Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

→ WHAT IT COVERS Matthew Smith, founder of Cronometer Partners, presents well-level modeling of every US natural gas asset to argue that AI data center demand plus committed LNG exports totaling 35 BCF/day will exhaust US working gas storage by 2030, creating an unprecedented structural energy crisis with unbounded upside price risk. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Supply-Demand Gap:** US natural gas production can realistically grow to 128–132 BCF/day maximum, but committed LNG exports alone will reach 35...

→ WHAT IT COVERS John Kim, former General Catalyst fundraiser who helped build the firm into a multi-billion dollar operation and now leads capital formation at Lila Sciences, breaks down the mechanics of raising capital — covering trust-building frameworks, the three laws of fundraising, and how consensus moves large institutional pools of money. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Persuasion Formula:** Persuasion equals desire minus fear, where desire encompasses far more than financial greed — it includes...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jeremy Giffon, investor and frequent collaborator with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, covers eighteen months of observations from hundreds of conversations with founders and capital allocators in private markets. Topics span cap table strategy, the rise of "poster class" influence over billionaires, SaaS structural decline, the shift from debt-driven to equity-driven finance culture, and how to evaluate emerging fund managers.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Etched founders Gavin Huberti and Rob Walken explain how they built a transformer-specific AI inference chip on the first tape-out attempt, raising $800M with over $1B in customer demand. They detail their low-voltage inference architecture, cluster-scale memory interconnects, and the vertical integration strategy behind their full rack-scale inference product launched in 2023.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Vlad Barbalat, CIO of Liberty Mutual Investments, explains how the firm deploys $120 billion in permanent insurance capital across private equity, direct lending, real estate, energy, and infrastructure. He covers the mutual insurance structure's investment advantages, portfolio construction philosophy, AI's impact on asset valuations, and how growing up in Soviet Moldova shaped his approach to risk-taking and capital allocation.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Kareem Amin, cofounder and CEO of Clay — a go-to-market software company valued at over $4 billion — shares the unconventional principles behind Clay's growth, including three core values (truth, justice, courage), risk-taking philosophy, and why creating from wholeness rather than lack produces better outcomes. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Three-decision framework:** Clay's entire company strategy flows from three core assumptions: give go-to-market teams the most powerful tool rather...

→ WHAT IT COVERS WhaleRock Capital founder Alex Sacerdote explains his three-part investment framework — S-curves, competitive advantage, and underappreciated earnings power — applied across AI infrastructure, foundational models, and enterprise software. He details his highest-conviction position in Anthropic at a $180B valuation, the decommoditization of hardware, and why enterprise software faces structural headwinds from AI disruption.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi outlines how Uber positions itself as the demand aggregator in an autonomous vehicle world, explains the company's path to $10B+ free cash flow, and details expansion into hotels, drones, and a super-app model built around 50 million Uber One members growing 50% annually. → KEY INSIGHTS - **AV Supply Aggregation:** Uber's competitive moat in autonomous vehicles is supply aggregation, not technology ownership.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Dan Loeb, founder of Third Point managing $25B across equities, credit, and insurance, reflects on 30 years of investing evolution — from event-driven deep value in 1995 to quality investing, thematic tech, and a $7B CLO business — while sharing his current conviction that AI-related semiconductors remain the most attractive sector despite the SOX index rising 40%.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Darren Farber, managing partner of Albion River defense investment firm, analyzes the Iranian military contingency, U.S. magazine depth deficiencies, China's structural illegitimacy, and what Congress must change in procurement law to enable neo-prime defense companies to scale and replace legacy prime contractors over the next decade.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Gavin Baker, CIO of Atreides Management, analyzes the two physical constraints shaping AI's next phase: power (Watts) and semiconductor manufacturing capacity (Wafers). He covers TSMC's role in preventing an AI bubble, orbital compute as a long-term power solution, GPU disaggregation extending hardware lifespans, and where economic value accrues across the AI stack.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao explains how the company manages compute as its core strategic resource, covering the allocation framework across training, internal use, and customer demand, the economics behind frontier model pricing, the $9B to $30B ARR growth in one quarter, and why enterprise returns to frontier intelligence continue accelerating rather than plateauing.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky traces his path from industrial design training at RISD through the pandemic crisis that forced him into founder mode, explaining how those same principles now apply to AI-era company building, product market fit methodology, recruiting strategy, and shifting from adulation-driven to craft-driven motivation.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Paul Tudor Jones reflects on 50 years of macro trading with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, covering the structural differences between trading and investing, current equity market overvaluation at 252% of GDP, AI safety risks, the mechanics of identifying major market moves, and how kindness and philanthropy shape a meaningful life beyond markets. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Trading vs. Investing Identity:** Jones envies long-term investors like Buffett but acknowledges his fund maintains a -0.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Dylan Patel of Semianalysis details how AI token demand is growing faster than infrastructure can supply it, using Semianalysis's own spending trajectory from tens of thousands to $7M annually as a case study, while mapping semiconductor bottlenecks in memory, logic, and fab equipment that constrain scaling through 2028. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Token spend as competitive moat:** Enterprise AI contracts with Anthropic now include rate limit increases as a strategic asset.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Biotech investor Alex Karnal outlines a five-layer "health stack" framework covering lipid optimization, cardiometabolic health, neurocognitive health, inflammation, and blood pressure. He argues that existing medicines — GLP-1 agonists, PCSK9 inhibitors, and anti-amyloid therapies — can already extend human lifespan by a decade if deployed proactively, and that AI-driven drug discovery will compress development timelines from years to months.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Scott Nolan — SpaceX early engineer, Founders Fund investor for 12+ years — explains his framework for identifying underappreciated problems, the contrarian investment philosophy behind Founders Fund's biggest wins, and why he left investing to build General Matter, a startup rebuilding US uranium enrichment capacity that vanished entirely after the 1990s.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Alan Waxman of Sixth Street traces the U.S. financial system through three regulatory eras—Glass-Steagall (1933), its 1999 repeal, and post-2008 Basel III reforms—to explain how private credit grew from $500B to $2T, why the "factory model" of capital raising now dominates, and what asset-liability mismatches mean for markets today. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Three-System Framework:** U.S.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sergey Levine, cofounder of Physical Intelligence, explains why building general-purpose robotic foundation models — systems that control any robot for any task — is more tractable than narrow domain-specific approaches, drawing direct parallels to how large language models outcompeted specialized NLP systems by leveraging broad, weakly-labeled data at scale.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Mitchell Green, founder of LeadEdge Capital, details the systematic investment machine he built over 15 years with partners Brian and Nima — covering their 9,000 annual cold calls, eight-point company criteria, LP network of 800 executives, and disciplined focus on 2–2.25x net returns across 20-position funds. → KEY INSIGHTS - **LP Network as Competitive Moat:** LeadEdge's 800 LPs are 95% senior executives and entrepreneurs — not institutions — deployed across the full...