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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
17h ago

The companies that tend to win in technology are the ones that are able to identify the inflection point on the S-curve early enough to make a big bet, but not so early that they run out of capital before the market develops. The penalty for being too early is often indistinguishable from being wrong.

1d ago

The way I think about it is that the most dangerous time to own a technology business is when it's currently executing well but the next curve is about to start. Because what happens is all your best people, all your resources, all your management attention is focused on scaling and perfecting the current curve, and the new curve looks tiny and unimportant by comparison.

1d ago

The other thing I'd say about AI is it has this strange property where the more you use it, the more you realize how transformative it's going to be. Most technologies, the more you use them, the more you understand their limitations. AI is almost the opposite — the more deeply you engage with it, the more you realize the ceiling is higher than you thought.

1d ago

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.

3d ago

The exciting part of being in technology investing is that you have these waves of innovation that create extraordinary opportunities for value creation and also value destruction. And the companies that are able to ride multiple waves are extraordinary compounders over time, but it's actually quite rare.

4d ago

The failure mode that I've seen in technology investing over my career is people who are trained on a particular way that technology markets work, and they can't break free of it. They have a very successful decade, typically, where they nail one cycle, and then the next cycle they try to map the old framework onto the new one, and that's where the mistakes get made.

5d ago

The mistake most investors make is they think about technology investing as stock picking, when really it's about cycle recognition. If you can identify where you are on the S-curve of a technology's adoption, the individual stock selection becomes almost secondary to being in the right part of the cycle at the right time.

5d ago

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.

6d ago

The business of investing in technology is really the business of identifying where you are on the S-curve, because most of the money that's ever been made in technology investing has been made by people who correctly identified that they were in the early innings of a very long S-curve, and most of the money that's ever been lost has been by people who thought they were in the early innings when they were actually in the late innings.

1w ago

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.

1w ago

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.

1w ago

Which means that puberty is the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media. For our ultra-social species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction in the real world, not by TikTok's algorithm.

1w ago

This is a story about what happens when you combine real human data with AI, and why that combination might just be the future of how companies make their most important decisions.

1mo ago

Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. But software thinking has also been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.

1mo ago

The thing that started as like Elon sort of being like I want to buy Twitter is now like a Neol with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget they own graphite now or potentially will uh and and and a social the space review

1mo ago

The purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. As machines get smarter, we get smarter. I call this humanistic AI, artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people.

2mo ago

I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. As machines get smarter, we get smarter.

2mo ago

The purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. As machines get smarter, we get smarter.

2mo ago

As manufacturing gets cheaper like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, uh the tires on your cars, uh all these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people people enjoy.

2mo ago

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.

3mo ago

I think it would be helpful for the industry to refocus some messaging on not AI is going to cure cancer, but humanity is going to use AI to cure cancer and do a number of other things, right?

3mo ago

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