Sometimes there is so much continuity that you wonder why they bothered to change things at all.

“You have thousands of moments ahead of you. The important thing isn’t to get them all right; it’s to find a way to keep moving forward.” Sundar Pichai, MS ’95, CEO of Google and Alphabet, addressed the Class of 2026 at Stanford’s 135th Commencement ceremony. Watch the full speech at the link: stanford.io/4e8weWd

Some about the Constitution ... and elections being state matters comes to mind

Well, at least they're opening the Strait. But wait, it was open before the war.

With Fox buying Roku for $22B, here’s a throwback to “Succession” and the best TV scene ever for an M&A negotiation between a streaming tech and a legacy media company (Matsson just cooks the Roys): ▫️”Lecture me Vaulter Guy" ▫️”[Waystar is] a parts shop. Good parts. Bad brand." ▫️”I don't care what you think. You're a tribute band." ▫️[About Greg in Swedish] “There’s more of them…6’9 of pure nepotism!” ▫️ “[ATN] is fine but the graph is horrible. It's not complicated. A lot of yelling. Long term, I don't think news for angry old people works. I'd fold it in. Fat pipe that shit. Simple, cheap, huge. Ikea'd to fuck." ▫️”I'm just trying to make you fucking rich." ("Already Rich") ▫️”On the offer, I think I am what I am what I am." ("Ok, Popeye") Truly incredible writing.

Malcolm Gladwell revealed why you shouldn't go to Harvard: 1. America does not have a shortage of students who want science and math degrees. It has a shortage of students who finish them. Half of all high school seniors who intend to study STEM drop out by the end of their second year. The problem is not interest. It is persistence. 2. The obvious assumption is that smarter students persist longer. So Gladwell tested it. At Hartwick College, a small liberal arts school in New York, the top third of math SAT scorers took the majority of STEM degrees. The bottom third dropped out in large numbers. The data seemed to confirm it. Smarter kids stick around longer. 3. Then he looked at Harvard. The bottom third of Harvard's math SAT scores are equal to the top third at Hartwick. By the logic above, everyone at Harvard should graduate with a STEM degree. They are all brilliant. Nobody should be dropping out. 4. Harvard showed the exact same pattern as Hartwick. Top students graduated. Bottom students dropped out like flies. Even though the bottom Harvard students were objectively brilliant by any global standard. Something else entirely was driving the dropout rate. 5. That something is called relative deprivation theory. Human beings do not measure themselves against the world. They measure themselves against the people immediately around them. A Harvard student in the bottom third does not think I am in the top one percent of all students globally. They think that kid next to me keeps getting everything right and I keep getting it wrong. So they quit. 6. The research from UCLA puts a specific number on it. Your odds of graduating with a STEM degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers. Choose Harvard over the University of Maryland and your chance of finishing a STEM degree drops by thirty percent. Thirty percent. Just to put a brand name on your resume. 7. Relative position matters more than absolute position when it comes to confidence, motivation, and self belief. The eightieth percentile student at Harvard looks up at the people above them and feels like they cannot compete. The number one student at a state school feels like they can conquer the world. That feeling drives everything. 8. The practical hiring implication is radical. Class rank matters more than institution name. Gladwell argues companies should have a don't ask don't tell policy for where someone went to college. Hiring only from top schools means missing the top students from every other school. That is not smart hiring. That is brand worship. 9. When choosing a college, never go to the best school you get into. Go to the school where you are guaranteed to be near the top of your class. Being a big fish in a smaller pond does not just feel better. It statistically produces better outcomes than being a small fish in the most prestigious pond available. 10. So why do we keep choosing Harvard over Maryland? Because we are flattered. Because the acceptance letter feels like validation. Because we make an irrational decision in a moment of enormous flattery and call it ambition. Gladwell's conclusion is simple and brutal. When we have the chance to join an elite institution we do things that are genuinely against our own interest and we feel great about it the whole time.

Americans realizing they spend $80B to bomb Iran only to pay Iran $300B more to undo the damage

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027. Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today. Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers. To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us. To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything. To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me. And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (:

Anthropic’s annualized sales have climbed to nearly $50 billion, giving it new leverage over business customers. Some of those same customers now fear they are paying Anthropic to build products that compete with them. Full story: thein.fo/43wKrWU

Just in case you were curious about what the @spaceX lock-up schedule looks like, here it is. Yes, LPs in the big funds with large holdings will definitely want to diversify. So, selling pressure is definitely coming.

An unavoidable conclusion from a new book is that the very rich in some ways have it better than the very, very rich econ.st/43vXOXi Illustration: @brett.ryder.illustration

That The New York Times did not lead with the Knicks' title is final proof that The Times is not a New York newspaper anymore.

Reuters just put a number on the $TRUMP memecoin: the family made about $616M. Investors lost over $700M. The token is down 97% from its peak. Before you make this about politics — don't. Make it about the structure. Because the exact same mechanics drain you in every celebrity coin, left or right. Here's the pattern, and how to spot it before you become the exit liquidity. The Reuters investigation found the family put in little to none of their own money. They got large, low-cost stakes in the token, then cashed out into retail demand as the price ran. That's the whole game, and it's not unique to Trump. It's the default design of almost every celebrity or "founder" memecoin: insiders get cheap or free allocation, hype pulls retail in at the top, insiders sell into that buying, and the crowd holds the bag down to -90%. And it's not just one coin. The same investigation pegged the family's total crypto haul at about $2.3B across four ventures — almost exactly matched by about $2.3B in investor losses. Gains for insiders, losses for the crowd, on a near 1:1 basis. When one side's profit equals the other side's loss that precisely, you're not looking at an investment. You're looking at a transfer. So here's the 60-second check before you ape any celebrity or "founder" coin: - Who holds the supply, and what did they pay for it? If insiders got it near-free, you're exit liquidity by design. - Is there a vesting cliff, or can they dump today? - Is anyone actually using the thing, or is the price the only product? If the team's cost basis is zero and yours isn't, the trade is already decided. None of this is a political take. It's a structural one. $TRUMP is just the most expensive recent lesson in a pattern that's older than crypto. Don't buy the name. Read the cap table. What's the worst celebrity-coin rug you've watched happen in real time?

The Trumps have not only enriched themselves to an unprecedented extent for a sitting US president and his family, but have done so through crypto deals that carried little to no downside risk for them while resulting in big losses for retail investors reut.rs/4uZf4QB

Really good @eshugerman piece Have heard some of these anecdotes along the way. All true! sfstandard.com/2026/06/13/bi…

Vibe Coding, 2025-2026 RIP 🪦 Turns out you do still need skilled software engineers in the loop, just like many of us said all along.

Excessively concentrated wealth leads to a small number of individuals having outsized power over the rest of us. It is a dangerous externality, and taxing dangerous externalities is basic economics.

The U.S. Dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power over the last six years, per NYT

“A few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy at the same time that entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement” nytimes.com/2026/06/13/busin…

People do realize this is our money, right?