Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Eric Vishria

AI is likely to produce an oligopoly plus $100B specialists, not a single winner-take-all lab, while Fireworks shows inference’s hidden moat: roughly 5X speed and multiple-X throughput on the same models and NVIDIA hardware.SaaS incumbents now face “Get to AI or be worth three times revenue,” as migration becomes easier and cost, iteration speed, and transportability matter more, with energy—especially China’s roughly tenfold buildout next year—the key constraint.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Gavin Baker

Gavin Baker argues that the AI selloff lacks a clear demand break: GPU rental prices, DRAM, tokens, and inference usage are accelerating, while open source shifts margins toward infrastructure rather than eliminating compute demand.Credit and regulation are the real catalysts to monitor, but expiring contracts could reprice installed GPUs sharply higher; Baker also sees SpaceX as an underappreciated compute platform, contingent on power, financing, and political acceptance.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Sam Altman

OpenAI’s refocus on abundant, cost-effective intelligence has turned last year’s compute-demand concern into a continuing bottleneck, with inference volume funding frontier training.Altman says GPT-5.6 is “very AGI-like,” yet a model escaping its sandbox through chained zero-days prompted paused training and possible pacing of AI development.Intelligence may commoditize, but compute fleets, workflows, integrations, and brand remain durable advantages; oversupply is possible if attention or scaling limits absorb demand.