2025-03-25 20:24:19
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Hi friends 👋,
Happy Tuesday! Sometimes, you write an essay and need to come up with a title. Sometimes, you have a title and need to come up with an essay. This is the latter.
Let’s get to it.
When I was a kid, if I missed a UPenn basketball game one night, I’d have to wait until The Philadelphia Inquirer arrived the next morning, shake the dew off the bag, throw out the useless (non-Sports) sections, and search for the box score. Or watch Comcast SportsRise like a hawk to make sure I caught the 30 second Penn segment, whenever it came on.
Today, when Puja decides not to stay up until 3am to watch the F1 Chinese Grand Prix, she records the race to watch when the kids nap the next day. Do you know how hard it is for her to avoid spoilers? Simply unlocking her phone is a live action game of Battleship.
Information that was once hard to find is now hard to avoid.
This is, of course, what the internet does. And it gets better at it all the time. But something I’ve noticed is that we do it to ourselves, too.
Tyler Cowen says that he writes for the AIs now. That he writes in such a way and in such volume that the models of the future might know his mind as fully as is possible. Maybe, given the volume, the models will give his words more weight.
In a recent profile in The Economist's 1843 Magazine, Cowen describes the inputs that produce those AI-legible outputs:
Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or five books. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract by Martin Luther. Later, I sat next to him while he went through an economics paper. He read it at the speed of someone checking that the pages were correctly ordered.
Hyperlexic. I like that word. Hyperlexia is when a kid learns to read unusually early and surprisingly well. Cowen certainly knows this. He knows a lot. He’s repurposed the word to mean something like: extremely fast, prolific, and retentive reader; someone for whom reading is very easy.
If 'hyperlexic' describes extraordinary reading ability, then let me propose a complementary word for extraordinary readability: Hyperlegible.
Hyperlegibility defines our current era so comprehensively that I was shocked when I googled the term and found only references to fonts.
So pardon me, yoink, I’m taking this one. HyperlegibleTM. You can use it, too.
Fifteen years ago, after reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Venkatesh Rao (VGR) wrote about A Big Little Idea Called Legibility. Before the book had become a cult classic in tech circles (VGR helped make that happen, with blog posts like this one… he made Scott’s work more legible), VGR explained its core concept: legibility.
The picture above illustrates an attempt to make forests legible. Because wild forests like the one on the left were “illegible” to tax authorities, “scientific forestry” transformed them into “orderly strands of the highest-yielding varieties,” Rao writes. “The resulting catastrophes – better recognized these days as the problems of monoculture – were inevitable.”
This was the general thrust: over and over, the state tries to impose order (legibility) on chaos (illegibility), disaster ensues.
With that context, what’s fascinating about modern Hyperlegibility is that it is not the result of top-down action; we impose it on ourselves. Or Moloch does, at least.
Hyperlegibility emerges with game theoretical certainty from each of our desire to win whatever game it is you’re playing. Certainly, it’s a consequence of playing The Great Online Game. In order for the right people and projects to find you, you must make yourself legible to them. To stand out in a sea of people making themselves legible, you must make yourself Hyperlegible: so easy to read and understand you rise to the top.
Once you become aware of Hyperlegibility, you see it everywhere.
Remember when The New York Times psy-opped the Laptop Class into making Personal User Manuals? “I get a little grumpy if I hadn’t had my latte ;) Don’t Slack me after 9pm 😡 Honestly I’m incredibly insecure and I take that out on my subordinates 🤷” That’s Hyperlegibility.
When NBA teams “solve” basketball by jacking up a lot of threes, that’s Hyperlegibility.
When a venture capital firm blares its thesis to the world instead of farming it in secret, that’s Hyperlegibility.
When Aella tweets a Sankey Diagram for her birthday orgy (NSFW), that’s Hyperlegibility.
When a company shares its “ARR” numbers in real time instead of building in “Stealth,” that’s Hyperlegibility.
No judgment. When I write an essay and send it to you, that’s Hyperlegibility.
Hyperlegibility isn’t good or bad. It’s neither and both. But it certainly is. Information used to be the highest form of alpha. Now everyone bends over backwards to leak it.
Through a combination of humanity getting ever-better at reading anything and humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible, information is easier to find and understand than it’s ever been.
When I say we’re getting better at reading anything, what I mean is that we have both all of humanity’s accumulated information and modern tools by which to discover and decipher new information at our fingertips.
Let me give you an example.
I was reading Dominion the other day, the book by Tom Holland on the spread of Christianity, and found this paragraph particularly striking:
For almost two and a half millennia, one of the inscriptions commissioned by Darius to justify his rule of the world—written in three distinct languages, and featuring a particularly imperious portrait of the king himself—had been preserved on the side of a mountain by the name of Bisitun. Carved into a cliff some two hundred feet above the road that led from the Iranian plateau to Iraq, its survival had been ensured by its sheer accessibility. The chance to risk life and limb in the cause of deciphering ancient scripts, however, was one that the odd adventurer might positively relish. One such was Henry Rawlinson, a British officer on secondment from India to the Persian court. He first scouted out Bisitun in 1835, scaling the cliff as best as he was able, and recording as much of the inscription as he could make out. Then, eight years later, he returned to the site properly equipped with planks and ropes. Balanced precariously on a ladder, he was able to complete his transcription. ‘The interest of the occupation,’ he later recalled, ‘entirely did away with any sense of danger.’ By 1845 Rawlinson had completed a full translation of the section written in Persian, and sent it for publication in London. The Great King Spoke once more.
That’s a long block quote, probably too long for an essay this length. But sacrificing flow, adding a little friction and heaviness, is the best I can do to give you a sense for the lengths people once went to to get information, to make the world more legible.
Rawlinson spent a decade – not the whole decade, but still – in pursuit of information that you can now, thanks to his efforts, Google. In fact, I forgot the names of both Rawlinson and Bitisun, so a traditional in-book search came up fruitless. In the past, I would have spent, what, half an hour combing the book, or given up. Now…
Easy as.
And let’s say Rawlinson had never scaled Bitisun, that Darius’ words were still undiscovered. How would we get them today? A climb so treacherous as to “do away with any sense of danger”? No of course not. We would send up the drones, equipped with high resolution cameras and maybe some LiDAR, and use photogrammetry and machine learning to stitch the pictures together and make sense of their contents.
What once took a decade might take a week, and the results are searchable in a second.
There used to be this bit on the podcast Reply All where the show’s producer Alex Blumberg would bring a tweet he didn’t understand and co-hosts Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt would try to explain it to him. By the end, they’d try to get to three “Yeses” – meaning that all three understood the tweet.
Now, you just hit the little Grok button.
It costs like $100 to read your whole genome. Our telescopes can see 13 billion years into the past. Luke Farritor pulled an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano. Elad Gil is funding efforts to translate “the top 1,000 off-copyright books into all commonly spoken languages,” generate audio versions, and host language models that allow you to talk to and ask questions of each.
Henry Rawlinson smiles. Or weeps. I don’t know. It must all seem so easy and weightless to him.
The point, I hope, is clear. We are getting better at reading the world, just as a book that is entirely illegible to a two-year-old becomes entirely legible to a ten-year-old through improved skill.
The second reason for Hyperlegibility is the more fascinating one: we are tripping over ourselves to make ourselves easier to read.
Think Personal User Manuals. Think Tyler Cowen writing for the AIs. Think me, writing this.
We are game theoretically driven to share more and more of our best ideas, the ones that we might have once exploited in silence.
Here’s an example I like that hits close to home.
Imagine you’re a small emerging early stage venture capital fund. You’ve noticed something about the market that no one else has. Say you believe that quantum computing is closer than anyone else believes. You’ve identified a handful of promising companies that you want to back.
What do you do? Do you keep it secret or tell the world?
Well, what do you need to do in order to successfully invest against your thesis?
First, you’ll need to raise money from LPs. To do that, you’ll need to spell out as clearly as possible why you believe quantum computing is more investable than everyone else does and which types of companies you think are most investable. Maybe you have a network already, and you can do all of this behind the scenes. Maybe you don’t, and you need to yell your thesis from the rooftops: blog posts, podcast appearances, conference panels, whatever. One thing a differentiated view can get you is attention. So you trade a secret for the chance at money.
Assuming you raise, you’ll need to stand out to the companies you want to invest in. This is not the public markets; you can’t just invest in whatever you choose. They need to choose you, too. Maybe in the early days, you can know everyone – go to the conferences, meet them one-on-one, impress them with your insights and with the fact that you believe harder than anyone else does. Does that scale? Do your early investments pay off quickly enough to build a reputation in the community before other investors come in? How do you stand out?
Say you convince companies to let you invest early, you need to help them continue to raise money from downstream capital. Which means part of your job is to make quantum legible to the very firms who might one day compete with you. Sure, while your category is small, unproven, weird, and risky, they might let you win at the early stage. But eventually, they won’t. Either way, the proximate issue is getting your companies funded so your investments don’t go to zero before your ideas have had time to play out.
In all three pieces of your job, you are incentivized in the short-term to make yourself and your ideas Hyperlegible so LPs, founders, and downstream capital can find you. And without the short-term, there is no long-term.
Now imagine this dynamic playing out everywhere.
My friend Tina He wrote an excellent essay last week, Jevons Paradox: a personal perspective. She noticed that instead of letting us work less, AI actually incentivizes working more. The more you can do in each minute, the higher the opportunity cost from not doing anything. The problem is, even if everyone agrees that’s not what we want, who blinks?
If you work less, someone else will happily take your slice of the pie. She calls it a Malthusian Trap; it’s like Scott Alexander’s Moloch or a Red Queen’s Race: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Same same here, with Hyperlegibility. You could opt out, stop publishing, encrypt yourself. Someone else will happily fill the vacuum.
Attention is the scarce resource. Information you can get.
Information, long alpha, becomes beta.
There’s a version of this essay that bemoans the fact that information is no longer precious.
That would feel good, to mourn Friday nights at Blockbuster, metaphorically speaking, but it wouldn’t be particularly useful.
The question to ask is: assuming Hyperlegibility, what do I do?
This is a question that I’ll probably explore over a bunch of essays, and without having the word, already have. There’s the question of what to do as an emerging manager given the conundrum I laid out above. There’s something about the growing relative importance of relationships, of “having a guy,” of agency and the ability to get things done. There is a reason that all of these ideas have become more popular recently (hint: it’s Hyperlegibility). There’s certainly something on the value of Vertical Integration, of how you chain things together to create new forms of value. The ideas in Most Human Wins are enhanced by thinking about Hyperlegibility. And I am quite certain that the more Hyperlegible most things become, the more people will crave mysteries and The Return of Magic.
But for now, I’ll leave you with this: Hyperlegibility is our reality. There’s no going back.
There is a generation of people living among us who don’t feel the same nostalgia for newspapers and “not knowing the answer to something immediately” that I do, because they never had those experiences in the first place. And they’re a preview of what happens when you take all of human knowledge as a commoditized input.
I’ve been talking to more college students recently, and despite rumors of their demise, the kids are very alright. Maybe every generation thinks this, but I’ve walked away from a few recent conversations thinking, “If I were competing with these people I would be COOKED.” They’ve somehow read as much as I have but have the faster brains of youth. It’s a scary combination.
The other day, I asked one of them, Malhar Manek, why so many of his peers seemed so scarily advanced. His answer was that they grew up on the internet, with access to all of the information imaginable. Not just the fire hose, but the blogs and newsletters and podcasts and YouTube videos that helped make sense of the stream. So it was easy for a relatively curious kid to figure out what to read to set a baseline, and then, baseline established while the brain is still fresh and curious, to jump off of that base of knowledge to ask their own questions. To help answer them, they have all of the internet’s information, AI, and even one-DM-away access to experts.
I’d never thought of it that way, because I didn’t live it. But by making the world Hyperlegible, we helped create a generation of Hyperlegibility-Native Hyperlexics who take as an input the information we worked to turn into an output. And thus civilization evolves and compounds.
A priori, I would have guessed that giving everyone access to the same information would lead to a convergence of goals. That doesn’t seem to be happening. One of the people I spoke with wants to start a vertically integrated healthcare company, another wants to write a Great Book, and what I’ve heard very consistently from smart college kids is that their smartest friends are all working on biotech, specifically neuro, specifically brain-computer interfaces.
Which is to say, if you think the world is Hyperlegible now, just wait.
That’s all for today! If you have a minute, go get SOC-2 or ISO 27001 compliant.
While you do that, we’ll be working hard on a Weekly Dose, and might even drop a new podcast on you in the interim. We’ll be back in your inbox… soon.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-03-21 20:18:40
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 136th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Today is likely one of the least productive non-holiday days of the year — the Friday of opening weekend of March Madness. Listen, I get it. There’s something about March Madness. I can go a full 4-5 months of not watching a lick of college basketball and then, suddenly, get pulled in for 12 hours of straight action during opening weekend. But before we all go and do that, there’s some light reading we need to do on all the optimistic stuff going on in the world.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Abundance
The Abundance Brothers!
This week Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein released their much awaited book Abundance. The Abundance Agenda, on which the book is based, argues for a shift from scarcity-driven politics to policies that prioritize building more housing, infrastructure, clean energy, healthcare, and innovation—removing regulatory bottlenecks and enabling faster, more widespread growth to improve quality of life. In Abundance, Thompson and Klein, two of the more influential progressive pundits of the last decade, call for a proactive government to unlock supply and make goods and services more abundant and affordable.
The Abundance Agenda is the ideological first cousin of, what I’ll call, our Optimism Agenda. Both believe that the future can be better — that we can progress — and that individuals and organizations have agency in bringing about that future. And at the core of each agenda is action — in order for society to progress, we need to take more action and we need to build more.
Abundance is also, as far as I can tell, the leading and most compelling vision for America’s new Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, at least in theory, stands for a social safety net, economic equality, civil rights, and progressive policies on healthcare, climate change, and education. These outcomes are the same desired outcomes of the Abundance Agenda. But the Abundance Agenda offers a new roadmap for how we can achieve them. Whether or not the Democratic Party or a compelling Democratic politician fully embraces that roadmap is still very much TBD. I, for one, hope they do.
Perhaps no ideological theory has been written about more — directly or indirectly — in the Weekly Dose of Optimism than the Abundance Agenda. Now, thankfully, that entire theory is presented to us in a full book. We encourage you to go out, buy it, and read it.
(2) Nvidia Looks to Expand AI Reign With New Chips, Personal Supercomputers
Ian King for Bloomberg
The lineup includes a successor to Nvidia’s flagship AI processor called the Blackwell Ultra, as well as additional generations stretching into 2027. Huang also unveiled Dynamo-branded software that will fine-tune existing and future equipment, making it more efficient and profitable.
GTC, Nvidia’s annual event where it showcases its latest AI chips, software, and partnerships was earlier this week. And, unsurprisingly there was a ton of hype heading into it. So much hype, in fact, that our good friends at Acquired, covered it live.
Needless to say, this was an important event, both for the AI industry and Wall Street. The quick takeaway coming out of the event is that it was solid but lacked bombshells, leaving analysts reassured by Nvidia’s roadmap but still cautious. Here’s what Nvidia revealed (and it’s a lot):
Blackwell Ultra AI Chips (2025): Successor to Hopper, offering more power and efficiency for AI workloads.
Vera Rubin Chips (2026): Next-gen upgrade focused on advancing AI compute performance.
Rubin Ultra & Feynman Chips (2027+): Long-term roadmap highlighting continued AI chip innovation.
Dynamo Software Platform: AI "factory OS" designed to fine-tune and maximize hardware efficiency.
Isaac GR00T N1 Robotics Platform: Toolkit to accelerate humanoid robot development, partnered with Disney & DeepMind.
GM Partnership: Integrating AI into next-gen vehicles, factories, and robots.
6G Wireless Project: Collaborating with T-Mobile and Cisco to develop AI-native 6G network hardware.
Personal Supercomputers: Partnered with Dell, HP, others to launch desk-side AI systems for developers and researchers.
Quantum Computing Lab (Boston): New research initiative to push forward emerging quantum technologies.
Photonics Breakthrough: Revealed new chip system combining silicon and light waves for faster, more efficient AI compute.
Nvidia’s stock didn’t move much on any of this news, but rest assured GTC was a signal that the company is trying to pull up the ladder on any would-be competitors.
(3) NASA Astronauts’ Nine-Month Orbital Odyssey Ends in a Splashdown
Kenneth Chang and Thomas Fuller for The New York Times
They set off to spend eight days at the space station. The trip lasted nine months. On Tuesday, two NASA astronauts who had been in orbit since June, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, splashed down in calm, azure waters off the coast of the Florida Panhandle, concluding a saga that had captivated the country since last summer.
Houston, they’re back!
After 9 months “stranded” in space, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore splashed back down to earth on Tuesday. The two set out for an 8-day mission aboard Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft but ended up spending 313 days on the International Space Station due to Starliner propulsion issues. Over the last couple of months, the “extended stay” was politicized by both parties — including Elon Musk — but thankfully the astronauts adapted to their situation —conducting research, spacewalks, and coping with physical tolls of prolonged weightlessness.
Ultimately SpaceX did save the day. NASA relied on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which was already docked at the ISS as part of regular crew rotation capsule, to bring the two back to earth. We’re just glad that they’re back and that the private space industry is in such a place that these types of blunders can be relatively easily righted.
Ritwik Pavan on Hardware Nation
Imagine never having to do a household chore again.
Packy here. Puja and I have had a Matic zooming around our house for over a year, when Matic co-founder Mehul Nariyawala reached out and offered to send us a beta unit and then came to the house to help set it up himself. Do things that don’t scale.
Aside from the free robot, I have no economic ties to Matic — they’re not a sponsor and I’m not a Matic investor — but it’s legitimately one of the best hardware products I’ve tried in the past five years, and the startup hardware we use the most. The lil’ guy cleans our house every night, vacuuming and mopping away as we sleep. When they see it, the kids say, “Hi Robot,” sometimes in a robot voice. One day, it’ll talk back.
This video does a great job showing off why the Matic Robot is already the best home cleaning vacuum (suck it, Roomba), but also hints at why this cute little vacuum might be the most plausible path to Rosie from the Jetsons: a robot that happily does your chores for you.
“Can we go from floor cleaning to organizing your home to organizing your whole life,” Mehul asks near the end of the video.
Ritwan takes over to close it out: “Once we get this right, our kids won’t even believe there was a time when they had to do chores. They’ll grow up in homes where they can focus on what matters most: pursuing dreams, making memories, and probably bigger messes than we’ve ever seen.”
I’m a big believer in businesses with massive visions like that, supported by business models and roadmaps to get them there. Think Fuse or Varda. Matic fits that mold. So know that when you buy a home-cleaning robot, you’re accelerating the humanoid future.
(5) Snack Makers Are Removing Fake Colors From Processed Foods
Deena Shanker for Bloomberg
PepsiCo is working to remove artificial dyes across its brands to meet rising consumer demand for natural products, despite the challenges.
Better For You, so hot right now, Better For You.
Two weeks ago, the natural foods Super Bowl, Natural Foods Expo West, kicked off. If you’ve never been or haven’t heard of it, it’s an absolutely massive (and overwhelming) display of the latest CPG innovations and trends. Think protein-everything, functional sodas, newfound supplements…think creatine gummies. The Expo has gotten bigger and bigger each year, in line with both consumer demand for better-for-you options and the growing consumer realization that our food system in the U.S. is pretty fucked. And despite all of the showcasing brands and all of the hype, the truth is that a few companies in the country still drive the vast majority of purchasing volume. The top five firms—Nestlé, PepsiCo, The Kraft Heinz Company, General Mills, and Unilever — control a substantial portion of the market. And I think it’s wrong to view these companies as evil. It’s that they’re operating in a system with poorly aligned incentive structures and serving consumers that have been poorly educated.
There’s really two ways to change this:
Government Intervention: The government can come in and mandate certain protocols and requirements and restrictions. The U.S. government has, for better or worse, been pretty laissez faire on this front historically. One of the hopes of the new Administration is that RFK’s MAHA agenda will take a more front footed approach to policing Big Food. I am all for banning Red 40 in my chips. But I don’t necessarily want RFK telling me exactly what I can and cannot indulge in.
Consumer Trends + Product Innovation: The other way to change the system is to change consumer demand and then offering consumers new products that better align with that new demand. All easier said than done. How do you change consumer demand? A mix of education, scare tactics, marketing, expanded distribution, and product innovation.
The company highlighted in the Bloomberg article, Pepsico, presents a good example how both agents of change are acting out in the real world. Fears of the governments potential regulation is forcing the company to proactively remove food dangerous dyes from its chips and eventually its entire product portfolio. And just this week, the company finalized a deal to acquire emerging BFY soda company Poppi for $1.95B — a signal that Pepsico knows there is growing and potentially canniballizing demand for a healthier soda option than its Pepsi pops. Pepsico is a co, and they don’t care if you’re spending money slurping sugary sodas or potentially gut healing beverages, as long as your spending money with them.
Bonus: On Modality Commoditization
Elliot Hershberg for Century of Bio
But I want you take a leap with me that will potentially annoy some drug developers: no discovery technology is immune from the inescapable pull towards commoditization—like virtually every other technology. For big and small molecules alike, once discovery technologies—whether it’s high-throughput screening, in silico screening, in vitro or in vivo models, or an analytical assay—become standardized, companies around the world will compete to offer them as a service. This is The Long Arc of Modality Commoditization. Over time, revolutionary ideas become universal building blocks for the next wave of innovation.
Packy again. Nothing gets me fired up like 1) strategic implications of commoditization, 2) Vertical Integrators, and 3) new Elliot Hershberg essays. So we hit the trifecta here. And this is legitimately one of my favorite Elliot essays, a glimpse into what makes him so good.
He argues that as drug discovery technologies get commoditized (today, drug discovery is happening on the cheap in China, and US Pharma is sourcing molecules there), biotech may have to compete more like traditional businesses. Instead of relying on a Cornered Resource in the form of IP as its only moat, biotech companies will need to dig moats like the rest of us. Because of data flywheels in algorithm-designed drugs, we may see the first drugs that benefit from Network Economies. Process Power and Brand are also on the 7 Powers table.
But Elliot also thinks there’s an opportunity for new entrants to use modern technology to take on sclerotic (a word I stole from him) Pharma incumbents and “establish themselves as an entirely new generation of pharmaceutical company.” In other words, he writes that we might start to see Bio Vertical Integrators.
As he points out, the path is a hard one. Capital formation will be hard. Doing a lot of things well, all at once, will be hard. Building a standalone business instead of selling assets to Big Pharma will be hard. But, he writes, “If the companies solving these global problems establish moats in new ways, we could see the first $1T+ biotech firms come into existence.”
Long story short: commoditized drug discovery is good for those of us who take medicine to get healthy. And if it’s short-term painful for certain companies in the space, it may spur creative destruction in the industry that’s good for us all.
Double Bonus: Narendra Modi: Prime Minister of India - Power, Democracy, War & Peace | Lex Fridman Podcast
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on Lex Fridman this week for a three hour long conversation about his life, worldview, India, and the state of the world today. Despite some fair criticisms, I’ve long been an admirer of Modi, after all he is the leader of the largest democracy in human history and has done a pretty darn good job of governing India over the last 12 years. But, admittedly, I have never heard him talk before. He governs in Hindi and his mother tongue is Gujarati. Lex now does this cool thing, in partnership with Eleven Labs, to dub foreign language conversations into English in a way that seems to capture and translate the original essence of the conversation. You don’t really hear modern American politicians speak the way Modi does and its quite refreshing. If you have a few hours to kill this week, highly recommend.
Have a great weekend y’all.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-03-14 20:47:34
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 135th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Packy is on his way back from a busy couple of days down in Austin, Texas -- word on the street is he's started lifting shirtless and joined a few Masterminds already. You can take the man out of Austin but it's really hard to take a few days of Austin out of the man, ya know? But the fun for Packy is just getting started -- the old man is hosting my bachelor party in NYC this weekend. Let's see if he can keep up. If you see us around town Friday or Saturday night...you didn't 🤝.
Let's get to it.
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(1) Wind and Solar Overtake Coal Power for First Time in U.S.
Perry Cleveland-Peck for WSJ
Wind and solar energy generated more electricity in the U.S. than coal for the first time last year, according to analysis from clean-energy think tank Ember. The two renewable energy sources accounted for 17% of the country’s power mix while coal fell to a low of 15%, it said.
For the first time ever, wind and solar energy outproduced coal in the U.S., supplying 17% of the country’s electricity compared to coal’s 15%. Solar led the charge, growing 27% year-over-year, and even outpaced natural gas in meeting new demand. The US installed over 50 gigawatts of solar in 2024, with Texas and California leading the way. This solar buildout was largely made possible by the plummeting costs of solar panels over the last decade, with costs down nearly 90%.
Replacing coal with renewables is an undeniable good. Coal is a highly pollutive and emits massive amounts of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. It’s also dangerous to mine and can pollute the environment around the mines. Coal is no bueno, especially when compared to the other energy sources at our disposal.
More energy is good. The more of it that’s clean and cheap, the better. For the US and the world to progress, the goal isn’t just reducing coal consumption. It’s generating abundant, cheap and relatively clean energy with lots and lots of solar, wind, nuclear, and, at least for the time being, oil and LNG.
(2) How Natural Gas Became America’s Most Important Export
Kevin Crowley and Ruth Liao for Bloomberg
The US, which in the span of about seven years transformed itself from an irrelevant supplier of LNG into the world’s largest, is set to expand its production capacity by 60% in the first half of Donald Trump’s second presidency, according to an estimate from BloombergNEF. By the end of the decade, almost 1 in every 3 tankers carrying the superchilled fuel will originate in the US…
LFG, LNG!
A decade ago, back in 2015, the U.S. was a minor player in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market. Today, the U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of LNG and has plans to expand that lead over the coming years. This transition to LNG super-producer has shifted the way the country interacts with global energy markets and transformed our entire approach to geopolitics.
This is how it happened:
Fracking – Tech advances, like horizontal drilling, unlocked massive shale gas reserves.
Infrastructure – Companies built massive LNG plants to liquefy and ship gas worldwide.
Global Demand – Europe needed a Russia alternative, Asia needed fuel, and the U.S. was ready to supply.
Policy – Trump lifted export limits and Biden sent LNG to Europe
And while LNG is still a fossil fuel, it has some key advantages to other fossil fuels and renewables. It’s cleaner than coal & oil and more reliable and scalable than renewables. In a perfect world 10 to 20 years from now, would we want to totally replace LNG with renewables? Of course. But as we build towards a cleaner energy future, the U.S. is extremely advantaged to bridge that gap with LNG.
(3) NASA Launches Missions to Study Sun, Universe’s Beginning
From NASA
NASA’s newest astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx, is on its way to study the origins of our universe and the history of galaxies, and to search for the ingredients of life in our galaxy.
Two missions for the price of one rocket launch.
Earlier this week, NASA NASA launched both the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. SPHEREx will map the entire sky every six months using spectroscopy to study the origins of the universe, galaxy formation, and the building blocks of life. PUNCH, a set of four small satellites, will observe the Sun’s outer atmosphere and solar wind to improve understanding of space weather.
Both missions are live, having established communications and are now entering their respective commissioning phases. SPHEREx’s data will complement existing telescopes like James Webb, while PUNCH will help predict solar storms that impact Earth.
These specific missions aside, it’s really cool to watch momentum pick up in space. Writing a newsletter that covers these types of stories makes that momentum all the more obvious. It seems like every week now there’s a new NASA mission or SpaceX milestone or startup breakthrough.
(4): This is Gavin Newsom
Yes, Gavin Newsom launching a podcast made this week’s list of top optimistic stories. Hear me out.
I’ll be honest: I am not a fan of Gavin Newsom. I don’t particularly like Charlie Kirk. And I’m certainly not a Steve Bannon guy. But what I do like is bipartisan dialogue and engagement, especially in long form podcasts.
Coming out of the 2024 elections, it was clear that the Democrats — as silly as this might sound — had a podcast problem. The medium was dominated by right wing/conservative/Trump-supporting hosts, and those hosts were often visited by Republican politicians that were willing and able to engage in multi-hour, unscripted conversations. Not only does appearing on podcasts with millions of listeners for three hours make you more notable, but for skilled politicians, it provides the opportunity to explain your ideas in a compelling manner and connect with the audience on a deeper level. We saw this with the Trump children on Lex, JD Vance on Rogan, and Trump on Theo Von.
The Democrats did not have the same roster of friendly podcasts hosts — Kamala ended up tapping Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy for her first ~longish podcast of the campaign — and did not have the roster of politicians that were willing and able to engage in more casual, long-form discussion. As an example, ahead of the election, the Dems sent John Fetterman on Rogan, the guy who (to no fault of his own) can barely communicate. And sending Mayor Pete on The Daily does not exactly bring new folks into the tent.
This problem was, and now certainly is, obvious to the Democrats. They’ve been searching for an answer to “Who is the Left’s Joe Rogan?” since before the election. And, for better or worse, the Left’s new Joe Rogan is…Gavin Newsom? Do I think this show will have a major impact on Newsom or Democratic politics? Probably not. But do I think the Left trying to engage in more honest, authentic, long form conversation is a good thing for American politics? Absolutely. The party’s ideas are in desperate need of sunlight — it’s the strongest disinfectant — and they’ve been stuck in the cool shade of 3 minute CNN spots and overly accommodating Crooked Media interviews.
And why is the Democratic party getting their shit together a good thing? Is it because I am a big lib that wants to see Democrats dominate elections and shape culture and control policy? Certainly not. But I do fear that, at this current point in time, Republicans are starting to pull away with it — demographic changes, blue state exoduses, anti-woke sentiments, etc etc. And when any one party starts to run away with it, we start to see very shitty ideas become very shitty policies. So yes, I want a stronger Democratic party right now. And that, believe it or not, starts with Gavin Newsom apologizing on his podcast for his Covid reservation at The French Laundry.
(5): Arc Boat, Aalo, Base Power Company, Pipedream, Too Cheap to Meter, and Fuse
Packy here. This week, I went down to Austin and up to Montreal to spend time with some Vertical Integrators generating, storing, and taking advantage of cheap, clean electricity, and to watch a documentary about how we can achieve the holy grail of producing energy too cheap to meter. I am fired up.
On Tuesday, I kicked off the day with a ride on Arc’s insanely cool Arc Sport. Before I went out, Arc’s CEO Mitch Lee told me that the difference between an electric boat and a gas boat was bigger than the difference between an electric car and a gas car. I didn’t get that until I was on it; then I got it. It whips, and it’s incredibly fun to drive.
Fresh off the boat, I headed to visit Matt Loszak at Aalo Atomics to check out the facility where they’re going to be manufacturing lots and lots of nuclear right here in the US of A, starting with a “50 MWe power plant purpose-built for data centers.” They’ve already begun: this picture is me and Matt next to the pressure vessel that Aalo made in the facility.
After that, I grabbed coffee with Garrett McCurrach, the CEO of our portfolio company Pipedream Labs, which is building a hyperlogistics network underground (click the link, read the thread, it’s wild).
That night, I went to the screening of Jason Carman’s new Frontier Film: Too Cheap to Meter, put on by our friends at the Abundance Institute. As we’ve talked about a thousand times in this newsletter, there’s nothing more important to civilization than energy production. Jason does a characteristically excellent job telling that story through the people and companies building the good future. He’s doing a screening in SF this weekend, and if you’re around, you should 100% go.
On Wednesday, I spent the whole day at Base Power Company’s HQ to hang out with a bunch of the team, see the batteries, and feel the … energy in person. If you’re not familiar with Base Power, you will be soon, and I wrote about them last year to get you up to speed. More to come…
To top it all off, yesterday morning, I flew to Montreal to watch another portfolio company, Fuse (Deep Dive here), successfully test fire its TITAN Impendence-Matched Marx Generator, an important step towards both selling radiation-as-a-service and, eventually, selling fusion power to the grid. Watch it here and here.
A few things struck me after spending time with all of these teams:
They’re very real. It’s one thing to read about a pulsed power generator. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to see it up close and personal, to watch it charge up its capacitors, and release oodles of energy on a target. In the facility, it doesn’t feel like a science project but an engineering and manufacturing one. Aalo is making actual reactors. Base Power Company is installing batteries on real peoples’ homes every day. Pipedream is out there laying that pipe. And you can actually ride on and buy an Arc Boat and feel the difference between gas and electric for yourself. All of these companies sound very cool, but I don’t think people fully realize that they’re actually happening. These are businesses.
The future is electric. An electric boat just performs better than a gas boat - it’s quiet, fast, turns on a dime, is a breeze to dock, and gets better with every software update. Our things will be delivered to us in minutes under our feet via electric robots in pipes. Tons of entrepreneurs — the ones I met with and the ones Jason featured in the documentary — are working on generating, transmitting, storing, and discharging megawatts, then gigawatts, then terawatts of sweet sweet power. I think it’s still underappreciated how electric the future will be, and what that will mean for the quality of products and experiences humans have access to. It also means a whole new toolkit for people who want to rebuild the world.
It’s really fun. Working on really hard, important problems with really smart, motivated people is as good as it gets. The vibes in each of these offices and facilities are excellent. If you’re thinking about what to do with your life, I couldn’t recommend looking at these companies’ jobs pages more strongly.
What a week for the optimists.
BONUS: TBPN
Anytime I have the excuse to pump the Technology Brothers, I will. They’re building the ESPN for startups, starting with daily 3 hour long streams and call-ins. Think of it like (and I mean really visualize it) Howard Stern, Bill Simmons, Jim Kramer and Jason Calacanis banging each other and having the cutest little media baby. That’s TBPN.
ESPN changed sports. Suddenly sports became a 24/7 spectacle. Being a sports fan no longer meant watching every game. It meant watching the pre and post game coverage, consuming hours of analysis, debating that analysis with your friends, and getting to know the stories behind the teams. ESPN raised the profile of sports: more athletes became celebrities, more people cared and cared deeply about sports, and sports became more culturally relevant. Startups deserve their own version of ESPN. With think John and Jordy can deliver that.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-03-07 21:39:51
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 134th Weekly Dose of Optimism. I am writing this from snowy Park City, Utah. Let me tell you — bad day to be a moderately challenging blue.
I was worried that I wasn’t going to have time in between ski runs to write the Weekly Dose — I usually spend about 3-4 hours researching stories and another couple hours writing them up — but then the universe delivered six very worth stories into my lap by Thursday morning. Lunar landings, bullish Starlink news, wooly mammoth mice, and a bunch of encouraging research papers. I am feeling so optimistic that I may even attempt to take on a black ⛷️.
Let’s get to it.
Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Plaid
I believe it was Sir Winston Churchill who said, “We move our money; thereafter it moves us.” Plaid has a unique vantage point into how our money moves across the world, so when they predict, we listen.
Plaid Co-founder and CEO Zach Perret and a panel of industry insiders recently teamed up to make their Fintech Predictions for 2025.
One: there will be a lot of AI hype, but most of it will remain hype (for now).
Another: stablecoins will grow massively. (I agree)
Plus: big banks might become advertising platforms?
For all of this, plus fraud, bank regulators, and the return of fintech funding, there’s no better way to understand where the technology that moves our money is moving in 2025. And it’s free, so your money can stay right where it is.
(1) Touchdown! Carrying NASA Science, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Lands on Moon
From NASA
Carrying a suite of NASA science and technology, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed at 3:34 a.m. EST on Sunday near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium, a more than 300-mile-wide basin located in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side.
The Blue Ghost lander is in an upright and stable configuration, and the successful Moon delivery is part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign. This is the first CLPS delivery for Firefly, and their first Moon landing.
One small step for Firefly Aerospace, one giant leap for private space companies.
Last week, we told you about three private companies whose vehicles were en route to the moon. The Ghost has landed.
Earlier this week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed on the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, marking the company’s first lunar landing and the first successful and upright lunar landing by a private company (Intuitive Machine’s first private landing in 2024 was successful but the lander toppled over upon landing.)
Blue Ghost, carrying 10 NASA science and technology instruments, will operate for about 14 Earth days, testing lunar drilling, navigation, radiation tolerance, and dust mitigation technologies. This mission is part of NASA’s broader Artemis campaign, which is design for long-term human exploration and a growing commercial lunar economy. And the moon itself serves as a jumping off point and testbed for technologies & logistics that will make Mars missions possible.
Not to be eclipsed (ehhh) Intuitive Machines landed its Athena lander on the Moon yesterday, too! But wait… while Athena has power and is communicating it may, once again, not be upright.
Which just goes to show you that it’s really hard to land things on the Moon.
(2) SpaceX's Texas Starlink Factory Produces 15,000 Dishes Per Day
SpaceX has published a rare behind-the-scenes video of its Starlink dish factory in Bastrop, Texas, which is preparing to expand. According to the video, the factory is already producing 15,000 Starlink dishes per day — which amounts to nearly 5.5 million dishes per year.
“It is way harder to make the machine that makes the machine that it is to make the machine in the first place.” - Elon Musk.
Perhaps no man in history is betting at building the machine that builds the machine. Gigafactories. Starbases. The guy knows how to scale production.
SpaceX’s Starlink dish factory in Bastrop, Texas is already producing 15,000 units per day or about 5.5 million per year. And that facility is more than doubling, is being built out from from 700K sqft to 1.7M sqft. Estimated capacity will be about 30,000 units per day or 11M units per year.
The company already has about 5M Starlink users and estimated revenues above $5B. I don’t think demand is going anywhere — these things are only going to get cheaper, faster, and smaller. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which everyone in the country owns a couple of Starlinks and is paying $100 per month for fast, reliable internet access, wherever they are. And if that’s the case, this is just the beginning of Starlink’s production capacity expansion.
It’s no wonder Balaji thinks we should set up THE SPECIAL ELON ZONE in Texas.
(3) Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) – a novel, high-throughput single-molecule sequencing technology
From Roche
Our friend Dr. Elliot Hershberg PhD (🍾) went viral this week for his explanation of Roche’s SBX, so we’ll just copy what he tweeted:
Extremely clever new NGS tech from Roche 🧬
If it's hard to discriminate between nucleic acids accurately with a nanopore, why not synthesize a new polymer off a DNA template that is easier to sequence?
(McCormick Brothers Translation: make a copy of the DNA that’s bigger so it’s easier to read. ChatGPT Translation: Roche's Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) technology converts DNA into an expanded molecule called an Xpandomer, which is approximately 50 times longer than the original DNA strand. This expansion improves the signal-to-noise ratio, making the DNA sequence easier to read.)
It's an intuitively simple idea, but took *a ton* of creative nucleic acid chemistry + enzyme engineering to design modified NTPs and create polymers of them. It's been very interesting to see Roche move into the NGS market, and time will tell how this stacks up with the growing set of totally orthogonal approaches people are cooking up for sequencing tech.
It feels like we are entering another renaissance for biological measurement infrastructure—which is super important.
“Progress depends on the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and ideas, probably in that order." - Sydney Brenner
(These animations of sequencing tech will never get old to me. What a time to be a biologist!) (McCormick Brothers Note: What a time to be a human!)
(4) Scientists Have Bred Woolly Mice on Their Journey to Bring Back the Mammoth
Jeffrey Kluger for Time
“The Colossal woolly mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said company CEO Ben Lamm in a statement. "By engineering multiple cold-tolerant traits from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we've proven our ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create."
Wooly Mice!
Colossal Biosciences has successfully inserted woolly mammoth DNA into mice, creating “woolly mice” with shaggy fur and enhanced fat metabolism—traits that helped mammoths survive the Ice Age. In doing so, Colossal demonstrated its ability to reintroduce extinct traits using CRISPR gene editing. With the gene editing processes now validated, the next step is to move from mice to elephants, which as you might imagine is a much more complex process. And if all goes well there, the plan is to have a living wooly mammoth by 2028.
This breakthrough makes this news from early January make a lot more sense. At the time, Colossal raised $200M at a $10.2B valuation. Presumably investors had a bit more visibility on what was coming down the pipeline from the company than the general public, who kind of sneered and jeered at the fundraising.
A $10B Wooly Mammoth startup?! Lol.
We got Wooly Mice baby! Who’s laughing now?
(5) Aging activates escape of the silent X chromosome in the female mouse hippocampus
Gadek et al in Science
Select genes on the Xi underwent activation, with new escape across cells including in the dentate gyrus, critical to learning and memory. Expression of the Xi escapee Plp1, a myelin component, was increased in the aging hippocampus of female mice and parahippocampus of women. AAV-mediated Plp1 elevation in the dentate gyrus of aging male and female mice improved cognition. Understanding how the Xi may confer female advantage could lead to novel targets that counter brain aging and disease in both sexes.
Some good news for our female readers!
Scientists have discovered that women's brains age more slowly than men's. The study found that as female brains age, some previously silent genes on the inactive X chromosome "wake up" in the hippocampus, a key memory region. One of these genes, Plp1, plays a role in maintaining myelin, which helps brain cells communicate efficiently. When researchers boosted Plp1 in aging male mice, their memory and cognition improved, and female mice given extra Plp1 performed even better.
This discovery sheds light on why women tend to have better cognitive resilience as they age and opens the door to potential new treatments for age-related memory decline. This new understanding of the X chromosome could lead to breakthroughs in neurodegenerative treatments like Alzheimers and/or lead to the development of brainer boosters to key genes to keep minds sharper and healthier.
Kirtane et al in Nature via InterIntellectus on X
Patients undergoing radiation therapy experience debilitating side effects because of toxicity arising from radiation-induced DNA strand breaks in normal peritumoural cells. Here, inspired by the ability of tardigrades to resist extreme radiation through the expression of a damage-suppressor protein that binds to DNA and reduces strand breaks, we show that the local and transient expression of the protein can reduce radiation-induced DNA damage in oral and rectal epithelial tissues (which are commonly affected during radiotherapy for head-and-neck and prostate cancers, respectively).
In this week’s edition of “Get Fucked, Cancer”, scientists used mRNA technology to temporarily shield healthy cells from radiation damage during cancer treatment without protecting tumors.
To do so, they copied a trick from tardigrade. Tardigrades are a tiny, water-dwelling micro-animal known for its extreme survival abilities, including resisting radiation and extreme temperatures. They make a special protein (Dsup) that shields their DNA, so researchers used mRNA to temporarily make human cells produce this same protein. They packed the mRNA into tiny fat bubbles and delivered it to areas that often get damaged during radiation therapy, like the mouth and rectum. In mice, this protected healthy cells from radiation without helping tumors, meaning cancer treatment still worked.
Add this to the growing list of reasons of why we think cancer is going to be cured in the next decade.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to Plaid for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-03-05 21:50:02
Welcome to the 665 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 241,032 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Ramp
Ramp reached a new valuation this week: $13 billion. The Financial Times reported that Ramp is now processing $55 billion in payments on an annualized basis, up from $10 billion two years ago. It is a company that is here to stay.
Announcing the fundraise, Ramp CEO Eric Glyman wrote, “We’re not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. We won’t invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Our job is more modest: save you time and money, so perhaps you can.”
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Time is money. It’s time your team upgraded to Ramp: The Official Business Card of Not Boring, now and for a very long time to come.
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Wednesday!
Over the past five years, I’ve written Deep Dives on 80 companies. I’ve only written about one company more than once: Ramp. They just announced a new $13 billion valuation, up ~43x since the first time I wrote about them in 2020.
One of the things I’ve learned from the Ramp experience, and from five years of writing about and investing in startups, is that there really are a handful of companies that will end up mattering more than all of the others, and that it’s often clear who has a shot at mattering pretty early on. I was an idiot (even more of an idiot than I am now if you can believe it) in 2020, and even I could tell that Ramp was going to be special.
Which would suggest that instead of simply writing about more and more companies, I should go back and revisit some of the best companies I’ve already written about. There’s as much, if not more, to learn from their evolution than from the shiny new thing. And it’s fun to keep myself honest - to see what I got right, what I got wrong, where I maybe took too many leaps, and why, despite that, the call ended up directionally correct anyway.
Maybe, by studying some of the same companies over time, we can learn a little bit more about the up-and-down journey of the greats while they’re in the process of becoming the greats, before their stories have been injected with narrative collagen to smooth out the unsightly wrinkles (while keeping some charming ones, of course).
I’m going to be playing around with different ways to follow-up. New Deep Dives on new angles. Profiles on founders. And a lot of conversations. Hopefully, these conversations will benefit from the history and depth of understanding.
For the first one, there’s no better company to follow up with than Primer.
When I first wrote about Primer in April 2022, they were a mostly online home for ambitious kids to learn in Clubs with other ambitious kids outside of school that was just getting ready to launch its first Microschools. They have since gone all-in on in-person Microschools based on the realization that if you want to actually fix K-12 education, you can’t nibble around the edges with software; you have to build a better version of the system and compete.
Primer is running the Vertical Integrator strategy for education, where the sclerotic incumbent is the US public school system. It’s the kind of incumbent that you don’t even really realize you can compete with, until you realize that you can, and then once you do, realize that you must.
Primer is the perfect company to come back to first, because its evolution mirrors the evolution of my thinking: the only way to fix a broken system is to compete with it and win. Some problems need more than software.
So today, I’m sharing a short essay on my refreshed thesis, a Follow-Up Conversation with Primer founder and CEO Ryan Delk, and a transcript. You can also watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify. Let me know what you think of this format.
Let’s get to it.
Ryan Delk used to begin Primer’s investor updates with a “Tweet-Length Summary”:
“Closed x partnership. Shipped y product. Increased conversion z%.”
That was how he was doing it when Not Boring Capital first invested in the company in late 2021, and when I wrote a Deep Dive on the company in April 2022:
https://www.notboring.co/p/primer-the-ambitious-home-for-ambitious
The product was growing so the updates were good. They were good in the way a lot of startups’ updates are good. Build a thing, grow a thing, optimize a thing.
The plan back then was to offer kids online Clubs where they could follow their interests and meet other curious, ambitious kids outside of school. Kids would go to whatever school they went to during the day – good, bad, mediocre – and then after school and on the weekends, they’d pull their curiosity out of the locker and log into Primer.
Long-term, Primer always expected to build Microschools, like the one Ryan’s mom created for him and his siblings when he was growing up in Florida, but that was eventually, once Primer had used software to acquire customers who were potential students at zero customer acquisition cost (CAC). Then, maybe, you’d start to offer something in-person as an extension of the online community the kids had come to love. The sequencing made sense. It got me.
The allure of Clubs was the allure of any social software product: tap into the internet’s scaled niches to build network effects at scale, then expand from there.
And it was going really well. It was growing. Kids loved Primer’s Clubs.
One time, Ryan got an email from a mom who said that her child “had not told her that she loved her in four years” until she found Primer, joined the Clubs, met other kids who shared her interests, and for the first time in four years told her mom that she loved her. The mom “literally recorded a video and sent it to me through tears explaining this,” Ryan told me.
Another time, two other kids asked their parents if they could go to San Francisco for spring break so they could visit the Primer offices. Then they … did. They hung out at the Primer offices all week.
That’s the kind of customer love most startups would kill for. And Primer had it.
Then Primer killed Clubs.
Not because they weren’t working; because no matter how well they worked, they weren’t going to solve the real problem.
On a walk with a friend, Ryan told me, “[The friend] just looked at me and was like, ‘Why would you not just go after the absolute hardest version of this problem immediately?’”
Good point. So he did. Primer started running actual schools, competing with a public school product that, while many parents were unhappy with it, was state-supported, Lindy, and free.
Since then, Ryan has begun every Primer investor update with a reminder:
“This is a civilizationally-important problem and we are willing to go to war to solve it.”
That’s not what you write when you’re selling Club software. It’s what you write when you’re trying to rebuild a system that has no intention of being rebuilt.
I was wrong about Primer in the way I was wrong about a lot of companies back in 2020-2022, and in the way I think a lot of investors are still wrong: I thought that software (a clearly superior business model) was a better approach than rebuilding the entire product, atoms and all. That you might really be able to solve the problem with software.
And I’m writing about it now because Primer’s evolution mirrors both the evolution of what startups think they’re capable of doing and how I think about companies, which goes something like this:
One vertically integrated startup willing to compete with incumbents to fix the actual problem is worth 1,000 startups writing software to improve this or that little problem on the margin.
If you want to fix energy, you need to build lots of nuclear reactors and install lots of batteries.
If you want to fix space exploration, you need to build your own rockets.
If you want to fix air travel, you need to build fast fucking planes.
If you want to fix housing, you need to build more houses.
And if you want to fix K-12 education, you need to build schools.
For two school years, that’s what Primer has been doing.
Primer partners with teachers in local communities and gives them the tools they need to start their own schools. They help them find a space – a church, a community center, any space that isn’t in use during the day (Primer recently pushed legislation through in Florida to dramatically expand the locations zoned for schools) – handle all of the paperwork to get them up and running, give them software to run the schools, and provide a core curriculum for students to follow.
Whereas Primer’s software used to be student-facing, most of it is now teacher-facing. This is a big shift, and it meant making big changes on the team side. Now, the goal is to use software to enable teachers to provide the best possible education for the lowest possible cost.
Cost is an important factor when you’re competing against free. In Florida and Arizona, where Primers exist today (Primer is announcing another state soon), parents can use their state’s school choice program to offset much of the cost of school. These programs are growing both in terms of the number of states offering them and the size of the programs, something I’ve seen first hand as an investor in Odyssey, which helps state governments administer their school choice programs. (For those getting mad just reading the words “school choice,” watch the video.)
As school choice dollars grow and Primer’s costs shrink, something critically important happens.
In our conversation, Ryan announced for the first time that, “We will have 100% free Primers live in August of 2026. So zero tuition, no out-of-pocket tuition for parents, just use the state scholarship.”
At free, Primer is the same price as public school, and its goal is to offer a higher-quality education that continues to improve – top quartile today, top decile soon – and costs less and less to serve.
This is the Vertical Integrator mantra: better, faster, cheaper, at higher margins. Primer is applying it to a $1.5 trillion US education market ($870 billion of which is spent on public elementary and secondary schools) – a gargantuan market whose impact as a multiplier on all other markets is even larger.
In its first deck, Anduril wrote “Anduril is a company that will save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year.”
Primer is pursuing that same promise in education – if it can provide kids with a better education at scale for a third or less of the cost of the traditional public school system, it will save our youth by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as they make tens of billions of dollars a year.
That seems overly optimistic if you view Primer in the context of traditional EdTech companies, which despite their lofty missions have generally failed to produce generational companies. But if you think about Primer as a company whose top line approaches the budgets of US public school systems at high and growing margins, it tracks.
Today, Primer owns a minuscule percentage of the overall market. There is much work to be done – technological, operational, and pedagogical – to even scratch that opportunity. And given the turning tides for school choice in America, there will be plenty of legitimate competition (not to mention a flood of “competition” from standalone AI tutors, a seeming threat we discuss in the conversation). Education will not be a winner-take-all market, and it shouldn’t. But there will be a biggest winner, and my bet is that Primer will be it.
Ryan told me that Primer is making three bets:
That there will be a Moore’s Law for Education: that software will help deliver a better and better education for a lower and lower cost.
That teachers can be excellent entrepreneurs: Primer is relying on teachers in local communities to attract students and provide them with a great education.
That it’s possible to scale physical schools quickly with asset-light real estate: that by skipping the high CapEx and long timeline buildouts both public and private schools undertake, Primer can move faster and cheaper and focus on the thing parents actually care about: teaching their kids.
To me, this is one bet, and it’s the thesis against which I’ve invested in Primer two more times since that initial 2021 investment:
It is possible to build a better school system, one that gets better and costs less over time. To do that, you need to build something that looks like the existing school system, but that has some of the scale and financial characteristics of a technology business.
That’s what Primer is building. It offers physical schools. Its teachers teach a core curriculum in the morning, and then give kids the freedom to pursue their curiosity in the afternoon. As states pay more in scholarships and Primer lowers costs, it can offer a product that is free to customers at growing margins. Using technology but not defined by it, Primer can offer students an education that gets better as Primer grows, until it can provide a better education for any family that wants one.
Which sounds great on paper, but which is really, really hard in practice. Ryan and I discuss those challenges and the tremendous opportunity in our Follow-Up Conversation.
You can watch the video up top, or watch/listen wherever you prefer:
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Listen and read along below:
Packy (00:00)
Ryan, welcome to, this is an unnamed podcast, but what I wanna do here is three years ago, which feels like a crazy long time ago, I invested in Primer and wrote a deep dive on the company and rereading it, some of it's held up really well, some of it has completely evolved, and you've, kind of as my thesis has evolved into vertically integrated companies taking on these sclerotic incumbents, Primer's kind of like, moved into that position as well.
In this case, it's a sclerotic incumbent that I didn't think was touchable, which is the United States public school system. And so I'm really excited to kind of talk to you just on what has changed and what all of that is and what all of that has looked like. So thank you for doing this little experiment with me.
Ryan Delk (00:48)
Yeah, always happy to hang.
Packy (00:50)
So I think, you there's a few investor updates that kind of like I look forward to every month and Primer is one of them and right up top, you say, and you have, think maybe every investor update since the beginning, this is a civilizationally important problem and we're willing to go to war to solve it. Why is fixing K through 12 education civilizationally important and how are you solving it? What does it mean to go to war?
Ryan Delk (01:12)
There’s couple ways I would answer. there's one, think K-12 education in the US is one of those like boiling the frog, it's kind like the national debt where it's like, you talk to anyone, the mainstream view is like, hey, this isn't working. This is probably totally unsustainable. But it's sort of like, it's not acute. It's never acute enough that it's like, have to solve this right now.
I would argue that the compounding effects of an interest rate are very similar in the negative direction, are very similar to the compounding effects of an education system where, according to the NAEP scores that came out, 80 % of eighth graders are not on grade level on one of the core subjects, at some point that catches up with you and has really, really bad downstream effects for the rest of society, whether that's overall life happiness or career prospects or percentage of families that stay together and have kids and have lives or just overall human flourishing.
And so it's this interesting problem where it's sort of like, it's like cool to like armchair quarterback this on Twitter and talk about how bad public schools are or whatever. But it's actually, it's been a very sort of intractable problem.
And historically one where it's been almost impossible to solve the core problem and so everyone's just tried to solve these like small orthogonal problems, which in some ways actually like we, which we can talk about it if you want, we sort of spent a little bit too long solving one of those I think orthogonal problems instead of just going after the absolute hardest problem as fast as possible. And so you have like, know, software, people that sell software to public schools and different things that maybe make an impact on the margins but are certainly not solving the fundamental problem.
And so I think that this is, for a variety of reasons which we can talk about, this is the moment where you can make a pretty big actual impact on the fundamental problem for K through 12, which is, know, a reductionist view would just be academic progress and getting kids back on grade level and accelerating academic progress back to, you know, at least the grade level standards we had 30 or 40 years ago. But in a more philosophical view, would be things like, you know, students having a better shot at reaching their potential or, you know, living a life where they truly flourish or being excited about coming to school every day or whatever, you know, sort of higher level metric you wanted to use. And then I think the go to war part is as much a reminder for our team as it is for everyone else, which is that this is really, really hard. And there's a reason why no one has succeeded at this. And the incumbent machine is very, very good at making sure that all other alternatives and other supplies is choked out of the market and making sure that the sort of current status quo stays the way that it is.
And so I think that without the posture of this is going to be a fight and we've got to be ready to come to that fight, you end up, you know, you could end up with a demoralized team, you can end up not being aggressive enough, and we've sort of taken the posture from day one that this is going to be probably the hardest thing that any of us ever do, and we need to wake up every morning, you know, ready to take some punches. Otherwise, you have no chance of, you know, surviving long enough to actually make the impact that you want to make.
Packy (04:04)
You anticipated my next question. You mentioned kind of nibbling around the edges to start. So when I wrote the piece in twenty twenty two, really it seems like the core of Primer was software online, these clubs that either were posted by people who were like excellent at kind of educating kids at scale or even some of the kids were making their own clubs. It has all of these like Internet benefits where you can get the absolute best teacher in the world and then you get these network effects almost from more people join, you can find more people to be a part of your club, and all the things that historically you want in your business, those things felt like they were kind of nascently there for Primer. In the same piece, we mentioned that the next week or something, you're about to start launching Microschools, which is a physical product and does not have any of the characteristics that investors like or that you traditionally want to see in a startup.
Since then, you've leaned pretty heavily into microschool. So what changed from being a software-first company with a little bit of a physical thing to a vertically integrated company with physical at its core and then software enhancing that?
Ryan Delk (05:07)
So I, I mean the original vision for Primer in our very first memo was always to eventually get to micro schools. It was to get to the education that I had growing up. And we had this, I think, too clever by half plan, which looked really good in an investor deck and had a lot of theoretical benefits, but in practice was very difficult to execute on, which was that we were going to build, and we did build, this online platform where ambitious kids, home school, private school, public school, could work on projects together. And they could be student driven or expert driven and We were going to get geographic density and key markets with that platform and Then we were going to launch micro schools in them the communities where we had the most geographic density and We were going to have this sort of zero cac or very very low CAC engine because you have this zero marginal cost software product that is ripping through all the most ambitious kid communities in the US and then you're just upselling them on, wouldn't it be great if your school operated just like this? And all the parents say, wow, that's amazing. So it sounds great in theory. Right.
Packy (06:12)
And I'm smiling because this is the bullshit that I absolutely loved and I think probably the biggest lessons that I've learned and luckily I fell for it here. The biggest lesson that I've probably learned over the past few years investing is I could ping pong that too well and be like, my God, it's the most brilliant plan in the world. Why was it not and what changed?
Ryan Delk (06:18)
Yeah. Yeah.
And so what I realized was that, this was the fatal flaw, was that the company, the team that you architect to execute on the software platform for all the world's ambitious kids to come work on products together is very different than the team that you architect to build a software platform that's going to empower great teachers to launch micro schools, thousands and thousands of micro schools all across the US.
Vinod Khosla, who's one of our investors, has a saying that the team you build is the company you build. And people often quote that in the context of, if you want to build sort a high performing company or you want to build a top 1 % company, you have to build a top 1 % team, which all those things are true. But actually, I think the more interesting part of it is, at least in our context, is that you have to purpose build the team for the precise product and outcome that you're building towards. just generically hiring great software engineers and great designers, unless you're just building sort of a vanilla SaaS product, is not enough. And so I had this realization as we were launching the first microschools and we were sort of trying to do both that I had basically two teams or two companies inside of one company. And I was very torn up inside over this because the software product was doing quite well by most metrics. And we were getting this incredible feedback from parents. I remember three weeks before we decided to go all in on microschools, which we can talk about, I got an email from a parent who told me that her student or her child had not told her that she loved her in four years and she found Primer and joined these clubs and met all these other kids that also shared her interests and for the first time in four years she just told her that she loved her and she literally recorded a video and sent it to me through tears explaining this. And so we getting this anecdotal feedback from parents which was clearly moving the needle for them for making this huge impact on their kids but we were not solving the fundamental problem. We were not fixing, we were not doing anything really to fix K through 12 education in the US.
Packy (08:09)
Whoa.
Ryan Delk (08:25)
Cool community for kids, on the margins, was helping them meet other kids that are ambitious and probably become more ambitious themselves. But they were still all stuck in these crappy schools where the really wealthy families sent their kids to great private schools. And so I had a conversation with one of our mutual friends that you know well, and he basically challenged me, and I was sort of talking about this debate with him, and the challenge that I was trying to think through, and he just looked at me and was like, why would you not just go after the absolute hardest version of this problem immediately? Like, you have the best investors in the world behind you, you have a great team, this is the ultimate vision, just accelerate everything to now and just go after the hardest version tomorrow.
And I was sort of already leaning towards some version of that. But we had all these kids and users that were really excited about the product. And so we ended up doing that. And I was able to kind of build the conviction internally. And it was very difficult decision. I probably should have ended up way faster. But we took all the software that we built, we put it inside the microschools, and then we went all in on Primer microschools. And that is what we've been working on for the last two and a half, three years now.
The fundamental problem is a one-for-one replacement for public schools, private schools, charter schools, teachers that love their community, that want to serve their community, can use our software to launch their own school and then give kids an alternative that is typically either free or very low cost and will outperform almost any school that they're in currently.
Packy (09:44)
Yeah, there's so much in there. want to before we get there, like just that pivot moment, you're kind of lucky, but also, mean, like the eventual plan, like you said, was micro schools, but you have founders fund and Khosla are kind of the biggest investors behind, behind Primer. And so they're used to things that are physical, real world require a bunch of CapEx might be slower bill interact with the government, all of that. Still, it's like a different kind of thing than, than you'd been tracking towards, and like a kind of accelerated timeline. What were those conversations?
Like I guess one with the investors but then two with the team because I know also that like even changing you know breather when we changed our sales model from like kind of short rentals to long rentals same team same everything it was a really hard pivot it's like what are those two sets of conversations like?
Ryan Delk (10:28)
The investor side was, I mean, I think for early stage companies, great investors are betting on the founder and to some extent the market, and that's it. So the investor side was very easy. It was sort of immediate, like, all right, if you've got a condition, sounds great, let's talk through the plan, how can we help? The team side was much harder because we had to make a hard, I knew that we had to make a full sort of, All in bet on building this platform to launch schools. And that meant shutting down or shifting a lot of the software that we had built to only live within schools. And there was a lot of, that was a very emotional experience for the team because we had all these kids across the US and the world. mean, literally they would send handwritten letters to our office. I remember two kids, they asked their parents for spring break, instead of taking a vacation, can we come to San Francisco and just visit the Primer office?
They spent their spring break in San Francisco to come to the Primer office because they just wanted to meet the team. So this was like, you know, classic, like, cult, you know, kind of product. And that was very, very difficult for the team because there was a sense that we were abandoning, you know, these people that been, like, long time users and really benefited from the product. But I think it was obviously the right thing to do, but that didn't make it any less hard.
Packy (11:43)
And did people see that? There's also, I think people forget when you hear about companies that there's a mix of senior people who've thought about the strategy and junior people and people who work on certain products and others who kind of have the higher level view. I would imagine some people think that you're a complete idiot at this point and think that you're missing or are heartless or missing these people actually are really getting a lot out of the product. walk me through some of that.
Ryan Delk (11:59)
Yeah. Yeah, we had multiple team members that said all those things and many other colorful versions of that. And I don't actually, I mean, I think, I don't actually blame them. Like, I think that they're...
I think that as a founder, you have to be honest about the different decision inputs and different decision framework that you're going to have than your team. And there's going to be times when those two things diverge and you can't expect every team member to make decisions in the same way or want you to make decisions in the same way that you're going to make as the founder. And so I knew that I was only doing this to try to build a true alternative to the current K through 12 system in the U.S. And it was only worth every marginal day of my time if I felt like we were doing
the highest probability path to get there. And once it was clear that it was not the highest probability path to get there, I felt like I had a moral, ethical, fiduciary, opportunity cost, whatever framework you wanna use, obligation to get us to the, once I found this new path that I thought was more of a straight shot, I felt like I had to get us there as fast as possible.
But I can't expect everyone on the team to also have that exact same framework. These are employees that, obviously they were very bought into the vision and the mission and they were wonderful, kind of all in team members. And some of them said, great, let's go, we're in. And others said, hey, this is not what I signed up for. I signed up to build this thing. And I think that it's easy to villainize them or to say, hey, you don't see the big picture. How can you not see this? But I think that there is just a very different framework that you have as a team member versus a founder, and I think that's fine.
Packy (13:32)
Yeah, think it's to be, you want them to be super passionate about the product that they're building and the impact that they're having. It's just hard. moving on from that hard part, what is, how is the micro school product evolved? What is the micro school product and why vertically integrate and then how far do you integrate? Are you building schools? Are you designing the curriculum? How do you choose where to integrate and what to build?
Ryan Delk (13:40)
Yeah. There's basically three bets that Primer is making. The first is that software is going to, that there's almost like a Moore's law in education, which is that you are going to be able to deliver higher and higher quality academic outcomes as measured by the NWA map or whatever sort of nationally normed test you wanna pick for a lower and lower cost. And that some of that will be AI tutors and these things that are coming down the pipe. But other of this is just pure operational efficiency that you can drive by software, like not having teachers fill out paperwork and automating attendance and things like that. So that's sort of one bet.
The second bet is that teachers are actually phenomenal entrepreneurs - not necessarily in the venture backable sense, but in the kind of small business sense. And the idea of giving them a small organization to run, a small school to run, actually a much higher percentage of them than you think would thrive in that and a much higher percentage than you think would want that. And we've consistently seen, we have thousands of teachers that apply to launch Primers. And they actually really, really resonate with this idea of this thing that becomes their own that they can run and grow.
And then the third bet is that it's possible to very quickly scale this software platform with real world schools through sort of an asset light real estate strategy. We don't ever build schools, we don't do a bunch of construction. The teachers find the campuses for their schools. We have a regulatory engine that helps them get that approved and that's part of it, so that will all be productized as part of the software. But they're responsible for finding students, finding the location, and that allows us to get to scale very quickly in new markets because our go-to-market motion doesn't look like a traditional school operator.
Put those together, you have a platform that can deliver, hopefully, a top quartile or eventually top-design education at half or better of the cost to educate per student for the median cost in the states that we operate in. You have teachers that are kind of in the driver's seat running these schools. And then you can scale very, very quickly because you're not sort of encumbered by, our parents do not choose Primer because there are marble staircases and charcuterie boards and champagne galas. They choose Primer because we teach their kids math, how to read, and how to write really, really well.
And they get time to start companies and work on things they're excited about every day. And so the physical facilities are not the defining characteristic. And so that allows us to open in a lot of places that maybe other people wouldn't want schools, like churches or community centers or libraries or any place that the community really likes and gravitates towards. And so we put all that together. In theory, you can grow really, really quickly and scale this high quality education option at a much lower cost. So that's sort of the bets that we're making.
Packy (16:28)
It makes sense. Again, I'm going to draw on the breather thing here. I think if anything, we made a mistake in not vertically integrating enough. The ideal world capital is not a constraint. You just own buildings and then you keep all the margin and all of that. Because the space was the product. For you, it's a very clear, you say asset light up front, it's a very clear decision to save all of that money, save all of that time and put it towards the education. I guess that's a really good heuristic actually is what do customers expect from you and be as good as you can possibly be on that.
Ryan Delk (16:48)
Yep.
Packy (16:56)
And kind of throw out the other stuff, do you see over time kind of either you deciding to integrate further into that stuff or giving teachers the ability to decide, you I want my school to be this high-end thing where we do have caviar toasts for our students. How do you think about what happens over time as you earn the right to integrate more?
Ryan Delk (17:15)
I could see us maybe going up market a little bit. I think the market for schools that are highly competent at teaching math, reading, writing, and science is so large, tens of millions of students a year, that it's hard for me to imagine tapping that out and feeling like we need to go further up market to the other things that parents care about on top of that. But in theory, the teachers are in the driver's seat, and so they could choose to push up market.
But we are laser focused on that segment, sort of the 80 % of the population, where those are the core things they care about. And I think it will take us many years or decades to tap that out.
Packy (17:50)
Yeah, it makes a ton of sense, which brings to bet number two, which is how do you build a product that parents across the country can come to trust and give teachers control? What's the balance there of what they can control, what is standardized throughout the system?
Ryan Delk (18:05)
Yeah, we are always toying with this balance. It's basically a question of, we think of it in terms of legibility. do not want to take pedagogical or other types of risk, most parents, on their kids' education. And so there's lots of these schools that have tried these highly innovative, either structural innovations or pedagogical innovations. And I think that just creates a ceiling on the percentage of parents that are gonna be willing to take some bet on some new thing. And so you, think for the segment of the population that we're serving, is sort of like, know, middle class, upper middle class, some lower class families.
They just want a really good school that's great at core academics and that's like that's that's what they that's what they are they are looking for. And so it has to be legible. The program the curriculum everything has to be legible enough to them that it feels like a one for one substitute for whatever their current school is. And so the way that we do that is we have a very very intense and rigorous core academics that happen in the morning and parents have total transparency into that they can see on their dash parent dashboard everything that's happening every day. We calculate learning velocity for every student.
And so we can literally project like by the end of the year by the end of the month by the end of the week like where should the student be if something goes off we know why we try to diagnose that But then the afternoon's kids can do these pursuits which are like passion projects like starting companies a lot of the original club stuff They can start companies they can launch podcasts write books And and I think that that is sort of as far as we're gonna push the envelope on legibility where parents can go Okay, like I can sort of understand core academics in the morning these kind of like, you know a creative passion parks in the afternoon and and that is
That is as far for now as we're going to go, and maybe in the future we'll go further. But that is sort of the mix that we chose right now.
Packy (19:42)
It might be early to know this, maybe not. How much does having the passion projects?
Impact the kids desire to learn in the kind of morning core session I asked because my like son I mentioned this briefly in a newsletter But my son like wants to build worlds and now like I can teach him I can like tell him to do anything It's he's you know, years old I could be like well You obviously have to go to swim class because like you're want oceans on your world, right? Or like we better practice our math because like you need math to do physics and like it works all the time Like if you have that motivation of a thing that you want to get done this morning He was homesick and he was dreaming he like wanted to go back to sleep because he was in middle of a dream
Ryan Delk (20:08)
Yeah. Yep.
Packy (20:18)
…about building this world with his grandmother. He's just obsessed. And so you can jam so much down that. And so I would imagine the projects kind of serve that same function. Does it make kids want to learn more because they have something to apply it to?
Ryan Delk (20:22)
So awesome.
That is the dream is that every student is experiencing some version of that. In practice, it's very difficult. So one of the things that we do academically is that every student has a personalized academic plan based on where they are. So it's hard to ensure that every student's project that they're working on directly ties in with where their academics are. But in theory, that is where the software we built will get to. That's the long-term goal. There's some.
You have to be careful because you want there to be some intrinsic motivation. Like it's not just purely to unlock this other passion project later. But the version you're talking about is not as reductionist as just, hey, if you do this, then you get to do this fun thing. It's actually, hey, we need to learn math because it's going to help you build a more robust world or understand how this part of the world's going to work. And that, think, is the connection at its best. And so in theory, that is what we will get to. In practice, it's very hard to do that for thousands and thousands of kids that are all different academic levels, but that is eventually the goal.
Packy (21:31)
Totally. All right, which I mean, that perfectly leads us into bet number one, is the software. I love the idea of kind Moore's Law for delivering quality education. Like, what are the different dimensions? see the chips have gotten cheaper and they've also gotten better. are you kind of on this software trajectory or, you know, the slope where in two decades we wake up and Primer is just the cheapest, but also the best education that you can possibly get? Like, how does that play out over time?
Ryan Delk (21:57)
Yeah, I told the team the other day, it's like surreal that there is literally going to be trillions of dollars this decade spent on CapEx that will basically directly reduce our cogs and our cost to educate and improve our academic outcomes at a lower cost. so.
The latest AI stuff, it's still not quite ready for primetime for AI tutors. still, still host, it's a little bit too high.
The way we think about AI tutor is the value of an AI tutor is directly correlated by how independently a student can use it. But that often, that is also precisely correlated with the magnitude of the downside if or when it hallucinates or gets something wrong because if a fourth grader is using it independently and doesn't know that it's being taught to mean incorrectly, then you're lodging this thing in their brain that is not correct. But they're getting very close. so right now most of what we've done is on the administrative logistical kind of like, you know, deleting the bureaucracy from the system for educators. And so like, don't think any teacher at Primer has ever filled out a piece of paperwork, for example. Probably some, one of them will email me after this and tell me that they did. But it's not a part, normal part of the experience at all. Like all these things are either automated or taken care of for them, or it's, you know, a couple clicks in their dashboard.
And so we're pretty relentless on that front. And I think we have a very, very,clean experience for the Primer leaders, which you'd be surprised how big of a difference that makes, just that difference when they come from their old school to Primer. And so now phase two is, how do you start to really improve the academic outcomes while also decreasing costs for students, and then specifically improve the personalization that you can offer? And so right now we use a combination of software tools and virtual tutors for students that need remedial support and live instruction from the primary leader. And in theory, more and more of that will get eaten by AI tutors as they get ready for prime time. And I think we're probably like six months away. If you're working on this, please email me. I want to meet you. Because I think all the technical building blocks are there. It's just going to take someone actually putting it all together.
Packy (23:54)
I mean, this is one of the things that I love about building a vertically integrated business is that you can be like, I hope that somebody solves AI tutor. Cause then I just plug that into my thing where I've done like all of this actually really hard stuff that nobody wants to do. And so like you want the world to come to you and it's not a competitive threat. I guess the flip side is there a world in which, you we wake up in five years and Apple figures out the vision pro and or meta does and it becomes cheap and then like there is a really good tutor in your classes and like it's just actually better to for kids to sit at home and in a VR with a perfect personalized tutor is like is there something that you think could could knock off Primer that you worry about in the future
Ryan Delk (24:31)
I have a very, very strong conviction that, so lots of people talk about this, AI vision for the future where every student's just sitting at home on a tablet, you know, learning from some AI tutor. That is such a like coastal elite like idea.
97 % of American families need their kids to go to school because they go work during the day and they need a place for their kids to go. And another 35 % of American families rely on schools to provide some other services for them, whether that's aftercare or lunch or various other things that they literally can't provide for their kids. And so this idea that every kid in America is just going to be sitting at home I think is totally wrong. And so that's actually part of the reason why we specifically decided for Primer to, single Primer as a physical location and we do all that work to help these educators find those locations to get them approved for school use because that is the bet is that that is never going to go away and that is going to be part of the durable advantage is this network of thousands and thousands of physical locations and so even as you know cogs and go down and AI tutors you know get ready for prime time you know kids are still going to need a place to go while their parents are working and and that's that is a like very important part of the bet that we're making.
Packy (25:36)
Yeah, it's also, even saying it out loud, like asking the question, didn't mean to make it sound like a but even saying it out loud, you're like, that sounds like the worst possible version of the future that everybody's just sitting inside.
Ryan Delk (25:44)
You have socialization, have all sorts of reasons why that's not gonna happen. But I think the most important one is just structural. Parents just need a place for their kids to go from nine to three or nine to five every day.
Packy (25:54)
Yeah. Well, I mean, so obviously right now, wouldn't get into it right now. That role is often served by the public school system in the US. It feels like things are really moving Primers way on the government side, but I would just love to like kind of, could you give us a snapshot in time of why the opportunity right now to kind of rebuild the system that does so much for so many people right now, why that opportunity exists right now from a government perspective, and then we can deal with the antibodies and all sorts of stuff that comes with that.
Ryan Delk (26:26)
I think coming out of COVID, two important things happened during COVID. One, think parents got a different and higher fidelity view into aspects of their kids' think kids were at home, and so they saw more of what was happening from an academic perspective. And I think a lot of parents rethought education. And then on the teacher side, I think a lot of teachers got burned out and kind of like, hey, there's got to be something better.
So that's one component of it. And then I think that cause or accelerated a lot of the regulatory bodies, sort of that state, local, federal, to think about alternative structures for K through 12 education. And so we had this pretty contrarian view when we started Primer, which is that eventually, micro schools and these kind of smaller, innovative schools would be a very significant portion of the U.S. K-12 education system.
And basically everyone thought we were insane. And now maybe a lot of people still think we're insane, but fewer people think we're insane. And you can at least squint and see that this could happen. And so I think we've had the state level stuff is probably where the most drastic changes happened over the last four years, where you've had 17 or 18 states come out and say, hey, we're going to give, we're going to create state scholarships for families, basically a tax refund. If you're paying property taxes and state and local taxes that go to fund the public school system, if your kid does not use that public good, you can get a portion of that back and you can use that somewhere else since you're not consuming the good that you're paying for.
I think it started as kind of a niche idea and then now it's just cascaded to, I think the majority of states will have those programs by the end of this year, which was sort of unthinkable five years ago. so parents are now, I think in the driver's seat, the meta here is that the parents are now more, have higher agency over their students' education and I think there's less of this just pure inertia towards the public school system. And part of that is psychological for parents coming out of part of that is regulatory from states kind of rethinking these programs. But that I think is sort of the meta thing that shifted over the last five years.
Packy (28:31)
It makes sense. I've seen this both with Primer and then with Odyssey and like really kind of supporting the ESA kind of payouts and making that easy for parents. Clearly there is a like red blue divide on which states have ESA programs and which don't. I'm hoping like, you know, I'm from Pennsylvania originally, someone like Josh Shapiro can purple it and bring ESAs to Pennsylvania. But, you know, even my sister, when I talk about this stuff positively, is like, what about the public schools? you know, are you just taking
Ryan Delk (28:52)
Yep.
Packy (28:59)
money and like giving you know giving better schools and better options to rich kids and you know leaving the public schools in a lurch like I guess one steel man the argument against kind of school choice or like why are blue states is there a good reason for them to be you know to be a little bit behind there and then two I guess you know address the address your own steel man and and like kind of explain why that might not actually be an issue and why what Primer is doing is not like this evil thing.
Ryan Delk (29:26)
The Steel Man is some version of historically non-public schools have done a poor job of serving students that either fall outside the middle 50 % of students on any dimension, whether that's income or academic ability or behavioral or whatever dimension you wanted to pick. And they have been extremely high cost, both in terms of actual tuition, also in terms of CapEx to get live.
And so if something is a very high CapEx effort, meaning for folks from the term, meaning like the initial costs that are required, whether it's real estate or otherwise, to get the thing spun up. You have this issue where in like highly rural areas and lower income areas, no one's gonna go through all the trouble to launch a non-public school. And so in theory, if you give parents back this portion of their taxes that they pay for public schools, that money ends up just going to existing private schools.
No new supply comes onto the market in rural areas or low-income areas because there's no incentive to do that and you end up just you know having $40,000 a year private school now cost 40 or $33,000 a year which doesn't make it any more affordable to a middle-class you know single mother who in theory these programs are supposed to hurt help and So so this is all just sort of one giant, you know handout or something
And I think that is… That is sort of a very narrow, it is true in the most narrow sense if you assume that it is just a subsidy of demand and not, and it doesn't impact supply in any way. And I think that is part of why people are so excited about Primer is that we are able to, because of the Asset Light Real Estate Strategy, we are able to spin up these schools very cheaply and very quickly, but also in areas that historically would not, you would not be building or launching a new non-public or private school.
And then you're able to offer that at a price point that even very very low-income families can afford and so we have schools With Primer we have them in you know the wealthiest neighborhoods of many cities But we also have schools where 96 or 97 percent of families are on food stamps And they are in the you the lowest income literally the lowest income neighborhoods of entire states Have Primers and they're thriving and they're self-sustaining and the the communities love it and the teachers love it and so we're sort of
I think breaking that narrative. And I think that's part of what the excitement is, that historically a lot of the innovation that's happened in education, in full stack education, has either been one-off charter models, where you have one really great school or two really great schools, but it's very difficult to scale, or really high-end private schools, like I won’t name any names, but they've tried and they haven't succeeded, or they've succeeded in a very limited scope at the $50,000 a year price point, but it's never actually made an impact for the families that need it the most. And so I think that's sort of the argument that applies to maybe weight 1.0 of this world, but everything that's shifting now, I think sort of bucks that argument.
Packy (32:18)
Yeah, I it like the 2.0, like it is a very interesting and disruptive and I hate that word because it's overused, like, disruptive thing when you can actually bring the cost of the education down as you're getting these subsidies, like where at some point, you know, if you're on that Moore's law curve, at some point, the ESAs, which are, you know, some states, I'm sure like as low as, you know, a couple thousand dollars up to what max of eight to $10,000. At some point you should be like the all in costs should be below that. Like what is the Primer if you're, if you're willing to talk about it, Primer cost to serve now versus what it costs, you know, public school in a similar area to serve a student's education.
Ryan Delk (32:55)
We will have 100% free Primers live in August of 2026. So zero tuition, no out-of-pocket tuition for parents, just use the state scholarship.
And we are very, very confident in that. That won't be every single Primer, but it will be a lot of them in several states. And we will probably have one or two of those piloting this year in August. So that's the future. And that's part of why I'm so excited about all the stuff that's happening on the software side, is you can deliver these incredible academic outcomes at a much lower price point than it was ever possible. And so when you pass those savings on to parents, you end up being able to, these programs end up being able to have the impact
that they purport to have, which is for families that can't afford a better alternative, it's giving them access to something that they never would have been able to afford otherwise, and a much better education for their kids.
Packy (33:44)
That's amazing. So free for the families just like public school would be taxpayers save whatever the delta is between what it costs Primer to serve and what it costs state schools, what it costs the local public schools to serve. And you have this education that is improving and keeping up kind of over time.
versus one that is just because it's part of a bigger kind of system, slower and harder to move. It's like a win-win-win. We were talking beforehand a little bit though that there are some people who are not as psyched about this. What's your experience been with the unions?
Ryan Delk (34:14)
Yeah. What to share here.
The incumbents are very good at staying incumbents, is something you learn in this world. And I definitely did not fully appreciate that. I think I had some broad sense going into starting to build Primer that that was the case. But I did not appreciate the extent to which it was true. And I thought of it more in the sense of, sort of like acute attacks which have happened and we have crazy stories to that end. It's actually the harder thing to overcome is the structural extent to which the kind of incumbent education system has captured every type of regulatory body that acts as a gatekeeper to new supply coming onto the market. And so everything from land use and zoning, to other like regulatory state level or local level regulatory approval that you have to have. All of these things are, you end up in a situation where it is very, very difficult for a new supply to come onto the market. no one, there's not one individual that's sort of culpable for this. It's that the entire system is designed to ensure that you can't get new supply onto the market. And that's part of the structural stuff that we spend a lot of time fighting.
Packy (35:19)
You had a big win on that front in Florida. How do you win it? Is it just like waking people up and tapping them on their shoulder and being like, hey, while you weren't looking, it was illegal to launch a school in this open public space, or is it harder than that? Like, what does it look like to change all of that?
Ryan Delk (35:32)
Yeah.
Part of it is like the you can just do things meme. We, I heard from so many, I talked to someone who was like, yeah, for the last 12 years, I've been trying to figure out how we can fix, you know, zoning for new schools. And we just wrote some legislation and found some legislators that were excited about it and we got a pass. And so we changed state law in Florida and opened up 50,000 new locations where you can open a private school.
And everyone was like sort of, everyone in that space was like, wow, this is amazing. Never thought we would see the day. And I wasn't easy, but it wasn't that. It was not in the top 10 hardest things Primer has done and probably not in the top 100 that we will do. And so it wasn't objectively that difficult. It just was no one had actually gone and tried to actually do it. And so there's things like that that we try to tackle on Spearhead. But it's also, think, it's a...
It's one of those things where until you are in it, it is very difficult to understand the specifics of what makes it so hard. And so you have many well-intentioned people in the legislature and different governing bodies who think that they've sort of solved these problems and it's not that hard. But when you're in it and you're actually trying to launch schools, you learn the actual mechanics and where the friction points are. And so in some ways, you kind of have to do it to figure out what's broken. And we were in a unique spot to be able to go fix it after that.
Packy (36:49)
The like, cynic view on this would be, like there's a lot of different types of cynic view. The business cynic view of this is like, damn, you're doing a lot of hard work to like, build an ed tech company and like, aren't these the worst businesses of all time? Like, what is the market opportunity? like, when you think about Primer as a business, like how do you think about that and what the kind of upside is there?
Ryan Delk (37:08)
For the last 50 years, the only thing you could do in the education world was this sort of thin slice of the market that we called EdTech, which was basically software that was either sold to public schools or to parents. And it was this very thin slice of, we spend $1.5 trillion a year on K through 12 education in the US. was this tiny little, low tens of billions of dollars spent, component of that. And that entire segment produced basically zero generational companies or organizations, very few amazing outcomes for the world or for investors or whoever.
And so, and I think that was a structural, it was a structural limitation, which was that the majority of this $1.5 trillion a year was basically just totally locked down, kind of one shot to public or charter schools. And there was nothing that parents or anyone else, there was no discretion over any of that. was just sort of, it was just gonna keep happening. And so if you wanted to do anything and try to improve anything or build organizations in the space, you either had to do it sort of at very small subscale, very small scale, you know, build one charter school or something like that. Or you had to just play in this sort of software space with these two year long procurement cycles and terrible margins, all that. And now, because of all these structural shifts, is the first time where you can actually go innovate on the bulk, like the foundational problems, which is the actual schools themselves. And you can go build alternatives.
And so I think… I think that it would be a mistake to conflate what's going to happen over the next 20 years of folks building things in education to what's happened for the last 20 years. I think that the opportunity now, think that we finally have a chance to try to improve and attack some of the hard foundational structural problems that have basically been off limits, not for lack of good intentions, but just because of the structure, that have basically been off limits for the last 30, 40, 50 years. And so obviously, there's a lot of execution risk and very hard problems to solve still, but the structural stuff has been unlocked. And so now it's up to us and hopefully many others to go improve the lives of families and kids and deliver great outcomes.
Packy (39:16)
When I hear like a $1.5 trillion, like there's very few markets that are the size of a defense, the defense budget is 900 million billion in the US. But if you include allies around the same size, like would it be easier for you to fundraise if you have like a physical school that you just like dropped in in different places and it like looked like you were doing this like hard tech thing or like it does feel to me like when you talk about it that way.
And when you really think about the business, like one of those kind of knocking over the defense primes, size opportunities, is it easier if you have a shiny physical product or what's that like convincing new investors?
Ryan Delk (39:51)
We've been pretty lucky on that front. We have a great group of investors that are very long-term ideologically aligned. And so I think we are very lucky. And I think that part of that is that our team is this mix of people that have come from the traditional education world. So we have people that have built some of the most iconic schools in the US that have a lot of hard-won battle scars and have been doing it for decades. And then we have people from the tech
and startup world that have built many iconic software companies and been early at places like Uber and Coinbase and other companies. And so I think that Nix has allowed us to attract a bunch of very high caliber capital. But I do think there's there, I do often think of that, if you were doing the more sexy version of this, then maybe it would be a little bit more hypey. But I actually think it's quite, I think staying under the radar
little bit and kind of just sort of building the version of this that really works for like blue collar, know, everyday Americans actually is the right long term, long term bet. And I think that that we are that is now like increasingly obvious to the market.
Packy (40:59)
How do you see the market playing out? Is this winner take most? Is this, there's gonna be a million different players? When you are doing all that hard work in Florida to get all these spaces approved, can there now be 10 other companies that come in behind you and say, awesome, we're gonna use that to launch schools as well? Or does the software side make it, you think, take most at the end?
Ryan Delk (41:19)
I don't think it's winner take all. mean, there's 80 million-ish kids in the US and it's one and a half trillion dollars a year of total spend. part of the promise of what's happening is that you will have a much higher aperture or variance of types of options available for families and so I hope that Primer eventually can be the platform that you folks launch amazing you know farm schools or technical immersion schools or language immersion schools or Religious schools are all sorts of different things that that you could use the Primer platform to launch
But I also think that we need a lot more types struck structural innovations people trying crazy crazy ideas and so I hope that part of what happens over the next 10 years is that you have much higher variance people trying You know things that have never been tried before to see if they work I think for for students with special needs there's a huge underserved market there that we have not You know really done a lot or explored but that's something that I feel I'm personally very interested in and invested in and And would like to to for primary part of the solution there, but that's something that's there's an amazing autism school in Phoenix, for example, has been able to grow tremendously because of lot of the legislative changes, but also deliver just incredible outcomes for these students that, as far as I'm aware, have literally never happened anywhere in the US, and now they're taking that same model and scaling it to a bunch of other states.
And so I think that that, it is definitely not one or take all. It is an enormous market, and I hope that the end state is every family and every student being able to find something that is closer to the ideal school for them, rather than this sort of one size fits all sort of defaults that we've been operating with for the last 50 years.
Packy (42:57)
I guess kind of snapshot moment in time right now, so when we revisit this again in three years, what can you give me on revenue growth? Like where were we in 2022? Where are we now? Where do we expect to be in the next kind of two to three years?
Ryan Delk (43:10)
Yeah, we're we've grown about 5x… 4.7x year over year from last year to this year.We will be announcing expansion to a new state. I'm actually here right now in our office in said state and We'll be announcing that soon. We'll do another another with another new state expansion lineup for next year.
So yeah, are, we are operationally, the constraint right now is operational capacity, not students or teachers, which I think is the problem you want to have, but is also the most frustrating problem because it is 100 % under your control and there's only one person to blame for not increasing capacity, which is yourself. And so that is what I'm spending all my time on right now. But I hope that three years from now we will have ubiquitous free Primers that are available to families across many states and that are delivering top quartile or hopefully maybe top decile academic outcomes at either free or very, very low cost for families. at that point, I will feel very confident in our ability to scale that to many hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of students.
Packy (44:18)
What are those big unlocks that kind of get you there? Are there like step changes where all of sudden, maybe in 10 years it looks like the federal government's like, great, we're dropping Primer and everywhere. That's obviously a ridiculous case, but are there big unlocks like this or is it just like we're grinding this thing, compounding for the next decade or two?
Ryan Delk (44:36)
We don't need any big structural unlocks. think there will be a lot of stuff that will happen on the software side that will keep pulling costs down and pulling academic outcomes up. But I suspect that will be, some of the AI stuff will probably feel like a step change when we're able to implement that. But a lot of it is just gonna be, we have better data, I think we have a better data set than any education provider on the planet because of the way that we've architected the operating system.
We are able to predict which interventions are going to work, recognize when learning velocity dips below the projected amount for a student that intervene in a way that I think probably no school on the planet can. And so a lot of this will just be letting that compounding advantage continue to play out, improving the product, improving the program. And if we can continue that, I think that it won't require any big structural unlocks. It'll just keep getting better every year.
Packy (45:29)
All right, so kind of just two last questions.
One, if you could go back and tell Ryan in April 2022 when I wrote the Deep Dive on Primer, if you could go back to the past and give him one piece of advice over the next three years, what would it be?
Ryan Delk (45:43)
It's gonna happen faster than you think, so be more aggressive.
Packy (45:47)
Be more aggressive is great. And then if there are people, and this is the last one, people who want to get involved, want to be more aggressive, want to help solve that operational constraint, what are you hiring for right now? What's the best way to kind of turn this into going to work at Primer?
Ryan Delk (46:01)
Hiring for almost every role across the company, marketing, growth, operations, admissions, engineering, design, product, education. email me r at Primer.com if you have a proclivity towards the types of problems that we've talked about and you're interested in working extremely hard on trying to solve it. It will be the hardest thing you've ever done, but it hopefully will be the most meaningful work of your life. And if you're a teacher that's interested in launching a school,
Either in Florida or Arizona or other states, please email me because I'd to add you to the list and get you involved in that when we're there.
Packy (46:32)
Ryan, thank you for doing this. I definitely get excited when I write about companies and somehow as excited as I was when I wrote about Primer in the beginning, just kind of getting to know you and the company more over the past three years. This is just a massive opportunity that if it goes right, you can't think of a bigger lever on kind of everything downstream. So I can't wait to do this again and kind of follow the story over the next three years. But thank you for doing what you do.
Ryan Delk (46:55)
Thanks, Packy. Always fun to hang.
Thanks to Ryan for the great conversation!
That’s all for today. Please let me know what you think about this format, and if you want to stop reading and just get to work fixing education by working at Primer or launching a Microschool, check out Primer’s career page.
We’ll be back in your inbox with a Weekly Dose on Friday, by which point I fully expect you to have your company set up on Ramp.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-02-28 21:42:10
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 133rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. Just a deluge of big, optimistic news to process this week: breakthrough research reports, splashy $500B investments, major crypto deregulation, and not one, not two, but three lunar lander launches. Good news from every part of the universe we cover. We’ll try to weave it all together for you in a way that makes sense. That’s what you pay us the big bucks to do.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) RNA neoantigen vaccines prime long-lived CD8+ T cells in pancreatic cancer
Sethna et al in Nature
At an extended 3.2-year median follow-up from a phase 1 trial..., we find that responders with vaccine-induced T cells (n = 8) have prolonged recurrence-free survival (RFS; median not reached) compared with non-responders without vaccine-induced T cells (n = 8; median RFS 13.4 months; P = 0.007).
mRNYAY!
Researchers have developed an mRNA-based cancer vaccine that generates long-lived, functional T cells targeting pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, with a 5-year survival rate of only about 12%.
In a phase 1 trial, patients received surgery, a PD-L1 inhibitor, chemotherapy, and a personalized mRNA vaccine. At the 3 year mark, 75% of patients were cancer free. Moreover, responders with vaccine-induced T cells had significantly longer recurrence-free survival compared to non-responders, meaning those that responded to the vaccine went much longer without their cancer coming back than those who didn’t respond.
The research shows the vaccine created immune cells that lasted for years, stayed active against cancer, and could help prevent it from coming back. 85% of vaccine-induced T cell clones persisted for at least two years, with a median lifespan of 7.7 years and some projected to last decades. The T cells maintained strong anti-cancer activity and infiltrated recurrent tumors, meaning they could help control cancer over the long term. The study’s results are extremely compelling evidence that mRNA cancer vaccines can induce durable immunity.
However, the study is not without its skeptics. Vinay Prasad pointed out on X that the study had multiple design flaws and that there have been many promising cancer vaccines, but ultimately only one approved by the FDA. Here’s the hoping Prasad is wrong on this one.
From Regeneron
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. today announced updated data for the investigational gene therapy DB-OTO from the Phase 1/2 CHORD trial in 12 children who have profound genetic hearing loss due to variants of the otoferlin (OTOF) gene.
Gene therapy restored hearing. I’ll say it again louder for the people in the back. Gene therapy restored hearing.
Last week, we kicked off the Dose with two gene therapy wins: restoring a blind man’s vision and treating a baby’s spinal muscular atrophy in the womb. Now, another gene therapy restored hearing in deaf children. This is a miraculous trend.
Regeneron's gene therapy DB-OTO showed significant hearing improvements in 10 of 11 children in the trial, with some reaching near-normal levels of hearing. Wild. Here’s how DB-OTO works: the gene therapy uses a harmless virus to deliver a working copy of the OTOF gene into the cochlea, restoring a key protein (otoferlin) needed for hearing. In children with otoferlin-related hearing loss, their inner ear cells detect sound but can’t send signals to the brain due to a faulty gene. By injecting DB-OTO directly into the cochlea, the therapy enables these cells to produce otoferlin, re-establishing sound transmission and allowing children born deaf to hear. Voilà!
Overall the trial not only met but exceeded expectations. Ten of eleven children in the trial experienced significant improvements in hearing. One child, treated at 10 months, demonstrated speech and developmental progress. And best yet, the treatment was delivered in a relatively simple procedure and the children experience only mild and temporary side effects. Hear hear.
(3) Not just for big dogs! Our senior dog program receives preliminary FDA efficacy acceptance (RXE)
From Loyal
This makes Loyal the likely recipient of both the first- and second-ever RXE acknowledgements from the FDA for longevity drug programs for any species — including humans.
Loyal is making some big (and small) dog moves!
The biotech company focused on canine longevity (and R&D that could eventually benefit humans) announced that the FDA granted its drug a “reasonable expectation of effectiveness” in extending senior dogs' lifespans. Loyal still needs the FDA’s final approval before it hits the market, but the company is still targeting late 2025 availability. The drug, called LOY-002, will be offered to senior dogs of all sizes (or at least >14 lbs). Importantly, Loyal’s previous programs focused on older, larger dogs and wasn’t available to smaller and medium sized pooches.
While Loyal can’t really yet make claims on lifespan extension, it does comp the drug to a previous study from Purina on caloric restriction that extended dogs lives 2 years. Dogs can’t be on caloric restriction forever, that’s not sustainable, but taking a beef-flavored LOY-002 drug may be scalable to millions of dogs.
Extending the lives of millions of dogs is a good thing. Achieve that and Loyal is not only a valuable company, but likely a very loved company. But the company’s ambitions don’t stop at dogs. It wants to build on its learnings in creating canine longevity programs to build human longevity programs. And if they achieve that before others, Loyal is likely one of the most valuable and important companies in the world. Bow wow wow.
(4) Arc Virtual Cell Atlas launches, combining data from over 300 million cells
From Arc Institute
The Atlas debuts with two foundational datasets…The first is a new, open source, perturbation dataset called Tahoe-100M, created by Vevo Therapeutics, comprising 100 million cells and mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions across 50 cancer cell lines. The second dataset, scBaseCamp, is the first single-cell RNA sequencing dataset from public data to be curated and reprocessed at scale using AI agents.
Arc on a bit of a tear recently!
Last week, they released Evo 2, an AI model that learns the “language” of DNA, allowing it to predict the effect of mutations, design new sequences, and influence gene expression.
This week, they released Virtual Cell Atlas, a resource for AI-driven biological discovery, starting with data from over 300 million cells. The Atlas standardizes diverse single-cell data for easier computational analysis, helping researchers study drug responses and disease mechanisms.
The initial release includes two major datasets: Tahoe-100M, mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions across 50 cancer cell lines, and scBaseCamp, an AI-curated single-cell RNA sequencing dataset spanning 21 species. To gather all this, Arc developed AI agents to continuously collect and process public data, removing the need for manual curation.
Those Collison boys are shippin’! And speaking of the Collisons, Stripe released its 2024 Annual Letter this week — $1.4 Trillion in total payment volume in 2024. Those Collison lads are both shippin’ and rippin’!
(5) Apple will spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years
From Apple
“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund, to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing. And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”
$500B! How ‘bout them apples?!
Apple is committing $500 billion to U.S. investments over the next four years, focusing on AI, silicon engineering, and advanced manufacturing. The scheduled investments include a new server manufacturing facility in Houston, expanded chip production in Arizona, and a doubled $10 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund. The additional investment is expected to add about 20,000 Apple jobs and, in addition, the company is launching a manufacturing academy in Detroit to train workers in AI and automation.
Why would Apple do this? Besides some obvious genuflecting to the Trump Administration, the move to onshore some of its manufacturing infrastructure to the U.S. is intended to increase supply chain resiliency in the face of increasingly cooled relationships with China. And maybe to give Tim Cook a little power back.
A couple weeks ago, on the Shawn Ryan Show, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey called Cook out for the company’s (necessary but embarrassing) stance on China:
Like Tim Cook, I have nothing against the guy, personally, but like if I were him, I would feel a little humiliated that I can’t say anything about China despite supposedly on paper being one of the most powerful men in the world.
…He’s politically engaged. Imagine what would happen if he said something like “I believe concentration camps are bad.” Like China, on account of the Uighur Muslim issue, would immediately lock them out of the country. He can’t say that. Isn’t that crazy?
I’ll stop. Palmer keeps going. Watch it. I started the clip at the beginning of the rant.
Critics argue that a lot of this is money Apple was going to spend in the US anyway, packaged into a nice, big, round, Trump-pleasing number. That may be the case.
But Apple is the most valuable company in the world — by a margin of, coincidentally, $500B — and it makes sense for it to continue to invest in its home country, make its supply chains less vulnerable, and (frankly) score a major political win with an administration that values flattery and cooperation above all else. We’ll take the W.
And if you hear Tim Cook start making Winnie the Pooh jokes, you’ll know what happened.
From Coinbase
SEC staff has agreed in principle to dismiss its unlawful enforcement case against Coinbase, subject to Commissioner approval – righting a major wrong. We’ve always maintained that we were right on the facts and the law, and today’s announcement confirms that this case should never have been filed in the first place. This is a victory not just for Coinbase, but for our customers, the United States, and individual freedom.
Big win for crypto!
The SEC has agreed to drop its lawsuit against Coinbase, pending commissioner approval. This case was a particularly frustrating one for anyone involved in crypto —the SEC had previously reviewed and approved Coinbase’s business model when it went public in 2021 but then sued the company in 2023 without any changes to its operations. The case, which was brought forth under Gary Gensler’s SEC, was pretty obviously politically motivated and a blatant example of the the SEC’s broader anti-crypto agenda.
The crypto industry, especially the larger companies like Coinbase, want clear crypto guidelines and regulations — they want certainty that their businesses could not overnight be the target of overreaching and vague regulation. It must be extremely frustrating to run a business that, at any point, could be the victim of politically motivated regulation. The SEC’s dropping of the lawsuit signals that those days of vagueness are over.
(7) Humanity has THREE lunar landers heading to the moon right now
Christian Keil on X
Video from Firefly Aerospace on X
We are so back. Literally. To the moon. Literally. Like “We are so back to the moon.”
As we speak, three private companies—Intuitive Machines, Firefly Aerospace, and ispace—have lunar landers en route to the moon. Until Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander touched down near the lunar south pole a year ago, no American craft had landed on Luna since 1972. 1972! Fifty-three years!
Now, in 2025, two American craft and one Japanese are on their way.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission, launched on January 15, 2025, is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which wants to establish a steady flow of robotic missions to the moon.
Intuitive Machines launched its second lunar lander, IM-2 (Athena) on Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, heading for a planned landing at Mons Mouton near the moon’s south pole. The lander is mostly carrying equipment use to drill for water ice, some smaller lunar rovers, and some communications equipment. This is also a CLPs program, and along with Firefly, a great example of public<>private<>private partnership between NASA, SpaceX, and Intuitive Machines/Firefly.
Japan’s ispace Resilience lander, which also hitched a SpaceX ride on January 15, 2025, is not part of the CLPS program but has been selected for a future CLPS mission.
Today, the moon. Tomorrow? Mars…which may be showing more signs of life than previously thought.
We’re even brining things back from space. Not Boring Capital portfolio company Varda’s W-2 spacecraft successfully landed at the Kooniba Test Range in Australia, “becoming the first-ever commercial spacecraft to reenter on Australian soil.”
Enjoy this shot of W-2 streaking across the night sky on its way back.
What a beautiful universe we get to explore.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring! We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan