Becoming Unsloppable, Anthropic’s Series G, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

0:01The big news, Anthropic has raised$30 billion at$380 billion post money valuation. We've all seen the revenue chart, 10x growth four years in a row, 100 million, a billion, now 14 billion. Will they do 100? That's the question. Will they be at$100 billion revenue run rate by the end of the year? They're growing on track to hit that, which is crazy and completely unprecedented. But again, they're going after all of SaaS. They're going after all of software. They're going after all of labor, all of white collar work. All in your job specifically. Yeah, it's not looking good for you. No, we're joking.

0:39Never doom. Never doom. There's plenty of opportunity. There are plenty of good potential outcomes. Dario has been on Dwarakash Patel today, and he did something else with Ross Douthat. And so there's a number of places where you can go to hear his latest takes on the good ending and what he's guiding towards. The question is, what happens to the companies that are currently under pressure with the anthropic narrative? They have to answer this question of, is Anthropic just going to steamroll you? What is your real source of strength? Yeah, not just Anthropic, but the labs, every YC company that is building an AI native, any company that is slapping AI native on their website.

1:25Everyone's going after the opportunity. We coined a phrase. We decided to coin something. What is a phrase that you can generally apply to businesses that can survive and then hopefully thrive during this moment in time? And heroin intelligence is too cheap to meter. Yeah. So the question, you know, earnings cycle last couple of weeks, every CEO has gone on. If basically like if you had to answer the question, like talk about the threat of AI. if you just had to answer the question, like basically the companies that were just, the entire earnings call was just about, generally about AI. You know, if you're like a core weave or something like that, that's a little bit more straightforward.

2:04But if you have to answer the question, do you have a durable moat right now with AI progress, your stock is probably going to sell off either way, kind of however you answer it. But there's a second question, which is like, are you a true beneficiary? So like, do you have a durable moat? And then are you a true beneficiary? So we decided to coin the phrase unsloppable. These are companies that we'll get into that have some type of moat in an era where it feels like more code could be written in the next 12 months than in all of human history. I was kind of running the numbers. It seems possible.

2:40Moat is specifically not okay. Okay, you're a company that has just spent 10 years writing a bunch of lines of code, and it would take a startup a lot of time and money, and they would have to hire a lot of engineers and write a lot of code to create a copy of what you have. So like to rebuild Salesforce as a platform, you would have to spend billions of, historically, you would have had to spend billions of dollars hiring thousands of software engineers to, you know, piece by piece, build out all of the functionality at Salesforce. Of course, you could build vertical solutions and get some amount of traction.

3:10But in general, the idea was like there was some effectively just an engineering moat and that there was a lot of code that you'd have to write to effectively compete. So software has undergone the largest non-recessionary 12-month drawdown in over 30 years. That's minus 34 percent, wiping out two trillion of market cap from the peak. This is JP Morgan as of a couple of days ago. AI threat sparks historic software stock crash. Goldman Sachs warns of newspaper-like decline. I love the newspaper. What's wrong with newspapers? Still got it. Still got it. And then as of yesterday, over the prior eight trading sessions, more than 20 % of the S &P 500 had a drawdown of 7 % or more in a single session, according to the compound.

3:56I wrote, everything was great when we were disrupting manual workflows, but as we enter the software singularity, we are having the uncomfortable experience of disrupting ourselves. Assume the marginal cost of software development goes to zero. If you're a software company where your moat was that a competitor would have to spend a billion dollars to hire a bunch of software engineers to write millions of lines of code to create a product and you have no other moats, it's going to be rough. Thankfully, there are moats that are unaffected by coding agents and effectively zero cost software development.

4:22Peter Thiel, PT, outlined four key sources of monopoly power in zero to one back in 2014. These are proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and brand. Most of these still hold, but proprietary technology by itself is no longer sufficient as a moat. In some cases, if you have a patent to a GLP-1 drug, that is a proprietary technology that will give you pricing power probably for as long as the patent holds. And there are patents on certain pieces of technology that even if they can be cloned or re-derived from first principles with your million geniuses in the data center, the first person to patent it gets to reap that value.

5:04And that's just the way our collection is. And the issue with software, how many, a bunch of designer friends of mine have like a design patent on a specific kind of workflow. Can they enforce it. And it's cool to say that you have a patent, but it's not. Yeah, proprietary technology can just be, okay, we have a big software system, but oftentimes it's more like we have proprietary, like something that's regulated, something that's a cornered resource, something that's scarce and will remain scarce. But yes, if your proprietary technology is just, you're the only person with this particular Python script, that's probably going away.

5:39But network effects aren't. And some of the economies of scale, some of the liquidity on these platforms is going to be durable. you can vibe code. I was talking to Dara Khoshashari at Uber about this. You can vibe code a pickup app that looks like Uber, has a map, lets you click the button, accepts payment. But if there's no one on the other side of that network to actually come and pick you up, your Uber clone is dead in the water. Now, the difference is that - Yeah, or if somebody does pick it up and the customer has a terrible experience, do you have the resources to actually make it right?

6:13Yeah, but Uber works because they spend a bunch of money getting to scale, cloning that scale is difficult. There are a set of businesses that will have to contend with the clankerfication of the economy. But that's second order. Yeah, so becoming unsloppable means two things. First, your business actually has to drive its economic power from a moat that is unsloppable. And second, you need to clearly communicate that to shareholders. Right now, if the market thinks you're just a bunch of lines of code, you're cooked. Tech companies we think of as unsloppable. You have hardware, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Cisco, Broadcom, SK Hynix, Western Digital, data centers, so neoclouds, things like CoreWeave, Lambda, social networks, YouTube, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, even thinking Roblox, right?

6:53Not just, you know, they have the network and they can be a beneficiary of AI because if it's easier to make games, a lot more people will make games. Maybe you'll get more usage. Marketplaces, Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, IP holders, Disney, Netflix, Warner Brothers. I think if you have a lot of IP right now and the cost to produce great content drops dramatically, you're going to benefit from that. And then platforms, things like YouTube and Spotify as well. I said it's been an incredibly rough couple of weeks for public market CEOs. Really disheartening on the show. CEOs have been putting up some great quarters, and then, you know, they're trading down between 7 % and 20%.

7:28There are two main questions everyone wants to know, even if they already sold your stock to buy Atoms. One, do you have a durable moat in the software singularity? Two, are you a true beneficiary of AI? many CEOs are still struggling to answer number one because it doesn't really matter what you say just having to answer the question equals a sell-off and two this one can really only be answered in the numbers you aren't an immediate AI beneficiary if revenue is not accelerating it's possible to be unsloppable but not an obvious beneficiary but you'll still likely sell off as the market digests and interrogates the actual real world impacts of coding agents some industries will be more resistant to change other industries will be revealed to have a secret source of market power that was underappreciated in the before times.

8:08What I was thinking was Nielsen, this company, it was, you know, in one way, Nielsen ratings, Nielsen data, a lot of consumer packaged goods companies use this. I'm sure Matina is looking at how is this Yerba Mate selling in this store. You go to Nielsen, you pay them and they give you data and it just which feels like an interface to sales data, but they have this whole network and you just have to pay for it. And it's not really something that you can just spin up. Capping off the newsletter, I said a lot of the software market feels like the office equipment and imaging sector in the 90s. So companies like Sharp, Canon, Panasonic, revenue was still up and to the right, but widespread adoption of the internet emails and PDFs was on the horizon.

8:55Even today, you'll still find a fax machine in every doctor's office and many of the giants of that era are still around. But if you stayed in those names, you would have missed out on generational gains by simply being long PDF. Had to go long PDF. If you look at these companies, Panasonic's still a massive company and they've obviously adapted over time. It's a shift from growth stock to value stock. Investors are less willing to pay for earnings that might come 10 years out because they're worried about those or 20 years out. Instead, they're asking, what will my return on invested capital be?

9:27this year? What will the dividend be this year? How much cash will you give me back if I invest for a one-year time horizon or shorter or longer? I think that there will be a reckoning around who is able to reveal a true moat and help people, help the market understand what their source of strength is, whether it's the liquidity on their platform, the network effect, the IP, if they have real IP that's defensible, but just having a big bag of code right now is a little bit of a weight since you're seeing so many companies that are saying, well, our software engineers aren't even writing the code anymore.

10:04Yes, we're advancing our products, but so many companies are going all in. It's also, it's pretty wild how long it's taken for the public markets to react to this kind of one-shotting concept or this zero marginal cost code coding concept, where we were having these same conversations in Q1 of last year, being like, what are the implications when you can just put in the prompt box, build me XYZ tool, right? And it took a while for the models to make progress. But even a year ago, it was pretty obvious that you would get to some point where you could one shot a big platform. Of course, reliability is still a concern, right?

10:42Security is still a concern. There's a lot of businesses where the potential risks of using like a vibe coded product like far outweigh the cost of just paying for the product and having something that's reliable, trustworthy, battle-tested. Yeah, I mean, there's still a ton of questions about how quickly disruption happens, how quickly market structures change. Some things go from monopolies to oligopolies. Some oligopolies are going to go to perfectly competitive. Certainly a bull market for YC companies who can vibe code something that's as good as a public company SaaS product and then go to those customers and say, maybe not as good, but as feature complete.

11:21As feature complete, or at least can compete a little bit faster and say, hey, I'll come in with an offer that's 10x cheaper. And that's just going to create some pricing pressure. The question is, what's the rate limiting factor? Is diffusion a real factor? Is adoption a real factor? Or do you need forward deployed engineers to go help companies transform with agentic coding? Or will this happen inside companies and they'll be building their own platforms? or will they want just a cheaper product from a new third party that has a different business model that's maybe more consumption based and Something where if it goes down on a Saturday, they don't need to even fire off a prompt How long until these these vibe-coded systems are like self-healing in the way an enterprise platform is and has like a proper SLA If the market is just catching up now to to like coding models being very good and vibe-coding all this stuff and they're basically like a year late.

12:15In one year, what do you think is going to be the thing that they're like, like, do you think they'll still be late? Is it going to be like, okay, actual like white-collar work is, you actually can't automate a lot of this stuff, and only in a year that they're actually going to like catch up to this? Tyler, if I knew the answer, we'd be on Wall Street. I think we'll be talking about it over the next couple months. We'll need to see like glimmers of demos. The one thing is like coding never felt so, here's the thing. So coding is a white collar job, but it's always felt a lot less fake than most white collar jobs.

12:46Like there's a lot of jobs like email jobs, laptop jobs where there's like six people on a call for an hour. And like one person is doing like really doing the work and the rest of them are just saying like nothing for my end. Thanks. Right. And that's like their entire day. Whereas coding, like the best engineers were actually just grinding all day long, putting in the hours. just shipping as some of these like more broad knowledge work tasks get more easy to automate. Do those people just like they're still going to be doing meetings? I mean, to date, the AI job loss has just been primarily from companies, I would say, still processing the Twitter acquisition and saying, hey, we just we need 50 percent fewer people here.

13:32My answer is the the unclankerable companies. So think about mining. I have a piece of land. There is gold in the dirt. There's another company that comes and their specialization is finding where the gold deposits are on my land. There's a third company that shows up with tractors and people that dig the gold out. Then there's a fourth company that takes the raw ore and refines it into gold. There's a fifth company that is a platform for selling that gold onto the market, right? So you have like five different layers of the supply chain to get the gold into the market from the ground. Let's just use that.

14:13It could be oil, it could be any mineral. Does robotic labor too cheap to meter change the value of the land? Probably not. But if you have a robotic digging machine that can show up and dig the ore out of the ground, dig the gold out of the ground at a lower cost. Well, the company that's been set up where their moat was they employed all the best miners and they had systems to know who's good, train them, make sure that they're doing it safely, train them on the tools, make sure that they have the right equipment to dig the ore reliably, work in shifts, all of that becomes attackable. If you're like, well, all I have to do to start a company that competes in the gold mining business is place an order with a bunch of humanoid robots and go to the guy who has the land and say, I want to dig the land and I will give you a little bit more.

15:08So I would say that that's probably the next thing that the market would be processing. And the ride hailing platforms dealing with the advent of this self-driving car is probably one of these like clankerification narratives, but that will come to a whole host of industries. The question is just on a five-year timeline, on a 10-year timeline, when will it be real? And then when will the market price it accordingly? Because a lot of the pressure that you're seeing in the market is not showing up in the financials. The companies are still growing. They're still producing cash. The business hasn't changed, but the perception of the future of the business has changed.

15:46And the perception of the future of the market structure has changed. Clavicular has also been in the news. Streamer Brayden Peters to host boxing match billed as test of physical dominance. The Valentine's Day livestream pits two figures from the male self-improvement internet against each other. Brayden Peters, the livestreamer known as Clavicular, announced Thursday that he will host a boxing match on his kick.com channel this Saturday evening, February 14th. The bout will feature two personalities from the online male aesthetics community, a figure known as ASU Frat Leader, an Arizona State University fraternity member who gained attention for his broad-shouldered build, and a creator who goes by Androgenic, a fitness influencer focused on hormone optimization and physical appearance.

16:33The matchup represents the latest example of niche internet subcultures, in this case, communities organized around male physical self-improvement and body image optimization, crossing over into live entertainment. So if you haven't been following these, we've been taking these viral kick clip posts and turning them into professionally written articles just as a joke. But Clavicular actually has a profile in the New York Times and it's written like that. And so I think our joke is over because it's hit the mainstream. Really, really wild time on the internet. Let's go back to the Anthropic round.

17:08Matt Slotnick says, LOL at the jockeying behind the scenes to land on this wording. Quote, we have raised$30 billion in Series G funding led by GIC and CO2, valuing Anthropic at$380 billion post money. The round was co-led by D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, Iconic, and MGX. A huge part of this raise is Claude Code, says Boris Cherney, who is the creator of Claude Code over at Anthropic. Weekly active users doubled since January. People who've never written a line of code are building with it. Humbled to work on this every day with our team. Still less annual revenue than AirPods.

17:43AirPods, last I checked, were a$20 billion revenue business. $22 billion in 2024. I'm glad this chart is now public because it is bananas. It is ridiculous. It should not exist, says Bruno F. $5 billion in tokens managed. Interesting. Salesforce invests in Anthropic colorized. I think when Mark was on, he said they have about a point of Anthropic going into this round, if I remember correctly. Let me ask you again. What is this? It's a horse giving money to a car. The car goes and buys a rocket launcher. The car blows up the barn and the horse is sad. And that does be like an apt analogy. From this extraordinary piece in The New Yorker, last summer, while Mark Zuckerberg was conducting hiring raids on other labs, Sholto Douglas, the anthropic engineer and TVPN guest, told me, this journalist, Gideon Lewis-Krauss, that a number of his colleagues, quote, could have taken a$50 million paycheck, but the vast majority of them hadn't even bothered to respond.

18:48spawned. They are early at a$350 billion company and are clearly very optimistic. Daniel says, so wait, Claude has seat-based pricing. Does this mean they're disrupting themselves too? Of course, a lot of the concern has been around the seat-based model. But it even feels like that is less of a factor than just the overall threat of zero marginal cost software. Yeah, why does Claude have seat-based pricing? It's essentially a consumption-based product, but psychologically, if I'm rolling out Claude to a company and I set up seats for a team, I know that there's individual rate limits, so no one individual is going to blow me up, basically.

19:33That's the idea. Let's play this timeless clip of George Hotz. Nah, we don't believe in stealth. I'm a really open guy. You are pretty open. I'll tell you everything I'm doing. Come on. Here's what I say. Here's what I say. I'm going to tell you what I'm doing, and you can try to compete, but I'll still crush you. Nah, we don't believe in stealth. It's so funny. Also, I don't know why that person cut that to be so widescreen. It looks very cinematic, but I like the quote here. You think the eggs I lay are valuable? I am the golden goose. Meanwhile, there's still a lot of secrets to every business.

20:09Yes, they're all over. And CEOs can do 100 hours of podcasts and tell you a lot about what they're doing without telling you the one or two things that are actually important. And it's very easy for somebody to come in and try to fast follow and ultimately just kind of get it entirely wrong, even though it looks like the right. And I think there was a huge incentive. I mean, going back to the SaaSpocalypse, there was incentive for a long time for companies that where their moat was not software to say, we're a software company, we need to hire the best software engineers, look at our open source projects, focus on all the cool tech that we're building, when really it was a marketplace, or really it was a liquidity provider, or really it was a network effect.

20:52If your network affects business, it can be sort of boring and honestly anti-competitive to just be like, look, we can do nothing and win. No one wants to hear a CEO say that, but we're going to find out who can do nothing and win. Over on LinkedIn, George Hatz is posting. And Reet says, George Hatz is the only thing keeping my LinkedIn feed good. He says, hello, corporate participant. You are building the machine that will eat you. You think your fake money will keep you safe. It won't. You think your social climbing friendships will keep you safe. They won't. The only choice is to stop. Tell your friends.

21:27Tell your neighbors. If you keep feeding this machine, it will eat you. The proposed revolutions will not be enough. A global scale nuclear conflict might, but even then, I'm not sure. The problem was never AI itself. It's the collapse of trust in society. Apps and phones have snuck between every crevice of people, and they are run by psychopaths. The AI will be a further wedge, just another lever to manipulate you. You will not be able to stand up to it, and you will be discarded the second you don't serve it. Like layoffs, you will die atomized and alone, and you won't understand that you did this to yourself.

21:58Brutal. Nice little white pill. Nice little Friday white pill. He's such a white piller. Well, here's a white pill. We're going to get into bunkers. There's a whole piece in the journal about how to secure a mega mansion. I know you've been asking. We have the answers. The mega rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses. and we're going to tell you how to do it for yourself. Anxiety over high-profile violence has the wealthy spending big on armed security, bunkers, a bunkie, and even moats. They're building moats. I haven't heard of an alligator in the moat or a shark in the moat, but people are, in fact, building moats.

22:34Being an alligator salesman, I feel like, is unsloppable. I think it could be clankable. Yes, maybe. But still, at the moment, unsloppable. But you've got to build the humanoid robot that can go in the water to wrestle the alligator. and that might be, we'll ask Red Adcock, is it waterproof? British music producer Alex Grant was living in an under construction mega mansion in Los Angeles. One morning, shortly after 9 a.m., an intruder armed burst into the home. Grant said he came in and we had a tussle. Grant managed to call his manager, who phoned the police. Soon, officers and helicopters were on the scene.

23:10He briefly considered abandoning the project after the 2017 break-in, but ultimately finished the 24 ,000 square foot home, which has eight pools, a car elevator, and a nightclub. Wow. But he doubled down on security features installing a guardhouse, tall gates, and a security system with retina scanners that alert the homeowner to movement in the home. Later, I found out he had these knives on him, Grant said, who recently listed the mansion, and a neighboring house for$85 million after moving to New York. In an era of high-profile violence, including the suspected abduction of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Arizona home just over a week ago.

23:44The wealthy are investing heavily in their personal security, particularly when it comes to their homes. Security measures once reserved for presidents and royalty, safe rooms, biometric access controls, laser-powered perimeter defenses, these are now mainstream items in luxury homes. Executive protection teams and armed guards patrol gated enclaves and suburban estates. While tech startups are rolling out predictive threat detection systems built for the ultra-wealthy, the shift reflects a hardening view among the affluent. Traditional policing and communal safety are no longer enough, no security.

24:16So security is being privatized and customized. The new emphasis is reflected in sales data. Roughly 45 % of luxury homes in 2025 included a reference to privacy or security, up from 38 % the year earlier. So break-ins at the homes of celebrities and professional athletes have been putting the wealthy on edge. A group of Chilean nationals was indicted last year for stealing items worth more than$2 million from sports stars, including Kansas City chief players, Travis Kelsey and Patrick Mahomes. This had something to do with the visa process with Chile, where you could very easily get a tourist visa.

24:51So there was these like, allegedly, there were teams that would be permanently based in the US, and then they would be running kind of the operations. They'd be in the kind of war room, and then basically tourists would come for two weeks, hit a bunch of houses and then bounced. Wow. And those were the only people that were actually exposed to, or exposed, meaning they were like carrying out the different ops. The homes of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman have also been broken into. Miami real estate agent Danny Hertzberg of Cold War Banker said he began noticing an increase in emphasis on security in 2020 when high-profile executives were migrating from New York to Miami during the early days of the COVID pandemic.

25:33Corporations are taking note. companies offering personal security benefits for CEOs increased by 10%. One entrepreneur capitalizing on this growth is David Weiderhorn, who got into real estate after selling a tech company in 2017. He recently built a heavily secured home in Scottsdale, Arizona. In early December, Weiderhorn walked through the 8 ,600 square foot property, pointing out 32 casino-grade AI-powered facial and vehicle recognition cameras. There's also a laser intrusion detection system around the perimeter. Pausing at a steel double gate in front of the house, he warned that the security system kicks in even before visitors reach the front door, which is fashioned out of three-inch thick solid steel and has 13 deadbolts.