Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbingsAug 27

If you do not listen to this weekly show, you are deliberately choosing to not make yourself smarter. The world of tech has never moved faster. You need to stay up to date with the most thoughtful analysis. That is where @rodriscoll and @jasonlk come in! 😉 On the agenda this week: - NVIDIA Bonanza: Buys Poolside & Invests in Mercor and Perplexity - Anthropic's $30TRN Revenue Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO - Why Customer Service, Defence and Robotics are Overinflated My notes below 1. We Are So Much More Addicted to Tokens Than We Think As employees adopt 10 to 20 sub-agents running around the clock, businesses are facing unexpected $20,000 per-employee token bills. This is not a temporary trend. Token consumption is becoming an irreversible dependency, with top talent increasingly viewing continuous access to AI compute as essential to doing their jobs. 2. Why Customer Support Is Dead as a Category Standalone customer support software is collapsing as agentic interfaces merge siloed tools into unified workflows. Legacy CS and CX platforms risk becoming cheap commodities as support capabilities are absorbed into cross-functional sales, marketing, and operational agents. 3. Why AI Services Companies Are a Bullshit Category Funding traditional law or accounting firms rebranded as AI services companies relies on convoluted structures that look great on spreadsheets but break down in execution. Premium tech multiples cannot be created simply by wrapping overworked elite graduates in AI-powered agency business models. 4. $9 Billion Doesn’t Clear the Bar for Seed Investing in 2026 High seed valuations combined with massive dilution mean even multi-billion-dollar exits may no longer generate fund-returning outcomes. If effective entry pricing reaches $600 million after dilution, a $9 billion exit produces only a 15x return, far below the 50x outcomes that drive venture power laws. 5. If Danger Can Be Described as the Absence of Choice, They Were Now in Danger As Anthropic gains enterprise share and improves profitability, OpenAI risks losing control over its public-market timeline. Massive capital requirements and intensifying competition across every model tier could leave it with fewer strategic options, forcing it to accept whatever valuation public markets are willing to offer. 6. It’s All About Code. That’s the Only Sentence That Matters Coding is the highest-ROI, fastest-adapting, and most critical workload in AI. While consumer chat products struggle with low willingness to pay and heavy compute subsidies, developer workflows command massive enterprise budgets and offer a clearer path to durable software value creation. 7. Silicon Valley Forgets Every Three Years That the Average American Is Not Trying to Be Efficient Tech founders routinely overestimate demand for personal productivity apps by assuming everyone shares Silicon Valley’s obsession with optimization. Most consumers do not wake up wanting to grind down their inboxes or maximize output, making personal productivity a notoriously narrow and difficult category to scale.