Business history and operating math on today's AI and markets news. Founder, Operating. Saw Facebook start at Harvard. Newsletter below.
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Munger in 2019 on Mozart. Maybe the greatest talent who ever lived, and he ruined it two ways. He spent more than he made and he was eaten up with resentment. I've seen both sink companies with great products.
(via @TmarketL, Daily Journal 2019)
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Howard Marks on Friday called AI the least knowable thing he's seen in his career. Then the part I'd underline. If you want the upside, own the equity. A lender gets his money back and nothing more.
(via @MikeLongTerm, CNBC)
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Ken Griffin on buying a forced seller's portfolio. Once the market smells trouble, traders front-run the selling and 'transform a possibility into a reality.' Whoever steps in with a full solution gets the reversal when confidence comes back. @MollySOShea, Bloomberg
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More than 100 people bought my $99 coaching offer in twelve days. I ended up delivering more than 400 hours of coaching.
"Demand can hide a bad operating model." One-to-one work scales with the one thing I can't make more of: my calendar.
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What I'm cutting, and where I'm putting the time: operatingbyjohnbrewton.com/p…
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I scaled a distribution business from $27.5M to $75M, and growth ate cash long before it made any. The real question every year was who funds the inventory. Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft answer it from cash flow. CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN answer it on a lender's terms.
Bloomberg projects AI funding gap will more than double to ~$330B in FY27 with $ORCL and $SPCX accounting for the largest share.
What stands out is that $GOOGL, $META, $AMZN and $MSFT funding gap largely disappears by FY28 while $CRWV, $NBIS and $IREN still need outside capital through FY30.
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John Brewton retweeted
Gucci spent years in family lawsuits until Investcorp bought out Maurizio Gucci, the founder's grandson, in 1993. Gucci went public in 1995 at $22 a share. The market is already charging €67bn for a family fight before a single pair of glasses goes unsold.
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Alexandr Wang says most adults have had the ambition they had as kids beaten out of them. His hope for AI is an "escalator of agency": make one thing happen, dream bigger, then make the next thing happen.
That's how a good team compounds too.
via @rohanpaul_ai, from Cheeky Pint with John Collison
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Charlie Ellis showed that amateur tennis points end on unforced errors. Small businesses work the same way.
I spent years hitting pretty shots on LinkedIn: 20M+ impressions, about 35,000 followers. You win with "systems that quietly keep the ball in play every single day."
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How to stop losing the game you're actually in: operatingbyjohnbrewton.com/p…
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A $561B backlog on a $123B run rate is about four and a half years of revenue already signed. Some of the biggest buyers of TPUs compete with Google, and a separate company is the cleanest way to keep them buying.
I think $GOOGL should seriously consider spinning off Google Cloud because on its own it could be worth nearly $1.5T and become one of ten most valuable companies in the world.
The numbers are insane with Cloud doubling revenue at a ~$123B annual run rate alongside 36% margins and a $561B backlog which would put it near that $1.5T valuation at 12x revenue.
And beyond the valuation I think there's another interesting angle because $ORCL, Anthropic and OpenAI are already turning to Google's TPUs despite competing with its AI products so a standalone Cloud business could become a more neutral supplier without being tied to all the concerns surrounding Search.
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Charlie Munger's rule: hang around good people, and behave better every year than the year before. The higher you rise, the more it matters. He and Buffett believed good behavior paid. The high road is uncrowded, and there's little competition on it.
@InvestingCanons, CNBC (2016)
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It’s not just a bet on immediate capacity, it’s also a bet on the powerful growth in capacity and capability the models will experience over the next 24 months.
That’s such a critical switch to flip with leaders to help them understand how to plan, strategize and set their ambition for the new world.
The continued growth of model capability has be at the center of what leaders are willing to bet on moving forward.
multiple big tech companies have essentially one (very well paid) person who really knows how to use AI, and this “AI fixer” is their great hope — taking on projects and educating others.
problem is, some don’t have anyone, and a lot of those frontier people would rather work in a broadly AI-native company and find out what a team of people going this fast can do
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United's Scott Kirby calls Starlink a "truly differentiating" revenue tailwind for 2027. Every airline gets fast Wi-Fi eventually. United's bet is to be first by about two years, win flyers away from other airlines, and keep them once they try the rest of the product. A head start only pays if it turns into retention.
@cb_doge, United Airlines Q3 2026 earnings call
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Meta is a huge company. Alexandr Wang says the research team building its frontier models is close to 100 people, plus infra, and it's kept intentionally tight.
The hardest work still goes to small teams with clear owners.
via @rohanpaul_ai, from Cheeky Pint with John Collison
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The printing press cut the price of a book by two-thirds within 50 years. In 1820, 12 percent of the world could read. Today it's roughly 90 percent.
Words are cheap again. Spend your scarce hours choosing ideas, and repeat a tight set of them until you're known for them.
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What to do while everyone argues about AI writing: operatingbyjohnbrewton.com/p…
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Intel's CTO on why Elon wants his own fab: "We either build the Terafab or we don't have the chips." Tools are the bottleneck, so a new fab doesn't add silicon to the world. It guarantees the owner gets some. When supply is scarce, ownership decides who waits.
@firesidealpha, Dwarkesh Podcast
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IBM's Arvind Krishna on why the mainframe has lasted 65 years: it was vertically integrated. In the '60s IBM went "all the way to dirt," from sand to wafers to fabs to chips. Today it does everything but the fab. His rule: own the layers where you have an edge, and buy the commodity. Nikesh Arora adds the payoff: control the stack and you decide where the profit sits.
@theallinpod, All-In Interview
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