While OpenAI signed $1.15 trillion in compute contracts through 2035, DeepSeek trained a frontier model for $6 million. This was 2025’s central question : are we building on bedrock or quicksand?
The top 10 posts of 2025 examined some of these topics :
Are we in a bubble echoing the telecom crash, or building the next internet? Do traditional exit paths still work when secondaries dominate & IPOs vanish? How do you design tools when the user is AI, not human? 2025 forced a reckoning with reality.
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How AI Tools Differ from Human Tools : I consolidated my 100+ AI tools into unified, parameter-rich interfaces based on Anthropic’s research. The counterintuitive finding : AI systems need complex tools with complete context, while humans need simple, chunked interfaces. Claude’s success rate approached 100% after the redesign.
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Back to Text : How AI Might Reverse Web Design : I watched an open-source agent book flights by navigating airline websites, extracting data from visual chaos. If AI thrives on pure text, the future of the web might look exactly like it started : simple text, but for robots instead of humans. The better AI performs, the fewer websites we’ll visit.
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Circular Financing : Does Nvidia’s $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble? : Nvidia’s vendor financing totals $110B in direct investments plus $15B+ in GPU-backed debt, 2.8x larger relative to revenue than Lucent’s exposure in 2000. But unlike the telecom bubble, Nvidia’s top customers generated $451B in operating cash flow in 2024. The merry-go-round has paying riders.
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The Scaling Wall Was A Mirage : Gemini 3 launched with the same parameter count as Gemini 2.5 but achieved massive performance improvements, breaking 1500 Elo on LMArena. Oriol Vinyals credited improving pre-training & post-training, with no walls in sight. Nvidia’s earnings confirmed Blackwell Ultra delivers 5x faster training than Hopper, translating scaling into capability.
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The Complete Guide to SaaS Pricing Strategy : The only three pricing strategies that matter : Maximization (revenue growth), Penetration (market share) & Skimming (profit maximization). Usage-based pricing experienced 29% longer sales cycles in 2023, but companies like Twilio achieved 130%+ net dollar retention by deliberately underselling initial contracts & expanding naturally.
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The Great Liquidity Shift : 71% of exit dollars in 2024 came from secondaries, not IPOs or M&A. With target ARR for IPO growing from $80M in 2008 to $250M today, secondaries have become a permanent fixture in venture capital markets. Venture is evolving to look more like private equity.
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2025 Predictions : I predicted the IPO market would rip, voice would become a dominant AI interface & the first $100M ARR company with 30 or fewer employees would emerge. Data center spending by hyperscalers would eclipse $125B, stablecoin supply would hit $300B & consolidation would define the Modern Data Stack.
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OpenAI’s $1 Trillion Infrastructure Spend : OpenAI committed $1.15T in infrastructure spending from 2025-2035 across Broadcom ($350B), Oracle ($300B), Microsoft ($250B), Nvidia ($100B), AMD ($90B), Amazon AWS ($38B) & CoreWeave ($22B). At OpenAI’s projected 70% gross margins, this implies nearly $1T in revenue by 2030.
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The AI Cost Curve Just Collapsed Again : DeepSeek released two breakthroughs : V3 slashing training costs by 90%+ & R1 delivering top-tier performance at 1/40th the cost. The innovation? Simply asking AI to show its work. The net : powerful smaller models with 25-40x reduction in price, plus explainability that could satisfy GDPR & enterprise auditability requirements.
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The Mirage in the Software Clouds : Public SaaS growth rates halved from 36% to 17% since 2023. It’s not that software spending is slowing, it’s that high-growth companies aren’t going public. The IPO drought since 2022 means public SaaS analyses no longer reflect the true state of software anymore.
I’m grateful for your readership & engagement throughout 2025. Thank you.