based16z

you're seeing a consistent pattern: - Fortinet: people bought bc of AI cybersecurity 'emergency'. turns out 4q decelerating, management price sensitive. stock -25% - ServiceNow: AI SAAS transformation requires forward deployed engineers, turns out 4q is decelerating - stock -25% - Google: spent entire time on TPUs and AI, going FCF negative while its core business (ads) is - you guessed it, decelerating in 4Q. stock -13% this was after youtube was supposed to be killing Netflix (stock -44% over past year) - Robinhood: big agentic push, Monthly active users sequentially decelerating. meanwhile the consumer sector (big ad buyer) is in beast mode. Cheesecake factory 15% comp, Chili's 10%. Norwegian cruise lifts full year guide - passengers up 22% year over year (983k vs 900k expected). which begs the question: if you have RSI, and AI is the future why are you underperforming fried mac n cheese sales or cruise billings in the middle of a war. like what are you actually investing against so company after company is going full tilt into AI, and not really getting a return - just as everyone is 1] locking in to multi year memory contracts (which is part of the price sensitivity fortinet noted) 2] going FCF negative 3] ready to absorb $2-4T of public equity issuance from the labs meanwhile market rejoices when Oracle *cuts back* investment guidance in data centers. Labs on fund raising roadshows are saying the new demand story is that software and hardware are insecure and need to be completely refactored for AI era. Which is just an expense, with no revenue acceleration - which brings to the macro question of 'is productivity going to accelerate' right now sub 2.5% - needs to be above 4% sustainably for debt dynamics to work out. if everyone has to rewrite their software to address cyber threat environment, and banks get hacked constantly (which is apparently the bull case for labs?) - you enter unustainable fiscal situation and decelerating growth which was buttressed by AI infra investment which (per Oracle) is likely to decel even at macro valuation level, China is far ahead of Europe in AI (non controversial). Hang Seng Tech index trades at 10.5x forward PE while French stock market (CAC Index) trades at 14x while Chinese 5 year yield is 1.3% and France is 4.3% so there's a completely believable world in stocks where you get a lot more inference, and a lot more AI, and multiples decline or costs accelerate. which seems like Blasphemy in SF but if you just listen to public companies seems closer to a base case