History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

Oh yes, I remember that Bond film where the villain decarbonized the auto industry, brought fast internet to everyone on the planet, and helped paralyzed people interact with the world again.

I’m at the bottom of a multi-layer SPV and am looking forward to the SpaceX IPO in much the same way a golden retriever looks forward to a car ride: - thrilled to be involved - no clue how cars work - unsure if going to the park or getting neutered

The world is run by people who give a shit.

Or how about we let free market capitalism work and let American companies innovate and win without burdensome red tape and regulations on top of government bureaucrat central planning on pricing and distribution? This is not some magic chip alchemy. It’s just the next generation of compute. The AI doomsday narrative is conflated and not based on technology reality. If bureaucrats were in charge during the PC revolution, American x86 and WinTel would not have been able to dominate for decades. Free markets work. Government involvement and intervention generally does not (hello Soviet Union). If the government was smart, they would do a nuanced strategy of letting China remain on CUDA but one or two generations behind (keeps USA ahead) - instead of literally creating a chip competitor ecosystem with tens of billions of R&D oxygen from the biggest chip market in the world. Basically, let Nvidia cook.

When I was 7 years old I was asked by my father what went into the price of a sandwich. Considering it carefully, I answered. The lettuce, the tomato, the bread and the meat. I did not consider correctly. I was short quite a few costs as my father was eager to point out. I had forgot the labor of the worker, the rent of the land, the marketing costs of the chain. I wasn’t seeing the full picture. Today we are all making a similar mistake with AI. We are not considering what cannot be considered. As foreign to the 7 year old as these excess charges were, so are the downstream affects of AI. In 1850, if you had told a teamster that his horse and carriage would soon be obsolete, he would have envisioned a world of mass starvation for men of his skill. He could grasp the concept of a faster carriage, but he could not conceive of the interstate highway system, the suburban real estate market, or the roadside motel industry. These were not just new products; they were an entirely new social architecture. We are currently in the teamster’s shoes. We see AI automating the ingredients of our current economy—the writing, the coding, the data entry—and we fear the void. But history shows that humanity doesn't fall into the void; it builds a floor over it. Karl Marx looked at the dark satanic mills of the 19th century and saw a terminal point. He argued that as the means of production became more efficient, capital would consolidate and labor would become a worthless commodity. He believed capitalism would eventually eat itself because it would run out of things for people to do. Marx was wrong because he viewed human utility as a fixed pie. He didn't understand that technology doesn't just subtract labor; it changes the nature of what we consider valuable. When the mechanical loom made fabric cheap, we didn't stop buying clothes. Instead, we invented the fashion industry. We created brand management, retail psychology, and textile engineering. We moved from a world where everyone owned two outfits to a world where millions of people are employed in the cycle of seasonal trends. In the age of the steam engine, "handmade" was a sign of poverty. Today, it is a luxury. We are already seeing a shift where the human touch—the artisanal, the face-to-face, and the physically present—is becoming the high-margin sector of the economy. Every time we automate a simple task, we move the human to a more complex one. We didn't stop needing accountants when Excel was invented... we simply started asking accountants to perform much more sophisticated financial modeling. The 7-year-old misses the rent and the marketing because they are abstractions. Similarly, we struggle to see the jobs of 2040 because they rely on problems we haven't even encountered yet. We might see the rise of Personal Data Stewards, who manage the interaction between our private lives and public AI models, or Reality Architects, who ensure that the virtual spaces we inhabit are psychologically grounded. The world works itself out because humans are fundamentally restless. We do not tolerate a vacuum of purpose, we seek higher function always.

Poasters when a new meme format drops

Introducing: Secondary Vehicles Now companies can run their own secondary SPVs for delivering liquidity to shareholders without the predatory SPV fee/carry structures.

"I'm raising a round, can you introduce me to X investor" — question i've had 1,000 times in the past 10 years. and another 1,000 times in the past 10 days 😆 Answer is often* "yes - but please send me something forwardable easily parsable, give yourself best chance of passing the 2-second inbox scan test" Back in 2015 i was the guy who wrote all the "featured startup" emails at AngelList .. email blasts sending out "active rounds" to thousands of online investors. I had the unique privilege of @nivi breathing down my neck, helping pedantically craft every word until we got the formula, format just right. That formula is the one i still use/recommend today. I've been meaning to share it in public, so i can sign-post back for founders requesting intros. And, here we are. So. If you want me to fwd something to someone for you, please send: four bullet points. no more, no less. Each bullet is one sentence, maybe two.. but it's not an excuse to write a paragraph. 1) what does your company do, what problem are you trying to solve? 2) what traction do you have, or how do you know it's working. why is this notable? 3) who is your team, why are they the right people for the job? 4) what's your fundraise status - past & future plans? "raising a seed round, targeting ~$X. ~$Y committed so far, led by ABC. Prev raised ~$Y from D, E, and F." #4 can be a hard one, highly dependent on where you're at in your journey....maybe you're just testing the waters on the round, in which case say that - "planning to go out for a pre-seed next month." If you list investors as committed/previously invested, make sure they actually are (and ideally investing again) because someone will probably ask them. Founders, does that help? Other investors, what would you suggest/iterate on this format? What's your dream intro request to receive?

Mo (founder of @frecfinance, backed by Greylock) used an RUV to raise $5.6M from his top customers. RUVs have grown entirely through word of mouth. Founders, investors, and lawyers love them. We did very little marketing and no advertising; we just focused on building a great product.

An excellent example of how using a Roll Up Vehicle can supercharge your fundraise while including your top supporters (your customers)!

SAFE.new is the hidden gem in this update. Send SAFEs with no account or sign up process required.

Introducing: SAFE fundraising USDC. Sign SAFEs in seconds & get funded even faster. Here's signing and funding an investment in 15 seconds.

Love to see it: The team at @rollupsHQ is giving all startups that raise a RUV with them a free annual subscription to my newsletter (which comes with the Product Pass, over $13,500 in value—a free year of @Linear @n8n_io @gammaapp @Superhuman @warpdotdev etc). I invest in RUVs (Roll Up Vehicles) all the time because they make it easy for founders to raise money from a bunch of investors while keeping just one clean line on their cap table. Check it out → rollups.com/lenny

Important chart. S&P 490 has had basically no earnings growth since 2022, despite rampant inflation. It’s just 10 companies doing really well, while the broader economy is in contraction in real terms.

Unless your dollar-denominated net worth has increased by at least 11% this year, you've become poorer. The dollar has decreased about 10% in value since Trump took office, so your net worth would have to increase by 11% for you to break even.