YC Doom-o Day

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Happy Thursday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, who left Thinking Machines to join Meta last year for reportedly $1.5B, is leaving to join Anthropic.

Today’s Lineup

Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan at 11:25 AM
Agentcard Co-Founder Karen Serfaty at 11:45 AM
Olam Labs Co-Founder Om Buddhdev at 11:53 AM
Nori Robotics Founder Antonio Li at 12:01 PM
Exosat Founder Edward Ge at 12:10 PM
Omanta Co-Founder & CEO Alfredo Gonzalez at 12:18 PM

Run of Show

YC Doom-o Day

What a great day to be covering Y-Combinator’s latest batch. Doom has taken over the timeline with wall to wall coverage of x-risk that feels like it’s breaking through to a new level. Will Depue put it well:

Even within groups, predictions range wildly. 10% of doom by 2030? I’ve seen historical predictions of extinction by 2005 (now falsified). 90% by 2300? It’s always hard to map out. It does seem like this round of discourse will make it even further on to the political stage, but I remain interested in fundamental technology and how people are using AI to get things done in the current moment. There are tons of interesting developments in the personal agent space, a reignition of the fight for the consumer between the latest ChatGPT, Meta’s Muse, and startup Instinct. And in the business world, dozens of companies are raising at or even getting acquired at decacorn valuations.

One interesting milestone on every startup’s journey now is a sitdown with Jensen Huang, he’s become a buyer of large startups (Groq and HuggingFace recently notable examples) and a funding source for many growth stage labs. He’s thrown his financial muscle around with authority and earned the title “the central bank of AI.”

This led to an interesting discussion on the show yesterday between Jordi and Keith Rabois about the role Jensen is playing in the AI boom. Is he doing too much? There are plenty of financial doomers who think the AI bubble will pop any day now with such incredible force that we will be instantly plunged deep into recession. The Economist has taken the other side on their recent cover.

The best point they make is that unlike the dot com bubble, where Cisco used debt to finance the internet buildout, Nvidia is using cash. “The company has $99bn of cash and is churning out more. In each of the past three years annual sales have roughly doubled. Gross margins have fattened from less than 60% to 75%.”

They continue: “This means that, whereas Cisco used debt, Nvidia can use cash to backstop its deals with buyers of its GPUs. Even if its commitments came due and its cashflows levelled off starting next year, by 2028 it would still be less leveraged than all but 39 non-financial firms in the S&P 500 are today.”

The central bank of AI has become a critical stepping stone on the modern American entrepreneurial journey. Risk is inherent to the strategy, and all capitalist endeavors, but increasingly, being able to marshal mountains of capital is critical to company building. VCs are reading founders for this ability, never more important to be “legible to capital.”

Clip Spotlight: Charleston AI Founder Jim Reilly on the SF p(doom) debate:

"It's all noise."

"I'm looking at the benefit. I can enjoy life. I could spend more time in the moment instead of having my head filled with things that are not going to happen."