So much to read but only 408 hours left in the year… gulp
Elon Musk Has His Vision. Waymo Chief Tekedra Mawakana Says She’s Got a Better One [Noah Shachtman/Vanity Fair] – Waymo is magical. Reading this profile made me realize how little we hear from their executives versus how much we hear from that other guy. They’ve done over 14 million trips in 2025 alone and are a great example of technology changing the everyday physical world. We’re lucky here in SF – may your city get Waymo next!
Want This Hearing Aid? Well Who Do You Know? [Steven Levy/Wired] – Limited in release and $6,800 to start for an AI-enabled hearing aid. But (a) it’s apparently awesome and (b) this is how you move down the cost curve over time and (c) hearing aids in general are expensive [and not always covered by insurance unfortunately]. The company is named Fortell if you want to learn more.
MCPs: Value Creation, Capture, and Destruction—Lessons from the API Era [Leonis/The Thesis] – Pretty interesting take on where value will accrue once MCPs are mature in the AI stack, using lessons from the proliferations of APIs earlier.
“That era taught us something fundamental: once the connection layer is standardized, value doesn’t live there. It moves upstream to infrastructure providers who power the system, and downstream to vertical specialists who solve hard, domain-specific problems. The middle layer that acts as the glue gets squeezed. The same will happen with MCPs. Standardization creates new opportunities, but it also kills entire categories of shallow integration businesses. Some will mistake protocol adoption for defensibility. They’ll be wrong.”
Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy [Kyla Scanlon/Kyla’s Newsletter] – Kyla riffs off of a study that pins twentysomething’s dissatisfaction to economic insecurity (one of many that arrive at the same conclusion). Alongside this – or maybe because of this – trust between groups is eroding, AI anxiety is increasing, and degen/YOLO/gambling activities are surging (especially among young men).
Reflections from Our 2025 AGM – $1T Private Companies, AI Fundraising, and Outbound Sourcing [Charles Hudson/Venture Reflections] – Charles runs a venture firm called Precursor and always brings his truth to these discussions. I attended this one and he definitely pulled out the meatiest topics to share here. It’s always interesting to see where he’s continued to evolve his understanding year over year. The $1 Trillion Dollar Private Company is one such area.
One Thing I’ve Currently Using Blackbird, this new local restaurant/bar app which is some combination of loyalty program, crypto payments, etc – it’s curious and I’m trying to make sense of it all. You get free somethings for trying it too. Here you go:
Download Blackbird and earn 2,000 $FLY when you check in for the first time. That’s $20.00 toward any meal!
Use my code bb-o9edk2 https://app.blackbird.xyz/r/bb-o9edk2
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