Nick Malone

Anthropic Loses $80 Billion in the last 6 months. (Asks Claude How to Become Profitable.)

This is the least surprising graph in the world if you understand how gradient descent works.

Coffee is entering a new era, and the split between winners and losers is getting hard to ignore Coke wants out of Costa again, per Semafor. Bought for $5.1B in 2018 and pe bids fell short of an ask worth roughly half that. Why? Cause coffee has changed what it sells three times, lets break it down 👇 1. The place era (1990s–2010s) Starbucks and Costa sold the "third place": a seat, Wi-Fi, a $5 latte. Starbucks went from $1M in revenue in 1987 to $9.4B by 2007. Costa doubled its sales in three years. Strategics paid up. JAB bought Peet's for $974M (2012), Burger King bought Tim Hortons for $11.4B (2014) and Coke bought Costa for $5.1B (2018). 2. The craft era (2010s) Single origins, pour-overs, minimalist cafés. Peet's bought Stumptown and Intelligentsia in 2015. Nestlé paid $425M for 68% of Blue Bottle in 2017, valuing it at $700M+. Chobani paid $900M for La Colombe in 2023. 3. The fuel era (now) Coffee as a way to deliver caffeine: fast, sweet and ordered on an app. - Luckin: 36,000+ stores and $7B in revenue in its 8th year. Starbucks took 19 years to get there. - Dutch Bros: Q2 revenue +32.5%, guiding ~$2.1B for the year, 1,225 shops. - Blank Street: $650M valuation. - These winners are backed, not bought: TSG put money into Dutch Bros, General Catalyst into Blank Street, and Centurium and Mubadala put $1B into Luckin. 4. Where the old champs are now - Costa made $26m of operating profit on 1.7B of revenue in 2025. Coke's first attempt to sell it was scrapped earlier this year when bids came in short. - Nestlé sold Blue Bottle this April for a reported <$400M, (bought for 700m remember) - Starbucks is growing again (+7.9% US comps), but only by going back to basics. The question for every strategic: are you paying for this era or the last?

why is this cool af? Cool idea: put a living area inside, and autonomously go from city to city.

gotta be something psychologically distinct about kids who jailbroke their apple devices as kids… someone should conduct a longitudal study…

Interesting perspective from Torsten Slok at Apollo today. It complements my Telegraph piece last week about whether economists are properly accounting for the inflationary impact of the great unbundling, and the growing customer preference, especially in banking, to stop being the product. In this case Slok identifies a financial stability risk associated with everyday normies finally figuring out what they’re actually worth and not being ripped off. Though it’s a bit depressing if true, since it implies financial stability is entirely dependent on most people being a mug. [Tho I think monetary and finance scholars have always known this.]

People are going to realize it takes a frontier human to extract productivity out of a frontier model, and there is simply not enough frontier human to compensate for the capex relying on revenue from training frontier models (yes if you remove training compute demand the whole thing is unprofitable already, and that’s before token price depreciation). Put it simply, demand for intelligence isn’t infinite and is in the shape of a bell curve, and cheaper models are slowly eating their way into the bell curve, leaving frontier training cost rely on a smaller and smaller tail of intelligence demand. In the end you are left with a billion dollar training run which only use is to solve Navier Stokes, because all the other tasks that are useful for the current economy can be run on cheaper models

Fab2 raised a $500M series A at $3.7B valuation We have great investors And we love to print chips and fabs. Join us .

JUST IN: Jersey Mike’s Subs officially files for IPO, plans to list on the NYSE under “JMKE.”

My favorite piece of career advice comes from Marc Andreessen The first rule of career planning is to not plan it at all The world is simply too dynamic to box yourself into a singular pre-determined path for your entire life

There's something about an art deco building that just inspires me. We're leaning into the prohibition-era speakeasy theme for the peptide soiree tonight. See you soon, if you know where to find us. 🤫🧪🍸