Everyone is eating
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
📈 Trending Up: Officer! … spine … NFTs, I guess … cold/hot war between the United States and China? … German aid for Ukraine … disgrace … even better AI voice natterers … partial wins for OpenAI … Digg … good reads on changing demographics …
Quote of the day: “The Los Angeles Times removed its new AI-powered “insights” feature from a column after the tool tried to defend the Ku Klux Klan.”
📉 Trending Down: American consumer safety … the CHIPS Act … non-agentic AI … knowledge transfers? … gay marriage rights in the United States …
Quick Hits
It’s not funny: American President Donald Trump threatened Europe in a speech last night, saying that “One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” referring to Greenland. (Greenland is an autonomous territory and a constituent part of the Kingdom of Denmark.) Denmark has said no. Greenland has said no. Trump, however, keeps saying that because he wants it, he should get it.
Hey that sounds familiar! Didn’t something similar happen to Ukraine a few years ago?
Everyone is eating: Back in mid-February, Arista Networks reported earnings. I missed the package, but want to flag something notable. Arista, which builds networking equipment for, in its own words, “large AI, data center, campus and routing environments,” grew 19.5% in 2024. And 25.3% in the fourth quarter.
One Q4 2024 highlight from Arista? “Meta has deployed the Arista 7700R4 Distributed Etherlink Switch for its latest Ethernet-based AI cluster.”
The AI game is raising a lot of boats. Including 2024 IPO Astera Labs, which sells “semiconductor-based connectivity solutions for cloud and AI infrastructure,” announced 179% growth in Q4 of last year, and 242% growth in the year. Golly.
Did Google pay enough to buy a pardon? I don’t know if Google CEO Sundar Pichai is cozying up to the Trump administration for any other reason than trying to avoid more trouble with regulators. But I do know that the company is showing up, donating money, and, surprise, would really prefer if the DoJ didn’t break it up:
Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Stop being such a downer: This is aimed at CO, which yesterday penned an afternoon addendum entitled “The vibes are bad.” The gist was that a host of economic and political factors added up to a very different set of feels in the market than we saw right after Trump won the 2024 presidential contest.
This led to Notable Capital’s Jeff Richards rejoindering with “nah 😉.”
Fair enough. I think it is worth considering the current good news, too:
AI is still advancing rapidly, and its robotic future is taking shape; we’re still waiting for its ChatGPT moment.
The space economy is heating up, and not merely because Blue Origin is finally orbital. No, startups myriad are building a whole in-orbit economy, bringing me great joy.
Stocks are still not cheap, which is good for startups in the comp department.
And it’s nearly Spring here in the Northeast.
Hit reply and send in your good news, and I’ll share a few later on here in the newsletter.
The Note: Who wins from Coreweave?
Yesterday we took a look at Coreweave’s S-1 filing’s big numbers. Today, a peek at who owns the company.
The founders, Michael Intrator, Brannin McBee, and Brian Venturo own a lot of the company’s stock (percentages are of ownership of the share class in question; Class B shares get 10 voters per, while Class A enjoy just one):
Intrator: 359,081 Class A shares (2.39%), 2,834,479 Class B shares (47.33%)
McBee: 37,034 Class A shares, 1,437,105 Class B shares (24.22%)
Venturo: 80,056 Class A shares, 1,923,096 Class B shares (31.6%)
Notably, those numbers could be much higher. The Information writes that the three “have each sold at least $150 million worth of stock ahead of the cloud provider’s planned initial public offering.” That is, the publication continues, a lot. And not super bullish; why take money off the table if you are doing well? Did you really need $150 million to pay off your house?
Anyway. Who else? Here’s the list:
Jack Cogen (board member): 1,123,118 Class A shares (7.47%)
Magnetar Financial: 5,398,116 Class A shares (34.53%)
Fidelity (various entities): 1,136,212 Class A shares (7.56%)
KOPACC (managed by Koppenberg Management, managed by Luchetti Street Investment Management): 921,136 Class A shares (6.13%)
The Linden West Trust: 912,625 Class A shares (6.07%)
Nvidia: 896,623 Class A shares (5.97%)
Expected to see more well-known names given the company’s funding history? There’s some weirdness involving Series C Put Shares and Coatue in the S-1 filing, but it seems that Magnetar, a hedge fund based in Illinois, is about to clean up after leading a great number of Coreweave’s various fundraising efforts.
Coreweave intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “CRWV”
What I want to know is how investors price Coreweave’s customer concentration. After all, Cerebras Systems is suffering from similar, single-big-customer blues.