Co-Founder & CEO of @JoinVantage: infrastructure cost management.
New York, NY
Joined October 2008
- Tweets26.6K
- Following602
- Followers3.7K
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Ben Schaechter retweeted
One answer to what's driving GPU rental prices:
Token demand on OpenRouter is up ~27x since last November, from ~6T/week to ~165T/week
Open-weight models now handle ~72% of those tokens, up from ~28% last November
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
Zooming out, GPUs are still renting ahead of a standard 6-year depreciation schedule
Rental price vs. schedule:
- H200: +143%
- B200: +111%
- RTX PRO 6000: +73%
- H100: +54%
- A100: +9%
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
Ben Schaechter retweeted
loved foursquare a ton but this an example of death by capital stack.
- more than 1x liquidation stacks
- $400M+ raised including debt
acquisition price is not high debt gets paid first, nothing left so preferred gets canceled, common gets canceled.
the danger of over-raising, not just the latest valuation you have the clear, but the size capital stack you're creating along the way
Linear is profitable and the assets are more than we have raised. At this point if shut down the company investors would actually make money just from the cash assets.
Cofounder of Foursquare on its recent acquisition:
"I was heartbroken by this ending"
Appreciate the retro, @dens.
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Ben Schaechter retweeted
SpaceX key charts: Revenue, EBITDA and CapEX
SpaceX Jumps On Blowout Quarter As AI Sends Revenue, EBITDA Soaring zerohedge.com/markets/spacex…
Ben Schaechter retweeted
Zucks: “So at the end of last year, we got quite excited about the progress but hadn’t seen the models yet, so it’s like we were going to write this check for, I don’t know, $100B or $200B and I’m like Alex…you sure this is gonna work?!
We are living in unprecedented times.
Mark Zuckerberg and Alexander Wang on deploying capital for AI spend:
Alexander: "you have to make very large investments or make very big decisions about how you're going to invest or develop the technology, you know, what decisions you're going to make long before there's proof points around."
Mark: "We have these conversations where it's like at the end of last year, we're like, alright, we are quite excited about the progress. We haven't seen the models yet. We're gonna write this check for like, I don't know, like $100 billion or $200 billion like, Alex, are you sure this is gonna work?"
Alexander: "Although it's like the joke, every time we talk about, we hope it's all gonna work and be good."
Spend or get left behind - the spending race in AI
Via @cheekypint on Youtube
$MSFT $META $GOOGL $META $AMZN
Ben Schaechter retweeted
if you believe your company is building tech that will kill everyone, do you:
1. delay your ipo and spend every waking hour working on alignment, or
2. go to dreamforce
Ben Schaechter retweeted
Future generations will hear stories of a brief period when $200/month bought you seemingly unlimited access to the world’s most expensive intelligence, the way we talk about $2 Ubers now.
Ben Schaechter retweeted
Big news from Jackson Lake Lodge: The price of a large drip coffee in the lobby is UNCHANGED this year at $6.42.
Ben Schaechter retweeted
I really don’t think any of us have internalized just how much software development has changed in these few years, truly insane numbers
On August 17, GitHub experienced a significant outage that disrupted developers and organizations around the world. If you were trying to ship software that day, we let you down.
I posted in March and April about the steps we’re taking to make GitHub more reliable. The work is still underway. Here is an update:
github.blog/news-insights/co…
Ben Schaechter retweeted
You guys sure you don’t want more data centers?
This is freaking huge: For the first time, a AI-assisted personalized mRNA cancer treatment has succeeded in a Phase 3 trial.
Moderna and Merck sequence each patient’s tumor and compare it with their healthy DNA. AI then helps identify which of the tumor’s mutations are most likely to trigger an immune response.
From those targets, Moderna produces an individual mRNA treatment encoding up to 34 neoantigens, The earlier Phase 2 trial followed patients with surgically removed high-risk melanoma for five years:
- 68.8% remained cancer-free, compared with 49.1% on Keytruda alone
- 49% lower risk of recurrence or death
- 59% lower risk of distant metastasis or death
Now the much larger Phase 3 trial involving 1,137 patients has also succeeded.
Absolutely incredible. Dario was right: cancer will be cured in just a few years!
Ben Schaechter retweeted
Billable Usage API .... Our most requested feature of all time.. One endpoint for usage and cost across every usage-based product. Workers, R2, D1, Workers AI, Vectorize, Images, Stream. Updated daily, broken out by product and charge period.
Live today for self-serve accounts. Enterprise next.
Special shout out to @Bensign @JoinVantage for near constant text and DMs pushing for it to get done!
blog.cloudflare.com/billable…
Ben Schaechter retweeted
and it works with @JoinVantage!
the data the API gives back maps to the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) 🤓 — any cloud cost tools that support this can easily consume it
focus.finops.org/ - standards yet again ftw
Ben Schaechter retweeted
This is 100% happening because companies are finally putting guard rails on usage instead of just letting their employees run freely with infinite fable tokens
We’re tracking Anthropic ARR at $74.3B as of July 22, with the pace of growth beginning to slow.
Yipit estimated $69B on July 10 and is expected to update tomorrow. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed a figure since its $47B run-rate disclosure. @jukan05
Ben Schaechter retweeted
Another reason I’ve been unphased by VC pitch weirdness is: high performance looks weird
And it looks weird in founders too—you want investors on your side who understand that
The world of mediocre performance is designed to create a sense of order, surface level politeness, predictability, warmth
When you push to the extremes of performance, and operate from first principles, the outcomes look alien to many people
It takes weird people to operate at this level
The last person you want on your board is a conformist bureaucrat who doesn’t understand the extreme chaos of running a high growth startup—because the reality will scare them and then you’ll have to put on a performance to manage them—distracting you from getting any real deliberation done
This dynamic is not super obvious because very smart, very weird people have a lifetime of practicing seeming normal on podcasts, in public, etc.
But in the environments where these people get together—it’s a totally different wavelength of communication, chaos tolerance, contrarianism, intensity
As a founder you also need to be able to identify weird and spikey people in hiring
It’s super important to understand how to work with these people and to understand why they think the way they do
It usually does not come from a bad place—it comes from consequentialist ethics and extreme optimization
Ben Schaechter retweeted
A lot of heads down work over the last six months has gone into building an agent tailored specifically to the FinOps vertical. We initially launched in Slack but we've refined the experience and are launching today on the web.
vantage.sh/blog/finops-agent…
