With so much froth in the market (some of it grounded, some of it... not), I took some time to remind myself what investing is / what it is for. Feels completely irrelevant now- which probably means it is more relevant than ever: open.substack.com/pub/sleepe…

$ADBE Demand for Adobe skills in the job market has turned negative YoY

“I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money — I think that can be a burden — I’m greedy for an exciting life.” David Hockney, 1937-2026

This is my experience as well, but it's arguably pretty scary. Pretty soon, we're going to be bottlenecked by new, super-compute-intensive ideas. Anything remotely doable today (which is most things you can imagine) will be close to free.

I wrote this one a few days ago. Maybe a good place to start: blog.workday.com/en-us/workd…

Fable 5 should be a boon for semis. Can’t see a better way for AI consumption to soar than an effective but inefficient frontier model. Lack of rally suggests there’s simply no upside to numbers bc all booked out through 2027. Or the vibes are off and they’re all that matter

Some considerations that many folks seem not to get: 1. It can be a bubble even if the tech works. (For instance, if the tech doesn't have a high-demand use case.) 2. It can be a bubble even if the tech works and has strong product-market fit. (For instance, if the tech cannot be economically viable.) 3. It can be a bubble even if the tech works, has strong product-market fit, and has a path to eventual economic viability. (For instance, if profitability takes too long to achieve or makes margin/competition assumptions that fail to materialize.) 4. It can be a bubble even if the tech works, has strong product-market fit, and is currently highly profitable. (For instance, if demand has a hard ceiling and growth stops once the ceiling is reached.) 5. It can be a bubble even if the tech works, has strong product-market fit, is currently highly profitable, and has unlimited future demand. Literally all it takes for something to be a bubble is for lots of people to over-enthusiastically bet their money on it, and subsequently get panicky. Importantly, bubbles can be attached both to things that are completely hogwash, like the Metaverse, and to world-changing developments like the Internet or railways. Bubbles don't care. They're brought into existence by the thoughts and feelings of investors, not by actual tech or products. "The bubble has burst" doesn't mean "the tech didn't work" or "people stopped using the tech." It only means that people got panicky, investor money dried up, and valuations collapsed. Internet adoption didn't stop in 2000.

Safety becoming a marketing liability in real time. Fascinating

If a SaaS company doesn't enable read-only vibecoding on top of the data any given user has access to, it is behind. Snowflake/Databricks are leading the way- but every software co can do this with its own data/permissions architecture. Worth it for the added stickiness alone!

A corollary to this: the tiring/energy-consumptive aspects of work are counterintuitive. Cold emailing is way more tiring than playing video games, even if the physical/mental exertion is the same. Understanding this is key to grokking what AI can/can't do for productivity.

I had not fully considered this possibility before. Interesting.

econ is quite beautiful because almost everything in life can be essentially reduced to supply & demand constraints. if you can think deeply in supply & demand curves, it’ll be much easier to parse the world esp the reasons for why ppl behave the way they do.

“It’s not like investors are home doing math,” Buyer said. “There’s zero math that makes any sense whatsoever.” These are the sorts of quotes that can become iconic in retrospect. cnbc.com/2026/06/09/spacex-i…

welcome to the world, Claude Fable 5!

May was the second-highest month of SaaS hiring in the last two years.

Vibecoding = bad news for introverts/productivity-stack maximizers. It is easy to rationalize spending hours prompting and iterating rather than getting stuff done out in the real world- and perhaps hard to stomach that anything code can do is rarely the real bottleneck.

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

As I wrote this, I saw X go into meltdown over tokens. You've seen the headlines: “Uber blows yearly AI budget in just one quarter.” “Meta employee burns 281 billion tokens in April.” But, the problem isn't spending. Spending works. Since 2023, the top quartile of our AI spenders doubled their revenue. The bottom quartile? Flat. It's blind spending. We don’t know which spend worked. A sales team has qualified leads. A support team has resolved conversations. These are units you can measure against. All a token tells you is the meter ran, not whether the work was worth it or not. Finance says, “half the budget,” engineering says, “double it” and you don’t know who’s right because there is no shared language of value. There’s no attribution, and no attribution means no allocation. For example, right now, all work, no matter the size or shape, defaults to frontier models. But meeting summaries and calendar updates don’t require GPT-5.5 Pro. In isolation this seems trivial, but re-route just 10% of a $10M AI bill from frontier to GPT-4 level intelligence you’ve saved nearly one million dollars. This sounds like a made-up stat — it’s not. It truly is that much cheaper. This is the future of finance: not blindly rubber-stamping or rejecting AI spend, but allocating it with the same rigor companies apply to headcount.

Unbelievably sad. Some combination of runaway capitalism and social media is really stripping people’s awareness and fidelity to what really matters/makes for a fulfilling life.

Github Copilot is far out of the zeitgeist but is still heavily used and (apparently) had been heavily subsidized. Going to be very interesting times in AI for code- feels like a great time to have a homegrown, open-source based model a la @cognition techspot.com/news/112628-git…

Today, Ramp raised $750M at a $44B valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 1/20th the size. For 2000 years, business was built on two pillars. Today, a third: intelligence. It’s your least governed cost. It’s also your single greatest opportunity.