Chamath Palihapitiya

Enterprises still measure an executive's importance by the size of the team they manage. But this is an old proxy for a world where more people was the only way to do more work. This isn’t true anymore. The leaders who will be most impactful over the next five years will be the ones whose people spend all their time on only the work that actually moves the business, because they use systems and factories to do more of the rest.

There is no failure. Only do and learn…

One thing that has surprised me is that shorts of @theallinpod are growing very quickly. And overall usage ramp shows this kind of content driving a huge portion of our growth. Bad news if your content format is 30-90mins. People love 1-2min.

What Is a Software Factory?

Earlier this year, our team at 8090 took apart the billing engine of a large entity. It was 18 million lines of COBOL and Assembly that had been accumulating since before some of our engineers were even born. Nobody fully understood it anymore but by using our Software Factory, we reverse-engineered it into more than 100,000 plain-English rules in 40 days. In finishing that work I realized why the phrase "software factory" was suddenly being used by everyone else as well. The concept is being appropriated because it implies a certain level of industrial reliability that enterprises want but aren’t getting. Software factories have fifty years…

If the monopoly —> duopoly —> oligopoly —> commodity cycle can happen in the most advanced areas of technology, in part accelerated by AI, what is the true value of “long term” cash flows? Long term may not mean what it used to…

A new study from Smarsh and FTI Consulting, out this week, found that 55 percent of enterprises are actively deploying AI right now, but only 26 percent say their governance frameworks have kept pace with that deployment. 30 percent can actually detect the AI tools employees are already running without approval. What we know is that an auditor doesn't care whether a decision was made by a person or a model. A regulator cares whether you can show your work. If you can close this auditability and governance gap with a traceable record of every decision, adoption can keep moving at full speed. If not, I suspect adoption will be forced to slow …

This was a very good and hopeful day. Thanks to @Benioff for organizing this group on such an important topic.

The marginal cost of energy is going to zero. This is bad for utilities and great for homeowners who have solar + storage. It’s also great for businesses who feed this entire supply chain. The amount of bottoms-up energy production from homeowners will shock people in its scale. America will have 100M utilities over the next 25 years.

The end boss of tokens is enterprise ROI. Nobody buys tokens for fun. A Fortune 500 CEO buys line-of-sight to making more money or operating more efficiently, and whoever can give them that will win the category. It's why everyone is now standing up consulting JVs, and it's why we built Software Factory as a control plane that can arbitrage the best of every model on behalf of large enterprises. Find out more here: https://t.co/fkfTXgcI8c

We’ve had every major open source models provider and CSP reach out to 8090 since the post below. We will run a massive recursive optimization with the major open weight models (Chinese) AND American Open Source - starting with Nvidia’s Nemotron - and will publish the results. I think you will see, unambiguously, that a 3rd party control plane (like 8090’s Software Factory) + open weight/open source + leading CSP is much cheaper and much more strategically protective than using a closed model directly.

If you can choose where to work, work somewhere that will help invest in your Trump account. $5k/yr will leave you with $13M at 55. Sorry, but that’s a huge amount of money. If you have this choice but don’t want that because it’s called a “Trump Account”, you’re a retard. 100% irresponsible retard. That’s your kids speaking btw.

Looks like Apple rebranded “top episodes” to “trending episodes” - regardless, we’re # 5 over the holiday weekend. https://t.co/MmwCFWuiq5

As said on the pod last month…the price of poker is going up.

I believe this 💯.

To our Founding Fathers, thank you for creating heaven on earth 250 years ago. America has given so many of us everything we have. I, personally, owe her everything in return. Happy 4th! https://t.co/DQoxlPjmLZ

The federal government is currently trying to do something hard and right: collapsing more than 100 separate HR systems into one. Civil servants and appointed leadership have wanted this for decades. What stopped them was not willpower, executive mandate or talent but tech debt and complexity built up slowly over decades from each system. That trend finally has a counterweight, because AI is collapsing the cost of rebuilding and retiring old software. The agencies that pair their institutional knowledge with a well governed AI control plane are going to move faster and accomplish more than anyone expects. 
If you’re interested, here is how…

Tesla is one of the smartest, cracked and most advanced engineering companies in the world. If they actually did this, then it is likely verifiably true that a dollar above $200/week is waste.

TL;DR: Use a control plane, pick your model on a per task basis, do it massively cheaper as a result, keep your edge, don’t leak it to the frontier labs. The thoughts below are exactly what we find in large enterprises that use 8090’s Software Factory control plane. Our control plane is agnostic and sits above all the model chaos. You use it to manage your engineering team. It creates a more rigid conformation to the software development lifecycle so Owners and executives get well documented, governed, auditable software - not broken promises, vaporware pr large T&M bills. Engineers need to do a bit more work upfront but then are relieved o…

Smart take.

True

It’s well within Anthropic’s rights to compete in any market they choose. What’s funny, in this instance, are the number of Pharma companies, who through their unchecked use of Anthropic, are driving revenues into what they think is a model provider but is in fact a competitor lurking in the shadows thereby accelerating their own demise. I suspect any end market with reasonable ROCE that could be AI accelerated is on the table. If I were them, I’d probably do the same.

A Primer on Gold, Silver, and Platinum Group Metals

For the first time since 1996, the world’s central banks hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries as a share of their reserves. The institutions managing entire countries’ savings now hold more of a metal that pays no interest than of the bonds that do. China has led the trend for years, reducing its U.S. Treasury holdings while buying gold. Its gold reserves now exceed 74m ounces, according to its central bank. Gold has also become a yardstick for the rest of the market. In dollar terms, the U.S. stock market continues to set record highs. But measured in gold rather than dollars, the S&P 500 has not made a new high since 2000. Measuring financ…

yup.

Part of what 8090 will be able to show, over time, is that companies powered by us generate return on capital employed (ROCE) that exceed their peers. We help companies do this by encoding their "edge" into software that can recursively improve vs leaving it as tribal knowledge or tacit conventions that sit in people's heads but nowhere else. Because when those who know what to do leave a company, it creates a hole and those that remain often find themselves treading water or moving backwards as a result. From a recent BCG report: "As the cost of capital has returned to long-term averages (8% to 11%), roughly half of large US companies can…

Extreme but likely directionally right.

The Great Descent

Fifteen years ago, Marc Andreessen wrote a contrarian take at the time that software was eating the world. He was profoundly right. The essay has aged into something very rare: a prediction that came so entirely true that its thesis is now the water we all swim in. Every industry he named got eaten. Most of the ones he didn't got eaten too. But an essay that good doesn't just close a subject, it also opens the next one. Andreessen described a world where software would consume industry after industry. What he did not fully describe, because the technology did not yet credibly exist, was what happens when the software starts to think. That i…

The GAO just reported that some of the Treasury's most critical systems still run on COBOL, kept alive by a workforce whose average age is now eligible for Social Security and, at the same time, is shrinking every year through retirement. The modernization programs meant to fix this are years in and mostly undocumented. This is what vendor capture looks like in practice: decades of contracts that ultimately only produced reports about modernization vs the actual modernized systems themselves. The agencies that get out from under this weight won't be the ones who sign one more integrator. They'll be the ones who can finally see, test, and c…

Please tell Corning and Jensen to stop hallucinating. Dario told me no jobs left.

“That makes the round feel less like a meme and more like a serious breakout candidate with a very high weirdness tax. It also puts 8090 in the same broad economic weather system as the cloud-landlord phase of AI: sooner or later, the glamorous layer cashes out into governance, infrastructure, and invoices large enough to gain personality. My verdict is that 8090 looks smarter than the average giant AI round and more fragile than its rhetoric would prefer. The product thesis is coherent. The buyer pain is real. The capital intensity is not a side note; it is the plot. If this works, it could become one of the more important enterprise wrappe…

Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. The business model of Systems Integrators is to bill by the hour. You should not be surprised, then, when your project takes three years or more and is never finished. An 8090 Software Factory project that finishes in three months is a threat to a business model built on never finishing. They will tell you AI isn't ready or that the traditional time and materials model is the only way. But what they stay quiet about is the real reason they push the timeline to “never ending”, which is that a short timeline breaks their business model vs reinforces it. Learn more here: https://t.co/fkfT…