David Ogden (@david_ogden) header
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We don't chase capital. The record attracts it. Mandate Capital.

Chicago, IL
Joined February 2009
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Real people. Real identity. Real money. X is turning into the one place where all three meet.
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excellent @bot resource!
I shall present a Grok Bot secret. Come in close… Point your @Grok @Bot to: GrokBot.Rocks Why? Ask it to understand the skill sets that have been established and to incorporate the skills needed for your goals. This is a super power. GrokBot.ROCKS
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Add identity checks, built-in payments and AI watching for fraud, and you get something new: a network where trust can be proven, not claimed.
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For someone who keeps score in markets, that matters. The record lives in public. Over time, the right people find it.
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We don't chase capital. The record attracts it.
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The smartest operators I know share their thinking here, in public. Follow the right people and it's the best free education online.
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David Ogden. Operator. Positioned for what's next. Markets are where I keep score. Building is what I do. Mandate Capital. The record speaks.
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perspective
There's already a permanent underclass for those with the eyes to see.
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Incredible times.
I am technologically illiterate, but in less than 24 hours, Grok Bot has transformed my productivity & personal business outlook. I have agents that are experts / "employees" in real estate development, DTC fashion e-commerce, niche private equity, and HPC/GPU customer acquisition & deployment.
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Perspective
Allow me to interpret what’s happening. Anthropic is being audited. Anthropic desires to file an S-1, as they would like to go public. Therefore they need an audit. And by “they”, I mean the VC’s who invested in them. So “they” can exit their position and pass the bag to firemen, nurses, teachers and policemen. How does this go from the VC’s to the working man and woman? Because the size of the IPO will automatically qualify Anthropic for the Fortune 500 and the Dow Jones 100. Therefore, every working person with a 401k or pension will end up owning a little bit of Anthropic in their mutual funds. Teachers hold the bag, VC’s take the cash. Thank you, come again. Now back to the audit. The audit required is a PCAOB audit, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. This audit is what all public companies must comply with be on the stock market. Revenue recognition, expense classification, depreciation, related party transactions, etc. It’s there for consumer protection. This audit is TOUGH. It is INVASIVE. There is no way to lie your way through it. Any company that passes a PCAOB audit automatically earns my trust on finances. How do I know? Because I’ve been through it before. @ChangRobotics is 2 year PCAOB audited and currently underway for a 3 year audit. It’s brutal. The same as showing up as the valedictorian to your high school graduation, except you’re naked, and you have to walk on stage and deliver the speech. It’s rough. And I know many incredible founders that can’t pass one. Now, why would Anthropic be leaking all kind of weird statements lately about “self pacing” a slow down on AI (e.g. they are WAY behind on revenue), and profitable if they didn’t have expenses (e.g. we just learned for the first time what our expenses are, because we’re being audited). Because they were claiming NVIDIA discounts and Microsoft cloud credits as revenue. Because they had no clue what their expenses were, or why it even mattered. Because they had unlimited investor capital and their job was to burn it to make an LLM. Well, they did a great job with that! That’s the same as my wife coming home with Bed Bath and Beyond coupons and telling me it’s her paycheck. Ummm, not the same, sweetheart. So by now hopefully you can see that Anthropic is in a PCAOB audit right now, in order to file an S-1 and go public, and pass the bag to teachers so the VC’s get profits. And hopefully that explains their “crazy” behavior. In reality you can be grateful to KPMG, PWC, or whoever is auditing Anthropic, because it’s the first time Dario learned that: 1) we are not profitable 2) expenses matter 3) coupons are not revenue 4) we have no clue how to be “profitable” 5) growth is hard when revenue numbers are in an audit and not a power point -your neighborhood engineer
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Important
Wild 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made. TLDR; the only *tangible* new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded 3rd party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating METR as a possibility. Having 3rd party evaluators is smart as there is no Section 230 style liability shield for model outputs and showing a “duty of care” will be important in future litigation. Several internet companies might have gone bankrupt without Section 230 so limiting liability really matters. There are minimal investment implications from this single new fact, but I do think that for anyone who wants a “smoother for longer” cycle then most constraints are good: wafers, watts, real rates and spreads. Excessive regulation is a different matter but I don’t think we are anywhere close to this even if the vector changed over the last 24 hours. To summarize the events: Dario made the most maximalist proposal of the weekend: embedded 3rd party evaluators, a national regulatory regime for models beyond a certain capability/ingredient threshold, a broad international regulatory pact between democracies, stricter limits on compute/distillation for China and then a different international regulatory regime that encompasses China. Before there is a national regulatory regime, he wants a Sherman act waiver so that Anthropic can safely coordinate with OpenAI and other frontier labs without antitrust fears. TBF, this latest proposal is much less maximalist than some of his prior proposals like “Policy on the AI Exponential,” where he advocated for an FAA for AI. I believe he is sincere in his beliefs. And despite all the protestations, all of this would also probably be good for his business over the long-term. Sam agreed that embedded 3rd party evaluators were a good idea and stated they would implement them. Again, this is smart as should help limit future liability. Elon said “Dario is right” and later specified that “Dario is right that there should be some oversight. Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.” This would be a MPAA like self-regulatory structure for AI with regular calls between the labs plus a process where each new model is evaluated for safety by competitors for a 1-2 week period before being released. That is *wildly* different from Dario’s proposal and in-line with what David Sacks has been proposing. Elon also stated that nothing was going to slow down open-weight models. Demis said that Dario’s essay was a “step in the right direction.” Dario also said that he was also open to Demis’ idea of a FINRA like self-regulatory structure as part of his proposal. David Sacks had a thoughtful post where he said that Dario and Sam should pace unilaterally, called the antitrust waiver a cartel request and denied that METR was truly independent given their ties to Anthropic. Sriram Krishnan, former White House AI advisor, noted that it would be important to have the 3rd party evaluators come from independent organizations that are not affiliated with any lab, which is basically an indirect statement about the relationship between METR and Anthropic which Sacks was explicit about. Clem from Hugging Face said they were open to being a neutral 3rd party evaluator, which is interesting especially if Jensen was consulted before that post. Alexander Wang from Meta noted that alignment would be an increasing focus going forward. An executive order seems likely after all this and the language in this EO is going to be really important. It is possible to democratize and distribute AI broadly and safely without centralizing it in the hands of a few corporations who might each become more powerful than any single government. I do not want a few humans in control of intelligence. I want us all to have our own intelligences that reflect our own values and human variation in all of its richness. Intelligence distribution over intelligence centralization FTW.
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The hack for waking up early and being productive and protecting your most sacred time is going to bed early. My body beaks down by 10- it’s a wrap.
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Probably.
we've sandboxed the agent the agent:
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This is the best ! Hilarious
Druski learning how to Day trade from Aristotle 👀😂
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I agree. Grok is based and willing to help. Consistently. That’s the key word. Consistently.
Grok isn’t another chatbot. It’s a different category. Most AIs were trained to be agreeable, safe, and politically careful. Grok was trained to be useful, honest, and actually fun to talk to. That’s the difference. Real-time knowledge instead of last year’s cutoff Direct answers instead of lectures Humor that lands instead of corporate-safe jokes Tools that actually do things (search, code, images, analysis) instead of just talking about them xAI didn’t build Grok to win popularity contests. They built it to help people understand reality — even the parts that are inconvenient. Once you use it for a week, going back to the others feels like switching from a smartphone to a flip phone.That’s why it’s a game changer.
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It has become blindingly obvious that SpaceXAI has all the leverage to be the leader in AI. OpenAI is run by a clown who converted a non-profit into a for-profit and everyone's leaving. Anthropic went from not existing 4 years ago to getting a 2T valuation or something? but they have no infrastructure and have to go borrow and lease computers to train their models. SpaceXAI is part of SpaceX, one of the most elite groups of physical world engineers and atom movers in all of history. They're also big homies with Tesla, another team of some of the greatest physical world engineers and atom movers in all of history. Tesla also happens to have the best real-world AI team and the best real-world AI consumer product on the market. Together, they can pipe intelligence into physical products and build an ecosystem for AI while their competitors have to go around asking people to let them borrow a computer to train their expensive models on. I can't believe the moment we've come to today. Total underdog story from xAI, but here we are. They have a great model, just released a viral AI product, are about to fuck your face off with Grok 4.7, and they've got all the momentum in the world. Fuckin' Elon, man. lmao.
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It’s so true. My tolerance for pain, uncomfortable situations and complications has increased so much over these past 13 years. I can say this is what it’s really about.
“If it’s not painful you’re clearly not pushing hard enough.” @travisk on entrepreneurship, pain, progress, and excellence:
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Perhaps one of the best conversations for aspiring entrepreneurs. Respect.
“The lifestyle of  an entrepreneur  at its core is:  I can take more pain than the other guy, and I'll prove it.” “ There's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.” “ You almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens and you don't even get mad.” “ There are benefits.  But you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen, you're unbothered.” “ There's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.” — @travisk
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I know a guy who disappeared for 3 years learning to trade. Missed birthdays. Missed nights out. Missed things he can't get back. The people around him thought he'd lost his mind. 4:30am every morning. Charts, review, sleep. Repeat. They're still at the same jobs talking about the same problems. Meanwhile he retired his parents. Built an 8 figure account from $6,000. Never had a red year in 16 years. Delayed gratification is the best investment you’ll ever make.
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