Chamath Palihapitiya

Just wrapped! https://t.co/p1NQSaFBbJ

Katie is the best. Excited and impressed to see her scale Haun Ventures.

If your AI stack is single player, you’re driving into a brick wall. Our Software Factory is collaborative and multi-player at every stage and by design. As you build complex enterprise workflows, this is a P0.

It’s hard to understand what the other 39% are thinking. Once you drive a Tesla, it’s like driving an all-seeing sensor with a super computer behind the scenes doing all the decision making, driving and navigation. Also, you never have to go to a gas station.

How much data did we need before we understood the harmful societal effects of smoking and implemented restrictions? Actually, it was a lot. A lot of data was needed because the cigarette companies wanted to milk their golden goose as long as possible. The cost of paying class action lawsuits in the future was far less than the cash they could make in the moment. This is the same incentive today with social media and their app makers. Some parents try to organize their other classroom parents together in a coalition to limit the apps. This seems to work but it’s so few and far between. A broad societal moratorium on social media for peop…

This is really bad. I love Italy. If this trend isn’t reversed, it will put them under a lot of pressure.

Well, one fucked up and non obvious part of the answer could be that certain folks are paying massive amounts to them to distill the model via API. But the revenue is so worthwhile that they could stop it but instead allow it because it allows them to stay ahead in the funding race by showing evermore increasing revenue. Aka my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

Pod!!!!

Deep Dive: Where Value Accrues in the AI Stack

How should we think about AI in 2026? Well, the first generation of internet companies had a map. It was called the OSI stack, a conceptual framework that demarcated where one layer of computing ended and the next began. Get the boundaries right, and great companies get built on top of them. Intel. Cisco. Broadcom. Oracle. The question now is what the conceptual stack for AI looks like. There will be a stack we will one day look back on and use to explain every company that mattered in this era. The opportunity is to draw it now, while the boundaries are still being set and the fulcrum assets are still being claimed. So we set out to map …

A good example of why it’s time to rewrite all of your enterprise software. This specific company is a public, multi billion dollar revenue company who manages critical care for millions of patients. Lots of regulations, lots of safety and care required. Vibe coding doesn’t work here - 8090 was brought in and using Software Factory, it’s been a slam dunk.

Super fun read…

The winner in all of this AI token spend isn’t: 1. More revenue growth 2. Less OpEx It’s: 1. Leisure time - go home early, work on a side gig, play video games etc etc etc My suspicion is that people are using blower token budgets to do their job in less time. Not so more work in the same time. This may change but humans are not motivated to do more work and see upside accrue to a few. Take this to the bank as Wall Street starts demanding specific data about AI enhancements over these next 18 months.

David Hammons is the most important artist in the world. The boundaries he pushed in his art both explored the past but also foretold the future. The best artists all seem to achieve this. I had the chance to spend a morning with David in his Brooklyn studio in 2014 and he gave me an incredible secret. When I asked if I could take a photo with him, he said no. He asked me to get on the ground with him and he looked at me and said, “I say no to everyone. Remember with your heart…not with your camera.” I’ll never forget that. I still remember what I saw in his studio, how he treated me and others, how creative he was. In other words, it wor…

Money is starting to flow downhill - a critical observation for the next few years. The Mags may make all the money but they are spending it faster than they can make it. Their free cash flows are cratering. Best to follow the money and see who’s getting it. In this case, it’s following the AI trade and, more specifically, the data center and power economies. Make money from capital light business models like ads and software, then redirect it to asset heavy, traditional infrastructure companies. A complete reversal from the last 20 years is underway.

Software Factory helps people build their good ideas and refine their taste and judgement. This is the long term human differentiator in the AI age.

Another week, another ship cycle. Slowly but surely we hope to make a product that is good and useful.

This is an excellent interview with Steve Hilton who is running for Governor of California. DO NOT WATCH IT. He explains why California leads in taxation, cost of living and poverty. He explains why housing costs so much and why California is a legal cesspool that prevents housing supply. He explains why California’s largest source of oil is from Iraq! Yes, Iraq. DO NOT WATCH THIS. Stay in your bubble!

Wow. Awesome. Thanks. Please also raise my taxes and destroy my children’s education more than you already have so my family and I can stay impoverished, uneducated and in your indentured servitude while we carry your branding on us.

Counterintuitive take: AI makes people more important than ever. While simple work may be automated, judgement and taste are still the sole domains of humans and will be for a long time. Software Factory allows us to capture what we know into a Knowledge Graph that then helps you to guide and manage your team - of people, agents, AI and everything in between. The result is a better product and more resilient software. Try it.

The missing layer in successful software development usually isn’t writing code faster but, rather, documenting the reasoning and shared context behind the decisions you made so everyone (including agents) can follow along. Oftentimes, architectural choices live in slack threads or linear tickets or just in someone’s head. This means that the individual may get faster but the team's collective knowledge doesn't compound and the team goes the same speed or slower. A good, multiplayer version of the software development experience would capture the "why" layer, not just execute the "what" faster. This is what 8090’s Software Factory is. A m…

This is the way. The past 50 years of computing was about inventing form factors to interact with information. Retrieve information. Search for information. Edit information. Save information. AI is about interacting with knowledge. It's completely different. Agents and models are there to do the dirty work aka interact with information). We need a new layer - more executive function, less tactical tools. So instead of trying to jam AI into old form factors, its time to imagine a new form factor. From scratch. From first principles. It's probably not a phone tbh, but what it is, I have not a clue. That said, like most breakthroughs we'll …

As you go to work today and settle into the week, please study the form below. You will soon need to fill this out EVERY year and tell the government what you own and then allow them to tell you how much its worth. That is the framework that is enabled by the Trojan Horse "Billionaire Tax" that is trying to get passed. Give them credit: they cleverly use Billionaires as the hook, but build in the language and the framework that will allow the Legislature to simply extend the tax to everyone and make it yearly. And this is where the form below comes in... In this case, ask yourself, will it be you or the Billionaires that will be able to f…

the maintenance era is ending. the rewrite era is starting. an insurer we worked with replaced an $8M/year legacy vendor with a purpose-built system. $21M saved over four years. if we can hep, please ping us sales@8090.ai

But very little lift in productivity thus far if true.

every AI coding tool on the market is a single-player game. cursor, copilot, claude code. they all make the individual developer faster at writing code. And they are brilliant at it. 2-5x individual velocity, sometimes more. but software isn't a single-player game. software is mostly architecture decisions, requirements debates, compliance reviews, code reviews, rollbacks, post-mortems, onboarding. it’s a multiplayer sport with a dozen roles and thousands of decisions that don't just live in one person's head. the key in good software development is the coordination between roles, the traceability of decisions, the institutional memory of…

Probable.

On page twenty-six of “The Billionaire Tax” proposal in California, it explains how the state legislature can convert from a Billionaire Tax to an Everyone Tax without voter approval. They can also adjust the tax to be a yearly tax, not just one time…again, without your approval. Intelligence test for you: if this was meant to just target Billionaires, why did they write this in?

Agreed.

Pod!!!!

Over the last few years, my team and I have written many Deep Dives - fundamental research that I use to learn, guide my thinking and refine my decision making. We started publishing these Deep Dives once per month. We now have a team and process that allows us to publish once per week. The topics are bangers - you can see a table below in the picture. We call this service Learn with Me. It costs $1,000/yr. We charge $1000/yr as a quality signal. I wanted to find a price that a) signaled when people made an important decision to subscribe to Learn with Me but also b) by staying or churning, signal to me how good the Deep Dives were. We ha…