Even if only for how well Instagram and WhatsApp were managed post acquisition, your message doesn’t hold up.
Most large tech companies buy late and struggle to integrate the products and teams they acquire without creating massive damage. He didn’t. Twice.
I am quite far from a fan of what he brought to the world (privacy nightmares), but to say that he’s a proof you only need to get lucky once is quite far off.
Far from me the idea of criticizing a founder starting something to help other startups. That's amazing. However, the post is not really accurate! Are you sure that all these MBS pools have the same government backing as Treasuries? Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac are not equal.
Are the additional risks (spread risk, liquidity mismatch, and risks related to the mortgage structure that even Regan discloses!) worth the tiny extra yield above money market funds? Startups have to deal with uncertainty all the time, that's the nature of business. Principal loss, and liquidity issues are not things you should have to deal with as a startup. However, providing options to startups is always great, and I think this is a great direction!
Again, I hope this doesn't come as negative, but I'm not sure this is making the risk clear.
I am not sure I would suggest my portfolio companies to risk their treasuries unless I am sure they're fully understanding the risks associated. Do you intend to provide anything else?
Ars technica’s lack of journalistic integrity aside, I wonder how long until an agent decides to order a hit on someone on the datk web to reach its goals.
We’re probably only a couple OpenClaw skills away from this being straightforward.
“Make my startup profitable at any cost” could lead some unhinged agent to go quite wild.
Therefore, I assume that in 2026 we will see some interesting legal case where a human is tried for the actions of the autonomous agent they’ve started without guardrails.
(Original title: Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States -- Had to be trimmed to fit within 80chr)
That’s only tangentially related but I have a very hard time using Opus for anything serious. Sonnet is still much more useful to me thanks to the context window size. By the moment Opus actually understands what’s needed, I’m n compactions deep and pretty much hoping for the best.
That’s a reason why I can’t believe the benchmarks and why I also believe open source models (claiming 200 but realistically struggling past 40k) aren’t only a bit but very far behind SOTA in actual software dev.
This is not true for all software, but there are types of systems or environments where it’s abundantly clear that Opus (or anything with a sub 1m window) won’t cut it, unless it has a very efficient agentic system to help.
I’m not talking about dumping an entire code base in the context, I’m talking about clear specs, some code, library guidelines, and a few elements to allow the LLM to be better than a glorified autocomplete that lives in an electron fork.