Exactly! Helpful to understand the tech stack that brought us here (and enjoy a visit to the Computer History Museum every once in a while), but we can do so much more now and that's to be celebrated :)
Thank you for sharing—very inspiring. I'm interested in the operations of starting and managing these companies in parallel. How did you go about finding people to run the companies? How much involvement do you have in their day-to-day operations? Are they "your" companies, or do you consider yourself just Customer #1?
Agree on looking at the company-behind-the-numbers. Though presumably you're aware of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Shouldn't "slowed down datacenter growth" be baked into the stock price already?
If I'm understanding your prediction correctly, you're asserting that the market thinks datacenter spending will continue at this pace indefinitely, and you yourself uniquely believe that to be not true. Right? I wonder why the market (including hedge fund analysis _much_ more sophisticated than us) should be so misinformed.
Presumably the market knows that the whole earth can't be covered in datacenters, and thus has baked that into the price, no?
Great writeup. With LLMs doing an increasing amount of the coding now, it would be great for the browser or development environment to have built-in validations that enforce good performance. The coding agent (or human) would get direct, immediate feedback at development time that there's a performance threshold violation, at development time.
As both a 4x founder and recovering manager-of-managers, I have to say Founder-vs.-Manager is a bit of a false dichotomy.
Interestingly, the most successful managers I've seen have themselves been founders. They had both autonomy and organizational trust, and also tenacious creativity, which led to significant successes. This binary notion of "are you a Manager™ or are you a Founder™?" is a false dichotomy and leaves great people out.
A founder mentality has certain recognizable characteristics: doing whatever it takes to succeed, applying creative solutions to challenging problems, going outside your lane to win, and putting in energy well beyond the standard 9-5 expected of a standard employee. You can hire talented people with such qualities AND build an organization with trust and autonomy. Bringing it back to Chesky's disastrous results with delegation, I'd ask this: Did he just hire bad people?
This dichotomy may at worst cause an entire generation of new founders to ignore really fantastic advice, "Hire really great people, and give them the support and space to succeed." This is not antithetical to: "Oh, and those people should look like founders." It's a Both, not One-or-the-Other.
All this said, I do think PG is touching on something super interesting, which is an almost anthropological understanding of "The Founder", and view that as a very important area of discourse and study for the next generation of great companies.
The point that both PG and BC are really trying to say is that rigid, hierarchical employee types are detrimental to company's long-term success, and instead you should be building your team with hungry, bright, and creative problemsolvers who aren't afraid to break artificial rules to succeed. But you sure as hell be building an organization with trust and giving those founder-types everything they need to succeed.
Looks very intriguing, will give this a try. As a windowing and task switching productivity nut, I built my own replacement for ⌘+Tab, Switcheroo. Check it out here: https://switchfaster.com/