Antonio SC retweeted
A stadium worthy of hosting a Super Bowl
The iconic Santiago Bernabéu
An honour to be here.
Antonio SC retweeted
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Antonio SC retweeted
Football belongs to the fans! Thank you to all the fans around the world, the Ballon D’Or of All Time is also yours.
Antonio SC retweeted
A lot of ink has been spilled on GPU financing lately. I spent over a decade trading ABS on Wall St, and structured over $2B+ of debt financings as an operator (including at @tryramp). Figured I'd try to make sense of this market, so I went back to a framework I knew well: aircraft ABS and aircraft engine ABS.
My take: a GPU neocloud runs on airline economics, and the debt behind it looks a lot like aircraft engine ABS.
The parallels:
• Perishable inventory. An empty seat after the door closes is gone forever. So is an idle hour on an energized H100 rack.
• 85%+ of cost is fixed (servers, 10-year rack leases, 10-14% debt service). One more hour of compute costs pennies of power.
• Utilization is everything. Airlines break even around 80% load factor, a levered GPU cluster around 65-75%. The returns live in those last 25 percentage points.
• NVIDIA is Boeing and Airbus rolled into one. Powered shells and grid interconnects are the new airport slots.
• Wall St copied the aircraft financing playbook: take-or-pay contract plus servers in a bankruptcy-remote SPV, 70-80% LTV.
Part 1 of my blog post goes into a lot more detail:
alexyangsong.com/blog/alumin…
Antonio SC retweeted
88% of VC-backed founders who exited their companies got $0. Eduardo Azevedo and Kent Smetters analysed 157,669 startups and 248,454 founders from 1987 to 2025.
Let that sink in...
Antonio SC retweeted
My quick takeaways on the Anthropic S-1:
1. This is a historical moment
2. $6.6M in revenue per employee!! Hard to even comprehend how good that is but Anthropic is AI native as it gets so makes sense.
3. I always thought OpenAI would drop their S-1 first
4. Customers spend about 9x more after a year. Net Revenue Retention is approximately 900% as of Sep 30, 2026. Good SaaS companies brag about 120%.
5. Cowork is growing faster than Claude Code did. Goes to show you the demand for consumer products. Duo will probably rip.
6. 3 years ago this company did $41M in revenue. In the first six months of 2026, it did $16.3 billion. I don't think anyone has a mental model for that curve yet, I sure don’t.
7. Nearly half of revenue comes through cloud marketplaces. About 48% comes from customers buying through them. Big companies buy where their budget already lives, and the lesson for founders selling to enterprises is to get listed where your buyers already spend.
8. Their run rate formula is published: the last 28 days of usage times 13, plus subscriptions times 12, which i guess is the new ARR math for founders?
9. It looks like They're merging Cowork into Claude dot au which tells you the chat box era is ending and the "go do the work for me" era is here.
10. Thousands of Anthropic employees are about to become liquid at once, so expect the biggest wave of new AI startups and angel checks San Francisco has ever seen. Reminds me when Facebook went public but this is way bigger.
Let’s go!
11. Buried in the filing, Anthropic says the gap between what Claude can do and how widely it's used is one of its biggest growth opportunities, so the company itself is telling you the models are ahead of the market and someone has to close that gap for dentists, landlords, and plumbers.
12. Whatever happens, exciting times to be building in AI.
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
Antonio SC retweeted
Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents.
The war on agents has begun, and here’s how it probably plays out:
Stage 1: Companies block agents because agents skip the ads and upsells.
Stage 2: Agents learn to act like humans, and it becomes an arms race.
Stage 3: The market splits. Companies that make money on sales let agents in, companies that make money on data charge for access, and the giants build their own agents.
Stage 4: A trusted middle layer for agent identity and payments becomes the standard way in.
Stage 5: Companies that welcome agents start winning customers from the ones that block them.
Stage 6: The agent blockers come back and let agents in on their own terms.
Stage 7: Everyone starts competing for agents with better prices, faster checkout and SEO built for agents.
Stage 8: The ads come back, and companies pay to be your agent’s first recommendation.
Stage 9: The agent war ends, and selling to agents becomes as normal as having a website.
notice..
> Delta is blocking AI agents from booking flights
> JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accounts
> Yelp requires paid data licensing for agents
> Amazon has blocked Grok bot and other shopping agents.
the internet is starting to block AI agents that were supposed to do everything for us
Antonio SC retweeted
La Liga can never get back to the top level with this level of refereeing. Every Betis player is complaining, Pellegrini is complaining and 60,000 people in the stadium are booing.
Shame on this league.
a16z’s latest Top 100 Consumer AI list, in one line: everyone’s trying AI, almost nobody’s paying for it.
4.5% of US consumers pay for ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. Meanwhile the top 1% of payers drop about $900 a month. More than the bottom half combined.
a16z.news/p/top-100-consumer…
Top 100 Consumer AI Apps - Seventh Edition
Top web and mobile AI products by monthly traffic
a16z.news 74
Comunicado Oficial.
realmadrid.com/es-ES/noticia…
Another great summary…
As a parent of 2 young teenagers, I think about this one a lot:
‘Advice for college grads used to be “follow your passion” and now it’s follow careers that are not document-driven, rules-bound and verifiable.’
More SF observations:
1. Seeing the word "inference" on billboards in SF still blows my mind. 99.9% of america has no idea what inference is and I wonder how many know what an agent is. Will Muse, Instinct, Dots etc will change that over the next 12 months?
2. You know who doesn't get enough credit? Manus. In March 2025 they shipped the blueprint for AI agents: every task gets its own computer in the cloud, you can watch it work, it writes a todo list and checks it off, and you walk away while it finishes. So much of what we use today runs on those ideas!
3. Your product now has to sell itself twice. First the agent has to pick it, then the human has to trust that pick enough to say yes.
4. I was talking to a guy who told me we should just destroy all the data centers. I think that sentiment is more common than people in SF realize. You can already see some of the big AI companies adjusting positioning their AI as something that helps people and gives them more time/cures for cancers etc.
5. AI is making people work 5x faster (at least), so for freelancers/agencies that charge per hour you're earning 5x less per unit of work. But your rate is the same? I think a lot of freelancers and agencies are about to have to rethink how they price.
6. Running a company now feels kinda dystopian sometimes, especially with a small team of a few humans and a lot of agents. Some days the Slack channel is mostly bots reporting to each other, and you're the only one in the room with a pulse.
7. Every product company is turning into a product studio. I see it firsthand as a co-founder of @meetLCA , which is basically a Labs as a Service company incubating new products for companies. (DM me if you want to work together in 2027).
8. Personal software is exploding. People at every company are building their own little tools for their own jobs. It's amazing for productivity and a nightmare for IT, because nobody knows what's running or who owns it.
9. Revenue per human is the new flex. Founders used to brag about headcount. Now they brag about how much they're doing with how few people.
11. More founders are using agents for customer research. Agents run the interviews, read every support ticket and summarize what people are begging for. Synthetic market research is the new thing.
12. Shipping technology that actually takes 3-6 months with unique partnerships that are hard to replicate. So, partnerships are sooo back!
13. Insane amount of young people (22 or younger) making absurds amounts of money. At least it feels that way. Never seen anything like that, even during mobile era.
14. Only 2% of the US is paying for AI products, but it feels like 110% SF is.
15. Advice for college grads used to be “follow your passion” and now it’s follow careers that are not document- driven, rules-bound and verifiable
16. Seeing the word inference on billboards in SF still blows my mind.
17. Agents paying for things feels futuristic. I think its coming, only a matter of time, but I’m wondering when it becomes mainstream. 2027?
18. Lots of talk about proactive agents being the next phase of personal agents. Right now you ask your agent to do something. In 2027, it’s all going to be about noticing things (context/memory) and acting first. "Your flight got delayed, I already rebooked you."
19. The quote "what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years." by Chris Dixon. It feels like that length of time isnt 10 years anymore, its 12 months.
20. This is the most asymmetric window I've ever seen in business.
My DMs are open. Respond to the most interesting ones.
Loved my trip to SF. Until next time. Maybe NYC next?
Thank you for everything.
I'm rooting for you.
50
This is the most relevant tweet/summary you will read today. #AgenticEconomy
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
58
Antonio SC retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
The #AI boom isn't lifting all private jets… Tech billionaires: 📈💲845B.
Everyone other billionaire: ⬇️💲62B.
Tech billionaires account for all $845 billion in wealth gains on the @business Billionaires Index so far this year, while billionaires outside technology lost a combined $62 billion, underscoring how dramatically the AI boom has widened the gap between tech fortunes and everyone else.
57
Antonio SC retweeted
Scroll through American politicians' feeds today and Columbus Day looks like an Italian holiday. Italian flags, Italian heritage, Italian pride. One country is missing from the picture: the one that paid for the voyage.
Italy did not exist in 1492. It would not exist for another 369 years. Columbus was Genoese, yes. Everything else was Castilian: Queen Isabella's money, ships fitted out in Palos, the Pinzón brothers commanding the Pinta and the Niña, a crew drawn largely from Andalusia. That is why October 12 is Spain's National Day.
America should know this better than anyone. St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, was founded by a Spaniard in 1565, four decades before Jamestown. Bernardo de Gálvez fought for American independence, and Congress made him an honorary citizen. Some 65 million Americans today have roots in the Hispanic world.
Disagreements between Washington and Madrid come and go. History does not. Spain's next government must defend it without hesitation, at home and abroad, with the same pride Americans show for their Fourth of July. The story of 1492 was written in Spanish, and it will keep being told in Spanish. 🇪🇸
Would you call the Moon landing a German achievement because Wernher von Braun was born in Germany?
Antonio SC retweeted
I maintain that King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I were the first venture capitalists.
¡Feliz 12 de Octubre 🇪🇸!
La distancia no hace olvidar, hace entender.
Cada año lejos de España lo echo más de menos.
Sin duda, uno de los mejores paises del mundo.
¡Viva España! ¡Viva la Fiesta Nacional!
53
Antonio SC retweeted
¡Buenos días, aviadores! 🇪🇸
Feliz Día de la Fiesta Nacional.
#DFN26



























