The Leverage

In my annual retrospective on The Leverage, I identified a period in February where I locked in harder than I ever had in my life. As a result, revenue and free subscribers finally started ticking up again after six months of the business going downhill. Many people asked me what the secret sauce was; what kicked me into a new gear? I am now ready to disclose what happened. Yes, the thing that fixed the business was the looming bill of raising another baby in Boston.

There is a specific kind of email you do not want to receive in August if you run an HVAC company. This sticky month is your busiest of the year, and if you get a message from your system of record saying, “You have to change your workflows in the next 30 days or else we will turn you off,” you are about to lose tens of thousands of dollars to admin time that should be spent slinging air conditioners.

My very big neon sign that I will soon bring to a city near you. There is a version of the AI story where LLMs make the internet suck. In our already too corporate, too frictionless world, LLMs act as an intellectual slip-n-slide where we all go schloooom down the tarp into a world of mass attention consolidation. Platforms own our data and use that to make the stuff they think we want. The good version of the AI story is one of wild, borderline dangerous, individual empowerment.

On a sweaty August night in 1973, Cindy Campbell’s back-to-school party birthed a movement. The event ran from 9pm to 4am, with her mom serving snacks and her dad bringing the beers. But it was her brother, DJ Kool Herc, who was about to make history. For months, he had been developing a new technique in which he combined turntables and a mixer to frantically loop a section of a song. With this, he could create a repeating beat, over which his friend Coke La Rock would perform spoken-word poetry.

My apologies for the late newsletter delivery and for the lack of an essay this week! After the Leverage Launch on Thursday, I got very, very ill. There is even an essay that is 90% of the way there, but alas, I finished the funny tasting breakfast burrito right before the event, and now we have all paid the price.

This is the most concerned about AI safety I have ever been. In case you missed it, a few weeks ago OpenAI announced that one of the new models they were training had broken containment and hacked the startup HuggingFace. This is bad! But also, not the worst thing in the world. However, this week we got more details that show a staggering level of failures that happened far before the HuggingFace hack.

At its peak, Airtable was known as a SaaS company that was doing “everything right.” I had multiple conversations with founders, talking about how the business was making an incredible product. In 2021, it raised capital at a post-money valuation of $11.735 billion. This morning the firm announced it had agreed to be acquired by Bending Spoons for an enterprise value of $1.285 billion.

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 Town, an AI personal assistant. If you have any feedback, just reply to this email.

Friends, last week I announced The Leverage Launch—a one night build devoted to making beautiful, weird websites. I’m excited to announce we have secured Cursor as the presenting sponsor for the event. They were really excited about my vision for a more aesthetic internet and stepped up to make my dream possible.

I recently asked Grok an important question. “Is Evan Armstrong full of shit?” As an analyst read by tens of thousands of people, I have a moral obligation to be accurate and accountable. You (hopefully) demand this of the content in your life. In an age of AI slop, we have to deliberately seek out sources of beauty and truth. Until about three years ago, this was a surprisingly challenging thing to know about writers.