The a16z Show

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the $220 Billion AI Buildout

Amazon expects to spend roughly $220 billion in CapEx in 2026, yet CEO Andy Jassy says the company is still leaving meaningful AI demand on the table.

Pivot

Why Scott Galloway Is So Worried about Democrats' Midterm Chances

Selling shovels in a gold rush is great. Using your shovel profits to buy your own stock, it basically says that the shovel seller isn't sure how long the rush is going to last or how deep the mine is going to go.

The a16z Show

How AI Is Rewriting the Power Law of Venture Capital

David explains why capital itself can now reinforce an AI company's advantage by buying more compute, while Aram makes the case that AI should increasingly be treated as a core allocation rather than a satellite position.

TED

Who Controls Your City’s Money? | Trinity Tran | TED

Money ultimately decides what gets built. Money decides what survives. Money decides what future becomes possible. So change where money goes and who controls it -- then you change what becomes possible.

Founders

#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

"Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's."

Founders

#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]

The interesting thing about AI is that the returns are so uncertain. You could imagine a world where AI is transformative and these investments are the best ever made, or you could imagine a world where the returns never come and it's the biggest misallocation of capital in history.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]

why he thinks it would be dangerous for the United States to win the AI race outright, what container shipping and the railroads of the 1870s tell us about the buildout, and why the binding constraint on all of this may be capital rather than compute.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters - [Invest Like the Best, EP.485]

The street is now generally assuming that hyperscalers are going to spend somewhere between $300-325 billion in capex in 2025. And these are numbers that were literally unimaginable 2 years ago. The question is what is the ROI on that spend and what is the right mental model for thinking about it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The US is going to be consuming a lot more natural gas going forward, and the infrastructure to deliver that gas is going to be a bottleneck. You're going to need more pipelines, more LNG export terminals, more storage. The question is whether the capital investment can keep up with the demand growth.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The number one thing I've learned is that investors invest in people, not in strategies. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if they don't trust you, if they don't believe in you, if they don't think you have the capability to execute, they're not going to give you capital.

The Prof G Pod

The AI IPO Wave Is Coming — Here's What It Does to Your Portfolio | Office Hours

You're going to see that open AI uh lacks I wouldn't call it business discipline, but it's just a drunk spender and their numbers will reflect that.

Diet TBPN

The Meta Compute Debate | Diet TBPN

It doesn't give you a lot of confidence in like the strategy overall. They're signing these Neo cloud deals worth tens of billions of dollars. They're built, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And yeah, they can make the argument that these type of um like doing any type of NeoCloud deals themselves is just good business. It's it's just like how it's just the best way to get ROI today. It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that there's near-term products on the horizon for Meta that are going to be able to utilize that capacity themselves.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The beauty of permanent capital is that you can say no to a lot of things. You don't have a fundraising cycle, you don't have to worry about returning capital to LPs, you can take a very long view. And that long view is actually a massive competitive advantage because most of the investment world is driven by relatively short-term incentives.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The best businesses we've found are ones where the value of the business actually increases the longer you hold it, not just because of retained earnings, but because the competitive position strengthens over time. That's the opposite of what most people think about when they think about an investment decaying or having a terminal value that you have to discount back.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The best businesses in the world are ones where the reinvestment rate is high and the return on incremental capital is also high. Those are very, very rare. And when you find them, the right thing to do is to do nothing, which is actually very hard to do as an investor because you're paid to do things.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The best businesses we've ever seen are ones where the incremental return on capital is essentially infinite because you don't need capital to grow. And so you have a business that's generating cash and you need to decide what to do with that cash. And most of the time, the best answer is to give it back to shareholders, but sometimes the best answer is to redeploy it into new investments.

The Prof G Pod

Scott Galloway: Stop Demonizing Billionaires and Start Taxing them | Office Hours

AI's capex boom is the second largest share of use GDP in history. bigger than the railroads, second only to the I think the Louisiana purchase, and there's the build out of the electrical grid, the highway system, uh the Apollo program, although that wasn't very big, and then the internet and sort of the telco infrastructure.

The Prof G Pod

Scott Galloway: Stop Demonizing Billionaires and Start Taxing them | Office Hours

AI's capex boom is the second largest share of use GDP in history. bigger than the railroads, second only to the I think the Louisiana purchase... unlike past tech booms, Facebook, Instagram, Door Dash, it's fundamentally a supply side story about making chips, building data centers, and powering them. It's money creating demand for energy, not the reverse.

The Business of Tech

Power play: Qiulae Wong on R&D, AI, hi-tech skills and tax

tax us more because we need more capital to run our businesses, and it's been a stranglehold on that because of our obsession with property.

The Business of Tech

Power play: Qiulae Wong on R&D, AI, hi-tech skills and tax

most of the ones I talked to you say tax us more because we need more capital to run our businesses, and it's been a stranglehold on that because of our obsession with property.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dylan Patel - The Infinite Demand for Tokens, Claude Mythos, and Supply Constraints - [Invest Like the Best, EP.468]

His own firm has gone from tens of thousands of dollars in AI spend last year to seven million this year.

TBPN

SpaceX Financials, Chimpanzee Civil War, Self-Driving Safety, Ferrari

Investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of uh high performing commercial space and telecom firm.

TBPN

SpaceX Financials, Does AI Increase Unemployment or Leisure, Chimp Civil War | Diet TBPN

Elon has uh always had multiple irons in the fire, one project that's working and producing cash flow and and growing uh to finance the next uh piece of innovation.

TBPN

Benchmark vs Travis Kalanick: Can They Ever Be Forgiven?

Getting a 2x over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. Uh, it and Lyft has fallen to just five billion. like he won the capital war and Dar has done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Nvidia Says $1T Is Coming — The Market Isn’t Buying It | Prof G Markets

Investors don't believe the great data center build that will continue into next year. The market is now telling us that it is expecting 2026 to be the peak year in the data center buildout.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

The man who predicted the 2008 financial crisis on impending market risks @RealEismanPlaybook

So much money is being spent. Are the returns that these companies are going to generate going to justify those returns? I suspect not.