Forward Deployed Nerd. Weekly extended write-ups on Software, AI & Investing. https://xitter.cf/t.co/wCDQ1Jx4dv
Joined July 2014
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Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Airbnb is dead. Well it’s not dead but it’s going to be dying soon.
The Bear case for Airbnb.
I’ve been bullish on Airbnb as a company for many years. But my outlook on the business changed this week.
Let me tell you why.
In 2012 I purchased my first Airbnb property. Over the years that one property has turned into a portfolio of high-end Airbnb’s that generates almost $1M a month in rental income.
Using ai agents for the first time this week has completely changed my outlook on the company.
Airbnb is facing an existential threat that most of the market is completely missing.
With Airbnb pushing its mandatory host-side commission to 15.5%, the middleman tax has never been higher.
Enter AI agents. (Hark, Dot, Muse, Grok Bot, etc)
Right now, booking a vacation rental requires navigating a siloed app and paying heavy platform tolls.
But your AI agent won't care about Airbnb's brand wall. When you know the property you want to book and you ask it “what’s the cheapest way to book the property” it will query property management system APIs directly, find the exact same home, and execute a direct booking that saves everyone 15%.
Airbnb's entire model relies on holding supply captive behind a closed interface.
When AI agents can autonomously search, verify reviews, negotiate terms, and book direct with property operators, that walled garden turns into a leaking pipe.
The middleman tax's days are numbered.
I’m predicting that Airbnb’s growth rate will slow down significantly in the next 24 to 36 months. And within 5 years they will be seeing negative growth.
The same can be said for most other online marketplaces that don’t have unique inventory that can only be booked directly on their platform and nowhere else.
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Chamath says IP and software were "effectively rendered worthless" this week, after people decompiled Adobe's core products and published open-source versions, as every service goes headless
"The more important point I want to make though, is I sent this to Nick, there's been a couple things that happened in the last couple days, which I think are incredibly important."
"There have been people that decompiled the entire, the entire big five. What is the big five? Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite. Freeberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop. There's like a bunch of others. Okay."
"And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open source versions of these things. And Rust, yeah. And I was so shocked, because I was like, hold on a second, these are like profound products that have existed and have had moats for years, and now they're just open source versions."
"And then Nikita was, I think, trolling, and he was building on that idea, and just talking about GTA, because it's about to get released. I think GTA 6 is about to come out, and we'll reconstruct this."
"Why is this important?"
"I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago."
"Because if you think about it, when everything is headless, so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier, when all of these things are headless, and you can wrap them in agent tools, and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences, the value of IP does no longer exist in software. It doesn't exist."
"And I think that probably is the most profound implication."
"So, like, even in our business, we would argue with some of our customers all the time, because we'll say, oh, we'll build this for you, we'll own the IP. They'll say, no, we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it. And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys, I said, who cares? Who cares? But before, it was always a negotiation and a set of trade-offs. Now it's a who-cares thing, where, like, the IP is irrelevant."
"It still takes a while for the machinery of a business, and frankly the market, to understand. But that is the most important thing that happened this week in AI, in my opinion."
David Sacks says Anthropic is run by a "religious cult" and is doing the very things it says it fears most, like opening a wet lab while warning of bio risk, and that there's an argument for sending in a federal SWAT team
"But I do think that there are potential externalities from having the number one frontier model company run by a religious cult."
"So, for example, they are opening a Claude-powered wet lab in the middle of San Francisco. But at the same time, they're warning of bio risk. At the same time, they say that we have to pace the frontier, they're extending the frontier. At the same time that they are saying that there's a risk of superintelligence growing beyond our control, they're programming it to grow beyond our control."
"I think there are potentially huge externalities to the way they approach these things. And it's, like, insane that they call these decisions "safety." These are not safe decisions. These are crazy decisions, it seems to me."
"This is why I've called this a schizophrenic company, is they appear to be not only hypocritical, but they're doing the things that they say they are most afraid of."
"Like, what is going on here? This is bizarre. And I don't know where this all leads. I do think there's an argument for a federal SWAT team to come blasting in there."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The referenced open-source Adobe alternatives were not created via decompilation. Their developer describes them as clean-room reimplementations built from public specs, observed behavior and AI assistance in Rust.
github.com/storytold/phot…
arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/sof…
frontiernow.dev/en/resources/a…
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
I used GPT-6 Astra to break an unsolved cipher to one of Napoleon's generals that had gone unread for 217 years.
What makes this impressive isn't actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in ~6 hours from a single image and goal.
1/6🧵
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Here’s to the wanting. Here’s to the dreaming. Here’s to everyone.
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
This rave New York Times review of Muse is making waves. It is mind blowing Meta beat Google to release the first usable AI digital agent.
All they had to do was clone OpenClaw and leverage their digital assets (Gmail, Google accounts, Android, etc.).
I guess it's the classic Innovator's Dilemma and how cultural inertia/stifling bureaucracy kept them from disrupting their own search ad business. We all know Gemini is barely works with Gmail.
NYTimes: "Two weeks in, I found Muse to be the most useful A.I. app I had ever used. One clarifying moment came after I connected my credit cards to Muse and asked it to track my spending in Google Sheets. I watched as it spun up tabs with hundreds of rows of data each in minutes, then flagged two duplicate subscriptions, which it canceled for me. Then Muse used my email to request a refund for a free newspaper trial that had expired, saving me $44.99."
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
With Meta Muse gaining traction, an obvious inference is that much of today's search ad spending may no longer be necessary if AI agents become the next demand generator.
I wrote about AI's inevitable disruption of search in my negative take on Google (screenshot below) two months ago.
Ben Thompson also wrote about Muse/AI agent risk to Google this morning.
Morgan Stanley: "While EXPE spends >5% of bookings on performance marketing, the highest of the three OTAs, with the majority of performance marketing being on search"
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
We just spoke with Jamal Baksh (CFO of Constellation Software/Topicus).
He explained to us that Daan Dijkhuizen is not leaving Topicus $TOI.V , but his responsibilities just extend on top of it with his new role at CSU. Quite an important nuance that might have been misunderstood by some people.
We (might) release a little bit more information tomorrow in our newsletter:
tresorcapitalnieuws.nl
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Volaris acquired the global market leader in bird detection systems for onshore wind farms. Those systems require proprietary hardware that must comply with regulatory requirements🐦🐦🐦
I didn't even know such systems existed 🤣
Fun fact: Several employees are ornithologists 🦉
Vibe-code that!
globenewswire.com/news-relea… $CSU.TO #SaaSpocalypse
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Look what I found! $CSU.TO $CSU is in the business of building agents for software verticals. Seems to be able ot do to following:
The work exclusive with CSU companies because is homegrown via the VMS Fund. The fund that was founded by Leonard and run by Topicus CEO.
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Legendary investor Li Lu on special businesses:
"Such a company [one with sustainable competitive advantage and long-term growth]... once you truly understand it and find it, my usual advice is: absolutely do not easily throw away your shares. If you throw them away, when you try to buy them back, you will face the same problem. When you sold, you felt the price was too high. But often, when you try to buy it back, you will find it is still 'overvalued.' You will continue to wait. And while you are waiting, its growth will have already far exceeded your original estimate of its value. If it is truly an outstanding company, this scenario is highly likely to occur."
I generally agree. I personally am a bit more opportunistic but have found especially in momentum driven markets that I almost always sell too early. That being said my portfolio is always positioned in value, which let's me sleep better at night. Another important point is special businesses are extremely RARE.
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Few things:
1. $PLTR Palantir CEO Alex Karp said last week that the foundation model companies are stealing your IP which is why you need data sovereignty. If Apple’s allegations are right, OpenAI stole trade secrets from a $4T company….you could understand why enterprises might be a bit hesitant to give them their data.
2. Apple is alleging that OpenAI is trying to build their own consumer device and has stolen trade secrets from them within the scope of their collaboration. I really, really don’t like the AI hardware play. At all. First, Consumers want to trust the hardware they are using and Apple has built a TON of trust, OpenAI has not. Second, I don’t think glasses/pendants will work. Just feels like getting into a game that is going to cost a ton of money and probably not result in a meaningful consumer device that’s better than the iPhone.
3. It seems pretty obvious now why OpenAI delayed their IPO. If the stock was public, it’d be down 25% right now.
OpenAI has a ton of spending commitments with big tech…they are half the RPO for Oracle and Microsoft…it also is obvious why they want the US gov to own 5% of them: Sam Altman likely wants OpenAI to be too big to fail.
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
"... in the fullness of time, whenever we have enough compute, the most valuable place in the value chain will be the place that has always been the most valuable: owning the user touchpoint"
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
“All kinds of things improve the efficiency of American business without making it more profitable”. - Buffett regarding the internet.
Interesting to think about the billions of capital being spent today under assumption that there will be profitability improvements in AI’s case
Product & Investing Nerd retweeted
Interesting clips from CNBC's weekly Buffett email on when Buffett and Musk traded barbs on moats. I think Elon makes a great point in his quote here, and I'd love to hear what WB thinks about what he said a decade ago, specifically the idea that Snickers or M&M's brand have more pricing power than a hypothetical "Musk bar". The upstart brands (see the protein bar isle), health food focus, store brands (Kirkland, etc) and the downfall of all kinds of once powerful food brands like GIS, KHC, etc... I wonder if WB has a different view today
