Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbingsSep 3

This podcast is the single most important podcast to know what is going on in tech every week. On the agenda this week: - NVIDIA Crushes Quarter and Buys Hugging Face - OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor - Instinct Hits $2.5BN Valuation and The Race for AI Assistants - Cognition Raises at $46BN, Linear $2.5BN and Clay $7BN My notes with @rodriscoll and @jasonlk below: 1. How Instinct Could Follow the Same Path as Replit and Lovable In the early days, cloning lightweight AI tools is trivial. Defensibility emerges by rapidly adding complex workflows like security automation and multi-agent orchestration. Products that start without a moat can build formidable ones over time by solving dozens of evolving customer requirements faster than anyone else. 2. Hugging Face Acquisition Explained As the maker of compute, NVIDIA benefits when AI token traffic flows through 30% gross-margin open-source models rather than 70% gross-margin closed models where platforms capture more of the economics. Driving down software margins allows a greater share of total ecosystem spend to flow directly into GPUs. 3. The Bull Case for Clay Being a $100 Billion Company Autonomous agents executing go-to-market strategies around the clock could consume 10x to 100x more tokens and software usage than human sales teams ever could. As a leader in agentic GTM, Clay is positioned to capture an enormous wave of automated outreach, campaign analysis, and global prospect engagement. 4. The Bull Case for Linear When software teams build 100x more features at 50x the speed using AI, legacy project management tools and manual Kanban boards begin to break down. Linear can become the agent-friendly system of record for coordinating, tracking, and managing thousands of issues generated simultaneously by human-agent development teams. 5. The Three Ways the Wheels Come Off the Bus for NVIDIA NVIDIA’s record-breaking momentum faces one fundamental existential threat: a sudden collapse in end-user demand for AI intelligence. Hyperscaler CapEx buildouts and complex vendor financing arrangements work only as long as customers continue aggressively buying frontier-model tokens throughout the supply chain. 6. We Are All Building Compound Startups Today AI development tools have accelerated code production dramatically, making narrow point solutions increasingly vulnerable. To survive rapid competitive convergence, software startups must embrace becoming compound companies that ship expansive, multi-module product suites covering the entire customer workflow. 7. We Did Not End Up Doing More With Less. We Did More With More, and That’s Why European Startups Fail The belief that AI would allow companies to shrink headcount and simply do more with less has not played out as expected. Winners are compounding capital and talent to do vastly more with more, putting underfunded point solutions, particularly across Europe, at risk of being overwhelmed by aggressively scaling U.S. competitors. (links in comments)