Sure, I'll pay 2,000x revenue for your AI business
Sure, I'll pay 2,000x revenue for your AI business
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Modestly upbeat.
📈 Trending Up: Epic Games Store … stocks in Asia … stablecoins … Series C crunch … Ukrainian advances in Kursk … that’ll do it … mpox … protests in India … Kamala?
📉 Trending Down: U.S. drug costs … the safety of Taiwan … NFT volume …
🤔 What Else?
Who would have guessed that venture capitalists don’t like one another? Connie has the latest on Venture drama here at TechCrunch. I’ll let her summary stand, but what’s incredibly clear is that all is not copacetic amongst the Silicon Valley financial set. Recall that we recently saw a YC vs. David Sacks spat as we now watch Sequoia squabble with a16z.
Yawn. Arguing instead of TVPI into DPI is loser shit.
That said, Ben Horowitz’s quoting of the best song from the Drake-Kendrick beef was a treat; Euphoria > Not Like Us.
Google is being a dick: Google is currently in trouble for being “a monopolist, and [having] acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Given that backdrop, you might think that the company would be doing all that it can to avoid inciting more complaints about its business practices as they relate to search.
Nope! It turns out that the same Google crawler that the search giant uses to index the Web is the same piece of software in charge of its AI-powered answers that it now shows atop search results.
Publishers are stuck. They either allow Google to both index their website and summarize it, or lose their placement in the key search engine’s results. If Google had, say, 35% market share, websites could tell it to go to hell for a while and perhaps force concessions. But thanks to Google’s — let’s just say it — greedy arrogance, all indexed websites will be up for summarization or face irrelevance.
Not a great look for a company that might get broken up. Mix in Google’s work to cripple ad blocking on Chrome, and you are left with a former tech upstart that appears to more recently blend the joys of rent-seeking with the business practices of a club promoter.
2,000x ARR because fuck you
Brody Ford and Katie Roof wrote a brilliant investigation into the Snowflake-Databricks rivalry. I know the Databricks folks better than anyone at Snowflake, mostly because the latter company is public while Databricks is not. So, I’ve been on the phone here and there with its CEO.