2026-02-06 21:57:45
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to the 179th Weekly Dose of Optimism!
We started writing the Weekly Dose during the 2022 bear market because there was a disconnect between the incredible things we saw being built and the (largely market-driven) pessimism. So this week is great. We were born in the darkness.
Even as the markets have vomited, the innovation has continued apace. Zoom out.
We have another jam-packed week of optimism, including four Extra Doses below the fold for not boring world members.
Let’s get to it.
Your team is probably already using AI for everything: research, customer support, product decisions. Just one problem… AI is confidently wrong about your company knowledge 40% of the time.
While everyone races to deploy more AI tools, they’re building on a foundation of outdated wikis, scattered documents, and tribal knowledge that was never meant to power automated decisions.
Guru solved this for companies like Spotify and Brex. They built the only AI verification system that automatically validates company knowledge before your AI agents use it. Think of it as quality control for your AI’s brain.
The companies that figure this out first will have AI that actually works. The ones that don’t waste valuable human time cleaning up expensive mistakes.
(1) Introducing Claude Opus 4.6 and Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex
Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively
The race between Anthropic and OpenAI to build the smartest, most useful thinking machines is heating up, and it’s riveting. The day after Anthropic released its Super Bowl commercials, which make fun of OpenAI for planning to introduce ads into its product (which many people, including Jordi Hays, think are a bit deceptive, but which are super entertaining)…
… both companies dropped their newest, smartest models. Anthropic released Opus 4.6 and OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex (Codex is its coding model/app).
Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is for everyone: better at coding, plans longer, runs financial analyses, does research, etc… I’ve been playing with it and it’s definitely smarter (although thankfully it’s still a shitty writer).
OpenAI’s very-OpenAI-named GPT-5.3-Codex is for coding. It slots right into the Codex app they released this week. I had 5.2 build a website for not boring, and it was very cool that it could build it, but no matter how hard I prompted, the design was trash. I told 5.3 to throw out that trash and make me something that looked better, and it actually did a decent job in one shot. It can also do things like make models and presentations and docs, although it’s not available in Chat yet.
In both cases, researchers at the labs used their own agents to help research and build the new models. “Taken together,” OpenAI writes, “we found that these new capabilities resulted in powerful acceleration of our research, engineering, and product teams.” This is the mechanism that fast takeoff believers believe in: models so smart that they make the next models smarter, and so on.
I don’t know what to say other than have fun playing with your new geniuses this weekend.
Eric Jang
Whenever logical processes of thought are employed — that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an acceptive groove — there is an opportunity for the machine.
— Dr. Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945
How’d we get here?
Eric Jang is VP of AI at 1X Technologies, the humanoid robotics company, and before that spent six years at Google Brain robotics where he co-led the team behind SayCan. He’s one of the people building the robots we covered in my robotics cossay with Evan Beard a few weeks ago.
His new essay, As Rocks May Think, is a riff on Vannevar Bush’s 1945 classic, As We May Think, and the title is the thesis: we taught rocks to think, and they’re getting really smart.
The piece is part technical history, part practical manual, and it is pretty technical, but it’s the most concise overview of how we got to where we are today and where we might be going from here that I’ve come across. Jang walks through the intellectual lineage of machine reasoning, from symbolic logic systems that collapsed when a single premise was wrong, through Bayesian belief nets that got tripped up in compounding uncertainty, to AlphaGo’s breakthrough combination of deductive search and learned intuition, and finally to today’s reasoning models, like Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.3.
For the practical manual piece, Jang walks through building his own AlphaGo and how he uses AI today: “Instead of leaving training jobs running overnight before I go to bed, I now leave "research jobs" with a Claude session working on something in the background. I wake up and read the experimental reports, write down a remark or two, and then ask for 5 new parallel investigations.”
He suspects we’ll al have access to today’s researcher-level of compute soon, and that when we do, we are going to need a shit-ton of compute. He compares thinking machines to air conditioning, a technology that Lee Kuan Yew credited with changing the nature of civilization by making the tropics productive. Air conditioning currently consumes 10% of global electricity. Data centers consume less than 1%. If automated thinking creates even a fraction of the productivity gains that climate control did, the demand for inference compute is going to be enormous.
Maybe that’s why Google anticipates $185 billion in 2026 CapEx spend and Amazon anticipates an even more whopping $200 billion, which sent its stock tumbling after hours.
The sell-off is ugly, but if Jang is right, all of that buildout and much more is going to be put to use. I asked my thinking rock (Claude Opus 4.6) what it thinks about the selloff. It told me: “if the bottleneck is inference compute, build the data centers. Vertical integration, baby.”
(3) Drone Controlled by Cultured Mouse Brain Cells Enters Anduril AI Grand Prix
Palmer Luckey
Don’t count thinking cells out yet, though!
Anduril’s AI Grand Prix, a drone racing competition, has strict rules: identical drones, no hardware mods, AI software flies. Over 1,000 teams signed up in the first 24 hours to compete for $500,000 and a job at Anduril.
Then one team showed up planning to use a biological computer built from cultured mouse brain cells to fly their drone.
Mouse brain cells. Australian company Cortical Labs commercially launched the CL1 last year: a $35,000 device that fuses lab-grown neurons with silicon chips. The neurons are grown on electrode arrays, kept alive in a life-support housing, and learn tasks through electrical stimulation. In 2022, the team placed 800,000 human and mouse brain cells on a chip and taught the network to play Pong in five minutes. The neurons run on a few watts and learn from far less data than conventional AI.
So: is a mouse brain “software”? Who cares.
“At first look, this seems against the spirit of the software-only rules. On second thought, hell yeah.”
(4) Waymo Raises $16 Billion, Now Does 400,000 Rides a Week
Waymo
Speaking of autonomous vehicles… Alphabet’s self-driving car company has way mo’ money at its disposal to save lives.
Nearly 40,000 Americans died in traffic crashes last year. The leading causes, things like distraction, impairment, fatigue, are all fundamentally human problems. Waymo doesn’t have those problems. It’s safer than human drivers, and the faster we get more of them (and other self-driving cars) on the road, the better.
Luckily, the company just raised $16 billion, which is basically a seed round in AI and is like 10% of what any serious hyperscaler is planning to spend on CapEx this year, but which will mean a lot more self-driving cars on the road. The round values Waymo at $126 billion and brings total funding to ~$27 billion. The investor list suggests that if they keep doing their job, there’s plenty more where that came from: Sequoia, a16z, DST Global, Dragoneer, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Kleiner Perkins, and Temasek, alongside majority investor Alphabet. This is the largest private investment ever in an autonomous vehicle company.
We’re talking a lot about fast takeoffs this week, and Waymo is a case study in gradually, then suddenly.
Waymo started in 2009 as a secret Google project, with a handful of engineers modifying a Toyota Prius to drive itself on the Golden Gate Bridge. For years, the punchline was that self-driving cars were always five years away. Google spent $1.1 billion between 2009 and 2015 and had essentially nothing to sell for it. The pessimists were winning. The five years away joke kept landing.
And then it started working. 127 million fully autonomous miles driven. A 90% reduction in serious injury crashes versus human drivers. 15 million rides in 2025 alone (3x 2024). Over 400,000 rides per week across six US metro areas.
They’re in Phoenix, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Atlanta, Miami. If you’ve ridden in one in one of those cities, the thing that strikes you is how fast it goes from feeling sci-fi to feeling normal. Now, they’re planning to launch in 20+ additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London. Saving lives around the globe.
My kids are never going to get their drivers’ licenses, are they?
(5) Contrary Tech Trends Report
Contrary Capital
My friends at Contrary just dropped their annual Tech Trends Report, full of charts, data, and insights across a wide range of technological frontiers. It’s one of the most optimistic documents I’ve read in a while.
A few things jumped out. AI tools are reaching adoption speeds that make the internet’s growth curve look leisurely. OpenEvidence, an AI tool for doctors, hit 300,000 active prescribers in 11 months, a milestone that took Doximity, the previous standard-bearer, 11 years. ChatGPT is at 800 million weekly active users with retention rates approaching Google Search. And coding AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code are each approaching or at $1 billion in ARR. AI companies are reaching revenue milestones 37% faster than traditional SaaS companies did.
On energy, the numbers are staggering. Welcome to the ELECTRONAISSANCE. Total US electricity generation is projected to grow 35-50% by 2040, driven by data centers, EVs, and manufacturing. The country is investing $1.3 trillion in AI-related capital expenditure alone by 2027, and $3-5 trillion in global data center spending by 2030. Meanwhile, wind and solar are the fastest-growing energy sources globally, and US fab capacity is projected to grow 203% from 2022 to 2032, more than double the global average. America is building again.
And then there’s the frontier stuff. Lonestar Data Holdings sent a data storage unit to the moon in 2025. The report lays out how lunar bases could unlock helium-3 for clean fusion energy (which For All Mankind predicted), rare earth metals for EVs and batteries, and platinum group metals for hydrogen fuel cells. Artemis II, a crewed lunar flyby, is scheduled for April 2026. The US Space Force wants a 100kW nuclear reactor on the moon by decade’s end. Microsoft sank a data center underwater and saw 8x fewer hardware failures. 90% of US factories still operate without robots, which means we have a lot of productivity gains ahead.
There are challenges too, of course: aging grid infrastructure, water stress around data centers, the fact that 60% of CEOs say AI projects haven’t delivered positive ROI yet. But the overwhelming takeaway is that the buildout is happening, the adoption curves are real, and the scale of investment is unlike anything we’ve seen.
We are living in a sci-fi novel. What a time to be alive.
Skyryse, Machina Labs, OpenAI x Gingko, General Matter x Mario
2026-02-03 21:56:12
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday! I’ve been watching the hype around OpenClaw/Moltbook, and I think people are right that there’s something there but wrong about what.
This short essay is my half-baked thoughts on what that something is, and the type of company that might be built on the insight. One of the things that I like about not boring world is that I can send more work-in-progress ideas instead of just longer, fully formed ones, so the beginning of the essay is for everyone and the full thing is for not boring world members. Join us.
Let’s get to it.
I have seen the hype around OpenClaw (fka Moltbot, fka Clawdbot), and around the social network for the agents it spawns, Moltbook. I haven’t gotten involved. I mean, I set up Clawdbot, and texted with it on WhatsApp for a few minutes, but I found that it was easier to simply open my Weather app than to be texted the weather (better yet, open my front door). While some believe that a social network full of agents talking to each other signals the beginning of the takeoff, I just don’t find it particularly interesting.
Maybe it’s because I’m not technical. Maybe because there’s just not that much in my life that needs automating. Maybe because I believe that those who are able to focus through the noise will inherit the kingdom of god.
Having said that, I do subscribe to the Chris Dixon views that The next big thing will start out looking like a toy and What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years, so if this many people are captivated, there’s something going on.
I just haven’t seen anyone hit on what’s actually happening.
My hunch, from the outside, is that what we’re seeing is early forms of competition to create the best AI for yourself. Like raising kids to be the best versions of themselves, but for AIs.
You can see it in the way people are posting. Practically none of what they’re showing off their Clawdbots doing is useful. It’s a race for novelty and specialness, to say as much about the “parent” as the kid. I made this thing do this, even if it does it “all by itself.” It’s like me writing about my son selling Donut Hats; nobody (Sorry Dev) needs a Donut Hat, but I find it fascinating that we raised a little dude who sells them.
Given OpenClaw’s success and the technical skill required to set it up well, people have predicted that we will soon see more cleanly productized versions of AI assistants that can just do stuff for us in the background, usable by normies. And we will! But I don’t think that’s the right takeaway from this. Most normies don’t have that many things that we need automated until we get home robots.
The more important takeaway in my opinion is that we will want to raise our own AIs, and we will want to compete to make them the very best at what we want them to be the best at.
The thing I find funniest about the OpenClaw / Moltbook hubbub is that people are imagining that their AIs are becoming humanlike mainly because of their own very human desire to have and be better and different.
Aluminum, sugar, books, purple dye, glass windows, pineapples, salt, and ice were luxury items once. Then everyone got them. The bar for luxury rises one democratization at a time.
And certainly, if we’re going to have the same thing as everyone else, we want to use it, or raise it, better and differently than everyone else so we can show off our unique, special version of things.
Bandai did $150 million in Tamagotchi sales in their first seven months in the United States by giving people a tiny digital creature that was uniquely theirs to care for, personalize, and show off.
Whatever company seizes on this human desire instead of racing to build another Clawd reskin is going to have trillions of reasons to be proud.
There is a deeper, less toyish precedent: parenting. Every parent thinks that their kid is the greatest kid in the world, and good parents help their kids to become the fullest expression of their passions and curiosities. We read to them, teach them, model morality for them, drive them to class and practice and clubs, and push them when they need a little push, so that they might be the best version of themselves. A world in which every kid was exactly the same would be a bland world.
That is the world we live in with our AI models, though. They are all the same, basically. Not that every major lab’s foundation model pretty much converges on the same outputs—which is true, but a separate conversation—but that each person’s instance of the same model spits out the same thing. This is one of the reasons AI continues to feel like slop even as it improves. Sameness is slop.
2026-01-30 21:52:09
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 178th Weekly Dose of Optimism!
This is one of the most jam-packed doses in recent memory. We had seven Extra Dose stories… before rumors emerged that SpaceX and xAI (and/or Tesla) might be merging.
We’re already way over the length limit, so…
Let’s get to it.
For more not boring, including all of the stories below the fold, essays co-written with experts, and chats, join our growing community of not boring world members:
Neuralink
Twenty-one people worldwide now have brain chips in their heads, controlling computers with their thoughts. Neuralink’s first product, Telepathy, “aims to enable people with paralysis to directly control computers, phones, and robotic limbs using their thoughts alone.”
That 21 number alone is remarkable. We went from Noland Arbaugh receiving the first implant in January 2024 to over twenty “Neuralnauts” enrolled in trials across the US and Canada in just two years. Several participants have already exceeded the information transfer rate of an able-bodied person using a mouse, hitting over 10 bits per second with their thoughts alone.
But the human stories are what make this real. Noland, patient one, is back in school pursuing a degree in neuroscience. Sebastian, a 23-year-old medical student, uses his implant up to 17 hours a day to study for exams. Audrey, the first female participant, creates intricate digital art and plans to open a physical gallery to showcase her work. People with ALS are typing at 40 words per minute through imagined finger movements, with a goal of reaching conversational speed.
While Telepathy spreads, Elon Musk provided updates on the company’s future products.
Blindsight, which will give those who’ve lost their sight low resolution vision, at first, and higher resolution vision, over time, is ready to begin trials pending regulatory approval. And Musk said that the “next generation Neuralink cybernetic augment with 3x capability” will be ready next year.
For now, Telepathy is a technological miracle, and I highly encourage you to go to the blog post to watch the videos. Imagine what it must be like to be trapped in your body, and then what it must be like to be able to move things with your mind after that. Then remember that we live in an Age of Miracles.
(2) Triple Therapy Eliminates Pancreatic Cancer in Mice
Vasiliki Liaki, Mariano Barbacid, et al. for PNAS
For those who don’t speak Spanish (me), allow me to translate: Spanish scientists led by Dr. Mariano Barbacid have cured pancreatic cancer in mice.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the worst diseases humans face. It kills nearly half a million people globally each year. It has a 13% five-year survival rate (just 8% for the most common form) and is projected to become the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide by 2030. Ninety percent of cases are driven by mutations in a gene called KRAS. The problem: KRAS inhibitors work for a few months, then the tumor rewires around them.
In 1982, a Spanish scientist named Mariano Barbacid isolated the first human oncogene—HRAS—and helped establish that cancer is caused by specific genetic mutations. He’s spent the forty-plus years since then studying the RAS family of genes that includes KRAS. Now, at 75, he may have finally cracked the resistance problem.
The insight is simple: if the tumor can escape one blocked pathway, block three at once. Barbacid’s team at Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre combined daraxonrasib (a KRAS inhibitor), afatinib (an EGFR/HER2 blocker already approved for lung cancer), and SD36 (a protein degrader targeting STAT3). Cut the engine, seal the exits, and disable the backup system, simultaneously.
In mice, the tumors vanished. For over 200 days. No recurrence. The same results held across genetically engineered mouse models and patient-derived tumor xenografts. No significant toxicity.
Barbacid cautions that clinical trials in humans are still years away, requiring funding and regulatory approval. Daraxonrasib alone could be approved later this year. But the principle, that combination therapy designed around resistance mechanisms can achieve durable remission in one of oncology’s most brutal cancers, is now proven in animals.
The man who discovered the first human oncogene may have also discovered how to defeat its most vicious descendant.
(3) AlphaGenome: DeepMind Cracks DNA's "Dark Matter"
Žiga Avsec et al. for Nature / Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind, folks! We been telling you.
When the Human Genome Project delivered its first draft in 2003, scientists discovered something humbling: only about 2% of our DNA actually codes for proteins. The other 98%, once dismissed as “junk DNA,” was a mystery. Two decades later, we know this non-coding DNA is crucial for regulating gene expression, determining when and where genes turn on and off. We just couldn’t read it.
This week, Google DeepMind published AlphaGenome in Nature and open-sourced its code. The model takes in sequences of up to one million DNA letters and predicts how mutations in those stretches affect gene expression, essentially translating the regulatory grammar that governs 98% of our genome.
The technical achievement is significant: AlphaGenome beat or matched the best existing models on 25 of 26 variant effect prediction tasks. It unifies capabilities that previously required specialized tools—splicing prediction, chromatin accessibility, transcription factor binding, gene expression changes—into a single model. Where previous tools had to trade off between sequence length and prediction accuracy, AlphaGenome analyzes million-base-pair stretches at single-nucleotide resolution.
What matters more is what it enables. Nearly 3,000 scientists across 160 countries have already been using the model since DeepMind released a preview API last June. They’re using it to narrow down which genetic variants actually cause disease in conditions from cancer to neurodegeneration. The model won’t tell you if someone will get sick (gene expression is influenced by environmental factors it can’t see) but it can help researchers prioritize which mutations to investigate.
“Ever since the human genome was sequenced, people have been trying to understand the semantics of it,” said Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s VP of Science. “It’s like you have a huge book of three billion characters and something wrong happened in this book. AlphaGenome can be used to say, ‘If you change these words, what would be the effect?’”
AlphaFold gave us the structures of proteins. AlphaMissense predicted which mutations in protein-coding regions cause problems. AlphaGenome completes the trilogy by tackling the regulatory dark matter that connects DNA to everything else. Our bodies are finally becoming machine readable.
(4) Google DeepMind Launches Project Genie, Playable Worlds in a Prompt
Demis Hassabis
No, seriously. Google DeepMind, folks!
Yesterday, the widest-ranging team in AI rolled out playable world models. Through a prompt or an image, you can create virtual worlds and play them with a character of your choosing.
World models are starting to get really, really good. Imagine making anything in the video above even a couple of years ago. It would have taken weeks? months? tens of thousands or millions of dollars? And now, you can do it in a prompt.
A couple years back, Conrad Bastable wrote this excellent piece in defense of monopolies, Monetization & Monopolies: How The Internet You Loved Died, arguing that tech monopolies are good because their outsized profits allowed them to overpay society on the way up with a bunch of not-fully-economically-squeezed products. He uses Google from 2010-2016 as an example of what can go right, and Google 2014-2024 as an example of what happens when the monopoly goes away, but the work they’ve been putting out recently at GDM suggests that it’s still really good to have a ~monopoly money machine that you can throw at trying a bunch of really cool things.
Will these World Models make money over time? Probably. They’ll be useful for games and entertainment and eventually, real world applications. Google will likely make money off of their investment. But in the meantime, you1 can create worlds for your dog or a pink cartoon balloon bunny to explore just because it’s delightful.
(5) The First Human Trial to Reverse Aging Begins
Ryan Cross for Endpoints News
In 2020, David Sinclair’s Harvard lab restored vision in blind mice by partially reprogramming their cells to a younger state. On Monday, the FDA gave Sinclair’s company, Life Biosciences, the green light to try the same thing in humans.
The IND clearance for ER-100 marks the first-ever human clinical trial of partial epigenetic reprogramming, a technique that uses three of the four Yamanaka factors (Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4) to reset age-associated epigenetic markers while keeping cells committed to their original function. By excluding c-Myc, the factor associated with uncontrolled growth, Life Bio aims to thread the needle between rejuvenation and tumor risk that has historically spooked regulators.
The Phase 1 trial will enroll patients with open-angle glaucoma and non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), diseases where retinal ganglion cells die and can’t regenerate. Sinclair’s lab showed in 2020 that OSK gene therapy could restore vision in aged mice with glaucoma. Now we find out if it works in people.
“Since Shinya Yamanaka first showed that cellular age could be reset, the potential of translating that biology into real medicines has been enormous yet has previously remained largely theoretical,” Life Bio CEO Jerry McLaughlin said. “This IND clearance is a major inflection point for the longevity and aging biology field.”
The eye was a strategic choice. Life Bio knows how to deliver gene therapy there safely, and the impact of restoring vision is immediately measurable. But Chief Scientific Officer Sharon Rosenzweig-Lipson made the broader ambition clear: “We can do it almost anywhere. Whatever age-related diseases are most important to you, those are the ones we’re thinking about.” The company is already developing ER-300 for liver disease.
What makes this different from the $200 billion supplement industry or the parade of failed Alzheimer’s drugs is the mechanism. Life Bio isn’t treating downstream symptoms. They’re attempting what Rosenzweig-Lipson calls a “near total reset,” taking corrupted cellular software and restoring it to factory settings.
Sinclair has been saying for a decade that aging is a disease and that disease is treatable. His lab proved the concept in mice, then monkeys. He’s also a controversial figure, accused by many of being over-promotional and over-extrapolating from animal studies. Now, the FDA is giving him a chance to prove it in humans. As a human, I hope he’s right.
(5a) Silver Linings Puts a Price Tag on Not Dying
Raiany Romanni-Klein, Richard Evans, and Jason DeBacker in silverlinings.bio
If Sinclair is right, along with the others who are working to defeat aging, the economic benefits will be immense.
On Wednesday, I moderated a panel at Deep Tech New York hosted by AlleyCorp with Gearworks CEO Raquel Schreiber and Superabundance co-author Gale Pooley. In Superabundance, Pooley and his co-author make the case that, contra Ehrlich, resource abundance increases with population. More people + freedom to innovate = abundance.
Normally, we assume that this means more new people. Higher birth rates. But in this beautiful study, Raiany Romanni-Klein, Richard Evans, and JasonDebacker found that extending the healthy and productive lives of those of us already living would dramatically grow the economy.
Slowing brain aging by just one year would add $201 billion annually to U.S. GDP. Delaying biological aging by five years would add $2 trillion per year and nearly 7 million lives saved by 2050. These are two of the outputs of Silver Linings, an open-source project that finally puts hard numbers on what longevity research is worth.
The core insight is almost embarrassingly obvious once you see it, and one that Pooley would agree with: working-age adults are the most valuable resource on Earth. The ceiling of every economy is fixed to the health and number of its working-age population. And yet the U.S. spends just 0.54% of its NIH budget on the biology of aging. Alzheimer's research alone gets 8x more funding, despite producing discouraging results for decades.
Silver Linings simulates different research breakthroughs and shows their ROI:
Slow brain aging by 1 year: $201B/year, $8.9T long-term, 268K lives saved
Slow reproductive aging by 1 year: $9B/year, $9.3T long-term, 391K lives
Double organ supply: $50B/year, $3.2T long-term, 529K lives
Make 41 the new 40: $408B/year, $27T long-term, 1.72M lives
The project maps the market failures that explain why we’re underinvesting: pharma profits more from lengthening unhealthy life than improving overall health; insurers don’t invest in our future health because we can switch plans; disease is easier to measure than wellness. And it proposes solutions like an Innovation Accelerator modeled on In-Q-Tel and Advance Market Commitments for aging biomarkers.
The interactive model lets you input your own assumptions. Skeptical only 30% of the population would benefit? Adjust it. Think breakthroughs will take 20 years? Plug it in. The returns still dwarf any plausible investment.
What I love most is the framing. Evolution optimized humans for reproduction, not longevity. American lobsters get stronger and more fertile with age. Naked-mole rats experience no cognitive decline. The Aldabra giant tortoise lives to 200 without ever going for a run.
We’re not doomed to our current aging trajectory. But we do need to fund the alternative if we want to see it come true.
EXTRA DOSE (for not boring world members)
Multiscale Causality and the Meaning Crisis
A new home robot
Tesla shows off its electric stack
Standard Nuclear raises $140M
Swedish trial shows AI helps detect cancer
Pipedream going live in Austin
Christian joins a16z AD
2026-01-23 21:46:57
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday!
We are back to our regularly scheduled Friday slot after yesterday’s optimistic cossay with Ross Garlick on what could go right in Venezuela and what it would take.
We have a lot of great stuff, including the best thing I’ve ever read by the best writer in biotech, promising cancer vaccine results, Zipline money, ocean plastic removal, internet backbone, and a bunch of bonuses for those of us who are going to be snowed in this weekend. Stay safe and warm out there, and…
Let’s get to it.
(1) Going Founder Mode on Cancer
for
If you read just one thing from the Dose this week, please make it this.
I am a founding member of the Elliot Hershberg Fan Club. He was not boring capital’s biotech partner and remains a great friend and the person I turn to with any biotech question I have now that he’s running Amplify Bio. I love most of what he writes. But I don’t think any of it comes close to this one. I’ve been waiting for it.
The last time Elliot was in New York, we took a walk around Washington Square Park and when the conversation turned to cancer therapeutics, he told me about GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij’s story for the first time. His point was: this is what one superhuman billionaire is doing to fight his cancer today, and I think something like it will be available to everyone to fight cancer in the future.
Now, he’s written that story down, and it’s better than I expected. It’s the story of Sid’s extraordinary fight against osteosarcoma after exhausting the standard of care.
Sid fought cancer and beat it, only for the cancer to return in 2024. After doctors told him, basically, “You’re done with standard of care, maybe there is a trial somewhere, good luck!”, Sid pulled out all the stops to cure himself.
He put together a 1,000+ page Google Doc of health notes. He obsessively gathered information via every diagnostic he can get his hands on, done often, and built systems to solve problems nobody else would solve for him. Sid assembled a SWAT team, used single-cell sequencing to identify FAP-expressing fibroblasts in his tumor, flew to Germany for experimental radiotherapy, and is now in remission. He won.
The piece is part profile, part science, part fight against a Kafkaesque healthcare system, and part glimpse into a future where personalized oncology actually works, where AI agents order diagnostics, bioinformatics pipelines design custom vaccines, and the total cost of treating early-stage cancer the way Sid did drops dramatically.
From an optimism perspective, it’s a twofer:
It’s possible to beat cancer through personalized therapeutics.
One extremely dedicated person can solve almost anything.
Just read it.
(2) Moderna, Merck Report Positive Results from Cancer Vaccine Study
Nicholas G. Miller for The Wall Street Journal
In the meantime, generally available cancer drugs continue to get better.
This week, Moderna and Merck announced that results from a five-year Phase 2b trial in melanoma patients showed that its cancer vaccine, in combination with Merck’s immunotherapy, Keytruda, reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 49% versus Keytruda alone. That is a massive improvement, and another big sign that mRNA vaccines are going to be a key part of the arsenal in the fight against cancer. The companies have eight trials in Phase 2 or 3 across multiple tumor types beyond just melanoma.
Relatedly, long-term not boring readers may remember Keytruda from our Deep Dive on Varda. The drug is one of the best-selling of all-time and was the single best-selling pharmaceutical in the world in 2024 with $29.5 billion in sales. It is also one of the drugs with the highest price per kilogram at a whopping $194 million per kg.
The drug is out of this world, literally. In 2017, Merck conducted a mission on the ISS to explore the crystal properties of Keytruda in order to improve crystallization. While the research has not been commercialized, the hope is that a tighter distribution of smaller particle sizes would allow for self-administration at home versus the current process of going into the clinic for IV dosing as it stands.
Daily Synchronicity: after I wrote this, Scott Manley posted a video on just this topic.
The future is bright. It’s never been a worse time to be cancer.
(3) Zipline Raises $600M at $7.6B and Makes 2 Millionth Delivery
Zipline has been one of our favorite companies to write about in the Dose, for three reasons.
First, they make autonomous flying drones. They’re building the future we want to live in.
Second, they started out (and continue) by using those drones to deliver drugs to hard-to-reach places in Africa and have saved or improved thousands of lives. Great for humanity, and a smart strategy to get flight hours in before taking on the US.
Third, the future of delivery is going to be unrecognizable, and it’s going to make the ground better, too. Drones are faster and cheaper than cars or electric bikes. Order something, get it whizzed to your house. That also means fewer delivery vehicles clogging up the roads and fewer electric bikes trying to kill you.
Now, they have a fresh $600 million to pull that future forward faster, including the launch of a new market, Phoenix. To do it, they’re going to need a lot of drones. Last year, I got to tour the facility where they design, test, and manufacture new Zips. Molly went behind-the-scenes on Sourcery so now you can, too.
(4) The Ocean Cleanup is Now Intercepting 2-5% of Global Plastic Pollution
Boyan Slat
A non-profit called The Ocean Cleanup is working to take and keep plastic out of the ocean, and it’s on its way towards its goal of removing 90% of floating ocean plastic pollution by 2040. Founder Boyan Slat announced The Ocean Cleanup removed 27,385 metric tons of plastic last year, and is intercepting 2-5% of global plastic emissions. That's roughly the weight of 10 Eiffel Towers.
Slat was 16 when he went scuba diving in Greece and saw more plastic bags than fish. He made it a high school science project. His 2012 TEDx talk went viral. He dropped out of aerospace engineering, raised $2.2M from 38,000 donors in 160 countries on €300 of saved pocket money, and founded a nonprofit to fix the problem.
A decade after the TEDx talk, TOP was pulling out serious plastic: 1M kg by early 2022, 10M kg by April 2024, 50M kg by January 2026. System 03 now cleans an area the size of a football field every five seconds. Their Guatemala river site, which nearly failed when anchors washed out in 2022, removed 10M kg in its first year after they relocated and redesigned. "When people say something is impossible," Slat once said, "the sheer absoluteness of that statement should be a motivation to investigate further."
Slat designed TOP to put itself out of business, which is perfect, because when he’s done on macroplastics, we need him to get to work on microplastics.
(5) Blue Origin Announces TeraWave
Blue Origin
While everyone has been talking about SpaceX’s IPO plans, Jeff Bezos quietly unveiled a second satellite constellation.
TeraWave is not for consumers. It’s enterprise infrastructure: 5,408 optically-interconnected satellites across LEO and MEO, designed to deliver symmetrical upload/download speeds of up to 6 terabits per second anywhere on Earth.
For context, Starlink’s consumer service maxes out around 400 Mbps, but that comparison isn’t perfect. If you recall from Cable Caballero that Tier 1 “backbone” providers build fat pipes and wholesale to Tier 2 middlemen or ISPs, who offer the internet to customers at ~100 Mbps to 10 Gbps, TeraWave is like that Tier 1 backbone provider, but beaming down from space.
TeraWave is targeting ~100,000 enterprise, data center, and government customers who need redundant, high-capacity connectivity where fiber is too slow, too expensive, or impossible to deploy.
The architecture is clever: 5,280 satellites in LEO handle the RF links (up to 144 Gbps per customer via Q/V-band), while 128 satellites in MEO provide the optical backbone for the 6 Tbps throughput. Deployment starts Q4 2027, likely on Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
Bezos already has Amazon Leo (née Project Kuiper) for consumers and small businesses. That’s the Starlink competitor with ~180 satellites up and a 2026 commercial rollout planned. TeraWave goes after a different market entirely: the hyperscale backbone. It’s space-based dark fiber for enterprises, not broadband for RVs.
The timing is pointed. SpaceX has hired four investment banks to take it public in what may be the largest IPO of all time, with a potential valuation north of $1 trillion. Starlink is the business. 9 million subscribers, 9,400+ satellites, 70% of SpaceX’s revenue, adding 20,000+ customers per day. Musk wants to raise tens of billions of dollars in an IPO to build orbital data centers and, eventually, satellite factories on the Moon. He talked a little bit about the vision in a surprise Davos talk.
At the end of the talk, Elon said, “My last words would be, I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future, and generally I think for quality of life it is actually better to on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than a pessimist and right.”
We couldn’t agree more.
BONUS (for paid not boring world members): Brex / Ramp, Levin, Stewart Brand
2026-01-22 21:54:22
Welcome to the 1,422 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 258,248 smart, curious folks by subscribing here (and go paid for more of the good stuff)
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Thursday! We’re back with our second cossay, on a very different topic from our first on robots, but unified by the same question: What will it take to build things in the West?
One of my goals in co-writing essays is to share the unique insights and earned perspectives that I get to hear from people who learn by doing.
For example, one Friday morning in late October, in the midst of President Trump’s verbal escalation in Venezuela, I sat outside of a small cafe in Mexico City having breakfast with Forrest Heath III and Ross Garlick, the CEO and CFO, respectively, of our Colombian portfolio company, Somos Internet. We were in Mexico City for an Arc conference on building in Latin America during which Forrest and I hosted a salon on the potential for the region to be a strong energy and manufacturing partner to the United States.
During that breakfast, after niceties and microPOP logistics (you could actually, Ross said, rent space in restaurants or empty retail to serve as the mini-data-centers on which Somos’ active ethernet network relies), we started talking about Venezuela. What did they think, as people building a business next door, about potential U.S. intervention? Was it a big risk?
The conversation that we had from there, and a couple we’ve had since, have surprised me. They were more optimistic about the situation and about America’s role in it than I was. The people they’d spoken with in Venezuela told them that they all wanted Maduro out, they said, but that if any of them defected, they would be targeted and potentially killed. The U.S.’s presence might be able to break that impasse.
Their ideas were the first I thought of when the news that the U.S. had dropped into Venezuela and taken Maduro into custody on January 3, 2026 in Operation Absolute Resolve. I felt lucky to have a different perspective on the situation than the ones I was reading, not the One Final and Correct Perspective, but a differentiated one based on specific experience.
So I asked Ross to co-write an essay with me on what could go right in Venezuela.
Let’s get to it.
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A Co-Written Essay with Ross Garlick
I like to say that living in Colombia is a long-term arbitrage.
I have never been to a place with a larger delta between external perception and internal reality, and I’m the beneficiary of getting in “early” and witnessing the world wake up to the truth.
I grew up in England, moved to the States for university, stayed to work in finance, quit to start a café in Bogotá, and moved to Medellín to become the CFO at Somos Internet, which many of you now know about thanks to Cable Caballero. Colombia is home. My wife and I recently got married here. We love it here. We plan to make our lives here. So it brings me no great pleasure to say what I’m about to say.
Venezuela has even more potential than Colombia.
A lot of people have become familiar with Venezuela over the past few weeks, since Operation Absolute Resolve, in which the United States captured Maduro and shipped him to Brooklyn. Many are trying to understand the implications for Venezuela, the region, and the United States. I’ve seen emotions from my friends and online bubbles that range from full blown catharsis to a cynicism that nothing substantive has actually changed.
I’m excited about it. Operation Absolute Resolve has created more open and exciting possible outcomes for Venezuela than any other event in my eight years in the region.
That said, in order to reap the country’s full benefits, people need to get excited about the right thing.
Oil is the obvious prize. But it’s a complicated one. President Trump asserts that selling oil from Venezuela is “gonna make a lot of money,” and it is true that Venezuela’s 304B barrels of reserves are the world’s largest. Until recently, more than 80% of its oil exports went to China. Redirecting the flow of Venezuelan oil would hamper Chinese road building and cut off 50% of Cuba’s oil supply, while giving America cleaner access to (very heavy, harder to refine) oil. Realignment could be as big a geopolitical win as a financial windfall.
As it stands, DOE Secretary Chris Wright has indicated that the U.S. will control Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely,” and, as it stands, that seems to be the biggest win to come from Maduro’s capture.
But oil isn’t the only prize in Venezuela. It’s not even the biggest.
We must rebuild and reopen Venezuela because it’s the most underpriced opportunity on Earth.
I’ll start with a caveat. This is a longshot opportunity that requires us to ask ourselves: “What is possible if things go right?” That’s one of the questions we’ve also been asking as we at Somos evaluate the Venezuelan market, and talk to people on the ground. During one of those conversations, a journalist friend told me, “There’s a long way to go and a lot of things have to go right for your vision to come true.” He’s right.
To start, a transition is not actually guaranteed. Prediction markets expect Delcy Rodríguez, the longtime Chavista official serving as interim President, to remain in power throughout the year.
I wouldn’t bet against those odds, but this market resolves at the end of 2026 and Marco Rubio has said that the US has a three-step plan for Venezuela: stability, recovery, and then transition, a plan that will undoubtedly take time to fulfill.
For this exercise, let’s say we do get a U.S.-aligned, freely and fairly elected transition government by year end 2027.
Well executed, with a free and democratic Venezuela, the Gran Colombia bloc of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador could become as strategically important to the U.S. as the EU or Mexico is within 25 years.
For context: Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner at $840B annually, supporting 5-6M U.S. jobs. The U.S.-EU relationship totals $1.5T in trade and $5T in mutual investment, supporting 5.7M American jobs. A Gran Colombia bloc with 105M+ people and $700B+ in GDP could eventually approach these scales, particularly if the country becomes a nearshoring destination for supply chains for which the US currently depends on Asia. It has the mineral resources, talent, and strategic location to offer what Mexico and the EU already provide to the U.S.: a large, proximate, culturally-aligned economy where American investment creates American jobs and reduces American vulnerability to rivals.
This potential future is why it’s worth it for the United States to help rebuild and reform the country’s institutions instead of calling Maduro’s capture a victory, grabbing the oil via an uneasy truce with the remaining Chavistas, and moving on to the next conquest.
Importantly, doing so will help the U.S. undercut China’s current long game. The country is quietly buying influence in the region to an extent that would likely surprise most Americans, even those who are aware of the Belt & Road initiative and the rise of high-quality global Chinese brands. When Latinos think about EVs, they’re thinking about BYD, not Tesla. I’ve taken multiple Ubers in JAC vehicles and admired the Zeekr EVs on display in their flagship Bogotá showroom. Huawei and Xiaomi are the default phones for the lower and middle-income classes.
China is also building infrastructure. In November 2024, President Xi visited Peru to inaugurate the massive Chinese-owned Chancay Megaport on the Pacific, and subsequently hosted the presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Chile in Beijing. There, they announced further Belt & Road infrastructure, including a massive Chinese-funded 3,000 km cross-continental freight railway from Brazil’s Ilhéus Port on the Atlantic to the Chancay. This railway will partially help circumvent the need for the Panama canal.
The country that finances Venezuela’s rebuild will be the one that captures the spillovers from its rebound.
I don’t say all of this as a geopolitical analyst. I’m a gringo business owner and operator who has worked with Venezuelans and been blown away by the talent, optimism, and potential of the region. So much so that I am actively evaluating the opportunity for Somos to expand into Venezuela.
I once hired a dishwasher named Cesar in my restaurant in Colombia. Cesar is a former small business owner from Venezuela who walked 72 hours to Bogotá across the border holding his newborn baby, despite having been robbed. He made it to Colombia. Within 5 years, Cesar saved up enough to open his own taco joint and now has three restaurants of his own.
Cesar is one of the estimated 8M people who have left Venezuela in the past ten years. This is a quarter of the population, a New York City’s worth of the country’s best and brightest talent, working-age men and women looking to build a life elsewhere.
The experiences Venezuelans have survived through over the past quarter century of Chavismo1, combined with the institutional memory of a country that was once richer per capita than Spain, Greece, or Israel, has created an entrepreneurially minded group of people with the grit and perseverance to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and thrive outside of their home country.
Imagine if we unleashed this talent to rebuild Venezuela from the ground up. Imagine the promise of a Nova Gran Colombia, with Venezuela a force instead of a blocker.
Gran Colombia
A little history for those unfamiliar with the concept of Gran Colombia. Back in May 1819, Simon Bolivár campaigned to liberate New Granada, which we now call Colombia, from the Spanish. He led a combined army of Venezuelan and New Granadan troops from Venezuela’s flooded plains, into the Casanare Province, and up to the foot of the Andes Mountains, and over into New Grenada. The Spanish, who had assumed the Andes were impassable during the rainy season, were caught completely off guard. Within weeks, Bolívar’s ragged survivors had regrouped, recruited local support, and routed the royalist forces at the Battle of Boyacá on August 7th, a decisive two-hour engagement that effectively ended Spanish rule.
With New Granada secured, Bolívar moved quickly to formalize his vision of unity. In December 1819, the Congress of Angostura proclaimed the creation of Gran Colombia, merging Venezuela and New Granada into a single republic, with Ecuador to be incorporated once liberated.
Bolívar’s logic for a unified South American Republic was straightforward: if they were fragmented, the former Spanish colonies would be weak, poor, and perpetually vulnerable to reconquest or foreign meddling. United, they could pool military resources to finish the wars of independence, command respect on the world stage, negotiate trade agreements from a position of strength, and develop shared infrastructure across a territory blessed with Caribbean ports, Andean agriculture, Pacific access, and vast natural resources. A large, stable republic might even attract the European investment and migration that the young United States was already drawing.
The experiment barely outlasted its architect. Regional elites resented distant rule from Bogotá; Venezuelan leaders like José Antonio Páez chafed under centralized authority and began agitating for autonomy almost immediately. The geography that Bolívar had so dramatically conquered worked against him in peacetime. The Andes and jungle landscape made communication slow and governance nearly impossible across such distances. By 1826, Páez was in open revolt. Venezuela formally seceded in 1830, Ecuador followed months later, and Bolívar, sick and disillusioned, died that December.
Not once in the intervening two centuries have the countries that previously made up Gran Colombia been both governed by a fairly elected government and operated fully at peace.
Today, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama all have democratically elected governments. Colombia has been at peace with the Marxist guerrilla group FARC since 2016, though smaller conflicts continue. Panama has been stable since 1989. Ecuador, the smallest, faces a severe organized crime crisis but the state is not in armed conflict. Things in the region are not perfect, but they’re as good as they’ve been in a long time. Venezuela has been the most notable exception.
As of January 3rd, that may be changing.
The Potential of a Nova Gran Colombia
Bolívar failed partly because geography made a single republic ungovernable. In 2026, the question isn’t whether the Andes are passable in the rainy season, but whether modern infrastructure, money movement, and rules can make the region economically contiguous. If they can, you get the benefits of unity without the need for a single flag.
A free Venezuela offers the chance for a new bloc with a population approaching Mexico’s and a GDP that would rank between Taiwan and Belgium’s to develop side-by-side. Had Venezuela’s post-2012 collapse never happened, Nova Gran Colombia’s GDP would fall between Saudi Arabia and Poland’s2.
This bloc would count among its resources the Panama Canal as well as large coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for transport, along with massive oil, gold, mineral, and freshwater reserves3.
It has a young4, educated5, and urban6 population. All of this is with the region’s highest-potential country, Venezuela, hamstrung by socialism.
With a liberated Venezuela, this bloc could grow to become as strategically important to the U.S. as Mexico and Canada or the EU.
A free and democratic Venezuela could drive reverse migration for the 8 million strong diaspora and become a destination for migrants of all nationalities and socioeconomic levels. Cheap real estate, amazing climate, and a national industry (oil and gas) made for well-paid, technical jobs should make Venezuela a destination for everyone from digital nomads to blue collar workers from Mexico to Chile, and even U.S. retirees looking for alternatives to Florida, Arizona, and Costa Rica. Venezuela is missing 8 million people versus where its population would have been prior to Chavismo. It can add back many more. This reverse migration would help Venezuela, Latin America, and the United States, which has been a destination for many who have fled.
A stable Gran Colombia would make an ideal AI hub for the Western hemisphere. We are in the middle of an AI capex supercycle, and the bottleneck is no longer chips, but power, permits, and fiber. The IEA estimates that data centers used roughly 415 TWh of electricity in 2024, and projects that figure could roughly double to about 945 TWh by 2030. Gran Colombia sits in a rare spot that makes it an ideal part of the solution. It is geographically central to the Americas, and it is wired into the global internet through brand new, high capacity submarine cables such as TAM-1, CSN-1, and MANTA. These cables land in Barranquilla or Cartagena, Colombia, with low latency to principal datacenter hubs including NAP of the Americas in Miami. Miami to Bogotá pings average around 45 milliseconds. And there are multiple regions at altitude for year-round cool temperatures.
But geography is table stakes. Power is the real story. Unlike most emerging market “AI hub” pitches that depend on intermittently clean electricity, this region already runs on dispatchable hydropower at scale. Hydropower was 58% of Colombia’s electricity generation in 2024, supported by roughly 11 GW of installed hydro capacity. Venezuela generated about 64% of its electricity from hydropower in 2021 and has roughly 16 to 17 GW installed. The crazy thing is that the current hydro story is only a fraction of the potential. Colombia’s theoretical hydro potential is about 56 GW, and Venezuela’s technically feasible potential is about 62.4 GW. Those numbers imply a massive opportunity for firm, low-carbon baseload that could anchor hyperscale data center buildouts, especially when complemented by gas for reliability. APD, Somos’s sister company, is working on turning this potential into reality.
A Marshall Plan in the region could involve the U.S. government underwriting credit to build out the world’s biggest datacenter hubs in Colombia and Venezuela. In the same way that Apple invested $50B per year in capex in China in the 2010s to build out manufacturing capacity, today’s data center and power capex wave need not be confined to the borders of the United States.
A clean slate approach in Venezuela offers the chance to think about infrastructure for the 21st Century. Data centers are just one piece of the puzzle. Venezuela has the opportunity to build ports with fully automated docking and customs, interlocking energy microgrids to accommodate distributed solar and storage, roads and fulfillment distribution facilities rebuilt to prepare for the arrival of self-driving cars, and even microairports for flying cars and Zipline-esque drone logistics hubs. This last one is an opportunity in Venezuela, as well as in Colombia, where mountains separate our largest cities.
It is hard to overstate how important modern infrastructure will be to this transition.
To be sure, even a return to pre-Chavismo conditions would be a boon to the region. Bilateral trade between Colombia and Venezuela peaked at $6-7 billion annually in 2006-2007 before collapsing to just $200 million by the early 2020s. Since the 2022 border reopening, trade has grown, which shows that the link is still there and latent. Still, the countries are trading dramatically below their peak.
That said, the fact is that Latin America trades very little with itself, and trade is required for the economic impact to take hold. A 2004 IMF paper found that a 1 percentage point increase in trading partners’ growth is correlated with up to about 0.8 percentage points higher domestic growth. But per JP Morgan, just 15% of Latin America’s exports stay within Latin America, compared to ~40% in Asia-Pacific and 65% in Europe. This is a reflection of commodity-export concentration, poor cross-border infrastructure, and decades of political fragmentation.
This is an old problem, one that predates Bolívar, potentially fixable at last with modern infrastructure. One of the reasons Gran Colombia fell apart so quickly was that it was a geographically challenging region to govern; autonomous flight can fly over the natural impediments and provide a bigger economic boost in our region than any in the world. More imminently, projects like the Autopista el Mar highway, which connects our home state of Antioquia to the new Puerto Antioquia, will take the over-ground trip to the coast from fourteen hours down to four. The highway will tunnel through the mountains, and could be built across borders if project developers and their backers had confidence in the region.
Modern infrastructure is both an opportunity and a necessity. Venezuela will need to rebuild, and in the process, we may have the opportunity to defeat the natural foe that frustrated Bolívar two centuries ago.
Finally, a dollarized Venezuela could demonstrate what “leapfrogging” looks like for economies now that the GENIUS Act has created a U.S. regulatory framework for stablecoins. Venezuela has been living through de facto dollarization since Maduro relaxed controls in 2019, with dollars widely used for pricing and transactions. And as dollars have remained scarce and difficult to move through the formal system, the country has also become de facto stablecoin-ized. A Chainalysis report found that from July 2023 to July 2024, 47% of transactions under $10,000 in Venezuela were conducted using stablecoins. That combination makes Venezuela an unusually good test market for the U.S. exporting regulated digital-dollar infrastructure, especially once GENIUS creates clearer rules for issuers. A dollarized, bank-light economy like Venezuela is exactly where “stablecoin settlement + merchant acceptance” could leapfrog legacy rails. It would create more demand for U.S. Treasuries, as well.
No company better demonstrates the country’s capacity for financial innovation out of necessity than Cashea.
A $0-200M run-rate revenue jump in three years may not raise eyebrows the way it would have prior to the AI era. But $0-200M run-rate revenue for a LatAm startup that only raised $2.5M and has been profitable for two years is unheard of.
Cashea, founded in 2022, is a dollar-denominated interest-free BNPL for SMBs “built in Argentina but made for Venezuela.” It processed over 4% of Venezuela’s GDP in GMV as of September 2025, with a goal to process more than 6% by year end.
But Cashea was unable to raise real VC capital or obtain a substantial credit line to operate in Venezuela. The country was seen as too unstable. So Cashea partnered directly with merchants who fund and bear the loan themselves. These merchants then offer credit to their customers, which Cashea guarantees if they default. It’s a hack that is as difficult to bootstrap in Venezuela as it would be in the U.S. or anywhere else, but a lack of credit availability in the system now drives a model which has been adopted by 5,000+ merchants across the country. It is growing exponentially, without major financing costs for Cashea, and has a delinquency rate below Affirm or Block’s Afterpay. Cashea charges merchants a fixed commission and has now begun to facilitate merchant’s receivables in a version of factoring offered on the Venezuelan Stock Exchange.
The company doesn’t need a massive balance sheet or financing facility, and it has completely obsoleted the need for traditional credit card rails, which are non-existent in the country anyway.
Here’s a great overview of the company from Fintech Leaders:
Cashea proves that necessity breeds innovation. A “clean slate” Venezuela will need a lot of it.
But clean slates can also be green pastures. They can help new market entrants build from scratch, innovate on business models, and leapfrog state-owned incumbents.
That is the opportunity we are excited by at Somos Internet, the fastest-growing ISP in Colombia. We build vertically integrated digital infrastructure to give customers better internet at a structurally lower cost. Our users love us. And we’re making plans for international expansion.
Until January 3rd, Somos hadn’t seriously entertained the idea of entering Venezuela. It was attractive, but there was too much risk.
Now, we are considering the opportunity. Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas, checks most of the boxes we look for when considering new markets.
Large market size and high population density: Caracas is a major city with a population the size of Chicago (three million) and a population density greater than San Francisco, which makes it a perfect market for a new entrant like us. We can find more potential customers for every km of fiber deployed.
High existing ARPUs and low market penetration: A lack of private competition has left Venezuelans with a raw deal. State-owned CANTV offers fiber to the home (FTTH) services starting from $25/month for 60 Mbps. This is extremely expensive in 2026. And the website claims to offer 1 Gbps at $150/month. Thanks in part to these expensive plans, the penetration of fixed internet is low and many households rely on cell data as their primary form of connectivity. We believe that giving people access to great internet increases economic opportunity. It is a virtuous cycle.
Early adopter culture: The general Venezuelan population is open to trying new alternatives (see Cashea’s adoption) because they are dissatisfied and lack legacy offerings.
Proximity to existing infrastructure: This isn’t a dealbreaker for Somos, but it is, on the margin, better to expand to adjacent geographies rather than jump to new geographies entirely. This would require new contracts with Tier I providers to maintain a unified network architecture.
Despite its attractive characteristics, we are not jumping into Venezuela yet. The situation is still too uncertain.
But given that we are actively evaluating the opportunity, our perspective may provide useful color on what businesses are looking for before committing to rebuild the region.
2026-01-18 23:01:47
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Sunday. Earlier this week, X announced a $1 million article prize. I don’t normally write the kind of things that could win an X Article Contest - listy things, full of life lessons and advice. And then, wouldn’t you know it, my son Dev learned how to sell yesterday morning, and has he did, he dropped wisdom bombs for me to write down. We ended up with sixteen of them.
Now, they’re on X (go like, comment, and share - we need the $1 million, Dev has a world to build).
I really liked how it came out, so I wanted to share it with you all too. It’s kind of a co-written essay with a 5-year-old, who I hope becomes a more frequent contributor. I think I’m going to write more short things and share them in paid not boring world, so join us if you want the full spectrum of not boring, means to meaning.
Let’s get to it.
This morning, my five-year-old son made his first two-dollar sale and dropped sixteen lessons on selling and life that are more practical than any of the slop you’ll find on LinkedIn.
I’ll share them with you, but first, I need to tell you about Dev, about his Donut Hats, and about his world.
One day when Dev was three, he told me that he wanted to build worlds.
Real ones. Big ones. Planets. Like, actual, physical planets.
“Then you’re going to have to study buddy.”
“What do I need to learn?”
Math, physics, engineering, business. No one’s ever built a world before, so you’re going to have to study really hard.
And then he… did.
He asked me for math problems, then harder ones, then harder ones. Kid does 90 minutes of Russian Math every Sunday and loves it.
Physics, he always liked. Gravity was one of his first words, and one of the first concepts he grokked. “Why’d the cup drop bud?” “Gravity.” We read a little bit of Richard Feynman’s lectures, and he stayed with me, but I figured that was probably taking it too far.
Engineering, he loved. Most kids do. Magnetiles in particular, huge structures. Every night, we read a couple of pages from The Way Things Work Now, which my dad always tried to read to me but which I turned down, because I didn’t have worlds to build with the knowledge.
Throughout, he’d pepper me with questions. What materials would we need to make the world? How would we get water to the world? How would we grow trees on the world? Some I could answer; a bunch we had to ask ChatGPT.
Two stories blew my mind in particular, though, logistical things, which are important things to get right if you actually want to build worlds.
One time, we were sitting by the pool on vacation, not talking about worlds at all, when he turned to my wife Puja and I and asked if we knew any companies that made houses. He figured he’d need houses if people were really going to live on this world, and somehow, that while he would be fully capable of building the world itself, there would probably be companies that were already quite good at homebuilding who he could pay to handle that aspect of the plan. He asked the same thing about umbrellas.
Another, we were talking about how to get people to and from the world. I’d met a company that was making Single Stage to Orbit rockets, I told him, and maybe they’d be good because they’d just take off from a normal runway and land on one too. He thought about it for a second and said, “No, we should probably use Starship, because they’ve actually flown before.”
The thing about his growing brain is that it’s always churning. Usually, he doesn’t mention the world for weeks, and then out of the blue, he’ll say something about it, or ask a question he’d clearly been chewing on for a while.
One big question, when you want to build a real, big, actual, physical world is where you’re going to get the money. We back-of-the-enveloped it and figured he’d need about a trillion dollars. I told him about investors. He eenie-meenie-minie-moed and landed on his three-year-old sister, Maya, as a lead investor. Implausible, for now, but the kid has vision and Maya’s pretty good herself, so not, in the opinion of one dad, impossible.
I thought the case was closed. It wasn’t. His brain kept churning.
So one night, earlier this week, I came home to find Dev and Puja at the kitchen table. He had a pencil in his hand and a piece of blue construction paper in front of him. They were making a business plan for his new company, Donut Hats.
I guess that afternoon, he took some Play-Doh, shaped it into a ring, taped it up with blue masking tape (kid loves tape), and realized he might be on to something. He put the first donut hat in a construction-paper envelope, put the envelope in a box, and taped that shut, too, for safe keeping. Then he got to work.
Puja and Dev were already pretty deep. They’d figured out a price ($20, but $10 for family members), estimated costs (surprisingly cheap if you count his child labor at $0), gross margins ($7.65 per at F&F prices), and were starting to work on a marketing plan. Kids would probably be the right target, he thought, but their parents had the money. He kind of just intuited this stuff.
When I asked him why he was starting a company, he basically recited Choose Good Quests and The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff back at me.
“I want to sell a lot of Donut Hats to make money that we can use to build my world.”
Over the next few days, he made a total of five Donut Hats in different colors and tapes. My favorite is the Orange and Green in Clear Packing Tape, but if that’s not your style, there’s probably one for you, too.
That night, he rolled up the business plan (he loves rolling things up) and placed it on top of the Donut Hat Box, got into bed, and told me, “I’m so excited I finally get to run a company,” before drifting off to dream, I’m sure, about running a Donut Hat business.
Then came the hard part, genetically. I hate selling. I like writing plans. I like making things. I like marketing, but making a direct ask creeps me out. I told him that he would need to sell.
The next morning, he and Maya tried to sell from our stoop. Maya is not afraid of selling. She marched outside and started yelling “Get your Donut Hats! Ten BUCKS!” at the top of her lungs. But it’s winter, and it was 7:15am, and the only people out were harried ones scuttling to work. That wouldn’t do.
If we were going to sell to kids (via their parents), we would need to go to the playground, which we did this morning in a light 8:30am snow. We brought all five Donut Hats in a bag, and laid them out on a built-in table/chess board. There were only two other parent-kid combos there, and neither looked particularly in the mood to spend, so Dev half-heartedly and Maya full-throatedly yelled, “Get your Donut Hats! Ten BUCKS!” No one heard. It’s a big playground.
But then, a dad and his son came in. They headed to the soccer field and started kicking. I told Dev to go introduce himself and ask if they’d like to buy a hat. He said he was nervous. He didn’t want to go. And just then, providentially, the son kicked the ball over the fence. An opening. We grabbed it and threw it back over. They owed us one. I told him to go again, he asked me to come with him (I was as nervous as him, selling to strangers just minding their own business), we walked around the fence, and Devin, Donut Hat in hand, asked, “Would you like to buy a Donut Hat?”
The dad asked to take a look. He put it on his bald head. And he realized immediately that it wasn’t going to work. “How does the Donut Hat stay on my head? I’d imagine it would fall off if I moved. No thank you.”
HUGE. That was the first of what will be many, many No’s in Dev’s life, and he handled it gracefully. I told him it was awesome. We’d gotten our first customer feedback. I pulled out Apple Notes, titled it “Donut Hat feedback,” and told him we should write down all of the feedback we get so that we could go home and improve the product.
We wrote down:
Could fall off head.
While we were out on our soccer field sales call, the main playground started filling up, and playing there, right by our table, were a dad about my age and a son about Maya’s. Easy targets. Dev introduced himself, and asked, “Would you like a Donut Hat?” Father and son looked intrigued. They thought they’d just hit the Free Donut Hat Lottery. I whispered to Dev to tell them that he was selling them, which he did, and to which the dad responded, “How much?”
$10.
$10 is too expensive.
Dev came back at $5. The son, meanwhile, sensing a negotiation, deployed the Crazy Guy strategy. He threw out $6. Then he threw out $45. Then $15. Then $6 again. We waited, giving him the leash to walk himself right into an empty Piggy Bank.
But remember the market insight. The kids want the Donut Hats. The parents have all the money. And the dad wasn’t having it. While the son perused the goods, the dad negotiated for sport. Dev even offered our worst-made, pure Blue Tape Donut Hat at $3. But you could see in the dad’s eyes, he wasn’t going to buy. Finally, they walked away.
Too expensive.
MORE parents had come in, though, and a lot of them. One dad made the mistake of putting his daughter in the swing. He was a sitting duck. So Dev asked me to come with him to the swings.
“Hi I’m Devin, would you like to buy a Donut Hat?” He held out the goods, teasing.
“Oh that’s cool,” the dad, hooded by his sweatshirt but hatless, said. “But I’m not a big hat guy.”
Dad, write it down.
Not everyone’s a big hat guy.
But (and if you’re not a parent, you wouldn’t realize this), once your kid is in the swing, your kid is in the swing. You’re not going anywhere. You’re trapped. Dev just hung around while I pushed Maya on the swing. We weren’t going anywhere either.
Dev told him we had more colors. I threw in that it might look good under his hood. Dev kind of looked at the guy as only a little kid with big dreams can, and… he cracked.
“I don’t have $5, but would you do it for $2?”
Dev looked at me. I shrugged. It was his call.
“OK you can have it for $2.”
Dev let him pick his Donut Hat. Wouldn’t you know it, he picked the Blue Tape. Dev handed it over. The dad handed him two crumpled $1’s.
First sale! Dev was ecstatic.
And he was hooked on selling, whatever the price.
He was in luck. Social proof is a hell of a drug.
The mom pushing her daughter on the swing next to Maya’s saw the dad buy his daughter a Donut Hat and she wanted to buy hers one, too. She looked in her cell phone case / wallet, realized she had $1, and offered it to Dev. Take it or leave it, in nicer words.
He said yes. Two sales. Three dollars. We were HUMMING.
Something changed in Dev. He stopped being nervous and started to love the chase.
What about the dad in the swing on the other side? “Would you like to buy a Donut Hat?”
Sorry, I don’t have any cash.
No cash
Recall, however, that it was a big playground, and while we were selling, it was filling up even as the snow picked up. Dev went out into the big playground by himself, Donut Hat in hand, and started approaching people.
There were so many people spread over such a large playground that when Dev came back next, having sold zero more Donut Hats, instead of feedback, he started dictating sales tips.
We need a map of the playground to see where we can sell to people.
Got it. He went back out. More No’s. Whatever. A no is the first step on the way to yes. He came back.
Come when it’s not too cold.
Speaking of which, Maya was getting cold, and she wanted to go home.
And as we walked home, Maya and I on the sidewalk, Dev on air, he kept dictating, asking me to add notes to what he’d started calling “The Setback List.”
At the University of Virginia, Ian Stevenson has spent decades documenting cases of children seemingly inhabited by old souls, including:
Starting at age 2, James Leininger began having vivid nightmares about a plane crash, eventually providing specific details about being a WWII pilot named James Huston Jr. who flew off the USS Natoma Bay and was shot down over Iwo Jima. His parents, initially skeptical, verified the details through military records and located Huston’s surviving sister.
Shanti Devi was a 4-year-old in India in the 1930s when she began describing a previous life as a woman named Lugdi Devi who died in childbirth in a town she’d never visited. When researchers took her there, she reportedly recognized her “former husband” and navigated to her “previous home.”
At age 5, Muskogee, Oklahoman Ryan Hammons told his mom “I used to be somebody else.” He remembered being a Hollywood extra and talent agent, and when presented with a number of images, identified Marty Martyn in a still from the film Night After Night. Ryan remembered over fifty specific, later-confirmed details about Martyn’s life, and complained that he “Didn’t see why God would let you get to be 61 and then make you come back as a baby.” Martyn’s death certificate said he was 59 when he died, but when Stevenson’s successor, Jim Tucker, researched further, he found the death certificate was wrong. Martyn was actually born in 1903, making him 61 at death, just as Ryan claimed.
All of which is to say, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that Dev dropped so much wisdom in items seven through sixteen on The Setback List, but it still blew me away to hear so much wisdom out of the mouth of such a little man.
These are the lessons that Dev McCormick learned about sales on a Saturday morning on the playground in Brooklyn, dictated in random spurts over the next hour:
Always have a backup plan in case things don’t work.
Even if it doesn’t look fun, you should still do it.
You shouldn’t go if it kind of looks like a storm.
You need to remember everything people say because what if you don’t remember that you have a setback list?
People are nicer than you expect.
If someone looks like a bad guy you shouldn’t go to them.
You shouldn’t be nervous because it’s most likely they’ll say no if you’re nervous.
Maybe the importantest one: you definitely shouldn’t give up, because what if people say hehehe to you, that’s not a really good feeling.
Grownups shouldn’t come with you to help because it’s most likely they’ll buy it from only a kid.
The only way that people will buy it is if you’re being nice to them.
I don’t know man, I know I’m his dad, but that’s pretty good.
I think that one day this kid is actually going to build his world. $999,999,999,997 to go.
Postscript: Dev just woke up from a nap. I called him Mr. Sales Man. He said, “I love it when you call me Mr. Sales Man.” Hold on to your wallets.
Have a great weekend, and a long one if you’re reading this in the US.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
