The Business of Tech

Meet the government’s new tech boss

The challenge is choosing where New Zealand has a genuine edge, then backing it without confusing commercial discipline with impatience.

The a16z Show

What It Takes to Win as a Founder | Ben Horowitz

the best entrepreneurs aren't defined by a lack of weaknesses, but by having a strength or insight that's genuinely exceptional

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]

I do think that, in the long run, there's something like: the companies that are doing the most important work, on the most important problems, with the best people, tend to win. And I think AI is actually making that more true, not less true, because AI is a great equalizer on the execution side — it's getting cheaper and easier to build software. What's not getting cheaper and easier is knowing what to build.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks were making so much money that they didn't need to change. And the customers had no other choice. It was a very stable but deeply inefficient equilibrium that only existed because there was no technology and no capital to disrupt it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks in Brazil at the time were making 50% return on equity. They had the highest banking fees in the world. They had interest rates on credit cards of 300% a year. And they were serving customers terribly. So the opportunity was enormous.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks in Brazil were making 25-30% return on equity for decades, which is extraordinary. And they were doing that by charging customers incredibly high fees and interest rates. So the incumbent had an Achilles heel, which was that they were making too much money.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks in Brazil were making 30% return on equity, some of the highest returns of any banks in the world, and yet the service was horrible, the products were terrible, the interest rates were the highest in the world. That paradox was a sign that something was deeply broken.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks were so profitable and they were so used to that level of profitability that they just didn't need to change. And so when we came in with a completely digital model, with no branches, with a much lower cost structure, we were able to offer a credit card with no annual fee at a time when every single bank in Brazil was charging annual fees that were sometimes higher than the credit limit they were giving to customers.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks had been making so much money for so long that they had basically forgotten to serve the customer. They were just extracting value from the customer. And the interesting insight that I had was that you could build a much better bank just by using the customer as your north star, as opposed to using profit extraction as your north star.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks in Brazil were making 25% return on equity consistently for decades. They were some of the most profitable banks in the world. And the reason they were so profitable is because they were screwing customers.

Diet TBPN

Inflation Heats Up, Anthropic Investor Day, Tesla Roadster Mania| Diet TBPN

Being on the frontier just means you're getting distilled. If you're not getting distilled, that's the definition in your mind. Like unless other people will spend a lot of money to try to emulate your model and recreate it, then you are not — that's a good like reality check.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks were making so much money and were so profitable and had so much political power that nobody was able to change them. And the reason we were able to disrupt them is that we came from the outside, we had no legacy, we had no branches, we had no mainframes, we had no employees that were used to a certain way of doing things.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

OpenAI has a Muse problem

Meta, which still doesn't have a frontier model of its own, might have a meaningful edge here because it's much better at making and distributing consumer products.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Meta’s Muse AI Agent Cost $0. What’s the Catch?

Something that Meta has that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have is Meta is a massive advertising business. They only get paid based off of how much you're using the models. Meta is getting paid by how much time you spend scrolling on Facebook and on Instagram. Therefore, they can use all that ad money to subsidize their ability to roll out a new AI agent platform.

The a16z Show

Beyond the God Model | Alex Atallah & Amjad Masad

companies increasingly need to own their AI capabilities rather than depend entirely on a single model provider

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Meta’s Muse AI Agent Cost $0. What’s the Catch?

Something that Meta has that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have is Meta is a massive advertising business. In the last quarter alone, Meta did $59 billion in advertising revenue. The entire rest of the business did $1.5 billion. Meta is an advertising company.

Mixed Signals

Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario on Selling Water Like a Punk Band | Mixed Signals

Coke or Red Bull or whoever, they cannot make comedy at the level that we make. It doesn't matter if they have $100 million cuz comedy isn't about spending money. It's about building something that you need a unique machine to do it with. And especially in giant companies with all the approvals and bureaucracy, comedy is not designed to survive that, right?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.488]

the premium the frontier labs charge for being three to six months ahead may not last

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Does Google even want to win in AI?

It's crazy to me that they have that much power and all that going for the company, and they're still not in the lead, let alone being behind as of right now. That's what I think is crazy.

Diet TBPN

North Korea’s Secret US Workforce, Canceling the SaaSpocalypse, MSL’s Latest Exits | Diet TBPN

Having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago. That's for sure. Competition is increasing, especially for point solutions. But many of those SAS companies that were so beaten up in the SAS apocalypse were revealed to have sources of strength that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket.

The CEO Signal

Reed Hastings on Life After Netflix and the Next Wave of AI | The CEO Signal

For the last decade, AI has been getting roughly twice as good every year. Uh if that continues, which looks pretty likely, um then in 5 years, uh the AI will be 32 times smarter, more effective than it is today. You could either cut your workforce in half and stay in the same business lines, or you can use all these new resources to expand against your competitors.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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

The bears say inference is a commodity and that we'll see severe margin compression. I think that's probably right in aggregate, but I think that also misses what happened in the cloud. Amazon and Microsoft and Google do sell compute as a commodity, but they make enormous profits doing so, because commodities at massive scale with high fixed costs and low variable costs can be very, very profitable businesses.

Diet TBPN

Stripe’s $53B PayPal Offer, OpenAI’s First Device, TBPN’s New Business Ideas | Diet TBPN

You have a $50 billion company printing 5.5 billion in free cash flow. You can use a lot to finance debt, obviously, which is what's proposed here. Uh 400 million uh consumer accounts. So, lots of consumers have PayPal accounts, have Venmo accounts. Maybe they're not fully active, but they're ready to be engaged. It's a huge footprint and huge distribution mechanism. Uh, and they have bank info attached. That's difficult. You can't get that from many other consumer applications.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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

The vast majority of the best investors who I've ever met, they have some sort of an edge, right? And when you think about that edge, it usually comes from a very specific life experience or a very specific type of intellectual curiosity that they've developed over decades. And that is very hard to replicate.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that I find most exciting is that transformers have essentially won. We know that this is the architecture. And if you know that, then you can build a chip that only runs transformers, and you can get massive efficiency gains by doing that, because you're not building a general purpose chip.

Diet TBPN

Apple Sues OpenAI, Experts Sign Another AI Warning Letter, Paramount Threatens CA Exit

The winner could dominate the future just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years.

TBPN

Etched Founder Joins, AI Creates Jobs, It's OVER for Peptides, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome

Firms that adopt AI are hiring. They're going on the offensive. I've always said that this is the correct stance for a CEO to take is say, "Yeah, we're getting so much productivity. We're going to crush our competitors. We're staffing up."

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

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about incentives as financial. The real incentive is truth. If you create a culture where people can tell you the truth, you will make better decisions than your competitors. And making better decisions than your competitors over a long period of time is the only sustainable advantage.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The other thing that's really important in this world is that the flywheels tend to be self-reinforcing in a way that creates winner-take-most dynamics. The best models attract the most users, which generates the most data, which trains the best next models. And so you end up with a situation where the leaders tend to pull away from the pack over time rather than revert to the mean.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The companies that matter most are the ones that can actually translate technological capability into economic value, and that translation is much harder than it looks. Most technology waves produce enormous value for society but relatively little for investors, because competition drives returns to zero faster than most people expect.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The biggest risk for Uber is actually AV technology working perfectly and Uber not being a part of it. Because if AV technology works perfectly and Uber's not a part of it, then you essentially have players who have a lower cost structure than us who can come in and compete with us and essentially make our service irrelevant.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The formula that I used was when the company is doing well, double down. When the company is doing not so well, double down. I think that's actually the right formula because the greatest risk for Uber was irrelevance. If you slow down, you get lapped.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The S-curve is a very well-known concept in technology investing, but what's less appreciated is that the most dangerous moment is often at the top of the S-curve, when a technology looks the most dominant and the most entrenched. That's precisely when the next S-curve is being born underneath it, and the incumbents are most blind to the threat.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The insight is that if AV technology works, then every player in the space needs Uber more than Uber needs them, because we bring the demand. We bring the customers. We bring the transaction. And I think we are going to be the storefront for autonomous mobility for the world.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The mistake most investors make is they think about technology investing as a static exercise — you find a great company, you understand its competitive position, you underwrite the earnings, and you hold it. But technology is defined by change, and so you need to have a framework for thinking about how industries evolve over time.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The other thing about platform transitions is that they reset competitive advantage. So the incumbents that have accumulated distribution and integration and switching costs — those advantages largely reset with platform transitions. That's what makes them so valuable for investors; new winners can emerge from what looks like chaos.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The big players, the OEMs, they didn't want to give up their customer relationship. And I think that was a mistake, because the customer relationship is actually a burden when you're going through this transition — you're on the hook for the whole experience. We were able to essentially be asset-light, take the best of breed from all of these networks, and essentially build a better product for consumers.

The a16z Show

AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data

Fraser believes many companies are overestimating the threat AI poses to enterprise software.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The big opportunity for us is to use AI to make every single driver a top-rated driver and make every single eater a top-rated eater, because we have data that no one else has. We have 150 million people who are using our platform on a monthly basis, and we understand exactly what they want.

TBPN

New Glenn Explodes, Enterprise AI Enters ROI Era, The Dinosaur Fossil Boom | Diet TBPN

Even our second best rocket provider is better than everyone else in around the globe.

The a16z Show

Workday’s Last Workday? AI and the Future of Enterprise Software

why even the most defensible software businesses may now be vulnerable to replatforming

Office Hours

Can AI Actually Help You Start a Company? | Office Hours

I would describe AI is all chip no salsa and that is real insight like what is it you're going to do differently with your business what is it that's unique about your business most new businesses make no sense at the outset otherwise they would already exist.

The Business of Tech

Factories in retreat: inside NZ’s deindustrialisation crisis

Without a coherent industrial strategy covering energy, skills, investment, and R and D, we're effectively putting headwinds in front of our most productive exporters rather than giving them a competitive advantage.

TBPN

The $1B One-Person Company, China’s Pork Crisis, America’s New Weapon | Diet TBPN

If you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then and then anyone with access to a coding model can build it very quickly we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly

Prof G Markets

Why So Bullish? Markets Cling to Iran Hopes | Prof G Markets

It's really ironic that Nvidia, the largest stock in the S&P 500, is disrupting its own siblings to some degree in the software space.

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 Business of Tech

Too small is a tech myth – Mehran Gul on NZ’s real advantage

if one or two places can change their relative importance in technology within such a short time span, you know, five to seven years, and it's not just China, you know Canada, for instance, the outsize role that it has played in AI research. You know, much of the AI boom that we see today comes from just a couple of major advancements in AI that happened, for instance, alexnet, which was this seismic event in neural networks.