Colossus

In 2018, Sarah Guo became the youngest general partner in Greylock's 60-year history. She was 28. Four years later, she quit to launch Conviction, a firm staked entirely on AI. Before ChatGPT shipped, she seeded Baseten and Harvey; each is now worth over $11 billion. In Conviction's first year, she wrote early checks into Sierra, Cognition, and Mistral; those three companies are now worth, together, $54 billion. Andrej Karpathy worked out of Conviction's office until Anthropic hired him in May. Guo has been close to Jensen Huang for over a decade. Her first two calls after starting the firm were to Sam Altman and Nat Friedman. And yet the investor closest to the AI frontier is betting against its biggest companies. The two big frontier labs, worth close to a trillion dollars apiece, no longer just want to build the models. They also want to build every product and company on top of them, leaving nothing for anyone else. The market is paying as though they might succeed. Of the $300 billion in venture capital deployed in the first quarter of 2026, the biggest quarter in the history of the trade, 65% went to only four companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Waymo. Guo is betting the labs can't build everything, and she spends her days making sure of it. She won Harvey its first client. She flew across the country to take a single Baseten candidate to a four-hour lunch. On one wedding anniversary, she spent the whole weekend on back-to-back calls, keeping two founders on the line so they couldn't speak to rival firms. Twice a year, she flies the world's brightest young founders to San Francisco and inducts them into the fight. In the months Dominic Cooke spent reporting this piece, she had her fourth child, walked the Met Gala in 45 pounds of chainmail, and still answered her founders' texts within minutes. Guo's parents arrived from China in 1987 with $50, built a company, and took it public at $1.2 billion. Then it went bankrupt. Guo grew up inside that startup. She built its first website, did her homework in a cubicle, and slept over for bug bashes. She loved it. If two labs build everything, no one gets to do that again. Welcome to Sarah's Wager. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/efZGJ7JG

In a previous life, Jeremy Stern was a bomb squad technician in the U.S. Army. From 2014 to 2019, he deployed to five countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. For Memorial Day, he wrote about a soldier who killed himself shortly after their deployment, and a memorial service that became less about the man who died than the people left in the room. There is little that’s redemptive or feel-good in the story, and it has nothing to do with business, investing, or technology. But it will leave you thinking about how often we fail to see a person clearly until it’s too late, and sometimes not even then. Read the piece: https://lnkd.in/egwEb3qs

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with Wu: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. Jeremy Stern sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece: https://lnkd.in/eysWzXxq

The third best-selling computer platform in history, after Windows PCs and the Mac, began as a recruiting tool for Cambridge University's computer science department. It's the size of a credit card, has no case, and costs less than a pair of shoes. Eben Upton built Raspberry Pi in 2012 to get more applicants into Cambridge's computer science course, then the easiest to get into. He thought kids needed the real thing: a general purpose programmable computer (like his childhood BBC Micro) to fall in love with the unbounded creativity of coding. He was more right than he could have imagined. On launch day in 2012, he sold 100,000 computers. A million shipped before Raspberry Pi hired an employee. Computer science is now the hardest course to get into at Cambridge, and Raspberry Pi is a $1.5 billion public company that has sold over 73 million units. 80% of its revenue comes from industry. Every digital display at Heathrow runs on a Pi. Schindler uses them in its elevators. The International Space Station has carried one in orbit since 2015. You'll also find the tiny computers wherever the next thing is. Bitcoin mining farms ran on them. So did the first wave of hobbyist drones. Pis now run LLMs. In five years, Upton thinks Claude Sonnet-class intelligence will fit in your pocket. Most tech conversation is about the frontier: the newest chips, the biggest models, trillion-dollar training runs. Raspberry Pi is a case study in the opposite. It shows what cheap, general-purpose, and performant-enough can achieve. It's also a rare British hardware success story, designed in Cambridge, manufactured with Sony in Wales, and reshored from China a decade before the rest of the industry caught on. Read Terran M.'s interview with Upton: https://lnkd.in/dAt9FC9m. It comes with extraordinary photos of Pis baking in the Welsh factory, and covers the journey of automation, teaching children to program in the era of agents, and putting foundation models in your pocket.

The second installment of our Company Dispatch series: Inside Notion Last time, we covered the culture at Cursor. This time, Brie Wolfson and Camille Ricketts embed with Notion to see first hand what it looks like for a pre-AI company to AI pill themselves.

"The largest wealth transfer in the history of cryptocurrency, and every dollar of it went to users." https://lnkd.in/esb_gRcf

This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore. Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how 100-year-old markets work. Its founder, Jeffrey Yan, had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor. Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms. Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed. Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto. Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to. Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do. In January, Colossus managing editor Dominic Cooke spent a week at their office. This is what he found: https://lnkd.in/esb_gRcf

We're publishing an exclusive chapter from Sebastian Mallaby's brilliant new book about Demis Hassabis and DeepMind. This is the inside story of Project Mario. How DeepMind's co-founders spent 4 years trying every mechanism they could think of to put guardrails around AGI, only to watch each one fail, and conclude that the only safeguard was themselves. It reveals that Hassabis ran a secret hedge fund team inside DeepMind trying to beat Renaissance Technologies; Mustafa Suleyman assembled lawyers for a $5 billion walkaway plan; Reid Hoffman committed $1 billion of his personal fortune to back them; Google kept saying yes and no at the same time—and the endless negotiations left Hassabis so distracted that when the transformer paper dropped in 2017, he was less alert to its significance than he might have been. Meanwhile, OpenAI was fighting the mirror-image battle with Musk, Altman, and Sutskever tearing each other apart over the same question: who gets to control AGI? Musk proposed folding OpenAI into Tesla. When that failed, he stormed out. When OpenAI's nonprofit board finally tried to assert authority in 2023, it was crushed in days. Both camps arrived at the same unsettling conclusion, that governance structures don't hold. The best safeguard either side could come up with? Trust us. Read the chapter in the link below.

Despite the proliferation of startup pundits over the last 25 years, no one knows how to make startups more successful. The New Pundits have sold millions of books, and their entrepreneurship “science” is taught in universities and accelerators all over the world. But none of it has made a difference. Startups are no more likely to survive today than they were in 1995. By some measures, they are even less likely to work. In his latest essay, legendary venture investor Jerry Neumann presents the data, diagnoses the problem, and proposes something that might actually work. It involves Robert Boyle, Peter Thiel, Paul Feyerabend, and Lewis Carroll’s "Through the Looking-Glass." https://lnkd.in/dzYef2Pb

Shyam Sankar is Palantir's chief technology officer and the man most responsible for making its business and technology work. He joined in 2006 as employee #13, when Palantir was one of Silicon Valley’s freakshows: a small and somewhat demented chickenhawk of a startup with a buggy demo and no customers. For 20 years, largely from the shadows, he has brute forced it into the spearhead of "defense tech" and a $320 billion company. He embedded with intelligence analysts in Virginia, special operators in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the factory floors of some of the world’s biggest companies—building and rebuilding software in the field, sometimes with phones taped to his head so he could give and take feedback while keeping his hands free to code. He invented the “Forward Deployed Engineer,” which has since become the object of both skepticism and imitation. Alex Karp, Palantir's mercurial co-founder and CEO, says the company would not exist without him. The same can be said of the modern defense tech industry, many of whose founders cut their teeth working for Shyam. In this deeply reported profile, Jeremy Stern tells the story of the most pivotal but hidden figure behind America’s most controversial company. He also gives the clearest explanation you'll read of what Palantir actually does, whether its valuation is justified or absurd, and what any of this has to do with the company’s mission to save Western civilization. It begins in the Grand Ballroom of The Pierre hotel and winds through Nigeria and India, Florida and California, Iraq and Afghanistan. It ends with a rabbi, a monkey, and a lesson in what it means to buy time in the face of a coming fire. Only in Colossus: https://lnkd.in/eSwH4xfT