The Leverage

The prevailing doctrine in tech marketing is for everyone to “go direct.” The founder needs to be yeeting opinions on LinkedIn because that, somehow, increases shareholder value. The evidence for this advice is usually consultants trotting out the same 15 anecdotes. What I wanted was a rigorous, quantitative analysis on the nuances of the “go direct” idea. Is it just “raise lots of money?” What platform does this work best on?

Over the two months, it feels like every company within a 20 mile radius of Stanford has launched some type of “personal agent” product. Grok Bots, Muse, OpenAI’s Dots. Reflexively, whenever I see that much consensus in Silicon Valley, I want someone to argue the opposite. That person is my friend Nathan Baschez. Nathan is currently a product designer at Notion, and in a previous life was a founder at Lex and Every. Before that he spent some time at Gimlet Media and Substack.

Wonder is a company that has baffled me for years. They have bought a variety of failing food “tech” businesses (Blue Apron, Grubhub, etc.) added in some original recipes, and somehow turned this island of misfit toys into one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. After three Wonder restaurants opened up near my house in Boston, I decided The Leverage community needed to understand what this company does. So, I commissioned the best person in the world to investigate it for us.

Whenever the technology paradigm changes—like when we figure out how to make GPUs write code—we have to figure out which rules of building a good business still apply. AI companies are growing at absurd speeds. But how much of that growth will stick? To help separate the hype from the fundamentals, I turned to one of my smartest friends, Kyle Harrison.

Author’s note: This is the latest in my “What’s the Bet” series. AI has the potential to change everything, and founders have to make company-defining choices in response. That is not easy. In this series, companies pay me to analyze their bet and explain it to you. I retain complete editorial independence. Today’s bet is brought to you by Span, which tracks engineering effort and AI spending and connects them to software outcomes. If you have any feedback, just reply to this email.

There is a comically long list of lawsuits, grudges, equity positions, and grumpy tweets that have bounced between these men, but despite that animosity, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis have all come out in favor of slowing down AI development. The fear is that the rogue AI swarms we’ve been writing about here in The Leverage will soon cause catastrophic harm.

On September 1, a rumor reached OpenAI that a rival lab had solved two of the Millennium Prize Problems. This is a company that can smell a marketing opportunity at 500 miles, like a shark with the blood of competitors in its nostrils. So, of course, the firm started dumping millions of dollars of compute on the questions. Ironically, the rumor turned out to be wrong on both counts.

Happy model release week to my fellow AI dweebs. These launches give me a giddiness akin to what Apple keynotes used to. Still, there’s a darker undercurrent; every time one drops, I feel slightly worried it’ll be the one that kills my career. It’s like playing income Russian roulette but Sam Altman chooses when to pull the trigger. Does anyone else feel something like that? Please let me know in the comments that I’m not alone in this. This is a publication about power in the technology industry.

Author’s note: This is the latest in my “What’s the Bet” series. AI has the potential to change everything, and founders have to make company-defining choices in response. That is not easy. In this series, companies pay me to analyze their bet and explain it to you. I retain complete editorial independence. Today’s bet is brought to you by SpaceXAI. If you have any feedback, just reply to this email. SpaceXAI’s bet is that agents don’t need to be smarter.

Live in Silicon Valley long enough and you’ll collect a closet full of shoulda’s. There is the time you ignored the Bitcoin white paper. Or the Twitter DM you missed that turned into a company that would’ve made you $100M. They are an inevitable, painful aspect of the tech industry. However, the AI boom is a particularly intense version of this phenomenon. Never before, in the entirety of human history, has so much wealth been created so quickly in such a small geographical region.