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Venture's Metamorphosis

The narrative on venture has been negative for the past couple of years:Mega firms are concentrating all the capital in the marketExits take longer, companies stay private foreverNo more cash exits from large tech companies, who are investing / inventing internallyMassive competition for smaller funds, as mega funds write lots of pre-seed and seed tickets as options for later roundsConsolidation inevitableand so on. But this week, it seems like the narrative reached another bigger, more speci...

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UF #15: Tariffs, Necrobotics, Chips and… Unplug 2025!

Apologies for missing a week, which feels like a geological era in this new warp-speed moving technological times. Francesco pulled this one off while I’m stuck in France waiting for an alternator part for my car. The decentralized production model we push will someday enable the car repair shop to instantly print what’s needed to get us back on the road, but not just yet apparently! In any case, we’re extremely excited to reveal that we’re doing another one of our Unplug events! A 3 day retr...

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The AI and Humanoids bubble of 2025 / UF#14

It’s undeniable that AI and humanoid robots will be some of the most disruptive and consequential technologies of this coming century. They really have the potential to change everything for humanity going forward, and are essentially our only hope against pervasive and massive global depopulation, which could very easily lead to a full societal collapse in the coming centuries (after Africa is done with their growth peak). In any case, they’re happening, and apparently fairly soon. But at th...

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Tariffocalypse and the long march to reshoring

We had quite a few ideas on what to write this week, but, obviously, it all went out of the window when Trump announced tariffs on everyone and their parents. Last week we ran our “The China Century” piece, and we got the most positive feedback since we started this column. As usual, that wasn’t completely unanimous and we got a bit of pushback from a couple people. Some have understood that by acknowledging China has lapped the west in industrial and technological capabilities, we’d be long ...

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The China Century

We’re calling it, this is the China century. The west is too behind, and it won’t have the material time to catch up before China’s impending population collapse happens. We won’t go more far out than that because the geopolitical possibilities are vast (sadly most revolving around potential conflicts), but we can just call it how it is on the pure technological side: anyone who thinks they can compete with China on the built environment is either deluding themself, or needs to have a very, v...

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Unruly Futures 11: MemeAGI

With GPT 4o’s new image capabilities, it feels we’ve finally reached memeAGI. This is the world we live in, we ship a ridiculously impressive, almost unbelievable AI innovation, and people use it almost exclusively to anime-ify the world. And much more including: more quantum supremacy claims, cable-cutting robots, spies, biohybrid muscles.

#humans#ai#quantum#robots#compute
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Unruly Futures 10: Have we peaked? The Miami edition 🌴🇺🇸

Hello from sunny and hot Miami! No wonder so people have moved from NYC to here. The venture scene sure has benefited from that. While the number of interesting startups is still ~0, the amount of capital that gets allocated from these brand-new, oceanfront skyscrapers is increasingly substantial - with a non negligible amount for deeptech.But back to the most interesting thoughts of the week. Have we peaked? Sadly, the title does not refer to the macro scenario, or to AI funding, or other te...

#humans#ai
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Unruly Futures 9: Pandaemonium

AI continues to move at breakneck speeds. The main questions we faced this week is the retention power (we hear already of one large AI co who has had so much churn/costs it's going down) and what a future with superintelligent, infinitely-parallelizable, agentic computer users looks like. But this is also a week that saw one of the worst ever stock crashes, with many questioning if the US administration is playing 5D chess or just completely insane. Many institutionals are closing their USD ...

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Unruly Futures 8: The New World Order

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Unruly Futures, once again by Francesco who's taking charge of these more and more while I mend a couple of broken bones of my kids — apparently, they won’t be pro skiers after all. Once again, macro, AI and robotics continue to be the most consequential topics, so they make the bulk of the weekly reading we did, but as usual there's quite a lot of other stuff. We cut down on proper science papers, but let us know if that's something you'd lik...

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Unruly Futures 7: The Majorana Case

Greetings from sunny Venice Beach, LA! I'm spending the week here given all of the LA funds are hosting AGMs this week, coupled with the awesome Upfront Summit (for which I don't have a ticket, so if you happen to renounce your spot..). An important announcement: we're hiring! It's time for us to add a 5th member of the team, which will be our in-house full-time AI hacker. We're looking for someone that has been building with AI for the past couple of years, and is interested in seeing what w...