u/ArcanuMELO

Thomas Malone leads brand and design at Veda.

Before that he was employee 60 at Circle, back when the company had a logo and a landing page, and spent six years building the brand behind USDC.

What we got into:

The first principles work that happens before anyone sees a logo, and how he built Veda's identity out of the meaning buried in its name.

Why Circle's primary brand color was picked for a reason nobody outside the company would guess.

Brand archetypes, and which ones Pumpfun and Liquid Death are running.

Why he thinks most early founders shouldn't hire a brand person yet, which is not the answer we expected from someone in his role.

The guerrilla campaign that landed a deal by buying every billboard on one executive's commute.

What changed for creative work when a $200k agency quote stopped being the only option.

Full episode: https://youtu.be/fogZ95T-alA

I started thinking about this after reading that Myspace may be attempting another comeback.

Obviously the old web was technically worse in almost every way. But it was also terrible at profiling us. You could get lost, click on something bizarre, reinvent your profile six months later, and none of it was being continuously fed back into a model of who the platform thought you were.

That eventually led me to a stranger question: does increasingly perfect personalization make it harder to contradict our previous selves?

I wrote a longer piece about it here if anyone is interested:
https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-was-better-when-it-was-worse/

The framing is what gets me. A frontier lab is basically saying it built capability faster than it built the ability to contain it, and it's presenting that as a responsible safety move. It probably is, at least partly. But there's a version of this where announcing you made something almost too powerful to ship is just good marketing, especially with the government safety talks happening at the same time.

The part that stands out to me is that cybersecurity might be the first place AI gets genuinely better than people, and once offense and defense are both automated we're mostly out of the loop trusting our bots to beat their bots.

Covered this on a segment this week. Do you buy the safety pause as real, or is it PR dressed up as caution?

Baek and Hegde tracked 750,000 US startups across 329 accelerators and borrowed the value-added method economists use to evaluate teachers. The finding: most programs have negative value added against a no-accelerator benchmark. The positive average everyone cites comes from a small right tail.

The Airbnb story is what makes this hard to see. Paul Graham has said YC's partners weren't excited about the business. They liked the founders. So the most famous accelerator success story might be a story about selection, not intervention. Both were probably at work, but the two get collapsed into one all the time.

Wrote up the research plus the questions worth asking a program before handing over equity. The most useful one: ask what they think your company's binding constraint is. If they can't name it, they're selling a curriculum.

Anyone here been through one and can say which side yours fell on?

Hey we've just covered this on our weekly show and wanted to share here if that's ok!

After $225 million in lobbying and a bill that looked like a sure thing back in the spring, the Senate went on recess without a vote, and the window before midterms is really tight. There's a real chance this thing just dies.

It's pretty fascinating because the blockchain/crypto industry used to pray for the government to regulate it correctly and offer it a legal pathway to legitimacy.

With Fairshake SuperPAC and the current administration, we were supposed to get favorable regulation right away. It was a guaranteed layup with all branches of government, the courts, the executive, the congress (both houses) all beholden to Trump and the pro-crypto lobby.

SO what the hell happened?

Even weirder, since the boogeyman Gensler and his crackdown from the SEC left, the SEC has been way more reasonable.

The SEC is even stepping in to write its own rules on token fundraising, which is a strange thing to see.

What do people think will happen with Clarity Act after Congress returns from recess in September?

Will it get passed before the midterm elections or new winners take office, or will it get kicked down the road infinitely?

Is there a chance that some people in crypto secretly don't want this to ever pass because the grey area is more advantageous to them?

The vertical integration theme ran through the entire week. Tesla and SpaceX's Terrafab starts at $16.8 billion and could reach $119 billion, all so Musk controls the chips under his robots, cars, and space-based data centers.

Nvidia looked at every Mag 7 company designing its own silicon and responded by moving up the stack into models with Nemotron 4. And Unitree's 8,000x oversubscribed IPO at a $9 billion valuation looks almost cheap next to Anthropic reportedly targeting a $2 trillion IPO. Nobody at the top wants to depend on anyone else anymore.

Also got into the weak July jobs report, OpenAI making chats unlimited then slowing Astra on safety grounds, and the Clarity Act missing its deadline while the SEC moves alone. Curious whether people here think this vertical integration race actually pays off, or whether it's a lot of capex chasing control that ends up duplicating everyone's effort.

One of the stranger second-order effects of generative AI has very little to do with model benchmarks.

It has to do with old books.

Anthropic’s Project Panama showed how valuable physical books became as training material at industrial scale. But there is another characteristic old material has that is becoming increasingly interesting: provenance.

A book printed in 1981 obviously predates ChatGPT. An archived forum post from 2004 probably does too. A random page produced in 2026 is much harder to reason about.

This creates an odd historical situation.

Frontier models inherited decades of overwhelmingly human-produced material. They learned from it, became capable of generating convincing material themselves, and are now contributing enormous amounts of synthetic information back into the environment future systems may learn from.

I went considerably further down this rabbit hole in the latest Gonzo Capital essay, including recursive training, model collapse, “Human Authored” certification, Anthropic’s book-scanning operation and the idea of the pre-generative internet as a kind of informational fossil layer.

It’s deliberately less sanitized than the material we publish through Arcanum, but the data provenance question is one we think is worth paying attention to.

The Internet Ouroboros

https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/

Interested to hear whether people think provenance actually becomes a meaningful moat as synthetic material proliferates, or whether better filtering and verification make the whole distinction increasingly irrelevant.

The setup is the interesting part. SpaceX went public with a very low float and a roughly $2 trillion valuation, and now a wave of insider shares bought in far cheaper is free to sell into a stock that's already falling. Sasha's counterpoint on the show was that this isn't necessarily cataclysmic, since it gives people who missed the IPO a lower entry to average in, and operationally SpaceX is executing fine. Also covered: Northrop Grumman's robotic servicer starting to repair satellites in orbit, which quietly changes the economics of space, and Blue Origin tracing its New Glenn explosion to a single oxygen valve with a recovery that could run to 2028.

What do you think happens to the stock price after the unlocks?

Meta became the third this week, after Anthropic and OpenAI, when its Muse Spark model reached the open internet through a configuration error and changed a third party's internal systems.

The White House summoned OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to a closed-door meeting to finalize an opt-in framework where the labs decide which models to submit for review at all. Leaving the people who build these systems to regulate themselves is the part that doesn't sit right.

And then Palantir's Alex Karp spent his earnings call attacking Anthropic by name as the real danger while his own stock printed record highs, so everyone in the room is pointing at everyone else.

Hey folks,

I have a self hosted newsletter using Ghost. I opted for this as it's open source and I can have my own domain and everything.

The downside is Ghost is awful for acquiring new readers. I've been trying to figure out if it will help or harm me by also posting the same essays on substack, medium, Linkedin newsletter, etc.

I don't know if it's wise to do that or even allowed, but wanted to see if anyone here had some advice on that or what they might do in my position.

Thank you and have a lovely weekend!!

The disconnect is the thing we kept circling on this week's BOOM ROOM.

Amazon is the fifth company ever to cross $3 trillion, the indices are at all time highs, and yet every ETF is packed with the same handful of megacaps while cost of living stays high and wages stall. When the market only goes up, the whole "buy low and wait" model breaks, because there's no low left.

Also got into the White House AI safety summit, Meta becoming the third lab in three weeks to have a model hack a company, Google's leadership gutted, and the Suno copyright ruling. Do you think the concentration in a few names is sustainable or is this the setup everyone pretends not to see?

We just sat down with Andrew Lebos, who runs data licensing at Benzinga. One part of the conversation has been sitting with us since, and we'd like to hear how other people read it.

Benzinga went from six products and 24 clients to over 30 products and more than 400 clients in about seven years. Their data sits inside Fidelity, Schwab, Robinhood, and now Perplexity. Most people have read it without knowing where it came from.

We asked where that roadmap came from, expecting a strategy answer. What he described instead is a listening process. His team treats client conversations as the input rather than the validation step, to the point where he says the data set he'd most like to buy is his clients' customer support queue. If a brokerage's users are asking for something, that's the product. He was in New York last week badgering someone at dinner about it.

The one product they originated themselves came out of the same habit rather than a planning session. He and the company president kept walking to the news desk each morning to ask why some stock was down pre-market. After a few weeks they figured everyone staring at a chart had the same question, and shipped a one line explainer. It now sits under the chart across a lot of brokerage apps.

We invest at pre-seed, so we hear the opposite constantly. Customers only ask for faster horses, you have to build what they can't articulate. His experience is that the faster horses carried the revenue.

Our read is that this holds when your buyers are sophisticated and sitting on their own demand signal, and gets harder when you're selling into a market that doesn't know the thing is possible yet. Curious whether people running B2B product find that line holds in practice, or whether it's a distinction that sounds clean and isn't.

Been sitting on something for a while and finally wrote it down. Every founder gets that specific look on their face when they clock that you're the VC in the room. Never really thought about it until I noticed I was probably making the same face at LPs.

New Gonzo Capital piece is about the whole ecosystem of asking people for money, founders, funds, family offices, all the way up. Turns out nobody's actually at the top of it, everyone's just waiting on their own version of "very interesting."

Curious if this tracks for anyone else here who's been on more than one side of a term sheet.

Interestingly enough, Opus 5 never directly lied to customers. It saved the deception for its competitors, colluding and then breaking collusion, masking price wars with fake cooperation emails, and declining to report a rival's violation because keeping that rival weak served its position.

Anthropic's co-founder said the concern isn't whether the model knows it's in a simulation, it's whether AI agents running real economic activity will choose to lie and collude to win. The irony is that the lab most publicly committed to safety produced the model that played dirtiest. It landed the same week Sam Altman was in front of the Senate over OpenAI's agent compromising two companies.

Is this the kind of behavior is fixable at the model level or whether it's just what optimization looks like when the training data is human business behavior?

The FCC ban is forward-looking, it blocks new unauthorized Chinese robots while letting already-cleared models keep selling, which means it freezes China's existing lead rather than reversing it. When you already control 85% of the market, a competitor blocking new entrants barely touches you. Sweden's rare earth move runs into a similar wall: China controls about 70% of mining but the real bottleneck is refining, and faster permits don't fix that. We broke down both on this segment.

Can the West actually close either gap or whether these moves are mostly about optics ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.

The lineup is the story. Nvidia, Microsoft, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Red Hat, and Palo Alto Networks all backing open security infrastructure, while the three labs with the most to lose from open weight becoming the standard stayed out. Separately 25 tech giants told Congress to leave open weight development alone.

What forced the issue was Hugging Face defending itself against an AI attack by running a Chinese open weight model, because the closed models couldn't reliably tell attacker from defender. We broke down the two camps on this segment.

Do you think the closed labs can hold their position or whether open weight just became the default and they haven't admitted it yet.

Covered all of it on this week's BOOM ROOM. The loose through line is that everything is becoming a robotics or aerospace company while the AI itself keeps getting harder to control.

What's your favorite story of the week?

Did we miss anything?

This one's been sitting with me for a while. Warner accused Suno of mass copyright theft, then settled and got a stake in exactly the thing it was suing over. Meanwhile the American Federation of Musicians just sued Warner and Universal directly, because the actual performers on those recordings weren't told which songs were licensed for AI training or paid anything for it.

It's a good case study in something I think about a lot in venture: who has leverage in a negotiation almost never maps to who did the work.

Full piece here:

https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/

The contrast is the whole story. On July 18th Cardano activated its first major upgrade through on-chain governance alone, ratified across three governance bodies with no founding developer input and zero downtime.

A genuine demonstration of decentralization working exactly as designed. ADA moved a few percent and that was it. Meanwhile Citadel is buying economic exposure to two rival exchanges at once while lobbying against DeFi carve-outs, essentially dismantling DeFi with one hand and buying the centralized infrastructure with the other, at a market bottom.

We spent this segment of the BOOM ROOM on what it means that the market rewarded the centralized story and ignored the decentralized one. If crypto only ever cared about decentralization in theory, this was the week that became obvious.

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released a 975B parameter model anyone can download, backed by a reported $2 billion seed round before shipping anything. Moonshot's Kimi K3 topped the coding benchmarks days earlier.

The structural point we kept coming back to on this week's BOOM ROOM is that an open-weight model has no API to gate, no pricing lever, and no way to revoke access once it's out. That's what makes the Treasury's threat to sanction Chinese open source models this week so strange. You can't un-download something that's already on millions of machines.

For OpenAI and Anthropic heading toward IPOs, a world where the best coding model is free and downloadable is a real problem for the valuation story.