass DoorDash. Episode link
Harry Stebbings called the tech show “the only show you need to listen to in tech”; the post presents it as notes with Jason Lemkin and Rory Driscoll on OpenAI, market turmoil, DoorDash/Instacart, Kalshi, and Cognition. Jason Lemkin shared it with “We’re back!!” and linked the YouTube video.
Jason Lemkin urged followers to “Learn from the best!” and linked to @samdblond’s announcement of Monaco’s Vertical Agent Meetup on Nov. 18 in San Francisco. The meetup is presented as a chance for people building specialized agents for production to learn and share practical practices, “All signal, no hype.” Announcement
Elon Musk called Gavin S. Baker’s post “Interesting” and linked to it; the post discusses Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa’s data-center policies . Baker’s post points to an interview video and notes that the data-center discussion starts at 6:30 . Musk gave no specific reason for his interest .
Jason Lemkin promoted the video “Going from 10 to 1 SDRs: How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org”, featuring Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser. His highlighted takeaway: Vercel ran its AI SDR in shadow mode for six weeks and reviewed every output to improve it; Grosser says it now performs like a 90th-percentile rep 100% of the time.
Garry Tan recommended watching the full conversation from Walter Isaacson’s podcast featuring Tan, saying it had gone live earlier that week; he linked to the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq1H71h-gYE.
Elon Musk called @Smirkley’s CNN exit-poll quadrant chart “Interesting” and linked the post—a brief positive signal, not an explicit read-or-watch recommendation. The chart compares which issues hurt or helped Republicans and how voters who called each issue crucial voted.
Martin Casado endorsed @poteto’s post on formal methods, saying it reflected his “long standing view”; the post’s takeaway is to combine formal verification, such as TLA+ with TLC, with empirical checks. Poteto also recommends trying the pstack /statechart skill to make implicit state machines easier to inspect: skill link.
