2025-07-11 20:43:41
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 152nd Weekly Dose of Optimism. They said that nothing happens in July. That the VCs and founders and changemakers are all galavanting across Europe, humble-complaining about the lack of air conditioning, and observing that they actually lost weight while in Italy despite eating pasta every day and not working out. Well they were wrong. It was an action packed week. The world marches onward, even in July.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) They Want Him Dead. Augustus Doricko Just Wants to Make It Rain.
Blake Dodge for Pirate Wires
In short, the flooding wasn’t their fault.
But the virality of the blame, and the intensity of the emotion behind it, is officially a Rainmaker trend. It could master the intricacies of cloud physics just to be taken out of the game by people who believe that Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires — or that the white trails behind airplanes are actually government mind-control chemicals (chemtrails). RFK Jr. followers, thanks to his public endorsements of the chemtrail theory, are violently opposed to Rainmaker, because they think cloud seeding is not worth distinguishing from chemtrails. Thanks to pressure from this community, and perhaps general willingness on the part of politicians to farm engagement from anti-establishment audiences, 31 states introduced bans against cloud seeding and other forms of weather modification in the last year.
Packy here. Over 4th of July Weekend, a slow‑moving mesoscale convective vortex—fed by remnants of Tropical Storm Barry—dropped up to 20 inches of rain, or between 5.5 and 5.8 million acre-feet, in Central Texas’ Hill Country. Over 120 people died in the floods, including many children from Camp Mystic, and over 170 people remain missing.
The floods and the loss of life they caused were a tragedy. I drop my son off at the camp bus stop every morning. I can’t imagine what those parents are going through.
But they weren’t Rainmaker’s fault, as Pirate Wires’ Blake Dodge writes in this epic profile:
In Texas, Rainmaker suspended operations, following guidance from in-house meteorologists, a day before Texas officials would have required them to; the last two clouds it seeded dissipated more than 24 hours before the storm’s arrival; and, for context, even the startup’s most successful missions have only produced about 0.0005% of the rain that the storm did in a 48-hour period.
Despite that, over the past week, Rainmaker CEO Augustus Doricko has taken on an onslaught of conspiracy theorists, politicians, trolls, and concerned citizens who blame his company for the disaster to win political points, or just because they need someone to blame, and the mulletted 25-year-old CEO of a tech company is an easy target. He’s handled it with facts and grace.
If we can harness technology to make it rain, or even to avoid disasters like the one that befell Texas, we must. Critics claim companies like Rainmaker are playing God, but the fact is, the natural state of planet earth is hostile to humans.
In The Beginning of Infinity, something of a Weekly Dose Bible, David Deutsch explains:
The Earth was not a suitable environment for humans until they changed it. The first humans to leave Africa had to invent clothes, shelters, and new hunting techniques to survive in colder climates. Every step in human progress has involved transforming the environment to suit our needs, using knowledge.
Lives are lost every day from lack of adequate water, as are livelihoods. In the profile, Dodge shares that in Utah, one of Rainmaker’s first customers, “The depletion [in lake levels] is harming surrounding ecology and exposing toxic, arsenic-containing dust from the lakebed, which blows into the city and appears to be worsening respiratory health.” If Utah works, Dodge writes, Rainmaker has a case to replenish the Colorado River. “The river provides drinking water for 35 to 40 million people across seven states, irrigates millions of acres of crops, and produces billions of kilowatt-hours of hydroelectricity — so its decades-long drought is an issue.”
Earth can be a dangerous place for living creatures, like us. Rainmaker is fighting back on our behalf with knowledge. “There’s a lot about the weather we don’t understand. We are making it rain more. Can we make it rain less?”, Dodge asks.
The company may succeed, or it may fail, but we certainly can’t let it stop trying because of some conspiracy-toting fear-mongerers. One of the reasons we started writing the Weekly Dose is that we want to support the people who try despite the long odds. Rainmaker is full of those people.
Make it rain, Augustus.
(2) Oscar‑Winning Movie Director Is Betting $15M on a Bird That Went Extinct 600 Years Ago
Maggie Ekberg for Complex
The 63-year-old Oscar-winning filmmaker has officially joined forces with Colossal Biosciences to help bring a long-extinct bird back from the dead. On Tuesday, July 8, the biotech company announced it’s partnering with Jackson and New Zealand’s Ngāi Tahu Research Centre to resurrect the moa — a massive, flightless bird that went extinct around 600 years ago. Jackson is backing the project with a reported $15 million in funding.
Back to Dan. In a move as epic as his films, Peter Jackson is teaming up with Colossal Biosciences (a company we’ve covered multiple times in the Weekly Dose) to bring back the moa, a giant (we’re talking 12 feet tall here fellas!) bird that went extinct over 600 years ago. The project is a combination of Jackson’s purported obsession with moas (you didn’t expect the Lord of the Rings guy to be normal, right?) and Colossal’s scientific and commercial ambition to de-extinct cool, big animals.
The project is notable for a few reasons:
You love to see a rich guy dedicating some of his wealth to pursuing far-flung scientific endeavors. When tech billionaires do it, they somehow get flack. But when the Lord of the Rings director does it, it’s pretty cool. Modern Magnificenza!
Another win for Colossal. The company has been on a tear: high valuations, creating woolly mice, and generally progressing on de-extinction efforts more than most naysayers projected. The collab with Jackson is certainly interesting…imagine a Jurassic Park type world created by Jackson filled with creatures de-extincted by Colossal. (Packy note: they also just showed up on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, analyzing what might be a real direwolf jawbone for the guys.)
Moas are pretty cool. Tall as shit. Flightless. I basically just picture Larry Bird from the neck up on the body of an ostrich. Is Jackson’s obsession with them a little weird? Sure. But if Jackson wants to front the bill on bringing these big ass birds back to life, I, for one, am not going to stop him.
(3) Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help
Jill Rosen for The Hub at Johns Hopkins University
A robot trained on videos of surgeries performed a lengthy phase of a gallbladder removal without human help. The robot operated for the first time on a lifelike patient, and during the operation, responded to and learned from voice commands from the team—like a novice surgeon working with a mentor.
A robot from Johns Hopkins, trained on videos and voice commands, autonomously performed a complex phase of gallbladder removal surgery on a lifelike model. Unlike earlier systems that followed rigid plans, this new robot, SRT-H, adapted in real time to unpredictable scenarios, responded to spoken feedback, and made surgical decisions on the fly. This wasn’t a robot executing against a pre-ordained set of instructions, this was a robot performing dynamic and real-time surgery.
We’re still a ways off from a surgery like this being performed on live humans or from scaling this up to multiple types of surgeries and hundreds of thousands of patients. And personally, I will take a real life surgeon cutting me open and fixing my organs over an autonomous robot at this point. But this is a big step towards bringing AI surgeons into the operating room. Surgeons already rely heavily on technology and machinery and robotic assistance in performing surgery, but getting autonomous robots in the operating room could dramatically improve the safety of surgeries and reduce the cost of healthcare.
(4) Sweet or sour? AI-powered device achieves human-like sense of taste
Katie Kavanagh for Nature
A device that combines a graphene-derived material with machine learning to detect salty, bitter, sweet and sour flavours could one day help to restore a lost sense of taste to people with neurological conditions.
Yum!
Researchers have built a graphene-oxide “tongue” that uses AI to detect salty, sweet, sour, and bitter flavors with up to 90% accuracy, even in wet, mouth-like environments. Unlike earlier sensors, it mimics how our tongues send electrical signals to the brain, and it can even identify complex flavors like coffee and cola. Whether it can tell Diet Coke from Diet Pepsi remains to be seen, but that might be the real Turing test.
Like other brain-computer interface tech, this is starting with people who need it most. Neuralink is targeting paralysis and ALS; this taste tech could help patients with Parkinson’s, MS, or stroke regain a lost sense of taste. But the implications go far beyond medicine. If we can digitize senses like taste, smell, and vision, we’re laying the groundwork for a sort of sensory internet. Imagine scrolling through DoorDash and getting little tastes of the food before you order it or thinking back to your grandma’s kitchen and getting a real whiff of her home cooking or feeling the touch of a long distance loved one. Both spooky and cool.
(5) Nvidia's stock market value hits $4 trillion on AI dominance
Shashwat Chauhan for Reuters
Nvidia briefly reached a market capitalization of $4 trillion on Wednesday, making it the first company in the world to reach the milestone and solidifying its position as one of Wall Street's most-favored stocks.
Earlier this week, Nvidia briefly became the first company ever to surpass a $4 trillion market cap. The company’s financials are insane, demand for its products is insatiable, and its stock performance is bolstered by really every tailwind imaginable. The company is on a decades-long heater at this point, rising from a $5B market cap in 2009 to a $4T market cap today. That’s a 790x in 16 years off an an already relatively high $5B market cap. Insane.
And for good reason: Jensen was prescient (or very very lucky) with his early bet on GPUs. But the company has also been (at risk of stating the obvious) extremely strategic in transitioning from being merely a chip designer to building the full-stack AI platform. If you believe that AI is going to be very big and important and valuable, at this point you also have to believe that Nvidia is going to capture a lot of that value.
The Nvidia story aligns perfectly with one of Not Boring’s core theses over the last coupe of years: Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger. The core idea is that tech is entering a new era defined by the convergence of software, hardware, and AI which will unlock intelligence, energy, and dexterity at near-zero marginal cost. This shift dramatically expands tech’s addressable market, making room for much larger companies than we’ve seen before. Nvidia, its chips and its full-stack AI platform, is perhaps the company which makes this entire thesis possible. If you think tech, broadly speaking, is going to get much bigger, you think Nvidia is going to get much, much bigger. And ultimately the real winners here, beyond the Nvidia shareholders and employees (congrats!), are the companies and consumers whose lives are going to get a lot better and longer thanks to the technology enabled by Nvidia.
(Not Financial Advice, of course. No one has ever made money investing in a $4 trillion company.)
(Bonus) The Wealth of Everyday
Clifford Sosin on X
Tomorrow, when I rise again on that utterly ordinary mattress, I’ll whisper a thank-you to the engineers, farmers, nurses, coders, and soldiers who turned luxury into baseline. God bless the United States of Standard-Issue Comfort—and the patriotic genius that made equality feel so wonderfully mundane.
Cliff Sosin, an investor recently notable for his appearance on Invest Like the Best, shared a lovely reflection on the everyday wealth that Americans enjoy today. Yes, tech has gotten bigger, and the rich have gotten richer, but during this same wave the quality of life for almost all Americans has also risen dramatically. And that quality of life is driven, in large part, by the everyday niceties that almost everybody has access to: comfortable mattresses, effective personal care items, affordable electronics, accessible utilities, free information, quick shipping, convenient food options, etc, etc.
This piece really resonated with me. I am a relatively simple man: I’d rather spend my money on things like Starbucks coffee, an apartment with a bath tub (yes, I take baths!), some quality athleisure clothing and high quality groceries than expensive watches, fancy trips, or exclusive memberships. Nice things are certainly nice, but 99% of my mood and general happiness is driven by day-to-day convenience and comfort. And I’d imagine, if you polled the richest people in the world, behind the yachts and private jets and members-only clubs, that they’d tend to agree.
The funny thing is that we, the 99.9% of people need those richest people, with their yachts and PJs and extraordinary bank accounts, in order for us to enjoy the everyday wealth that we’ve become accustomed to. If Jeff Bezos couldn’t easily afford a $50 million wedding, I wouldn’t have free, next day shipping. If Nivida shareholders didn’t enjoy 790x returns, I wouldn’t be able to one day receive a safe and affordable AI robotic surgery. If Sergei Brin didn’t have a mega yacht, I’d have way less access to free information and knowledge. Simply put, we need more billionaires if we all want to live lives that are, for the most part, indistinguishable from the lives of billionaires.
(Double Bonus) Varda Announces $187 million in Series C Funding to Make Medicines in Space
Varda Space Industries announced a Series C fundraising round today, bringing the total amount of capital raised by the microgravity-enabled life sciences company to $329 million. The $187 million fundraise was led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lux Capital, and Also Capital.
Congratulations to Not Boring Capital portfolio company Varda Space on their $187M Series C. Varda is one of the companies we’ve written about most at Not Boring, and for good reason: its mission is ambitious and hard, it’s vertically integrated, and its story is great. The company manufactures pharmaceuticals and advanced materials in microgravity using orbital labs, while also providing hypersonic reentry testing for government partners, all to build the foundation of a scalable economy beyond earth. Varda sounds like sci-fi, but it’s executing like sci-non-fi. And now it has some fresh Earth dollars to fuel its out-of-this-world ambitions.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to HoneyBook for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-07-09 20:55:56
My conversation with Mario Gabriele on his Founders Fund series is on pace to be our most popular Hyperlegible episode by far. If you watch it and enjoy it, I’d really appreciate if you’d click the like button and leave a comment with your thoughts so that we can bend the algorithm in our direction.
If there is one lesson in the Founders Fund story, it is to differentiate.
Differentiate on talent, on thesis, on product, on conviction. Differentiate on all of the things that differentiate you. But when it comes to things that everyone has to do, just work with the best. For compliance, there is no one better than Vanta.
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Hyperlegible 012: Mario Gabriele, No Rivals
The introduction to Mario Gabriele’s 35,000 word, four-part series on Founders Fund, No Rivals, was so good that all I could say was, “Jesus.”
The reaction was apt. Over the course of four weeks, Mario went on to write the best profile of a single venture capital firm I’ve ever read in four Christian-themed chapters:
I can’t recommend the series more highly. It is worth every subscription penny.
Because Peter Thiel is fascinating, and Founders Fund is dominant, and both its characters and investments are compelling. And Mario got more access than the firm has ever granted an outsider. And he got his hands on returns data that has never been shared.
But mostly because Mario can write. This story in any other hands wouldn’t be what it was in Mario’s. He has become something of a master at the art of venture capital firm storytelling with profiles on Union Square Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Hummingbird (where he is now a Venture Partner).
Founders Fund is his magnum opus, a piece he spent a year and a half toiling over. After reading it, it’s clear that there’s no one else who could have written it.
“The way to escape competition is through authenticity.”
In our conversation, Mario recalled Pirate Wires Editor-in-Chief and Founders Fund Chief Marketing Officer Mike Solana telling him this in an interview, and I think it perfectly captures what makes both Founders Fund and Mario so good at what they do.
We discuss both on this episode of Hyperlegible.
We start the conversation by talking about how this piece came about, and how Mario wrote it. Did he read first and then do interviews? Or do interviews and then read? Or start writing, and then read and do interviews to fill in his gaps in knowledge? How does he incorporate conversations versus audio versus text? How did he choose to place the paywall where he placed it? How did he choose, among all the vignettes at his disposal, that perfect opening scene under the Capital Dome, and once he chose it, how did he write it so well? How did he walk the line between access and honesty? While Founders Fund is clearly exceptional, no person or firm is without its blemishes; Mario told the story as it was.
Then we talked about what makes Founders Fund, and Peter Thiel, special. Some mixture of macro insights applied to an asset class without much macro thinking, 0.00001% talent-spotting capability, and raw horsepower pushed to its limits. We covered the firm’s most representative investment (Airbnb) and its most unknown partner (Napoleon Ta). I ask about what makes Thiel so especially good at talent spotting across such a wide range — from JD Vance to Demis Hassabis to Lauren Gross to Jesse Michels.
And we riffed on the questions with which Mario concluded the series:
What will it do now that others are mimicking its moves, invading its music with sounds of their own? How does a singular object avoid the suffocating, narrowing grip of being desired?
It is not easy to remain original and successful. The world moves on around you. It takes your best ideas and digests them: The future has stagnated; startups are monarchies; democracy is disappointing; we need to build in the world of atoms, not bits; we do this thing called “scapegoating”; all, truly all, is mimetic desire, and not one of us escapes from it.
And so?
The world eats all of this, swallows it whole, and asks: What now?
Founders Fund is such a curious case study because what lessons should you take from a firm that’s made its fortune by doing what no one else can, is willing, or would even think to do? How do you copy a firm that has been successful by diligently not copying?
You don’t. You let it season your own thinking, maybe sprinkle in some ingredients that would deepen your particular stew.
As a writer and investor, I picked up both specific ideas and the processes behind them from Mario’s series and my conversation with him, both on how he writes and how Founders Fund invests. I think you will, too.
The challenge now is to resist the mimetic urge and apply the larger lesson: escape competition through authenticity. Differentiate.
If you’re the reading type, I used Claude to turn the messy YouTube transcript into something well-formatted and clean:
Transcript: No Rivals with Mario Gabriele (Hyperlegible 012)
As always, you can find the full conversation wherever you like by subscribing to Not Boring Radio:
YouTube:
Spotify:
Apple Podcasts:
While you’re there, give us a like, comment, and subscribe so we can bring great essays to more people.
You can also find links to all of the essays and conversations at readwise.io/hyperlegible. Thanks to our friends and sponsors at Readwise, you can head there for a free trial and get all Hyperlegible articles automatically added to your account.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with a Weekly Dose.
Thanks for listening and watching,
Packy
2025-07-04 20:35:43
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 151st Weekly Dose of Optimism, which happens to land on America’s 249th birthday.
Every week, we find reasons to be optimistic. But zooming out, nothing fuels optimism quite like the American experiment itself. It hasn’t all been pretty, plenty of highs and some very real lows, but the long-term trend line is clear: up and to the right. Democracy works. Capitalism works. Freedom works. Let’s not mess it up. Let it cook for another 249 years (or more). I like our odds.
Sing it with me…
Let’s get to it.
Abundance Institute x Hermeus x Story Co
Any time we’ve seen an acceleration of a transportation network, it’s always been accompanied by pretty significant social and economic growth. And we haven’t seen one of those since the dawn of the Jet Age.
In May, Hermeus flew its Quarterhorse Mk 1 for the first time. It “took off from Edwards AFB, achieved stable flight, and landed smoothly.” Jason Carman and Abundance Institute captured it all.
Unlike future Hermeus aircraft, this flight wasn’t meant to prove in-air speed. It was meant to prove aircraft development speed. From 1945-1975, it took about five years to develop and field a new military airplane. Since then, that timeline has quadrupled. (see: wtf happened in 1971?). “The F-22 and F-35 took about 20 years to get to their initial operational capability,” Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica says in the video. Hermeus was founded 7 years ago, and “went from clean sheet to flight-ready in a little over a year.”
The next step will be to go supersonic, which Hermeus aims to do by the end of the year with the Mk 2, which is currently being manufactured at Hermeus HQ in Atlanta. This, too, bucks the trend. In the video, AJ says that the last time we broke a speed record was nearly a half-century ago, in 1977. Since then, new planes have gotten slower: the F-15 was Mach 2.5, the F-22 was Mach 2, and the F-35 is “like Mach 1.3ish.” Hermeus plans to fly Mk 2 at Mach 2.5, and get faster from there.
What Hermeus is doing is important for America, pragmatically and spiritually. Pragmatically, because it gives our military more speed and shrinks the globe. “Any time we’ve seen an acceleration of a transportation network,” AJ says in the video, “it’s always been accompanied by pretty significant social and economic growth.”
Spiritually, because we want to be a country where we can make faster and faster vehicles at a faster and faster clip again, where the trend lines start pointing back up after a half-century of pointing down.
Key to the American Dream is to live in an America that dreams.
Fuse Energy in Nature
FAETON-I is quadruple (4x) the neutron output efficiency than the next best pulsed fusion neutron source and >10x more than traditional z-pinch machines. FAETON-I also demonstrates the potential of a combined neutron/gamma radiation environment. This is a big step forward and paves the way for our next fusion machines. (
Speaking of the American Dream… the Fuse Energy team, which we dubbed the “American Dream Team” in our Deep Dive, published the experimental results of the world’s highest direct-charged dense plasma focus device in Nature, Scientific Reports.
As a refresher, Fuse’s founder, JC Btaiche, is a Lebanese-Canadian immigrant, and its Chief Engineer, Dr. Vahid Damideh, was previously the No. 2 nuclear fusion scientist in Iran’s nuclear fusion program. “Yes, you read that right,” Fuse wrote in a recruiting memo, “and no Dr. Damideh isn’t a spy; he’s a political asylee who also happens to be a world-renowned nuclear fusion physicist.”
JC, Dr. Damideh, and the Fuse team achieved something many thought impossible: excellent performance despite severe electrical "re-strikes" that typically cripple such devices.
As JC wrote, the paper shows that, “FAETON-I is quadruple (4x) the neutron output efficiency than the next best pulsed fusion neutron source and >10x more than traditional z-pinch machines.” Dr. Damideh explained, “We present—for the first time in Z-pinch history (over 70 years!)—a clear correlation between the dynamics-induced pinch voltage and the number of fusion neutrons produced.”
Fuse proved a few important things for fusion energy:
High-voltage, high-current plasma focus devices can work effectively
Deuterium-Tritium operation looks even more promising - the optimal energy range (80-200 keV) aligns perfectly with what these devices naturally produce
Re-strikes may become irrelevant for D-T fusion, eliminating a major engineering challenge
Peak yield reached 8 × 10¹⁰ neutrons - outperforming the universal scaling law for plasma focus devices
Beyond energy, they proved:
Exceptional radiation testing capabilities for electronics, aerospace, and medical applications
A unique combined neutron-gamma environment for materials testing
The Fuse plan is to sell radiation to build a real business on the way to fusion energy. This is a big step in that plan, and therefore, a big step closer to both a safer world and a more abundant energy future.
(3) Introducing Chai-2: Zero-shot antibody design in a 24-well plate
From Chai Discovery
When we set out on this project, we were aiming for a 1% hit rate , and we thought that if we could do this, it would be transformative for the field.
But when the data came back, we couldn’t believe it. We were way past 1%.
Rather than the 1% we were hoping for, it was closer to 20%.
Chai Discovery launched Chai-2, an AI model that designs brand-new antibodies, molecules that bind to specific parts of proteins, without needing any prior data. It finds successful binders 16% of the time, which is 100x better than older computational methods.
Instead of spending 6–18 months testing millions of guesses in the lab, scientists can now get working antibody candidates in just two weeks. Chai-2 does this by combining atomic-level protein modeling with generative AI to design stable, precise, and diverse binders right from the start. They liken it to Photoshop for Molecules.
Antibodies are the backbone of many modern medicines, from cancer treatments to vaccines, but they’re still slow and expensive to discover. Chai-2 flips the process from trial-and-error to something more like programming biology. It could mean faster, more targeted treatments, especially for diseases that were too complex or too costly to go after before.
Our house view is that LLMs aren’t going to turn into gods that take all of our jobs and render us meaningless meatsacks, no matter how much Zuck spends on researchers. But AI excels at navigating vast search spaces where traditional trial-and-error approaches are prohibitively slow, like in biology.
As they say in the video, “There are more possible protein sequences than there are atoms in the known universe. Previous methods have had to screen millions or sometimes billions of protein sequences to find a solution. But with our latest breakthrough, we’re often successful on the first try.”
The company believes that in the next few years, they should be able to design drug candidates in a single shot, straight out of the model. If that’s true, Chai-2 (or future iterations of Chai) will save a lot of human lives. Which is good, because we’ll need a lot of humans to keep coming up with new Chais.
(4) Figma Files Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering
From Figma
Figma, Inc. (“Figma”) today announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) relating to a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. Figma has applied to list its Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FIG.”
What’s that breeze I feel? Did Figma just open up the IPO window?
Early this week, Figma filed its S-1. You can find some great breakdowns of the business (TL;DR: strong business, beautiful business). For the purposes of this newsletter, we’re just happy to see strong companies that we love and use every day going public, and cracking open the window for others.
We make all of our beautiful images for Not Boring in Figma. We are very happy users and, via a portfolio company acquisition, small shareholders. In September 2022, Packy used Figma as one of the examples of magical software in Indistinguishable from Magic. It’s good to see magic rewarded.
Strong capital markets are essential to the companies that we write about in Not Boring every week. For investors to invest, they need to believe that they will be able to get their money back, and then some, through an acquisition or IPO. The IPO window has been pretty tightly closed (at least at the prices companies would want), and acquisitions have been hard to get past regulators.
Three years ago, Adobe actually announced it was acquiring Figma for $20 billion nearly three years ago, before European and UK regulators caused them to terminate the deal (which triggered a $1 billion reverse termination fee from Adobe to Figma).
And now, on America’s birthday week, Figma is dumping tea in the Boston Harbor, metaphorically speaking, and going public in American markets under American regulators and returning billions of American Dollars to employees, investors, and LPs, greasing the wheels of capitalism and setting the stage for the next wave of American companies to find their way into the accounts of American retail investors.
We’re looking at you, Stripe, SpaceX, and OpenAI. If not, we’ll see you on Robinhood Europe.
(5) It Came From Outside Our Solar System, and It Looks Like a Comet
Kenneth Chang for The New York Times
For only the third time, astronomers have found something passing through our solar system that came from outside the solar system.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…3I/ATLAS?!
Astronomers have identified a rare interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, entering our solar system, only the third such object ever spotted, after ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. It’s currently speeding toward the inner solar system at 130,000 mph and is believed to be a comet likely ejected from another star system. Its detection was first made by the ATLAS telescope system. Its brightness levels suggest a comet-like structure with a visible gas-and-dust coma, but its true size is still unknown.
Thankfully, it comes in peace: 3I/ATLAS poses no threat to Earth and is passing no closer than 160 million miles to us. But its extended visibility gives scientists a relatively rare view to study such an object in such depth. And while 3I/ATLAS is merely just a glowing rock racing space, it does always make you tingle when we’re unexpectedly visited by objects from outside our solar system.
bonUS: America, the Beautiful
Packy here. Sending you into your 4th of July weekend with a conversation with an entrepreneur helping Americans build their American Dream from the ground up. It’s hard to not be optimistic with people like Mackenzie on the case.
bonUS: Unlocked: New Test Footage.
Ok, last one. Please enjoy this recently released test footage of an Anduril Anvil-M taking down a Group 3 UAS (drone).
USA! USA! USA!
Have a great weekend y’all.
We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
2025-07-03 20:54:32
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Thursday!
Three years ago, Mackenzie Burnett, the founder and CEO of Not Boring Capital portfolio company, Ambrook, wrote the first in a short-lived series we called The Founder’s Letter. At the time, it was basically a dream.
Today, Ambrook is a real business with more than 2,500 customers across the country, helping them realize their American Dream.
And on Tuesday, Ambrook announced that it’s raised $29 million, including a $26.1 million Series A co-led by Thrive Capital and Dylan Field at Field Ventures.
When Mackenzie reached out to talk about how she should start to tell her story more publicly, we decided to have a conversation about what Ambrook is doing, how, and why, and to publish a follow-up to the Founder’s Letter, which we’re re-posting from Ambrook.
She called it, “America, the Beautiful.” There’s no better story to publish heading into Fourth of July weekend. As Mackenzie said in our conversation, “The American experiment is many different experiments actually.” We talk about many of the companies building Vertically Integrated companies to make America stronger; Ambrook is an example of grassroots American Dynamism, making the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who make America strong and resilient stronger.
You can find our full conversation on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
God Bless America.
On Tuesday, Ambrook announced $29M in funding raised, including a $26.1M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Dylan Field at Field Ventures, with continued support from Homebrew Capital and participation from Designer Fund, BoxGroup, Mischief, Not Boring, and others.
When I wrote our first Founder’s Letter, it was mostly about what we hoped to do. Three years later, this one’s about what we’ve actually done. Thousands of producers are using Ambrook to make better financial decisions, grow their operations, and invest more confidently in their land. And I feel more sure than ever that we’re on the right path.
Ambrook is building the financial infrastructure for American industry – starting with agriculture – and the opportunity in front of us is massive. We’re still early, but the impact is already visible. Now it’s time to grow.
Let me tell you a story.
Imagine you grew up on a ranch in the Mountain West. Went to school, hoping maybe you can come back one day. To help out, and eventually continue the family legacy.
But then, a family emergency. You have to take over the books from your dad all of a sudden, to keep the operation running. Not to mention run the operation itself.
This is the real story of our customer, Chase. His family runs cattle across 30,000 acres in Utah and Wyoming.
His first year, he had to wrangle the operation’s legacy accounting software. It had worked for the family business up to this point, but it still took up too much time and left him without a clear view of his numbers day to day.
Until he found Ambrook.
Chase’s dad is recovered now. And has come back to a family operation more resilient, not just financially, but intergenerationally too.
Since I wrote my last letter, over 2,500 operations in all 50 states have now used Ambrook to double their business, cut bookkeeping time in half, get better loan terms, and make land management decisions with confidence. Those customers have spent and managed $1.6B with Ambrook and saved an estimated 75,000 hours in the process.
Our customers have told us they feel less anxious and more optimistic about their future. That they feel empowered in ways they hadn’t before. (We had one couple who even told us they decided to get married because of a conversation with the Ambrook team about their finances.)
Because instead of feeling behind on their books, many of our customers can now focus on answering the questions that matter: How much have I spent so far on this herd? What will it cost to finish? Will this actually pencil out? And can my operation and my family thrive?
There are so many stories I want to tell. Stories of our customers, of our team. What we build and how we build it.
But first, let me zoom out.
For the first time in generations, most Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. That type of pessimism is corrosive.
Starting a small business used to be the way to build a better future for your family. Owning your time, owning your labor, owning that identity and tradition over generations. Staying independent.
It was never easy, but it was straightforward enough.
Small businesses are not simple anymore. Especially in agriculture – the first industry we’re building for – survival has meant diversification. A cattle ranch that traditionally sold its commercial herd at the stockyard, might now also run a direct-to-consumer meat program, a seasonal event business, and a trucking arm. These operations are balance sheet-heavy, multi-P&L, and deeply local.
Most financial software was built for simpler business models than that: a single enterprise, clean books. But that’s not the world we operate in. Today’s producers are managing herds, equipment, inventory, and land across long and volatile cycles, both remotely and in person. They’ve taken on more risk, added multiple revenue streams with countless payment methods, and adapted their operations to survive.
In doing so, they’ve outgrown the old tools, but many can’t afford to manage the enterprise resource planning systems built for their newfound level of complexity.
Some are just trying to get organized for tax time. Others want real-time, enterprise-level insights. Both deserve better tools.
Ambrook fills that gap with modern, collaborative financial software that meets producers and their families where they are. Accounting, payments, and cash management built for operators who spend more time in the field than the office.
Operators like Pittman and JoEllen, a married couple who run a grain farming and beef cattle operation in my home state of Maryland.
“The path we were on before, we were like a ship in the ocean with a small hole in it – just getting lower and lower and lower. With Ambrook, that’s been patched and there’s now a pump pumping the water out, and it’s starting to come back up again. It’s been a turn in the right direction for all of my operations.”
Clarity in the now drives confidence in the future. Confidence builds optimism. And that optimism is contagious.
I think of our work at Ambrook as American dynamism meets the American Dream.
Instead of top-down technological advancement, we’re working from the ground up to enable family-run businesses to become more profitable and resilient.
When one operation succeeds, it lifts up suppliers, neighbors, the whole community. Better land and resources, supply chain and food supply. That’s the America I want to help build.
True optimism comes from seeing real results. Effective land and resource management can strengthen the bottom line and build long-term resilience against shifts in the environment and the economy. We’ve seen that when producers have clarity, stewardship and profitability go hand in hand.
To us, that’s grassroots American dynamism.
I think how we build is just as important as what we build. The world is changing. How we build technology is becoming increasingly disrupted by AI. Its own adventure.
But when I was thinking about writing about our fundraise, I kept on being drawn back to the quiet moments with the team. The more human moments that make the hard things about building a company worth it. How we work, and how we spend the time in between.
I wanted to share some of those memories with you.
It was Eric’s second week. Do you want to come to a traditional pig harvest? I Slacked him. Sure, he said. What is it?
A few weeks later, we were elbow deep in pig’s blood, helping Howard make blood sausage. Howard’s a customer now.
You can see where I did the controlled burn. Katie’s dad gestured at the grass interspersed with clumps of small yellow wildflowers in front of us. Before, this was all just grass. Now it’s a mosaic. How it should be.
We piled back onto the ATVs. On the way back from the river, we stopped and he pointed to the ground. This is where we put the biochar. To improve the soil in this part. We’ll probably find out if it works in a year. He shifted his attention to a tall purple wildflower. We’re testing what seed mix grows best across the ranch.
I sent a photo of the flower to my dad. Montana, I said.
Penstemon grandiflorus, he wrote back. Identifying the plants I send him from my travels is his love language. Large Beardtongue.
No one spoke. Tired but happy. It was the three of us, me and Maika and Atticus. We had just signed our second customer, now driving the two hours back to the airport motel.
The thunderstorm boomed in silence across the Arizona plains, lighting up the dusk-dark. The Strokes played on the radio.
The long car rides, driving past amber waves of grain, that have emotionally contextualized my work in unexpected ways. America, the beautiful.
Haley, a mother of two from a Montana ranching family, on why she joined our operations team at Ambrook: I watched your Stripe video, she said. I felt as though we both wanted the same thing for different reasons.
She spoke to stewarding the land as a legacy for her children. I want to feel proud about what I pass on to the next generation.
We climbed up to the shed’s attic. Katie’s dad pointed to a line of 10 baskets, ordered by year. Each basket was filled with more antlers than the last. The regenerative practices on the ranch had rebounded its wildlife population over the decade.
The antlers Katie wrote about, he said. A father’s quiet pride. I finally got to see the antlers that tell the story.
The world is changing, and yet so much stays the same.
We still believe in the American Dream. And we’re here to build for the people living it.
This latest fundraising round will help us grow to support tens of thousands of businesses, not just within agriculture, but also to the communities that serve ag, all while deepening our workflows and partnerships, expanding our AI-native architecture, and building a payments network that keeps capital within local communities.
With this funding, we’ll accelerate the rollout of advanced financial workflows. Think multi-entity reporting, inventory management, and integrated payroll. These enhancements will help producers spend less time wrestling with spreadsheets and more time making strategic decisions.
We’ll also deepen our partnerships across the financial and agricultural ecosystem, connecting Ambrook to more of the tools and services producers already use, from POS systems to livestock management tools, so that data flows seamlessly and everyone wins.
We believe the best use of AI for our customers is to do the quiet things right, from receipt management to automated categorization to anomaly detection.
MIT economist David Autor calls AI an “inversion technology,” one that can democratize knowledge and bring decision-making power back to the middle class. That’s exactly how we think about it, too.
We started Ambrook by helping producers find and apply for working capital to provide disaster relief, do conservation work, and further invest in their businesses. Earlier this year, we rolled out 1% APY on all Ambrook Wallets, making sure customer capital was working as hard as they do.
Next, we’re expanding Ambrook Pay to farms, ranches, and other businesses nationwide. Because fintech was integrated from the beginning into Ambrook’s accounting platform, we can now offer free, instant B2B payments with minimal paperwork and automatic reconciliation.
We’re laying the groundwork for high-context, instant money movement. In the meantime, Ambrook Pay has already significantly improved cashflow and transaction margins.
We want to help our customers become more profitable and resilient. Keeping more capital in local communities is a big part of that.
Most of all, this investment helps us stay focused on our mission: to give independent businesses the tools they need to stay independent.
Together, we can build an America that’s prosperous and resilient and beautiful.
An America where Chase’s family can feel confident in decisions they make. Where Pittman and JoEllen feel like they’re doing more than just staying afloat.
Thank you to our team, our investors, and the operators who trust us with their numbers and their future. We are honored to be part of your story.
All my best,
Mackenzie
Thanks to Jim Portela for editing the conversation and to Matt Marlinski for letting us record at his studio, The Manhattan Lab.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow, with a 4th of July edition of the Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Thanks for Reading,
Packy
2025-07-01 22:55:16
Welcome to the 550 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 246,098 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
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A driving-gloved Vlad Tenev pilots a 1961 Jaguar E-Type through the curves and streets of Cannes, France to the gravel allée of Château de la Croix des Gardes. The Robinhood co-founder and CEO steps out of the Jag, resplendent in “playboy-in-Portofino” chic: crisp ivory blazer cut from lightweight suiting cloth, striped with thin navy pinstripes. Lapels: peaked. Shoulders: roped. Neck: ascotted. On his left wrist, Tenev sports a gold watch. In his right hand, a structured, hard-shell attaché case in British racing green.
The resurrected founder bounds through the Château and into its Italianate parterre, where he is to present the future of finance.
Flanked by colleagues and underscored by James Bond instrumentals, Tenev announces Robinhood’s newest product: Stock Tokens. On Robinhood, in Europe, investors can purchase tokens in public American companies like Apple.
How? Tenev, now bespectacled in golden aviators, will explain, on the very same chalkboard on which Cary Grant purportedly scribbled in To Catch a Thief, when he filmed the movie at the Château in 1955. He slips a stick of chalk from his jacket’s besom pocket, doodles a stick figure French investor wearing a beret, and proceeds to chalk it out.
But wait… there’s more. Tenev pops open the attaché, whips out a small metallic cylinder whose cold-storage thumb-drive, he tells us, contains “the keys to the first ever Stock Tokens for OpenAI,” and SpaceX.
Two of the most desirable, hardest-to-access, private company shares in the world, available on Robinhood. Better: on The Robinhood Chain.
Much has been and will be breathlessly written about Robinhood’s tokenization of stocks, and about its tokenization of private shares. “Did Robinhood Just Solve the Liquidity Crunch?” You should read those analyses. This is an important story.
But that’s not today’s story.
Today’s story is about the presentation. How fresh it felt. How different.
Robinhood’s is the latest salvo in The Great Differentiation.
The Great Differentiation is the race to be different. It is the salvation from slop.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also an emergent Law of the Market.
Sameness has never been cheaper.
Websites look the same. Writing reads the same. Hype videos hype the same.
Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status. What might have been 2019’s most beautiful landing page is 2025’s slop.
When sameness is cheap, differentiation is valuable. But how do you remain differentiated when copying is free and frictionless? Make copying expensive.
Neil Strauss wrote about the world’s greatest pickup artist, Mystery, in his 2005 best-seller, The Game. Mystery recommended to his undersexed mentees a technique called “peacocking”: wear a feather boa, a bright shiny shirt, a top hat, light-up jewelry; wear whatever it takes to be different from every other guy at the bar. It is socially expensive to wear silly outfits; other men will make fun of you. But Mystery and his acolytes weren’t signaling to men.
Male peacocks are famous for their feathers. “If a male peacock has a giant array of feathers and still manages to drag it around everywhere and survive,” Nathan Baschez wrote in his April 2022 essay, DALL•E 2 and The Origin of Vibe Shifts, “it’s a pretty good bet that they are physically fit and have good genes.”
This, Baschez says, borrowing from evolutionary psychology, is a costly signal, costly “because it costs something tangible to send them, which is proof of fitness (in the broadest sense of the word “fit”: well adapted to survive in the environment).”
Beautiful images on websites used to be costly, so all of the cool websites looked like this:
Then Unsplash came out, making beautiful images free, and all the websites started looking like this:
“What will happen when DALL·E 2, or something like it, gets released to the public,” Baschez asked. “The first order consequence is there will be a lot of websites and blog posts that now come with illustrations, or other cool visuals these algorithms are capable of generating, like 3D models, faux photos, clay models, etc.,” he rightly predicted.
Where would companies turn to stand out? Nathan thought “At the high end, in the short run I think the most likely path is to run towards interactivity. There are currently no AIs that can make interactive visualizations.” Even then, though, when DALL·E 2 was a private beta toy, he knew that the models would get good enough to do that, too?
“So what is the end game? What happens if we reach a ‘vibe singularity’ in all forms of art, where anyone can create anything by typing a few phrases? How does status get signaled through aesthetic vibes when all the vibes are free?”
Presciently, drawing on history, he observed that, “If all that mattered was absolute performance, then sure, the AI would be able to perform well enough to get the job done without human intervention. But when it comes to status games, relative performance is what matters.”
Because he was writing about websites, Baschez concluded that humans + AI would beat AI alone for the foreseeable future, and for websites, he was right.
But what Robinhood and the other examples we’ll look at show is that with the cost of almost any digital signaling plummeting to zero, those companies who wish to send costly signals have moved offline.
If anyone knows what it’s like to get their website design copied, it’s Stripe.
So when its co-founder, John Collison, announced his new podcast, Cheeky Pint, in June, the studio he filmed it in looked nothing like the bright, flowy gradients on the payment company’s homepage.
It looked like a pub.
That’s because it is a pub: to film the podcast, on which John interviews Stripe’s customers, from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and Meta CFO Susan Li, Stripe built a pub in its South San Francisco headquarters, complete with working Guinness taps, dartboard, booths, and lots of (mismatched) framed pictures.
The pub studio is a nod to the Collison brothers’ Irishness, a genealogical moat; it would be odd for a non-Irish podcast host to steal the setting, and even those who tried wouldn’t build with the same budget or skill that Stripe has. Within the pub, the format of the podcast itself is differentiated and protected: there are very few hosts with the depth of knowledge or gift of gab required to hold a conversation with Meta’s CFO on capital allocation while playing Ring-the-Bull.
Cheeky Pint’s Irish pub backdrop is entirely different from Robinhood’s polished French Riviera setting, but they’re both examples of the same thing: companies with the resources to differentiate differentiating.
I was so happy when I saw the Cheeky Pint trailer and even happier when I realized that it’s part of a pattern. I don’t want the world to gradient descend into bland uniformity, and it was starting to feel like it might. For most people and companies, it’s just easier to copy what seems to be working with as little effort as possible.
That disease, however, contains the instructions for its cure.
When they go cheap, go costly. When they go same, go different.
This reaction to ease is one of the things that attracted me to hard tech. In my July 2022 essay, The Good Thing About Hard Things, I wrote:
The main reason hard startups can be great businesses is that, because they are hard, they’ll face less competition if they succeed. All of the things that make it hard for them to succeed in the first place makes it hard for others to copy them. That’s doubly true because, by being first, they’ll often attract the best talent, lock down the most willing buyers, build a strong brand, and achieve economies of scale.
This is playing out. In the context of The Great Differentiation, what is notable is that by building things that no one else can build, they also create content that no one else can copy.
Rainmaker, a startup that makes it rain by flying drones into clouds and spraying microscopic nucleating agents onto which water vapor freezes or condenses until droplets are heavy enough for gravity to pull them down to earth, has a distinctive website.
A human with an AI could copy its 19th-century Romantic cloud oil painting and oversized Didone font in seven minutes to a close enough approximation.
A human with an AI cannot copy its precise precipitation over Texas or its team’s flights through the clouds.
Those are incredibly costly signals, and they do their job: attracting employees, customers, and investors. Rainmaker recently raised $25 million from Lowercarbon Capital.
The point is aqueous abundance; the side benefit is differentiation.
Hard tech is full of similar examples.
Monumental Labs carves beautiful statues from stone, so it earns beautiful content. In 2024, it carved a statue for … Stripe, in a Great Differentiation ouroboros.
In a similar (but, of course, different) vein, Paris’ Atelier Missor plans to “cover the west in giant titanium statues.” Its tweet announcing an upcoming fundraise earned 5.5k likes and 470k views and I am certain a check is soon to follow.
Look at that image. The team dressed and groomed as if from an entirely different era. The French flags drooping against a distinctly French building, a Third-Republic 19th-century French civic building qu’on appelle une mairie. The light bouncing off the window to suggest the end of a long day. The bronze of Hercules that Atelier Missor conceived, casted, and finished, and then donated to the French city of Rueil-Malmaison ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Torch Relay.
Maybe another team could copy the beards and the outfits and even the setting, for one picture, but they couldn’t make the statue, they couldn’t do any of it authentically, and they couldn’t be as convinceably… French. This is who Atelier Missor is. Good luck faking Atelier Missor: The Story of a Bankruptcy.
Earth AI films on-site from the remote interiors of Australia (this one has 509k views).
Astro Mechanica test fires turboelectric adaptive jet engines from its facility in San Francisco.
All of this is differentiated. All of it is just so cool.
Perhaps because hard tech offers so many opportunities for hard-earned, real-world footage, one of its biggest success stories has zigged. Anduril unveils its arsenal with anime.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
It’s certainly possible to ape the anime, but if a competitor attempted to appropriate the animations, the body would reject it. That is Anduril’s style now. Imitation would be cheap, not just not costly but negative signal.
Because it’s not just the physicalness or digitalness of something that determines whether it can be effectively copied. Many, many companies have produced Steve Jobs-esque product reveals. Without Jobs himself, they fall laughably flat.
Look at Rabbit.
Look at Humane.
Look at them now.
The funny part is that, were he alive today, Steve Jobs would not be presenting like Steve Jobs presented in 2007. Copycats killed the style; move on.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
Everything novel and valuable gets copied, at higher or lower fidelity. This is what René Girard warned about. Mimesis.
Look at me, after all this, copying Peter Thiel’s interpretation of Girard’s insights. Mimesis comes for us all.
Copying is inevitable, and I feared that our new infinite copy machines would drag us into a pit of paltry plagiarism.
What is wonderful about The Great Differentiation, though, what gives me hope, is that people seem to be copying the desire to differentiate.
Instead of faking the form, they are emulating the essence: create something unique and true to you, something that only you have earned. Something different.
This is good advice for all of us.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
Thanks to Ben Rollert and Dror Poleg for giving me feedback on the essay I threw out to write this one.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox this week with a Deeper Dive and a Weekly Dose. In the meantime, get your company compliant with Vanta, pick out your finest Red, White, and Blue, and get ready to celebrate America’s birthday.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2025-06-27 20:51:37
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday, welcome back to our 150th Weekly Dose of Optimism. Woah the big one-five-zero! That’s a lot of optimism. You may be asking yourself, “If these guys love optimism so much, why don’t they marry it?” Well, optimism is a mindset and you can’t marry a mindset, silly.
Speaking of marriage, many thanks for the well wishes on my marriage in Italy last week. Packy also appreciated the well wishes, but he has been happily married for 8 years :) A quick editorial note: assume I (Dan) am writing this entire Weekly Dose and Packy is editing, unless it is otherwise noted that Packy is writing.
Let’s get to it.
Money is more than math. It’s emotion, identity, control, and, increasingly, technology. And if you want to build the future of finance, you need to understand how people feel about their money just as much as how they spend it.
That’s exactly what Plaid’s new 2025 Consumer Survey Report digs into. They surveyed 2,000 consumers for unbiased insights on how they engage with financial services.
This quick, free guide peels back the curtain on the biggest trends on how consumers view banking, payments, credit, fraud, and investing in 2025, and walks you through some actionable insights like…
56% of crypto investors hold 25–75% of assets in digital currencies
30% of consumers trust neobanks, but only 13% use them
60% of consumers said they would share their financial data for enhanced security measures
If you’re a founder, investor, or operator building anything in or around financial services, this report is a fast, free way to get inside the mind of the modern money user (all of us).
(1) AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
From Google DeepMind
Today, we introduce AlphaGenome, a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that more comprehensively and accurately predicts how single variants or mutations in human DNA sequences impact a wide range of biological processes regulating genes.
DeepMind released AlphaGenome, a powerful new model that makes gene regulation computable. It takes in up to 1 million DNA letters at a time and predicts how those sequences control gene activity: where genes start and stop, how they’re spliced, how much RNA gets made, and how mutations might disrupt those processes. It’s the first model to combine long-range genomic context with single-base precision at scale, allowing it to capture the complex regulatory choreography that drives cellular behavior.
Until now, the non-coding genome, 98% of our DNA, has mostly been a black box. We knew it mattered, especially in complex traits and diseases, but lacked tools to decode its function. Most genetic studies focused on the 2% that codes for proteins because it was easier to interpret. AlphaGenome changes that by modeling the full regulatory landscape, letting researchers probe how small mutations in “junk” DNA might trigger large biological effects. It can even identify regulatory fingerprints of diseases and test hypotheses about rare variants in seconds.
This is the AlphaFold (protein structure) moment for gene regulation, a leap from static snapshots to dynamic, testable predictions. Biology moves from observation to computation, and eventually, to control. The implications span from precision medicine to synthetic biology to rewriting our understanding of what DNA actually does.
Google DeepMind continues to impress on the important stuff!
(2) New York to Build One of First U.S. Nuclear-Power Plants in Generation
Ryan Dezember and Jennifer Hiller for The Wall Street Journal
New York intends to build a large nuclear-power facility, the first major new U.S. plant undertaken in more than 15 years and a big test of President Trump’s promise to expedite permitting for such projects.
Volatile week for our beloved New York. The same week that the City nominated a Democratic Socialist with little-to-no track record as the Democratic candidate for mayor, the Governor unveiled plans to make New York a leader in the nuclear energy movement. You win some, you lose some I guess.
Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans to build a new nuclear power plant, the first major one in the U.S. in over 15 years, as part of her plan to push secure, clean, reliable energy and avoid past mistakes like closing Indian Point (thanks RFK Jr.!) without a backup. The plant will add at least 1 gigawatt of capacity and is being spearheaded by the state’s Power Authority, which may partner with private firms.
New York currently has three active plants — Nine Mile Point, FitzPatrick, and Ginna — located along Lake Ontario and operated by Constellation Energy. Collectively, they provide approximately 3.4 gigawatts of capacity, supplying about 20% of the state's electricity and 42% of its carbon-free power. This planned 1 additional gigawatt won’t fully replace Indian Point’s contribution, but will increase the state’s nuclear generation by about 30%.
The new plant, which will likely be located in Upstate New York, will take 7-10 years to build and anywhere from $6-$30B to complete depending on factors like reactor design, permitting, and financing. If it’s $30B - 2x the $/GW of the already over budget Vogtle - we’re in trouble!
But we’re… optimistic. As we’ve discussed at length, building nuclear plants in the U.S. has not historically been a streamlined or predictable process. New regulations from the Trump Administration are designed to help this, with more efficient regulatory processes, expedited permits, and directives to make the NRC move a bit quicker. Maybe more importantly, the lessons learned at Vogtle (and the people who learned them) can be deployed to make New York’s build faster and cheaper. You gotta build things over and over to bring them down the learning curve.
Let’s hope we can get this plant live soon. The State is going to need a lot more clean energy to power its government grocery stores and free bus rides :)
(3) 1 psychedelic psilocybin dose eases depression for years, study reveals
Jane Palmer for LiveScience
Psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, can alleviate depression for at least five years after a single dose, a new study finds.
I’m not really even surprised when new research like this comes out. It’s obviously great to see and helps to build psilocybin’s scientific foundation, but we’ve kind of known this for years. The research on psilocybin’s potential as an antidepressant is overwhelmingly positive. This new study found that a single dose of psilocybin combined with therapy led to full remission in 58% of patients with major depression within a month, 67% of whom remained in remission five years later.
Shrooms blow traditional depression treatments out of the water on both speed and durability. Good for people, bad for recurring pharma revenue!
Yet psilocybin is still not approved by the FDA. It’s received “breakthrough therapy” designation, and several companies are navigating the long regulatory slog to make it more widely available. One of those, Compass Pathways, just hit a milestone: its Phase 3 COMP005 trial met its primary endpoint, showing that a single 25 mg dose of its synthetic psilocybin (COMP360) significantly reduced depression symptoms in treatment-resistant patients versus placebo. This is the first-ever Phase 3 efficacy data for a classic psychedelic, and it’s a major leap toward approval, but also a reminder of how slowly this process moves, even when the data is this compelling.
The science is there. Now the question is whether the FDA is ready to catch up. Let’s get this in the hands of the people that desperately need it as soon as possible.
On a related note, our friend and recent Hyperlegible guest, Sari Azout, had this to say about her first mushroom journey:
From Jacob Kimmel on X
NewLimit, the longevity biotech startup founded by Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, VC Blake Byers, and scientist Jacob Kimmel, released promising updates on its push to reverse aging. The company’s goal is to reprogram old cells, restoring their youthful function, rather than treating individual age-related diseases. Their first prototype drug, M0004, showed early signs of success in liver cells, helping them better withstand alcohol damage and regenerate after surgery.
To accelerate progress, NewLimit uses AI to design combinations of transcription factors, which are molecular switches that control which genes a cell turns on or off. These “TF sets” can effectively reboot old cells, nudging them back toward a younger state. So far, they've tested over 4,000 combinations in liver and immune cells, identifying several that restore key functions. A recent algorithmic breakthrough made this process 100x faster and 60% more productive, with AI now driving the majority of hypotheses tested.
Rather than treating aging’s downstream effects, NewLimit approaches aging as the root cause. It's still early, but the results suggest a future where aging itself becomes a targetable, and treatable, biological process.
Rooting for the lads! And hoping to root for them for hundreds of years.
From Telsa
Tonight, the Powerwall fleet in California dispatched 345MW to the grid during a Virtual Power Plant event, reducing the need for fossil-fueled peaking plants.
What is Tesla? An EV company? A Robotaxi company? A Robot company? A power company?
Yes.
Tesla is potentially one of the most important energy companies of the future due to its mass distribution of Powerwalls. And earlier this week, it displayed that network’s power and potential.
On Wednesday, Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP) in California dispatched 345 megawatts of stored energy from thousands of Powerwall home batteries to the grid. This was triggered during a period of high electricity demand to help stabilize the grid and avoid the use of fossil-fuel peaker plants. The coordinated discharge had a measurable effect: there was a visible drop in load, and electricity prices fell by 30–40%. Meaning it worked, big time.
Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant is one of those brilliant ideas that would likely stay a brilliant idea if not for the extraordinary execution skills of Elon. The VPP links distributed home batteries into a single energy resource that utilities can call on like any power plant, and homeowners are compensated for contributing the energy from their Powerwalls. Powerwall owners win, utility companies win, consumers of energy win, and because it’s all powered by solar, the environment wins. Win. Win. Win. Win. Oh yeah, and Tesla wins too. WIN.
Over here at Not Boring, we think that Base Power Company will win even bigger for reasons we discuss here, but we need all the battery winners we can get.
Let’s all be winners this weekend. Go gettem.
BONUS: Inside the Secret Factory Building Homes to End the Housing Crisis
Bricks & Bytes
Packy here. Earlier this morning, the team over at Bricks & Bytes published an awesome video on Not Boring Capital portfolio company, Cuby. They interviewed co-founder Aleks Gampel in New York City and then flew to Minsk to tour the factory and the houses the company is building with co-founder Aleh Kandrashou.
The only way to make housing cheaper is to build more of it.
This is a great inside look at how we’re going to do it.
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
