# Patrick Collison cites The Winged Gospel to push back on "last chance to found a company" fears *By Recommended Reading from Tech Founders β€’ November 9, 2026* Collison's book pick at Startup School leads. Also: Garry Tan reproduces an article on cutting agent costs, Patrick O'Shaughnessy re-shares the Colossus Zuckerberg profile, and Paul Graham points to a National Review piece on the midterms. ## Patrick Collison: *The Winged Gospel* At Startup School, an interviewer asked **Patrick Collison** about the student meme that anyone who doesn't drop out and start a company now will be "trapped in the permanent underclass" [^1]. Collison answered that humanity has "always had... an affinity for these millinarian sort of models" in which society is about to be permanently transformed [^1]. He then recommended a book: "there's a great book, The Winged Gospel." His summary of it: after aviation was invented, people believed humanity was entering a new era. Aviation turned out to be "a pretty big deal," he said, but not the "sociological rewriting" its excitable backers expected [^1]. His conclusion: "I would take the under on this being the last couple of years... to create a company" [^1]. [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60HHTYELsts) ## Garry Tan: @polydao on cutting agent costs **Garry Tan** tested an article instead of just endorsing it. His gstack-evals project tried to reproduce @polydao's "How to Cut Your Agent Bill by 90% With Jev Engineering and Kimi K3." He reports that "this article replicates," and that a model he also had it try, particle-1, did "even better" [^2][^3]. The article's starting point is that most calls in an agent loop are small decisions: which tool to use next, whether a source is relevant, whether the task is done. Each one is billed as a full frontier-model generation [^3]. Its fix is to send those decisions to a cheaper model based on calibrated confidence, and pass only the hard cases to Kimi K3 [^3]. [Article](https://x.com/i/article/2104561908137283584) ## Patrick O'Shaughnessy: Colossus's Zuckerberg profile **Patrick O'Shaughnessy** re-shared *Colossus*'s "Mark," by @colossusjeremy, as "Worth a revisit" [^4]. Colossus describes Zuckerberg as the head of "history's largest nonterritorial empire" who "nonetheless remains a prisoner of his rivals." The profile took nearly a year. Stern interviewed three dozen people, among them Zuckerberg himself and his critics and competitors at frontier AI labs [^5]. [Article](https://colossus.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-profile/) ## Paul Graham: Andrew McCarthy on the midterms **Paul Graham** shared Andrew McCarthy's *National Review* piece "on what caused the Republicans to lose so badly in the midterms." He added no comment of his own [^6]. ## Shorter picks - **Martin Casado** called a demo video "beautiful" [^7]. It shows an open-world game built with Opus 5.5, gpt-Astra, Three.js, Anatomy and Suno, with art direction in the style of Moebius and Roger Dean [^8]. [Post](https://x.com/bei351009016/status/2119278569314779339) - **Tobi LΓΌtke** said "Love this" about John Fewell's isometric map of Toronto [^9]. The map covers all 630 kmΒ² from four angles, and you can rotate it to explore [^10]. [Map](https://iso.sloptoronto.ca) - **Jason Lemkin** promoted his own SaaStr piece on this week's 20VC episode. The headline takeaway: SaaStr cut the costs of its Connect app by 72% just by switching models, so "Re-benchmark every time a new small model ships" [^11]. [Article](https://www.saastr.com/jasons-takes-on-this-weeks-20vc-a-72-cost-drop-on-our-own-app-the-100m-acquisition-bar-and-doordashs-third-competitor/) --- ### Sources [^1]: [Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60HHTYELsts) [^2]: [𝕏 post by @garrytan](https://x.com/garrytan/status/2119624260675350605) [^3]: [𝕏 article by @Mr_Buzzoni](https://x.com/i/article/2104561908137283584) [^4]: [𝕏 post by @patrick_oshag](https://x.com/patrick_oshag/status/2119613277353419119) [^5]: [𝕏 post by @colossusmag](https://x.com/colossusmag/status/2099462933759553568) [^6]: [𝕏 post by @paulg](https://x.com/paulg/status/2119414341980012850) [^7]: [𝕏 post by @martin_casado](https://x.com/martin_casado/status/2119476281356267622) [^8]: [𝕏 post by @bei351009016](https://x.com/bei351009016/status/2119278569314779339) [^9]: [𝕏 post by @tobi](https://x.com/tobi/status/2119510806295466266) [^10]: [𝕏 post by @johnfewell](https://x.com/johnfewell/status/2119483229224771997) [^11]: [𝕏 post by @jasonlk](https://x.com/jasonlk/status/2119617852151894297)