One day after learning @monarch_money is at 1M+ users + $100M ARR @ebloch shared that @ChatGPT made Finances FREE + in Sept they shipped credit score monitoring, stock watchlists, Voice, & Coinbase support For ChatGPT Finances, you connect your accounts via @Plaid & get dashboards on spending, subscriptions, bills, net worth, portfolio allocation, + daily moves on ur holdings Feels like it's already at parity with PFMs on the basics? Have been having a version of this debate a lot recently re: the labs eating into the app layer --> the bear case for standalone PFMs is that every incremental new user gets more expensive to acquire when a free version lives inside ChatGPT I still think there's room for both. Tech-forward users who love tinkering will prolly use ChatGPT for this stuff, but most consumers are passive and need to be acquired, educated & feel like they're working with a brand built for them The labs will take a slice of PFM but I think the biggest consumer fintech cos will still be the ones whose whole purpose is serving that customer

TIL Spotify tells you your taste profile (top left nav)

One of the unusual things Biden and Trump agreed on was protecting a small group of port workers at the expense of all Americans 😡

I trimmed an $NVDA position yesterday that I’ve held since 2017 and already have extreme seller’s remorse that I did something dumb Moved 1/4 of the position into an exchange fund, the remainder is ~15% of my liquid portfolio.

TIL that ~25% of households in the US pay for SiriusXM!

Law was one of the most obvious early verticals for LLMs: expensive labor, lots of text, document-heavy workflows, and customers paying $000s per seat. GPT-4 (2023) was an inflection point for legal AI, & Harvey and Legora have shown how big that category can become. That inflection point took longer for accounting, looks like it happened around o3 (2025). AI has advanced enough now that accounting should be a great vertical for agents. The work seems particularly well-suited to AI: they use checklists, outputs are verifiable, and work is done by juniors and reviewed by seniors. That maps almost perfectly to AI doing the work and humans reviewing exceptions. Per the research below (great work!), 18 months ago the best models were still below the average accountant on these tasks, but today the newest models outperform junior accountants. There’s still a lot of work to do. Long-horizon, end-to-end accounting workflows are far from solved, and will be a massive unlock... but the trajectory is very clear.

California politicians love to campaign on how bad they were at school: My supervisor candidate cites his 151 LSAT Newsom often mentions his 960 SAT. Villaraigosa made failing the bar 4x part of his campaign I do not find it appealing but I guess it works for some.

I eat at Indian restaurants for Christmas every year - they are open! Join us!

Random idea @vladtenev: bring shareholder perks to Robinhood. Let companies reward people for owning their stock, with better perks for larger and longer-held positions.

Missed this yday - @Muse is 3 wks old & already has 3M+ people prompting it every week (4M+ weekly users total, 1M+ daily) per @theinformation - Launched Sept 8, still only live in US + Canada - 5M US downloads in 22 days (per @SensorTower) - #1 free app on the US App Store since Sept 18 Distribution, distribution, distribution! Obvi still super early. Real test is retention + what usage looks like once the initial curiosity wears off and the low hanging fruit use cases (negotiating bills, canceling subs, etc.) get used up theinformation.com/briefings…

This is smart and I hadn’t thought about it this way. Meta may not need to put ads inside Muse... If Muse browses, shops, or makes reservations for you, it creates intent signals Meta can monetize later through ads on Instagram and Facebook.

IMO it’s very smart to partner with CMU rather than attempt to start Griffin University. University prestige is one of the longest-duration network effects in the economy… CMU itself is the newest university in the top 50 in the US, from 1900! A degree is valuable in large part because everyone agrees it’s valuable. Students want Harvard because employers and grad schools value Harvard. Employers value Harvard partly because great students go there. Great students go because great faculty, alumni and other great students are there. Successful alumni donate, the school gets richer and more selective, and the cycle compounds. It’s a coordination equilibrium that becomes incredibly hard for a new entrant to break. You can spend billions and buy a beautiful campus, labs, great professors and scholarships, but you can’t buy generations of alumni, employer recognition, applicant demand and the shared belief that a degree from your institution means something. Stanford is the most recent ultra elite university, founded in 1885. It was absurdly well capitalized and benefitted from the West Coast being a huge underserved market. Essentially no new entrant has broken into the top tier of American universities, despite some good attempts (Olin, Minerva, UATX) Imo the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy is a very interesting experiment. They’re explicitly trying to build an elite institution from scratch for young builders. The first class will be tuition-free and have access to people like Jensen, Sama, Satya, and Patrick Collison, plus employer partnerships with a bunch of top companies. It’s polarizing, but putting Horowitz and Andreessen in the name is very smart imo. The fundamental problem with starting a university is that a new institution has no reputation, but they get to borrow a reputation from day one… Andreessen and Horowitz already mean something in the exact network they’re targeting. The name signals something to ambitious young builders, founders, investors and tech employers, they are borrowing prestige from them and the people that students will have access to. They’re effectively trying to bootstrap the network effect instead of waiting 100 years for it to emerge. Which gets back to Griffin. With $2B, he could build Griffin University. Instead he’s essentially building a new university in Miami and putting CMU’s name on it. Ken can buy almost everything a university needs except the hardest asset to create: the accumulated belief in the name, and CMU has a good one!