The inflation effect of SpaceX on founders
I took a couple of weeks off writing (and token-burning) to reallocate time for more reading/thinking, which has been quite beneficial. I did a delightful deep-dive into food with Fuschia Dunlop’s superb book on the history of Chinese food (which in retrospect I should have totally read before I visited a few weeks back) and Ruby Tanoh’s more contemporary-focused Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now. Both highly recommended.
Like, I suspect, many readers of this newsletter, I have been offered SpaceX allocation in every second email for the last couple of weeks. One of the more interesting side effects of the impending SpaceX IPO is the inflationary impact on founder aspiration. When the news cycle is filled with headlines and stories talking about trillions, it can be a pretty demoralising thing for founders who are building with TAMs of merely billions or even hundreds of millions. Turns out Elon’s IPO has become a useful test of whether you’re building for impact or building for ego.
There has been vast amounts of content generated about the need to ‘refound’ companies as AI-first, which I think is a good mental model if you’re running a pre-AI business. But at a more subtle level, I think that necessitates a need to re-discover the reason you’re building a thing in the first place. I’ve always felt the act of building a company is essentially physics: the transfer of energy from founders to an idea in order to make it real. The motivation can be many things (passion, revenge, anger, necessity) and in my experience evolves over time but it needs to exist in a way you can tap into.
Btw, in case you are feeling like all the world’s problems have been solved, Ben Evans published a particularly useful chart on where AI is being used. It’s a calming reminder that much of what we read about in terms of rate-of-change is really the impact of AI on software being projected onto the rest of the world. Software is less than 5% of world GDP and the impact will be slower elsewhere (but it will get there). You have plenty of time.
Relatedly Dylan Patel and Malcolm Spittler recently wrote a good piece on the challenges of measuring all of this impact which they are calling, dramatically, Dark Output.
“We are at risk of having an event on the scale of the Industrial Revolution where most of the new output is invisible even as businesses spend increasingly large amounts on AI services. Dark output is AI-enabled economic value that exists but is not visible, or is badly distorted, in GDP, prices, labor statistics, or industry accounts.”
Now I am not sure if macro economics is really the best way to capture this (at least in the short to medium term) but I will be keeping an eye on it.
Somewhat relatedly, over at 10xHumans we have been expanding our media footprint (earlier this year we invested into Richard, John and Terry at aibl) with AI Enablement Insider, a newsletter/data service very specifically for operators/founders of Applied AI services companies (essentially the sector responsible for changing the shape of Ben’s graphs). With both OpenAI and Anthropic now having set up consulting divisions which are making their first acquisitions, we’ve expanded our coverage to include M&A/investment tracking (not trivial as much of this is non-VC) but also partner programs. The latest issue is here (Daria did a great deep-dive into OpenAI’s acquisition of Tomoro). You should definitely be reading this if you’re in the space (either as an operator or buyer) but otherwise please don’t ruin our CRM 🤣
“Our lives already scripted/Already on some 2036 shit” Youngs Teflon
Reading/Listening/Bidding
The Currency has quietly become home to some really great pieces of business history. Alan English’s story on how predictions market began in Ireland with Intrade was extremely enjoyable.
I have become a serial underbidder on a growing number of WaxPoetic auctions for hip-hop memorabilia. Love what these guys are doing.
Tom from Levellr had a very interesting chat with Devin in Naavik about what social listening on Discord and Reddit looks like in 2026.
The team at aibl launched a (much needed) AI Enablement services directory.
Roblox announced an exclusive partnership with SuperAwesome to enable brand-safe ads for under-13 users.