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I've spent the last 6 years helping private and public industry adopt technology that supports the planning and development processes across North America. I hope you enjoy my field guide to Canada's permitting problem.
Mitchell Barker retweeted
Replying to @acoyne
Sir, the Bank of Canada has written extensively on this. It literally has impacted rents and housing prices.
Anotha one ☝️
JUST IN: Anthropic offers Blackstone over 10% yield on $60 billion AI chip debt deal
Mitchell Barker retweeted
Wages are the price of your labour. If you increase the supply of labour, what do you think happens to wages?
Mitchell Barker retweeted
BREAKING: The Canadian government is removing the requirement for employers to prove they can't find a Canadian for high wage jobs, per CTV
Rental costs continue to climb as supply doesn’t match chip demand. Where do we go from here?
AI bubble fears meet rising GPU rental prices: Nvidia H100s now cost $2.85 per hour to rent, up 53% from the Feb 2025 low and the highest since 2024. Older chips were supposed to get cheaper as new ones arrived. This chart tells a different story.
KBRA (Kroll Bond Rating Agency) gave Anthropic a BB+ rating. This is often called junk loans, one notch below investment grade (BBB-).
It impacts them because, big pension and insurance funds often can't buy below investment grade, so Anthropic will pay higher interest than a Microsoft or Google would.
The reason why this is significant, is that AI labs are shifting from raising equity to borrowing against their revenue to pay for compute, and this $35B deal to finance chips.
BREAKING: Anthropic just received a BB+ credit rating from KBRA, one notch below investment grade.
The rating comes ahead of a $35 billion chip financing deal, part of a broader $60 billion AI financing effort being lined up on Wall Street.
It follows Broadcom’s agreement to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to buy chips and computing hardware.
Robotaxis for Toronto in 2028. First Canadian city to have autonomous vehicles.
We’re bringing the magic of Waymo to Toronto! 🇨🇦
In the coming days, you’ll begin seeing Waymo’s all-electric vehicles driving through Toronto’s streets as we lay the groundwork for our ride-hailing service.
Our goal is to begin serving riders in 2028.
Sign up for future updates: waymo.com/waymo-in-canada
This needs to be addressed
New confidential briefing says the B.C. NDP government has committed to hand over approximately 400 parcels of public Crown land to First Nations.
How is this not the biggest issue in the upcoming election?
northernbeat.ca/opinion/rob-…
Mitchell Barker retweeted
We’re making the path to permanent residence simpler for international medical doctors. To support a stable health care system for Canadians, we offer international doctors:
• 5 options to get permanent residence through Express Entry and regional, provincial and territorial programs
• faster 14-day work permit processing for those nominated by a province or territory, so they can work while waiting for permanent residence
Medical doctors can also include their family members in their application.
Learn more: bit.ly/49xGh3u
Save this. Post of the year.
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Opportunity for folks to come live in the greatest country in the world. We welcome folks that have dedicated their life to their skilled trade! The people of Canada are extremely kind, welcoming and value and recognize productive citizens. And many of us are immigrants or come from immigrant families.
Are you an experienced skilled worker interested in immigrating to Canada and strengthening key sectors of our economy?
We’re looking to address labour shortages and support communities through the following categories:
• medical doctors, researchers and senior managers with Canadian work experience
• health care and social services professionals
• tradespersons
• educators
• professionals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) occupations
• professionals in transport occupations
• workers with French-language proficiency
Learn more about Express Entry categories: bit.ly/3SX2ujF
We will pay for this for decades. Unfortunately, everyone lost.
Canada's Mass Immigration (2017 to 2025) was the worst economic policy decision in Canadian history.
It was NOT progressive; it was, in fact, extremely REGRESSIVE.
It transferred wealth and market power:
➡️from the Young to the Old,
➡️from the Poor to the Rich,
➡️from Labour to Corporations, and
➡️from the Renter Class to the Owner Class.
Prior to 2015, immigration to Canada was high and focused on high-skilled, high-wage labour.
In 2015, THIS government CHANGED the RULES, which shifted the focus to low-skilled, low-wage labour. This hurt the job prospects of young Canadians entering the labour market, put downward pressure on wages and lowered Canada's productivity. ➡️bankofcanada.ca/2025/05/staf…)
It also increased housing costs, particularly for renters, who tend to be poorer and younger. ➡️bankofcanada.ca/publications…
In short, it was horrific for the youngest, poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Never mind the social upheaval it caused.
Now that Job Vacancies have normalized and rents are falling, this government is floating the idea of raising immigration. It is outrageous. Worse, it is, again, being pitched as progressive when it is not. It hurts the Working Class; Bernie Sanders was right...youtu.be/vf-k6qOfXz0
The only thing that will improve the standard of living for working-class people is productivity growth. That's it.
Mitchell Barker retweeted
Canada's Mass Immigration (2017 to 2025) was the worst economic policy decision in Canadian history.
It was NOT progressive; it was, in fact, extremely REGRESSIVE.
It transferred wealth and market power:
➡️from the Young to the Old,
➡️from the Poor to the Rich,
➡️from Labour to Corporations, and
➡️from the Renter Class to the Owner Class.
Prior to 2015, immigration to Canada was high and focused on high-skilled, high-wage labour.
In 2015, THIS government CHANGED the RULES, which shifted the focus to low-skilled, low-wage labour. This hurt the job prospects of young Canadians entering the labour market, put downward pressure on wages and lowered Canada's productivity. ➡️bankofcanada.ca/2025/05/staf…)
It also increased housing costs, particularly for renters, who tend to be poorer and younger. ➡️bankofcanada.ca/publications…
In short, it was horrific for the youngest, poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Never mind the social upheaval it caused.
Now that Job Vacancies have normalized and rents are falling, this government is floating the idea of raising immigration. It is outrageous. Worse, it is, again, being pitched as progressive when it is not. It hurts the Working Class; Bernie Sanders was right...youtu.be/vf-k6qOfXz0
The only thing that will improve the standard of living for working-class people is productivity growth. That's it.
Mitchell Barker retweeted
Loonie Hour is live in Montreal tomorrow!
Still a few tickets available here.
eventbrite.com/e/montreal-th…
6 days and about $40K of compute to find a full-chain Chrome bug affecting about 1B users, and defenders can run the same tools. Agents don't just write code, they search attack surfaces. The bottleneck is who operationalizes this for defence faster.
6 days and $40,000 of compute with GPT-5.6 Sol to find a critical vulnerability in Chrome, claiming Google’s first full-chain reward in 2026 for a vulnerability that would affect an estimated 1 billion users.
Highlights the opportunity for defenders to utilize these tools to secure their software to unprecedented levels:
Industries that invest in technology, see prices go down.
Marc Andreessen reveals why housing, health care, and education keep getting more expensive while everything else gets cheaper
"There's basically three components to the American dream. A house near great job opportunities, great health care for you and your family, and sending your kids to good schools"
"If you disaggregate the economy over the last 25 years, everything that technology touches basically collapses in price. Television sets, computer games, anything with electronics in it. But if you chart housing, education, and health care, the prices of those things are skyrocketing"
"The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices"
This is an excellent visualization of just how physical, not digital AI is as a technology. People understand AI as software, but what the general public doesn’t understand, is just how massive and opportunity this is for folks in the physical world - construction, mining, logistics, trucking, safety training organizations, environmentalists, engineers… I could go on - the opportunity for people that support the industry build out massive.



























