Tag: technology

Categories
Aging AI Business Living

The Being Phase

There is a metric making the rounds in technology investing circles that is, on its face, about market share and revenue concentration. Alex Sacerdote of Whale Rock Capital calls it the New Rule of 40 for AI. The formula is simple: take the percentage of a company’s sales derived from AI, add its percentage market share in that AI category, and if the sum reaches 40, you have a winner. Celestica, a company most people have never heard of, scores extraordinarily well. It owns somewhere between half and sixty percent of the cloud Ethernet white-box switch market. NVIDIA doesn’t need a formula. It simply is what it is.

Sacerdote designed the metric to cut through a specific kind of noise — the companies claiming AI exposure they don’t actually have, the giants whose AI revenue hovers at one or two percent of their base while their press releases suggest otherwise. The framework is a detector. It finds the companies that have stopped becoming AI infrastructure and started simply being it.

I found myself less interested in the companies than in that distinction.

I spent years at Visa watching a network that had long since crossed that threshold. By the time I arrived, Visa wasn’t becoming the global payments infrastructure. It was the global payments infrastructure. The work was real — fraud detection, modeling, the daily labor of keeping something enormous running — but the existential question had been settled before I got there. The network existed. Merchants accepted it because cardholders carried it. Cardholders carried it because merchants accepted it. That loop had been closing for decades. We were custodians of a fait accompli.

There’s a particular feeling to working inside something that has already won. It’s not complacency exactly. The problems are genuine and the stakes are high. But the uncertainty has a different quality — it’s operational uncertainty, not existential uncertainty. You’re not asking whether the thing will survive. You’re asking how to run it well.

I didn’t have language for that distinction then. Sacerdote’s metric gives me some. The companies that score highest on his New Rule of 40 have resolved their existential question. They’re not fighting for position. They’re administering a position already held.

The question that has followed me out of that career, and out of several decades of watching technology cycles turn, is simpler and more personal than any investment framework.

When did I cross that line myself?

I have been writing at sjl.us since 2001. That’s not a boast — it’s a data point. Twenty-five years of thinking out loud, of ideas arriving rather than being argued, of the specific memory as structural anchor. The blog is not becoming anything. It is what it is: a record of a mind moving through time, accumulated into something that has its own weight and shape.

The book on payments systems exists. The career at Visa exists. The photographs exist. The train journeys exist. The years in Dayton exist, and the years on the Peninsula, and the particular way the light falls on the California coast at Pescadero in the late afternoon — when the fog is still offshore and the hills are improbably green and everything goes briefly, completely quiet, as if the world is deciding whether to continue.

These are not things I am building toward. They are things I am.

Sacerdote would say I have high market share in a specific category. The category is small — one person, one particular configuration of experience and attention and accumulated knowing — but the share is essentially total. There is no competitor for the position of having lived this particular life. The moat is absolute. The switching costs are infinite.

I used to find that thought melancholy. The narrowing as loss. The aperture closing on what remains.

I’m not sure I find it melancholy anymore.

The L-Curve, Sacerdote says, is a long flatline followed by a vertical explosion. The tinkering phase, then the moment of lift. He means it as a description of demand curves for technology infrastructure. But I recognize the shape from somewhere closer. The long middle of a life, building and becoming, and then the morning you wake up and realize the building is substantially done. What remains is the being.

That’s not an ending. It’s a different kind of beginning.

Sacerdote’s metric will eventually stop working. All frameworks do. The AI infrastructure cycle will mature, the L-Curves will flatten, and some new measure will emerge to find the next thing that is just beginning to become what it will be. That’s the nature of markets. The detector has to change as the signal changes.

But there’s a complication worth naming. Analysts at Citadel Securities published a note recently observing that even the most powerful technologies must pass through the prosaic discipline of cost curves, capacity constraints, and marginal returns. Token bills are arriving unexpectedly. Compute is scarce. The vision of AI as ubiquitous, frictionless, and immediate is colliding with physical reality. Their conclusion: asset prices will periodically be forced to reconcile ambition with physical constraint.

That’s not a refutation of Sacerdote. It’s a reminder that feeling like you’ve arrived and having actually arrived are different things. The being phase has to be load-tested. The position has to hold under pressure.

I think about the fiber optics Corning is laying into the massive data center clusters — ultra-thin, bendable, carrying more light than anything that came before. The cable doesn’t know it’s infrastructure. It just carries what it’s given, at the speed it’s capable of, across whatever distance is required. It doesn’t matter what the cable believes about itself. What matters is whether the light actually moves.

That seems right to me. You become what you are over a long time, largely without noticing. And then one day someone builds a metric that accidentally describes your life, and you recognize yourself in it, and you think: yes. That’s the shape of it. High concentration. High share. A moat that deepened while you were looking elsewhere.

But the moat still has to hold.

The being phase, it turns out, is not the end of something. It’s the proof that something was built. And the daily question — for companies, for infrastructure, for a person in his late seventies still writing, still paying attention — is whether what was built is actually load-bearing.

You don’t get to stop finding out.

Categories
Aircraft History

The Merlin

There is a sound that men who heard it never forgot. Not the roar exactly, though it roared. Something beneath the roar — a note, almost musical, that settled into the chest and stayed there. Four Rolls-Royce Merlins at full throttle on a Lancaster climbing out of Lincolnshire in the dark, and sixty years later old men would close their eyes trying to describe it and find they couldn’t, not quite, which was itself a kind of description.

The engine was a miracle of the wrong era. Liquid-cooled, sixty degrees of vee, twenty-seven liters of displacement producing over a thousand horsepower from something you could fit in a large kitchen. Rolls-Royce had been making engines since 1906, had learned things about metallurgy and tolerance and the behavior of superheated gases under compression that couldn’t be written down, only accumulated, passed hand to hand through decades of making things that had to work when nothing could be allowed to fail. The Merlin was the distillation of all of it.

And then — this is the part that stops you — they couldn’t build enough of them.

Britain in 1940 was a country running on nerve. The factories were working. The workers were willing. But the math was brutal and the math didn’t care about willingness. So someone made a phone call to Detroit. To Packard. A company that had spent thirty years building luxury automobiles for American industrialists, cars with interiors like drawing rooms on wheels, cars that announced their owners had arrived at exactly the place they had always intended to be. Packard looked at the Merlin blueprints, converted the tolerances from imperial to metric and back again, retooled their entire production line, and started building the engine that would power the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, and the P-51 Mustang.

Think about what that required. Not just the engineering, though the engineering was extraordinary. The belief required. That these tolerances mattered. That this particular arrangement of pistons and supercharger vanes and coolant passages was worth the disruption of an entire industrial operation. Packard’s engineers didn’t question the design. The design had already proven itself.

You built the Merlin because the Merlin worked.

The question — the one that takes longer to arrive — is what you do when the thing the Merlin is for doesn’t.

Arthur Harris believed.

That is the first thing to understand about him, and maybe the last. He believed in the bomber the way certain people believe in a technology so new and so powerful that the believing itself feels like vision. Strategic bombing would break Germany. Not assist in breaking Germany. Not contribute to a larger effort that would break Germany. Would, by itself, through the systematic destruction of German cities and the German will to continue, end the war. Harris had held this view before the war began and he held it after the evidence came in and he held it, unmodified, until he died in 1984.

This is not stupidity. The most costly certainties never are. Harris was shrewd, forceful, organizationally gifted, genuinely courageous in the sense that he was willing to send men to die for what he believed and knew he was sending them. He understood logistics, understood morale, understood the brutal arithmetic of attrition. What he could not do — what the structure of his certainty would not permit — was update.

The evidence arrived slowly enough that you could always explain it away. German war production increased through 1943, then through 1944, even as the bombers came night after night. The factories dispersed. The workers adapted. The morale that was supposed to crack showed instead a remarkable tendency to consolidate under pressure, the way populations sometimes do when the threat comes from the sky and cannot be reasoned with. The theorists had a model of human psychology that turned out to be wrong, and the model’s wrongness kept arriving in the data, and Harris kept flying.

Fifty-five thousand men.

Picture Harris alone. The commander in the early morning after the casualty reports come in, before the day’s work begins again. The loneliness of a certainty that has become structural — no longer a belief you hold but a belief that holds you, because the alternative is not just being wrong but having been wrong, which means all those boys went down over the Ruhr for a theory, which is a weight no living person can carry and continue to function. So you don’t revise. You recommit. You ask for more aircraft, more crews, more nights.

You build more Merlins.

This is the mechanism. Not malice. Not indifference. The certainty becomes self-protective, which means it becomes invisible, which means it becomes the water you swim in rather than a position you hold. Harris stopped being a man with a theory about bombing and became a man for whom bombing was the answer to every question, including the question of whether bombing was working.

The Lancaster crews knew something was wrong before Harris did. You could see it in the casualty rates, which they could calculate as well as anyone — better, actually, because they were doing the calculating with their own lives as the variable. Forty-four percent didn’t survive their tours. They knew this. They flew anyway, because courage doesn’t require certainty about the strategic framework, only about the man beside you and the mission tonight.

The Merlin started and you went.

The Merlin outlasted the theory. It kept flying for decades after the war, in civilian aircraft, in racing planes, in the occasional restored Lancaster that still tours airshows in Britain, where crowds gather on summer afternoons to watch it pass and hear, carried on the wind, that sound. The note beneath the roar. The thing that settles in the chest.

Beautiful, people say, watching it go.

And it is. It genuinely is.

What they couldn’t know — what none of them could know — was that the engine was the most reliable thing in the entire enterprise.

Categories
Business Storytelling

The Closed Laptop

The conference rooms all look the same after a while. Same long table. Same chairs that cost more than they should. Same window with the same view of the same parking lot baking in the same California sun. You stop seeing them. You develop a kind of practiced receptivity, a professional openness that is also, if you are honest, a professional distance. You have heard the story before. You know where you are in the presentation without looking at the slide number.

Until the day someone sits down across from you and closes their laptop and says: can I just tell you our story?

Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has spent forty years learning to tell the difference between founders who can build and founders who can make you believe. The skill he overweights now, he’ll tell you plainly, isn’t technical. It’s selling. Recruiting, fundraising, convincing customers, inspiring teams. “Actually being able to write code,” he said recently, “is probably not a big deal anymore.” What matters is whether you can cross the distance between your vision and someone else’s imagination and deposit something true and alive on the other side.

Most founders never figure this out. They build the deck instead. They pull the projector cable from the drawer — there is always a drawer, there is always a cable — and the room fills with blue light and bullet points and the comfortable geometry of a prepared presentation, and what never happens is the thing that needed to happen.

But there was this one morning.

He came in with his cofounder in the flat gray light that Silicon Valley gets in February, when the rain has stopped but the sky hasn’t decided what it wants to be. They were early. He set his bag down and sat directly across from me — not at the presenter’s angle, not with one eye already calculating the distance to the screen — directly across, the way you sit with someone you already know, or intend to. Neither of them reached for the cable in the drawer.

He looked at me with the particular steadiness of a person who has decided not to manage the moment.

Can I just tell you our story?

I want to be honest about what happened next, which is that I felt something shift before he said another word. Not a decision exactly. More like the precondition for a decision, the ground tilting slightly in a direction I hadn’t chosen. I was, in some way I couldn’t have defended rationally at the time, already with him. And I knew it, and I knew it was not an entirely reasonable response to a man who had been in the room for less than a minute, and I felt it anyway.

The laptop stayed closed for the next twenty minutes. No transitions. No bullet points. No hockey stick arcing toward a number reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Just his voice and what he believed and the quality of attention you give a person when there is nothing else in the room to look at.

The deck came later. It was beautiful. By then it didn’t need to be anything except true.

Storytelling is not a skill in the way that financial modeling is a skill. It is older than that by such a margin that the comparison almost doesn’t make sense. What we are really talking about is the oldest technology human beings possess — a person in a room, a voice, an image made of nothing but words and the willingness to believe in them. It was doing its work around fires forty thousand years before the first conference room was built, and it has never once required a projector.

What the great storytellers understand, and what the best founders understand in the same unspoken way, is that a story is not a transfer of information. It is a transfer of inner states. When it works — when it really works — something that existed inside one person gets reconstructed inside another, and the listener emerges changed. Not persuaded. Not informed. Changed. These are different experiences, and only one of them makes a person willing to bet their career on something that doesn’t exist yet.

The deck puts glass between the teller and that possibility. The founder stands at the edge of the blue light pointing at things, and the room evaluates the things, and what never happens is the transfer. Everyone files out having formed opinions about the slides rather than beliefs about the person. Opinions and beliefs are not the same.

Wilson understands this even if he wouldn’t use these words. When he says the skill is selling, what he means underneath the selling is: can this person walk into a room and make other people inhabit their vision? Not convince them. Inhabit. The difference is the difference between reading about a place and being there. One of them changes how you act. The other one you forget on the drive home.

The projector cable is still in the drawer. Someone will pull it out next week, and the room will fill with blue light, and another founder will stand at the edge of it pointing at things, hoping that the right font and the right graph will do the work that only a human being, exposed and without props, can actually do.

It won’t. It never does.

The CEO who closed his laptop had been carrying a story he believed in, and he knew the story was the thing, not the packaging around it. He understood that the oldest container is also the most powerful one. His own voice. A room. Someone willing to listen.

I was ready to work with him before he said another word.

Categories
AI Blogs/Weblogs Living Menlo Park

The Foothills

It was later in his illness. Someone had set up a folding table in the garage and Chris was sitting at it in a folding chair, working through a stack of photographs. Signing them, one by one, telling me the story inside each one as it came up — where he’d been, what was happening just outside the frame, what he’d seen in the viewfinder that made him press the shutter at that exact moment and not a half second later. The garage was quiet. Outside, Menlo Park was doing whatever Menlo Park does on an ordinary afternoon. In here, a man was accounting for his life in pictures and I was standing there holding a camera, not quite sure what I was witnessing.

I made a photograph of him.

It’s at the top of his Wikipedia entry now. That’s how the world knows his face — a picture I made of him making sense of his pictures, in a folding chair, near the end. I don’t know what to do with that except carry it.

Chris Gulker had been a photographer long before he was anything else. Staff photographer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer. Published in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. He had the eye first. Everything else — the virtual newsrooms, the blogrolls, the hacked-together color systems that dragged newspapers into the digital age — all of it came from the same instinct: look carefully, see what’s actually there, build toward what you see.

When I first met him he had just gotten a Leica M8. He talked about it the way he talked about everything he loved, which is to say with specificity and without apology.

He had driven an Audi TT. He had a Leica M8. He was not a man who made concessions to the ordinary.

He had glioblastoma. Diagnosed in 2006. Surgery, radiation, the whole negotiation with a disease that doesn’t actually negotiate. He knew the terms and he kept going — kept shooting, kept writing at gulker.com, kept thinking out loud about what was coming next, as if the tumor were an inconvenience and the future were the point.

He walked when he could walk. He talked when he could talk.

He died in October 2010. He was fifty-nine.

Twice a week in those last two years I’d put Lily in the car and drive over to his house. Lily was small and opinionated and she understood the trip as hers. We’d pick Chris up after breakfast, when the morning was still cool, and do the loop — one mile, flat, because flat was what worked. Then we’d come back to find Linda moving through the house, Chris’s wife of nearly thirty years, the still point of everything that was happening to them. Sometimes she’d join us and the conversation would open into something more alive, the kind of talk where someone says something offhand and suddenly everyone is leaning forward.

One of those mornings the three of us decided to start a local blog for Menlo Park. Linda would write and edit. Chris would shoot. We called it InMenlo.com.

When Linda wrote Chris’s obituary, that’s where she published it.

People talk about spending time with the dying as a kind of grace extended downward. It wasn’t like that. Those mornings were a gift — the ideas, the talk, the way Chris described what was coming as if he could already see it clearly from wherever he was standing. I left those visits more alive than I arrived. That’s the debt I carry. Not grief exactly, though there’s grief. More like an obligation to keep paying attention to the future he spent his life building toward.

Last month a man named Demis Hassabis closed a two-hour technology showcase in Mountain View — twenty minutes from where Chris and I used to walk — and said seven words I haven’t been able to put down since: We are at the foothills of the singularity. The audience applauded. Then everyone went home.

I keep thinking Chris would have had something to say about that.

Not the singularity part, necessarily — that word carries a slightly rapturous charge, too certain of its own prophecy. But the foothills part. The careful humility of it. The acknowledgment that what we can see from here — AI systems autonomously building operating systems, models that predicted a hurricane’s landfall and saved lives — all of it is still just approach terrain. The mountain is what comes after.

Chris spent his whole career in the foothills of things. Slightly ahead of the moment, always building infrastructure for a future that hadn’t arrived yet, always explaining to people who weren’t sure they wanted to know. He pioneered the blogroll. Built one of the first online newspapers. Hacked color into the San Francisco Examiner with Macintoshes and ingenuity when the system said it couldn’t be done. He was the wrong man for the present tense. He belonged to the next sentence.

He had the photographer’s instinct underneath all of it — the knowledge that you have to look carefully, that the light is always changing, that if you wait too long the moment is gone. He put the Leica to his eye and he saw. He put his hands on a keyboard and he built what he saw toward.

Lily is gone now too. She outlasted Chris, which felt right — she was stubborn and she loved the route.

I still think about those mornings. The cool air, the flat mile, Lily pulling us both forward. The way the real conversation started when we got back. The way Linda might appear and the whole thing would open into something none of us had planned. The way Chris talked about what was coming — not as speculation but as something he could already see, the way a photographer sees the shot before he raises the camera.

He always knew something was coming. He had a gift for the future tense I’ve never quite encountered in anyone else — and a photographer’s understanding that the future, like light, doesn’t wait.

I wonder what he’d make of the foothills. I think he’d already have the Leica out. And I know we’d still be talking about it.

Categories
AI Business IBM Management

Making It Up As We Went Along

There was a building along Route 270 in Gaithersburg, Maryland where people kept secrets for a living. Not the cloak and dagger kind. The corporate kind, which in its own way requires just as much discipline. The IBM Washington Systems Center occupied a two-story modern building that looked, from the outside, like any other outpost of late twentieth century American business. Inside it was something else. It was where IBM sent its hardest problems, and where the largest IBM customers in the world — the ones whose names you would recognize immediately — sent their most urgent ones back.

I worked there as a manager. But before I was a manager there, I was a hire. And before I was a hire, I was like every other IBM professional on the outside of a particular line — a line I didn’t fully understand until I crossed it.

At IBM there was a protocol so embedded in the culture it had almost ceased to be a rule and become something closer to a religious observance. New products were not discussed until they were announced. Not hinted at. Not alluded to. Not whispered about with a favored customer over lunch. The announcement came in the form of something called a Blue Letter — a formal communication from senior leadership that functioned as the official moment a product entered the world. Before the Blue Letter, the product did not exist in any conversation you were permitted to have. After it, you could talk about nothing else.

Violation was not a career setback. It was a firing offense. Full stop.

That clarity had a kind of elegance to it. You didn’t have to calibrate how much you could say or navigate gray areas. The line was absolute. And because it was absolute, and because everyone knew the consequence of crossing it, the culture enforced itself. You didn’t need surveillance. You needed people to understand the stakes, and they did.

What I didn’t understand, from the outside, was what that line was doing to my imagination.

When you can’t see the roadmap — when the strategy and the unannounced products and the long arc of where the company is going are all behind a wall you have no access to — you don’t experience that as absence. You experience it as depth. The things you don’t know feel like they must be there for a reason. The gaps in the announced picture feel like the gaps in a great iceberg — what’s visible is impressive, but what’s below the surface must be more impressive still.

I had faith in IBM’s strategic intelligence the way you have faith in things you can’t fully see. And faith, uncontradicted by evidence, tends toward beauty. The hidden roadmap wasn’t just unknown — it was, in my imagination, a thing of coherence and intention and vision. It had to be. The alternative was too unsettling to consider.

Then I got hired into the Washington Systems Center and crossed the line.

There was no single moment of disillusionment. No specific product that shattered the dream, no strategy document that read like a disappointment. It was more like a gradual adjustment of the eyes — the way they adapt when you move from bright sunlight into a room lit quite differently than you expected. The room isn’t dark. It’s just not what you anticipated. And once your eyes adjust you can see perfectly well, but you can never quite recover the image you had of the room before you entered it.

The reality on the inside was messier than the dream on the outside. More improvised. More human. We were, in ways I hadn’t anticipated, almost making it up as we went along. Not carelessly — the people at WSC were extraordinary, the work was serious, the commitment was real. But the beautiful coherent roadmap I had constructed in my imagination from the outside bore only a partial resemblance to the actual thing. Strategy, it turned out, looked different up close. Less like architecture. More like weather.

I absorbed this alone. Nobody sat me down and named what I was experiencing. Nobody had the conversation with me that I would later learn to have with others. I found my way through it by degrees, the way you find your way through most things that don’t come with instructions.

What came out the other side wasn’t cynicism. It was something more useful — a clearer eye, a more grounded relationship to the institution I was part of. The faith hadn’t been wrong exactly. It had just been innocent. And innocence, once lost, can’t be recovered. But what replaces it, if you’re lucky, is something steadier.

Years later I was the manager. And I was hiring IBMers — good ones, experienced ones, people who had spent serious careers on the other side of the blue line. They knew the products cold. They knew the customers. They knew how to work. What they didn’t know, couldn’t know, was what waited for them on the inside of the wall they were about to cross.

I knew it. Because I had been them.

There is a particular expression that crosses a person’s face when the actual roadmap becomes visible for the first time. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s more like a subtle recalibration — a slight stillness, a momentary adjustment behind the eyes. The person in front of you is doing quiet interior work, reconciling what they imagined with what they’re now seeing. The gap between those two things is doing something to them, and they’re not sure yet what to do with it.

I learned to watch for that expression. And when I saw it I knew what was coming if I didn’t get ahead of it.

The danger wasn’t disappointment. Disappointment is temporary, and smart people move through it. The danger was what disappointment hardens into when it isn’t named and worked through — a corrosive cynicism that poisons not just the person carrying it but everyone around them. A talented IBMer who had invested a career in faith, discovered the faith was misplaced, and decided the whole enterprise was therefore hollow — that person could do real damage to a team. I had seen it happen, or the early stages of it, which was enough.

So I developed what I came to think of as the god is dead conversation.

The name came from Nietzsche, though the application was strictly practical. What Nietzsche meant — or one of the things he meant — was that when the organizing faith of a civilization collapses, the collapse doesn’t leave nothing. It leaves a vacancy that has to be filled with something else, something built rather than inherited. The god is dead conversation was about helping someone through that vacancy quickly, before they filled it with the wrong thing.

It wasn’t a long conversation. It didn’t need to be. What it needed to be was honest, and direct, and delivered before the cynicism had time to set.

I would tell them what I saw happening. I would tell them it was normal, expected, that everyone who crossed this particular line felt some version of it. I would tell them the dream they’d carried on the outside wasn’t foolish — it was a reasonable response to incomplete information, and the information had been incomplete by design, and the design had served real purposes. None of that made them naive. It made them human.

And then I would tell them what I’d learned on my own, without anyone to guide me through it. That the messiness on the inside wasn’t a failure of IBM’s intelligence or intention. It was just what strategy actually looks like when you’re close enough to see the seams. Every institution looks more coherent from the outside than it does from the inside. That’s not a scandal. That’s organizational life.

The conversations were tricky. There was real care required. You were asking someone to grieve something — the beautiful imagined roadmap, the faith in a hidden coherence — without tipping them into bitterness about what replaced it. You were trying to accelerate a process that, left alone, might drag on for months and quietly corrode their effectiveness. And you were doing it while also being their manager, which meant you needed them functional and engaged on the other side of the conversation, not just unburdened.

What I had going for me was credibility. I wasn’t delivering a message from outside the experience. I had made the same crossing. I knew the specific texture of what they were feeling because I had felt it myself — the diffuse quality of it, the absence of a single dramatic moment, the gradual adjustment of the eyes. When I told them I understood what was happening to them, I actually did. I think they could tell.

Trial and error had taught me the shape of it. What didn’t work I had found out the hard way, at some cost, early on. What I arrived at had been load tested by real people in real situations. It wasn’t a framework from a leadership seminar. It was something I owned completely, which meant I could adapt it in the moment rather than execute a script.

Most of them came through it well. Better than well, actually.

What I hadn’t fully anticipated — though in retrospect it makes complete sense — was what replaced the faith once it was gone. It wasn’t the steadier, clearer-eyed pragmatism I had found my way to alone. It was something more potent than that. Something that surprised me the first time I saw it and then became one of the things I quietly counted on.

They came out the other side feeling superior.

Not arrogant. Not dismissive of colleagues still on the outside. But quietly, privately elevated — because they were now keepers of the secrets they had once only believed in. The blue line that had shaped their entire professional identity, that had defined the boundary of what they could know and say and imagine, was now behind them. They were on the inside. They had access. They had been trusted with the actual roadmap, the real strategy, the unannounced products that the rest of the world was still constructing faith-based pictures of.

The believer had become the keeper. And keeping, it turned out, was a more powerful identity than believing. The believer is passive — sustained by what they imagine. The keeper is active, responsible, trusted. They carry something real rather than something projected.

It solved my practical problem neatly, though that wasn’t why it moved me. What moved me was watching people find their footing on the other side of a genuine loss and discover that the ground there was solid — different from what they’d imagined, but solid. They hadn’t just survived the crossing. They’d been changed by it in a way that made them more valuable, more grounded, more fully present to the actual work.

Which was, I suppose, what the god is dead conversation had been for all along.

I think about that blue line often these days.

We are living through a moment when artificial intelligence is advancing faster than most people can track, and the organizations building it — the labs, the research teams, the companies placing enormous bets on where this technology is going — have their own version of the wall. Not identical to IBM’s. The competitive and legal architecture is different. The culture is different. But the basic structure is the same: there is what has been announced, and there is everything else, and most people are working entirely from the announced side.

Which means most people are doing what I did before I crossed the line at WSC. They are filling the gaps with faith. And faith, uncontradicted by evidence, tends toward beauty.

The unrevealed AI roadmap looks, from the outside, like a thing of coherence and intention. The capabilities that haven’t been announced yet must be more impressive than the ones that have. The strategy must be more considered than what’s visible. The gaps in the public picture feel like depth rather than uncertainty — like the part of the iceberg below the surface, which must be vast because the part above is already remarkable.

I am not saying this faith is wrong. I held the same faith about IBM and it wasn’t wrong exactly — it was innocent. The people constructing faith-based pictures of where AI is going are doing a reasonable thing with incomplete information. The information is incomplete partly by design, for reasons that make competitive and strategic sense, just as IBM’s secrecy made sense. None of that makes the faith naive.

But I’ve been inside enough walls to know what the inside tends to look like. And I think it’s worth saying, clearly and without cynicism, that the reality is probably messier than the dream. More improvised. More uncertain. More human. The people building these systems are extraordinary — the work is serious, the commitment is real — but they are also, in ways that might surprise you, almost making it up as they go along. Not carelessly. But without the complete map that the outside imagines must exist somewhere, fully drawn, waiting to be revealed.

Strategy, up close, looks less like architecture and more like weather.

This isn’t a counsel of despair. It’s almost the opposite.

The IBMers who crossed the line and survived the god is dead conversation didn’t end up with less than they started with. They ended up with more — a clearer eye, a more grounded relationship to the institution, a more useful kind of engagement with the actual work. The faith they lost was the innocent kind. What replaced it was steadier and more durable.

I suspect something similar is available to anyone willing to look at the AI moment with clear eyes. Not the disappointed cynicism of someone who expected a beautiful coherent roadmap and found a human institution instead. Not the breathless faith of someone still on the outside of the wall, filling gaps with generous assumptions. Something in between — harder to sustain, more honest, ultimately more useful.

The technology is real. The progress is real. The stakes are real. None of that requires the roadmap to be a thing of beauty. It just requires it to be worked on seriously by people who understand what they don’t yet know — which, from everything I can observe, it is.

What I couldn’t give those IBMers, and what nobody can give you, is the experience of crossing the line yourself. The god is dead conversation only works because the crossing has already happened — because the person sitting across from you has already seen the actual roadmap and is already processing the gap between what they imagined and what they found. You can’t have the conversation in advance. The disillusionment has to be real before it can be worked through.

Most of us will never cross the line into the AI labs. We’ll stay on the outside of the wall, working from the announced picture, filling the gaps as best we can. That’s not a failure — it’s just the condition most of us are in, the same condition those IBMers were in for their entire careers before I hired them.

But knowing the wall exists, and knowing what walls do to imagination, seems like it ought to change something about how we hold our faith. Not abandon it. Just hold it a little more lightly. Stay curious about the seams. Remain open to the possibility that the most important thing about the unrevealed roadmap isn’t what’s in it — but what we’ve projected onto it.

The blue line is still there. Most of us are still on the outside of it.

And the hidden roadmap still looks, from here, like a thing of beauty.

Categories
AI Silicon Valley Technology

The View from the Edge

“Living on the edge” usually means you’re taking risks. One of the guests on the More or Less podcast used it the other way: as a diagnosis. A description of people who’ve lost their depth perception.

From where they sit, it looks like everyone is moving. The feeds are full of demos. The group chats debate which model won the week. Colleagues are building agents that book their dentist appointments and summarize their email while they sleep. David Sparks is selling a Robot Assistant Field Guide. The frontier feels like the present tense — not where things are heading, but where things already are.

When everyone around you has already crossed a threshold, you stop being able to see the threshold. You mistake the edge for the center.

The primary point — that the tech community wildly overestimates how much ordinary people want AI in their lives — lands harder when you hold it against that image. It’s not that the industry is wrong about the technology. It’s that it has miscalibrated the desire. Most people aren’t trying to optimize their Tuesday. They’re just trying to get through it. An always-on personal agent isn’t a solution to a problem they’re carrying.

Think about the woman in the Safeway parking lot, sitting in her car for three minutes before going in, scrolling back through her texts to find the thing her husband asked her to pick up. Egg product and cheddar cheese. She finds it, pockets her phone, and goes inside. The whole problem — the forgetting, the retrieval, the solution — lasted less time than it takes to read about it. She didn’t need an agent. She needed three minutes and a text thread she already had.

The edge distorts in a specific way: it makes appetite look like inevitability. From out there, adoption feels like a question of when, not whether. But whether is a real question. Most technology that could be woven into daily life never is — not because people couldn’t learn it, but because they didn’t want what it offered badly enough to bother.

The view from the edge is intoxicating. Everything looks like signal. But the middle is where most people live, and from there the signal looks a lot more like noise.

Which is why WWDC matters more than any model release this year. Apple doesn’t sell to people living on the edge. It sells to people who just want their phone to work. If Apple makes AI invisible enough — tucked into the camera, the keyboard, the thing that finds your photos — it stops being something you adopt and becomes something you already have. That’s a different motion entirely. Not convincing people they want AI. Delivering it before the question occurs to them.

Whether Apple can actually pull that off is a separate argument. But the watershed, if it comes, won’t look like a frontier crossing. It’ll look like a Tuesday that went slightly smoother than usual. Most people won’t even notice the edge they just walked past.

We will find out in a week or so.

Categories
AI

The Coach Who Wouldn’t Change

In 1975, a twenty-four-year-old Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, captured a black-and-white image at 0.01 megapixels, and took twenty-three seconds to record a single photograph to a cassette tape. Sasson showed it to his managers. Their response, as he later recalled, was essentially: that’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.

Kodak was not a stupid company. It was a dominant one. At its peak it held 90 percent of the American film market and 85 percent of camera sales. Film was not just a product line — it was the entire economic architecture of the company. Processing fees, paper, chemicals, the retail relationships built around the assumption that photographs needed to be developed. Digital threatened all of it simultaneously. So Kodak did what dominant companies do when confronted with a threat they can’t absorb into the existing model: they managed it. They ran studies. They filed patents. They made incremental moves. They protected the thing that was working rather than building the thing that would work next.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The digital camera had been sitting in their own archives for thirty-seven years.

Nokia’s version of the same story has a different texture. Where Kodak’s failure was about protecting a margin, Nokia’s was about identity. Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Nokia was mobile phones — not a major player, but the category itself. At its peak it held over 40 percent of the global handset market. The company had navigated a remarkable transformation earlier in its history, shedding paper mills and rubber boots to become a pure technology company. It knew how to change. It had done it before.

What it couldn’t do was change from a hardware company into a software one. When the iPhone arrived in 2007, Nokia’s internal assessments were, by most accounts, accurate. They understood the threat. They had touchscreen prototypes in development. What they couldn’t manage was the cultural distance between building phones that were superb physical objects — durable, reliable, made to exacting standards — and building phones that were primarily platforms for software that other people would write. The excellence that had made Nokia great was manufacturing excellence. The game was becoming something else, and manufacturing excellence was not only insufficient for the new game; it was actively in the way, because it oriented every decision toward the object rather than the experience.

Nokia’s market share collapsed from over 40 percent in 2007 to under 5 percent by 2013.

Andy Grove, who built Intel into the dominant force in semiconductors, called it plainly: only the paranoid survive. He meant it as a prescription. His successors treated it as a trophy.

Both stories have the clean shape of settled history. We know how they end. The verdict is in, the lesson is available, and it’s easy to read them now as cautionary tales about obvious mistakes made by people who should have known better.

This is the wrong way to read them.

Kodak and Nokia didn’t fail because they were blind. They failed because they were standing on a fulcrum — a moment when the old game and the new game were both plausibly real — and they chose the wrong side. At the time, that choice was not obviously wrong. Film was still enormously profitable. Nokia’s hardware was genuinely superior. The rational case for staying the course was real, and the people making it were not fools.

The reason the Kodak story is still told fifty years later is not that the mistake was obvious. It’s that it wasn’t — and they made it anyway.

Which brings us to now. Because there is a fulcrum in front of the enterprise software industry, and nobody knows yet which way it tips.

The companies in question — Salesforce, ServiceNow, and most of the SaaS category built over the last twenty years — were constructed on a simple and powerful premise: that businesses would pay recurring subscription fees for software that managed their customer relationships, their workflows, their data. The premise was correct. It produced some of the most durable businesses in the history of technology.

The threat AI poses to this model is not subtle. If an AI agent can handle a customer service interaction, manage a workflow, or synthesize a CRM record without a human touching licensed software to do it, then the per-seat subscription model — the economic engine underneath all of it — starts to look like film processing in 2003. Theoretically intact. Quietly at risk.

The responses of these companies have been instructive, and they’ve diverged.

Here is the honest position: we don’t know yet. The fulcrum is still in motion.

It’s possible that Salesforce’s Agentforce is the Kodak digital camera — the real thing, built by the right company, that gets buried under the weight of protecting what already works. It’s possible that the SaaS model is more durable than the threat suggests, that enterprises will pay for trusted platforms regardless of the underlying labor model, and that the companies racing hardest to cannibalize their own revenue streams are making a different kind of mistake. It’s possible that ServiceNow’s consistency is discipline, or that it’s the Nokia instinct to keep building the best version of the thing that used to win.

What the Kodak and Nokia stories actually teach — not the simplified version, but the harder one — is that the mistake is never visible in the moment it’s made. It only becomes visible later, when the fulcrum has tipped and the choice that was once defensible has become permanent.

The coach who wins five championships holds the philosophy and rotates the players. The coach who wins one holds the players and calls it philosophy.

The enterprise software companies standing at this moment have a version of the same decision. The ones who make it correctly will, in twenty years, be the ones we cite as examples of adaptation. The ones who don’t will be the ones we cite as examples of something else.

We just don’t know yet which is which. That’s not a comfortable place to stand. It is, however, exactly where we are.

Categories
AI Stanford

The Unit of Production Just Collapsed

The lecture was a Stanford CS session, AI-native companies, Garry Tan walking through what it now takes to build something. He’d rebuilt his old startup, Posterous, in five days on a modest Claude plan. A thing that once required a team and a runway. He said it matter-of-factly, the way you describe something that’s already obvious to you and hasn’t yet reached everyone else.

The argument Tan and his colleague Diana Hu were making wasn’t really about AI. It was about the economics of effort — specifically, what breaks when the cost of turning an idea into a working thing falls by an order of magnitude.

Their framing: AI-native organizations running as closed-loop systems, agents with access to the real artifacts of work, able to iterate without the error-accumulation that comes from handoffs and headcount. Revenue-per-employee ratios of a million dollars or more, with live examples already in the YC portfolio. Document processing, logistics, voice agents for specialized workflows.

What I kept hearing underneath all of it was a quieter claim: the mental model of what a startup requires is wrong.

Or rather, it’s right about the past and increasingly wrong about the present.

The assumptions embedded in “I can’t do this alone” or “we’d need to hire for that” or “we don’t have the bandwidth” — those are load-bearing assumptions, and the load is shifting.

I have some small version of this — not as a founder, but as someone who retired into curiosity. The blog, the reading, the daily effort to keep up with what’s moving: each one is a practice in staying oriented while the map keeps changing.

What I notice is that the constraint has shifted. It’s not information anymore. It’s not even tools. It’s the capacity to ask better questions of the abundance, to know what matters when everything is accelerating.

That’s the thing I find unsettling, yet also genuinely interesting: the skills that remain irreplaceable are the hardest ones to teach, and the hardest to evaluate in yourself. Knowing what matters. Recognizing when an output is almost right and almost wrong. Setting direction in ambiguous conditions and being willing to be wrong about it. These were always the valuable things. They were just obscured by all the coordination overhead that surrounded them.

The students in that Stanford course were asked to build something called a One-Person Frontier Lab — use the best available tools to extend your own reach over ten weeks. It’s framed as an academic exercise. It doesn’t feel like one.

But I’m not building. I’m mostly watching, and thinking about what this radical new fermentation does to everything downstream — to labor markets, to what a company even is, to how we’ll organize work and meaning when the old unit of production no longer applies. Those are slower questions. But they’re the ones that feel urgent to me.

The old excuses are getting lighter. Not that everything is possible — but that the weight of the usual constraints has changed.

What you choose to build, and whether you choose to build it at all, is more purely a decision than it used to be. That’s either clarifying or terrifying, depending on the day and my mood.

Categories
AI California San Francisco/California

Distant Billboards

Greg Isenberg came back from San Francisco with seventeen observations. The billboards advertising either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies, the seed rounds, the forward-deployed engineers, the founders showing each other their Obsidian vaults like athletes comparing gym routines.

He noted an important thing in observation fifteen, almost as an aside.

Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats — none of them use any AI at all.

Everett Rogers formalized the technology diffusion model in 1962. He was studying hybrid seed corn in Iowa. He noticed that the farmers who adopted early weren’t just better informed — they had different social networks, different relationships to risk, different orientations toward outside knowledge. The late adopters weren’t slower. They were operating from a different set of facts about what was safe to try.

Those AI billboards in SoMa are not visible in the Mission. That’s not metaphor. That’s just geography.

What strikes me about the taqueria is not that it’s behind. It’s that the conversation happening a mile away — about MCP endpoints and agent fleets — is not legible to it. The vocabulary doesn’t exist there yet. Nobody has sat across from the woman making carnitas for twenty years and said: here is what this could do for your ordering, your scheduling, your response to a customer who asks on Yelp at 11pm whether you’re open on Monday. One day her daughter or son might.

The builder class optimizes for the builder class. You build what you understand, for people whose problems you can see. The founders in SoMa understand each other’s problems with extraordinary precision.

The woman making carnitas has different problems — thinner margins, less access to capital, relationships built over decades that don’t easily transfer to a new system. Nobody is at the Series A meeting making the case that her problems are the interesting ones.

The historian of technology David Nye wrote about the “technological sublime” — the awe Americans felt in the nineteenth century standing before a great bridge or a locomotive or the first electrified city. The feeling was real. But the sublime is a view from a particular angle. The workers who built the bridge experienced something quite different. The families displaced by the railroad’s right-of-way experienced something different still.

The question isn’t whether the technology will eventually reach her. It will. The diffusion curve is patient. It likely will surprise.

The question is whether anyone is doing the translation work. The act of standing in a specific kind of life and asking: what would this actually change here? In the actual kitchen, on the actual Tuesday.

Isenberg noted that the coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people.

The taqueria is also a place where people want to be around people. It has been that for a long time.

She’ll adapt. She’s been adapting for twenty years.

But that’s a very different story than the one being told in San Francisco on those billboards.

Categories
Technology

The Silence of Glass

There is a moment, right before surgery, when the anesthesiologist asks you to count backward from ten. You get to seven, maybe six, and then the world goes clean and white. Scientists have a word for the material responsible for that transition: borosilicate. The same compound in the syringe barrel is in the telescope mirror trained on the Andromeda galaxy, in the fiber strand carrying the surgeon’s consultation with a colleague three thousand miles away, in the smartphone screen the patient’s wife is staring at in the waiting room, hands shaking, refreshing nothing.

Glass is everywhere and we have made it invisible, which is the oldest trick civilization knows.

Vaclav Smil argues in Making the Modern World that the most consequential material of the last two centuries is not steel or silicon or oil. It is float glass — invented by Alastair Pilkington in 1959, when he watched dishwater spread across his kitchen sink and understood something that had eluded glassmakers for four hundred years. Pour molten glass onto a bath of molten tin and it finds its own level. It becomes, on its own, perfectly flat. Every window, phone screen, solar panel, and architectural facade descends from a man watching his wife do dishes.

What Smil doesn’t quite say — though you feel it accumulating across his pages — is that glass is the one material that consistently mediates between the inner and the outer. Not metaphorically. Literally. It stands at the boundary and says: you may look, but you may not touch.

The fiber optic cable looks like nothing. Pull back the orange jacket and you find strands thinner than a human hair, each one pure silica glass so precisely drawn that a photon launched into one end will emerge after sixty miles having lost less than five percent of its energy. That number seems impossible. It is a kind of miracle achieved through obsessive purity: any contaminant at the molecular level, any stress in the crystal lattice, any deviation in the core diameter, and the light scatters and dies. Underneath every ocean, through every mountain, connecting data centers in Virginia to servers in Singapore, there are hundreds of millions of kilometers of this material, laid in darkness, carrying light.

I think about that sometimes when I hit send. The electrons leave my keyboard, convert to photons at some local junction, and then travel — genuinely travel, as light through glass — to wherever they are going. There is something devotional about it, though I can’t quite say why. Maybe it’s the invisibility. Maybe it’s the faith required — that the thing you release will arrive, intact, somewhere it has never been.

Glass is in the MRI machine and the X-ray plate and the laboratory flask where the drug was first synthesized and the vial where it is stored and the syringe through which it enters the body. Glass does not react. It does not corrode. It does not leach. This chemical inertness, which seems like absence, is actually the whole point. Medicine needed a container that would hold the thing without becoming it.

There is also glass in the eye reading the label on that vial. The human lens is, optically speaking, a soft glass. It focuses, ages, clouds — cataracts are the eye’s glass going milky — and the surgeon replaces it with an intraocular lens engineered to behave like glass. We have spent considerable effort making fake versions of something the body was already doing.

For most of human history, clear glass was expensive, fragile, and small. Window glass in medieval Europe admitted light hazily, like looking through ice. Clear vision was for churches, which is perhaps why we came to associate light with the sacred — it literally arrived, in those buildings, in a way it did not arrive anywhere else. Then Pilkington’s tin bath made clarity cheap, and the world changed in ways nobody fully catalogued because the change was so pervasive: big windows, watched experiments, extended growing seasons, telescopes reaching farther, microscopes going smaller. Each a story of glass making a distance crossable that was not crossable before.

The screen I am writing this on is glass. The Corning Gorilla Glass on this display is an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet, chemically strengthened through ion exchange, harder than most knives, clear enough that the pixels look like they are sitting on the surface rather than behind it. Apple spends considerable engineering effort making the glass seem like it isn’t there. The ideal phone screen is invisible. A window to computation.

And yet the glass is the thing you actually touch. All day. More than you touch almost anyone. The glass is warm from your hands. It has learned, in a way, the pressure of your thumbs.

Glass is the material of thresholds — it makes the threshold visible, makes it possible to stand at a door and see all the way through before you decide whether to enter. We built the internet through it. We see our loved ones through it. We study cancer through it. We watch the news through glass that traveled to us through glass captured by cameras with glass sensors launched on satellites with glass lenses through a sky that is itself, technically, a lens — bending and filtering the light from everything that has ever been.

In the hospital waiting room, the wife is still holding her phone. The screen has gone dark. She taps it. It lights up. She looks at her own reflection for a moment — the screen a mirror now — before the notification arrives and the glass goes transparent again, the way it always does, showing her something other than herself.

That is what glass does. It waits. It holds. And then, when there is something to show, it gets out of the way.