investment thesis by vintage: 2015: good management, earnings grow, long 2021: TAM $500bn, only 20x sales, covid win, long 2026: AI maybe hurt, chart bad, short

good post. lot of clearinghouse-like businesses in client/server and cloud era but unfortunately none became really big businesses - etl/elt, mulesoft, apis, enterprise service bus, snowflake data marketplace, etc. - most "single pane of glass" in cloud now inside ibm or unmonetized inside kubernetes - EDI around since 1970s and was effectively clearing house for supply chain/logistics (and still used today) most stayed as middleware layer (and despite hopes have not commoditized existing apps) -> curious why/how AI is different. if anything AI should trivialize the translation of different data/formats/audit trails. agree there is huge opportunity if done right.

* Correct quote is “politically left” not socialist. Point stands. Entrepreneurs take potential and turn it into value that’s added to the global GDP. They capture a small amount of that value in the process which is a big part of the incentive. The rest goes to others, employees, shareholders, government, suppliers etc. You can always criticize them. You can always criticize the redistribution efforts. But you should always remember that without them, there is very little new value enters society and that locks everyone in zero sum competition, sometimes war. Entrepreneurs are load bearing for human thriving. It’s a glorious act to put yourself out there and build a company that provides good and services to everyone. And Elon is the best entrepreneur that ever was. You don’t have to like him, and sure he’s crazy, but otherwise he wouldn’t do crazy things. Same coin, two sides.

investing in public markets feel increasingly toxic/untenable unless you are at a pod and can manage factor risk understand why people allocate to privates where valuations are high but you get up-rounds - price action terrible ex semis and random zero revenue retail themes and now bad in semis - lots of charts below 200d, great earnings faded - very low valuations for lots of names yet no bid/support at any range - crazy volatility/swings on narrative, often intra-day - everything is macro/factor/basket and co-specific fundamentals just don't matter much

$fis $gpn $fisv bull case?

Buying Meituan for its 10% stake in Unitree the new SKM/Zm anthropic trade

"What if the model companies do this?" is the new "What if Google does this?" I.e. the meaningless question investors ask that shows either that they're stupid or that they dislike you and are looking for ways to find fault.

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease. This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit. The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London. A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box. These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel. They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains. They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep. Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”: > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.” — The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates. It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption. SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins). The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill. With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment. Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two. It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place. All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now. That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective. If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

Pretty good year for positional goods $BATRA $MANU $MSGS

It's amazing how far the banning lab meat coalition has made it given that they have no real arguments, and they usually don't even bother pretending to have any.

In 2019, @animaloutlook uncovered horrible abuse at a salmon hatchery in Maine. The company said sorry & promised reforms (which satisfied Maine officials). Animal Outlook returned in 2025 and found even worse abuse. This has happened over & over again w/the biggest meat co's.

Been digging into a software stock everyone forgot about. Worth sharing some of it. Last August, BigCommerce quietly changed its name to Commerce and swapped its ticker to $CMRC. No big announcement, no fanfare — most people still have it filed under “dead 2021 SaaS name.” Here’s what’s actually interesting: while nobody was looking, the business did something the stock price doesn’t reflect. — Operating loss cut from -$72M to -$16M in two years — Flipped to positive free cash flow — Gross margins near 79% — $141M in cash and short-term investments, basically no debt And yet the stock is down ~65%. It now trades around 0.70x sales. For context, healthy SaaS names with margins like this usually go for 4-8x. So the whole debate comes down to one question: is this a melting ice cube that deserves to be cheap, or a business the market wrote off too early? There’s a real bear case too — growth has slowed to a crawl and it’s fighting Shopify. I’m not going to pretend it’s a layup. That part’s in the full writeup. Broke down both sides this week on Cheap Software Stocks: the numbers that made me look twice, the risks that keep it honest, and where it could go from here. Link in bio if you want the whole thing.

A powerful piece on the suffering of pigs in gestation crates in the US and why it’s important to speak out against legislative threats to animal welfare nytimes.com/2026/05/30/opini…

Crazy one way pain trade

Rush to defend exchanges on crypto perp competition means we are in first inning of de rating. Can revisit in 12-24 months since not a ton of NT catalysts to get them to work $ice $cme $cboe

I've been working on farm animal protection for a while now, and I haven't seen anything quite like what's happening around the Save Our Bacon Act. People who have never organized before, including some genuinely prominent voices, are hosting events, calling senators, and fundraising from friends. And those of us who have been here a while, across many ideological divides and every strategic disagreement, are showing up together. We've always punched above our weight (out of necessity!), but this feels substantively very different. The political and social cost of supporting this barbarism is finally rising.