Invest Like the Best

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Christina Cacioppo

Christina Cacioppo says Vanta’s 400-integration “trust graph” helps the roughly eight-year-old company build software and agents faster.About 25% of customers use agent flows; she expects raising that share to 75% to improve retention and customer experience.Vanta absorbs token costs rather than passing them through, since markups invite Claude comparisons, leaving commercialization and margin recovery unresolved.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × David Vélez

Vélez sees fintech disruption in its first inning: roughly 90% of the $10 trillion consumer-finance market still runs through branches.Nubank serves 140 million customers with 10,000 employees, at about 3% of traditional incumbents' cost to serve.Its US launch and stablecoin-backed accounts in upwards of 35 countries test whether that efficiency can travel, with organic brand-building the key hurdle.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Andrew Huberman

Sleep is the near-term neurotechnology wedge because users already accept physiological measurement, while an eye mask reportedly measures REM, induces sleep-promoting eye movements, and amplifies REM, with related technology expected in roughly seven to 12 months.Huberman predicts Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon’s Neuralink effort will converge on neural read/write biotech, but missing models of memory and thought, plus a possible 2027-28 downturn in optimization content, remain key risks.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Noah Shinn

Invite-only Instinct is nearing $1 billion in annual transaction volume, growing 10–11% day over day with $0 spent on marketing.Shinn envisions Apple Pay-style merchant-funded distribution; 40% share a personal credit card within three weeks, and trusted users show about 80% retention.With compute procurement taking months, 5–8% daily compounding could imply 100 million users, while mis-sizing capacity can cost 3–4×.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Gabe Stengel

Rogo’s model-era progression—from o1 Pro’s reliable search to Opus 4.5 handling junior finance work—supports a two-year race to redesign investment firms, not wait for better models.Its wedge is private-market dealmaking, where data rooms, DDQs, CRM and LP reporting still lack infrastructure, while high-value ideas can justify extreme token spend.The watchpoints are compaction, standardization, and whether incumbents move aggressively enough.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Michael Moritz

The structural edge that enabled Moritz’s venture career—pre-internet imperfect information, close founder relationships, and few competitors—dissipated “maybe 15, 16 years ago,” leaving today’s ecosystem healthy “if you’re a founder.”His Sequoia discipline tied compensation to performance, while he sees AI creating more jobs than it loses and tool-armed founders expanding what small companies can accomplish, with disruption across particular sectors still certain.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Walter Russell Mead

Mead sees a dynamic United States inside a collapsing Pax Americana, with information-revolution productivity keeping American power resilient.The investable question is whether “infostructure” can let AI and remote/hybrid work renew the ownership society while adapting to Ukraine’s drone-driven obsolescence.Taiwan’s “soft blockade” and Japan’s strategic awakening offer geopolitical variables as Trump’s unpredictability continues to erode institutional networks.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Sarah Guo

Sarah Guo says competitive open-source AI is already widespread, so US restrictions could handicap law-abiding American businesses while adversaries ignore them.Her roughly 250-person network sees recursive self-improvement and “some sort of exponential intelligence” as a one-to-two-year possibility, while Sunday Robotics targets home-robot beta by year-end.Compute independence, regulation, and physical supply chains remain constraints, while Chai Discovery’s $10 million contract and customer adoption test AI’s ability to capture value in biology.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Neil Movva

Sola Research is repositioning inference around long-running background agents, forecasting workloads shift from 50/50 background and real-time by year-end to 90/10 long term as cheaper tokens unlock unbounded demand.By trading latency for throughput, using overlooked chips and 1MW sites with 95% uptime, Movva targets radically lower costs, while KV-cache waste, idle GPUs, HBM supply, and the durability of frontier labs’ three-to-six-month premium remain key watchpoints.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Ben Thompson

AI’s near-term bottleneck may be capital rather than compute or power, as funding shifts from free cash flow and debt toward Google equity and NVIDIA’s $500 billion vehicle.Thompson’s Berkshire analogy makes Search a possible funding engine for AI’s “basically all white-collar work” TAM, while payback periods, hyperscaler chips, and an air-gap risk remain watchpoints as 2028-29 capacity arrives.