I have spent a lot of time in various states of concern, sadness and frustration this year. Which is too bad, as so many incredible things have happened to me. We passed a right to compute law. Valar Atomics took “accelerate” way more seriously than most.
It’s hard to balance knowing the future won’t be anything like the past, but still having to make decisions made on that being the only data you’ve got. Engaging in governance and investing in energy seem like sensible ways of approach a strange future. Organizing energy is civilization 101 stuff.
I can predict a world with increasing chaos but how it will affect demand for things like energy, compute and decentralization are directional bets. You know it’s coming but how and when? And the downsides are hard to consider. Nobody ever thinks the entropy will apply to them but it’s already begun.
Every time future shock gets me I’m surprised I’m managing an imitation of Cayce Pollard at all. I’m practically a poster child for “sensible takes about various concerning challenges” as I get asked about various eccentric revealed preferences.
The Fourth Turning is coming about and we aren’t ready. I use short hand like the Churn, elite overproduction, The Sort and other minor terminologies and schools of thought to signal to others. I understand this to be my best way available way signal. But who knows as the humans retreat from shared networks it won’t stay that way.
I often wonder how it is that venture capital remains so male-dominated when most of the work is the same skill set as a fashion editor or a style writer.
Sure, you occasionally see a man with good taste, and the twinks and gays are obviously the best of breed in both venture and fashion. But the game is basically the same. And yet fashion is dominated by women and venture as an esoteric sub-asset of private equity is very much not.
Let’s compare. Venture is a small, tight-knit group of people, who run on backchannels and gossip, and absolutely everything is determined by being the first person to land the next hot thing.
Now there is an avant garde who sets trends which then get validated with market success. In venture these are the earliest angel investors. In fashion, it’s the indie publishers who slog through the upstarts and pick who to champion.
The angel investor hopes their deal will go to later stage investors just as the trendsetting editor hopes their designer pick makes it to Vogue. Picking the next “it” thing and riding the wave to fortune is the goal for editor and designer, just as it is for investor and founder.
I personally think my skills are validated just as much being the person to get Mansur Gavriel added to the right boutiques as I am being the first check into Valar Atomics.
I took my bag to a breakfast at a boutique investment bank (you know the one with the summer camp) and happened to be meeting with an investor who loved the bag so much that the founder of their luxury ecommerce investment picked up the bag to stock immediately. Well over a decade later, I still carry that bag almost everyday and so do millions of other women.
Now ask yourself if this next story sounds pretty similar. I sent a direct message on Twitter to a young founder who seemed interesting. He had a quickness to his thought I respected as well as humility that set him apart.
Alas I didn’t like the company he was working on at the time and I didn’t like that he wasn’t its CEO. Sounds like “the food was bad & the portions are so small” sort complaint right? Well, I just thought he was so good he should be the lead in whatever he did next.
The young man had partnered with an experienced elder (which was probably wise for that industry) but the founder was clearly the dynamo in that situation. I told the founder that straight up. He had earned complete candor from me.
We began talking about what he really wanted to build. His intensity was awe inspiring. And his vision was just so crazy that I knew I had to back him. Many phone calls and strategy sessions later I wrote a check. It would take less time than I’d dared dream for others to see what I saw first.
To see him now as the jewel in the crowns of many much larger funds and backed by much more impressive and capable people than me feels amazing. I’ll always have the satisfaction of being the first to know he was going to be the next big thing.
And that’s not so very different from helping select the hottest hand bag of the last decade. Like Jeremy Irons’ character in finance classic Margin Call, I know the value of being first.
There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.
Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.”
If Isaiah’s work is successful, it will be an awful lot bigger than the hottest handbag. It will materially change the conditions of fueling our lives.
And while I am pretty smart, I knew enough to act first. Because it was a hell of a lot easier to just be first. And if I’m lucky, I’ll carry my bag and own equity in Valar for a long time to come. Read the full story in Bloomberg with a gift link.
Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.
This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.
Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune
So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.
About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance
Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.
For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.
How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez
Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.
There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.
And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.
As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.
So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.
Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.
We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.
So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.
I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.
The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.
There has been such a bleak mood on the timelines as Americans are once again locked into a cycle of agitation and propaganda driven by hyper persuasion A/B testing of rage bate as tragedy turns on the opportunism machines. So I’d like to share bits and bobs of good news in my corner of the world today.
Valar is audacious, ingenious and the kind of hard technical work I’d never seen anyone raise from his position as self taught young man. But what a challenge right? I was in. I believe in him. And boy do I look smart now.
If you want to watch an inspiring video with a Blackhawk click through. Kiewit is America’s 2nd largest power plant builder, with more active nuclear construction projects than any other company in North America. Utah deserved a win like this today.
Valar is incredibly grateful to the State of Utah, especially Governor Spencer Cox, DNR Executive Director Joel Ferry, EOD Director Emy Lesofski, USREL Director Jaron Wallace, and all our local partners in beautiful Emery County.
Chaotic portfolio founder, and once and future Montana guy, Sam Hogan has a good synopsis of CogSec 101 in times of tension that I thought I’d share as a teaser for introducing his fantastic compute company Inference.Net
He gives good being online advice and his company Inference.net (yes disclosure investor) just started sponsoring a new podcast about the culture of San Francisco.
It’s called Member of the Technical Staff. It’s a fun hang with perennial grist for the social mills topics like where are the girlies in San Francisco. It’s a hang for a subcultural issues relevant to understanding living in a boomtown while building.
In local Montana news, we have had national influence with our work supporting the Frontier Institute and its indefatigable leader Kendall Cotton. Must be something about this Rocky Mountain boys that we love. He’s proving you can just do things.
I’m thrilled to report that two model bills that we’ve pioneered in Montana were officially adopted as ALEC model policy. This means that state legislators from across the country who look to ALEC for ideas will be prompted to introduce their state’s own Right to Compute Act (recognized as the gold standard for state tech regulation) or Private Property Protection Act (a cutting edge approach to zoning reform focused on housing affordability).
We’ve officially become a national policy leader – a big deal! We’re a small state, and a small team here at Frontier Institute, but we’re making a huge impact thanks to supporters like you.
And that supporter like you? Heck yeah those supporters are me and Alex. .
You two can just do things as our boys Isaiah, Sam and Kendall have shown. You can build nuclear reactors, run decentralized inference compute markets and create new models, and even change your state’s policy with better laws that become models for the entire nation.
Being a mere node in a large but influential network I transmit as much as I receive. I intake and reroute information as part of my own synthesis process and I appreciate that it benefits me and others. But it also does damage and today was a rough start to June by any measure.
Any utopian dreams of a human noosphere of higher collective intelligence must reflect upon quotidian horrors showing our baser impulses daily and summer is war season for good logistical reasons.
Ukraine appears to have blow up a number of Russian fighter jets with drones smuggled in with trucks. Let’s recall the below image from last year. Ukrainian Netrunners vaping while flying FPV drones stepped up their game hardcore today.
Ukrainian FPV drone operator smoking a vape circa summer of 2024
believe this is the first ever direct attack on any nation’s nuclear triad in history, and it succeeded – @antroyn
Aesthetically, because it’s going to be a high volatility volume time on Wall Street, I am enjoying to see this Twitter account picking beautiful brutalism and “80s cocaine design aesthetics” out of the ether.
If one is to survive a summer of netrunners and volatility, this look will appeal to the sorts who want hyper focus, class & glass. While no one would recommend uppers, it’s clearly part of the overall vibe of managing nervous system input for anyone looking to do violence.
Almost two years ago I sent a Twitter DM to a young founder named Isaiah. He was intellectual, curious and humble and I was impressed by his authenticity.
He was strong enough and driven enough to ask for hard feedback. So I told him the truth when he asked. I hated his first idea, gave a prediction about how it would go and said I’d invest in him on whatever he did next.
Lucky for me that feedback turned out to be accurate. We talked for months as he worked through a plan for his true passion for abundant clean nuclear energy.
I was blessed to be put in a position where I could commit as his first investor. His progress since then been extraordinary. Their goal is to make the world’s energy by building nuclear reactors at planetary scale. Today Valar Atomics announced they raised a 19m seed round.
When I say extraordinary I really mean it.
First, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype, Ward Zero, at our Los Angeles facility—the fastest in history a thermal test unit has been developed and built. Ward Zero will be unveiled next week at an exclusive event in LA. Isaiah Taylor
We are in an age of acceleration. To be able to design and test a prototype this fast is a sign that we can expect better solutions to arrive and quickly if we should so will it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to turn on a working reactor in the near future. If you are interested in Valar (working for them or investing in their growth) hit me up on DM.
Want to see an android art direct as if it were in the cremaster cycle? The Protoclone is a faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 Myofibers, and 500 sensors. Clearly they are doing this just to scare us into giving them attention so here you go. I hope they don’t execute as swiftly as Valar.
