Business history and operating math on today's AI and markets news. Founder, Operating. Saw Facebook start at Harvard. Newsletter below.
Joined June 2025
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Becoming a tech stack means carrying fixed costs that move with interest rates, so most AI plans are really credit plans.
Walmart has spent years and billions automating its warehouses. Peak power bills at its automated grocery sites can top $800K a month, against about $250K when the work was mostly manual.
Automation pays once someone decides what deserves automating first. Every company needs curators.
John Brewton retweeted
If you sponsor this podcast, calling for the execution of Elon Musk, I will never use your product… and will buy from both of your top two competitors
This is unacceptable and dangerous.
This a dog whistle to murder someone because you disagree with them — and this is the same guy who joked about the assassination against President Trump.
Fuck this piece of shit.
Ben Horowitz says Andy Jassy told him Amazon's compute shortage runs beyond 2028. His dot-com lesson: the bandwidth and the debt arrived before the customers did. This time the customers are waiting. The debt still needs watching. Ben Horowitz on @theallinpod, via @firesidealpha
An AI agent can find the cheapest hotel room in Paris in seconds. It can't find a cheaper copy of a one-of-a-kind cabin.
Agents commoditize whatever they can compare. Own something they can't.
Everyone's looking at the GMV miss on Shopify. I'd look at the costs. Revenue grew 32%, operating expenses grew about 16%, and they're guiding opex down to 29-30% of revenue in Q4. That's a company getting leaner as it gets bigger, and I'd take that over one more point of GMV.
Brett Harrison is building an exchange where AI inference providers keep moving prices to their marginal cost. Next he wants auctions for three-month inference contracts. When compute trades like a commodity, the buyer who can switch wins. @BrettHarrison on @theinformation
Howard Marks on October 2008, when Oaktree was buying and everyone else was selling: "It's by doing the things that other people think are nuts. That's how you make the big money." His catch is that you have to do it and be right. When you're the only buyer, the seller takes your price.
@InvestingCanons
Netflix's CFO has said the difference is that Netflix shares the creative and economic risk with its creators. That's exactly the problem. Netflix pays about $18 billion a year for content up front. YouTube pays creators 55% after the ads sell, and its line keeps climbing.
1/ A24 opened "You Can See Everything" in 855 theaters and grossed $15 million. The film had not been announced before Sept 6. The interesting part is how they launched it.
5/ The playbook: short fixed window, one asset built to be copied, supply kept below demand, earned media doing the work paid media used to do.
6/ A small team with a strong product and a network of fans can now launch like a studio. Companies are becoming tech stacks. I write about how operators build and launch every week at operatingbyjohnbrewton.com
Munger in 2019 on Mozart. Maybe the greatest talent who ever lived, and he ruined it two ways. He spent more than he made and he was eaten up with resentment. I've seen both sink companies with great products.
(via @TmarketL, Daily Journal 2019)