The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves. I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside. This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week. - Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation - AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B - Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO - Oura Pulls IPO - Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma 1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position. 2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value. 3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers. 4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions? Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets. 5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics. 6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion? Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity. (links in comments)

Cognition is Infoysys masquerading as Anthropic

Why a16z, Lightspeed and General Catalyst Cannot Go To LPs and Be Confident of a 5X Net: "@ravi_lsvp, @pmarca @bhorowitz cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5x net. If you look at the recent returns data, it suggests that. They will make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis but LPs are in the business to make high money on money returns." @EverettRandle Love to hear your thoughts on this Ravi, Ben, Marc @htaneja would you not argue that different LPs have different return requirements and expectations?

Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate. This milestone belongs to our customers. Here's how a few of them are building with Devin.

It's been amazing to see all the new users to fomo over the past few months We now have 2.5 million users, many of which have joined us recently We've done over $500mn in annualized revenue over the past 30 days We've paid out $10mn to fomo creators in the past 2-3 weeks alone

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

The world needs far more software than it can build. Cognition exists to change that. We’ve just raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Since our round in May, run-rate revenue has grown from $492 M to almost $900 M.

The momentum continues at @WeAreLegora ...we beat our original Q3 '26 plan a full month early. July was the strongest quarter-opening month in Legora's history, and August was even larger. Total net new ARR grew 36% MoM. But the story of the month is in-house teams. ARR from in-house is up 15x+ YoY, average ARR per in-house customer is up 2.5x+ YoY, and in-house teams are now almost half of our total new customers. Most importantly, you earn ARR by building the best product on the market. Our usage climbs every month: 16+ hours per monthly active user. In September, we expect to add more ARR than in all of Q1 '26 combined, which would make Q3 the best quarter in our history and capture yet another ARR milestone. LFG!