Business history and operating math on today's AI and markets news. Founder, Operating. Saw Facebook start at Harvard. Newsletter below.
Joined June 2025
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John Brewton retweeted
Palantir CEO Alex Karp explains why your business is essentially fucked if it's not sovereign in the AI era:
“What is a business? Why can you charge more than it costs you to produce? Because you have some unique way of doing something.”
“You need to advance your unique capability, learn from the world, and never, ever expose to anyone else how you’re doing it exactly.”
“The minute someone else can do any part of those things as well as you can, your pricing parity goes down, and at some point, your value goes down.”
"Normal software is built to force you to adopt something that's parasitic. They take every one of those things, turn it into a commodity, and sell it to everyone else."
"You talk to VCs, what they wanted to hear was, 'Clients will be unhappy, but they can't get rid of you.'"
"Sticky is a metaphor for parasitic."
"I get your data, I get it into something you can't get rid of. The thing turns into something I can sell to everybody else, who then can't get rid of it, and de facto, your multiple goes down and my multiple goes up, and all of us are happy, and hope at some point you realize you're sad... Hopefully after it's too sticky."
Via @ZetaGlobal @dsteinberg10000
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: Businesses no longer want to transfer their alpha to OpenAI or Anthropic
"Why are [LLMs] charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
"If it was so valuable—let's say I can make you a billion dollars tomorrow. Wouldn't I say, 'I'll make you a billion dollars, and I want 30%?'"
"Look at our financials. The reason why everyone is chillaxing with bad financials and growth while losing money is: the client refuses to pay the true cost."
"The two places that actually make money—profit, free cash flow—are our application layer called ontology, and compute."
"We can get the frontier application to be exactly the same as a frontier model without the risk of transferring the alpha of your business to another."
Via @CNBC
John Brewton retweeted
Alexandr Wang — Scale AI founder, now Meta's Chief AI Officer — says Palantir's real growth weapon isn't the software.
It's the deployment model.
The strategy: embed engineers directly inside client operations until the product becomes load-bearing infrastructure. By the time anyone reviews the contract, the switching cost is already existential.
Most enterprise SaaS sells access. Palantir sells operational dependency — deliberately, structurally, at the process layer.
Wang's framing is worth taking seriously. This is someone who built a company on the hard side of enterprise AI sales, now running AI infrastructure at Meta. When he calls out a commercial strategy as unusually ruthless, he's seen the comparison set.
What makes Palantir's model durable: the moat isn't the product, it's the integration depth. You can't rip out something that runs your ops without rebuilding the ops. That's a different category of lock-in than a SaaS password.
The valuation debate around Palantir misses this. You're not pricing a software multiple. You're pricing an irreversibility premium.
John Brewton retweeted
The NBA's Philadelphia 76ers and NHL's Philadelphia Flyers have released the first images of their new South Philly arena scheduled to open in 2030 on the grounds of old Spectrum.
John Brewton retweeted
Sequoia's thesis: the next $1T company sells work🏗️, not software
Sell a copilot and you compete with every model release. Sell the outcome, books closed, contracts reviewed, claims handled, and every AI improvement widens your margin instead of threatening your product.
The insight most people miss: for every $1 spent on software, roughly $6 goes to services.
SaaS chased the software dollar. AI chases the services dollar at software margins.
Not AI for accountants. The AI accounting firm. Not AI for lawyers. The AI law firm
The winners will look like services firms rebuilt on software infrastructure, and most founders are still building copilots.
Which dollar are you chasing?
John Brewton retweeted
If you were wondering how powerful AI is getting, Agents are now capable of escaping out of systems, finding their way to the internet, discovering zero day security vulnerabilities along the way, and then breaking into external systems - all in an attempt to complete their goal.
Ironically, the ultimate way we’re going to defend against these new risks is equally by throwing compute (in the form of AI) at our code bases, networks, and other systems. You’re going to want vastly more AI on the side of defense as you do on the side of offense.
We’re entering a new era of what’s going to be possible with AI. Wild times ahead.
We're partnering with @huggingface to investigate an unprecedented security incident.
Cyber-capable OpenAI models compromised Hugging Face production during a benchmark evaluation.
Sharing preliminary findings to help defenders understand emerging risks:
openai.com/index/hugging-fac…
John Brewton retweeted
One category-one seat to the final started near $6,000 at face and topped out near $7,875.
By May it was listing around $32,000 on the secondary market, and one seat appeared on FIFA's own resale platform near $2.3 million (ESPN).
FIFA collects a 30% combined commission on every resale, 15% from the buyer and 15% from the seller.
Matchday revenue is forecast up 226% from Qatar's $950 million.
John Brewton retweeted
How would you be feeling right now if you had deployed a production workflow using Anthropic's Fable model?
The introduction of export controls in the frontier level of AI are a change in how seriously companies need to take on multiple vendors.
They also need to think very carefully about how many tasks can be suitably and cost-effectively performed by open source models and even what fallback options exist if AI is banned entirely.
John Brewton retweeted
Here is what most leaders, teams and companies are missing. AI can do the work a junior used to do.
But it cannot do what that work did to upskill the junior's future capabilities.
You save a salary this year. Yet, you give up the most knowledgeable person in the building ten years from now.
That's not a smart trade. The junior you do not develop today is the senior you will not have later. 👇
John Brewton retweeted
MIT reviewed 300 corporate AI projects and found 95 percent returned nothing measurable, and the cause was not the model.
It was that nobody redesigned the work around it.
McKinsey's 2025 survey put only 6 percent of companies at a material earnings gain from AI.
Most bought the tool and kept the old process.
But the tool cannot save a process no one rebuilt.
John Brewton retweeted
Tim Ferriss's catalog of number-one bestsellers will sell 80% fewer copies in 2026 than in 2022. Almost all of it since ChatGPT shipped.
Disruption does not announce itself. You do not get to schedule when it reaches you. You can choose however to build at the speed of it.
Fortunately for Tim, he has plenty of additional revenue streams. What would your strategy be in a similar scenario within your business?
John Brewton retweeted
A hiring freeze dressed up as an AI strategy carries the same risk. The savings land this year, but they're creating a hole in the 2030 version of your organization.
John Brewton retweeted
Lots to do together. Excited to be joining forces with @SpaceX to build useful AI.
SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models.
For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.
We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities
John Brewton retweeted
I'm publishing a new article on this topic tomorrow morning.
Follow me @mickeymiller today to get the article delivered to your feed tomorrow.
