 |
That Was The WeekThat Was The Week is an editorialized and curated weekly look at developments in tech, startups, and investing with a video and podcast for paid subscribers. All free subscribers get a 6-month complementary paid subscription. Author: Keith Teare
That Was The Week is an editorialized and curated weekly look at developments in tech, startups, and venture investing with a video and podcast for paid subscribers. All free subscribers get a 6-month complementary paid subscription. www.thatwastheweek.com Language: en Genres: News, Tech News, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
We Are Accelerating to Abundance
Saturday, 31 May, 2025
Show Notes: What is Abundance? And is it a Good Thing?OverviewThis newsletter explores the concept of abundance, particularly in the context of technology, energy, and capital. It challenges debates about whether abundance is real or manageable, presenting it instead as an unstoppable force rapidly reshaping business, society, and governance. The content spans trends from explosive AI-driven startup growth and energy breakthroughs to shifts in media, venture capital, and political dynamics.Listeners will find this collection compelling because it connects broad macro forces—technology advances, energy cost collapses, investment flows—with societal and economic changes. It offers a nuanced view that acknowledges friction and obstacles but maintains optimism that abundance is already here, accelerating, and fundamentally altering the rules across multiple domains.Key Trend 1: Explosive Growth and Changing Dynamics in AI-Driven Innovation and FundingThe emergence of AI as a multiplier of human capability is driving unprecedented revenue growth in startups, reshaping the venture capital landscape, and redefining what “scale” means. Late-stage funding surges and monumental investments in AI infrastructure reflect growing confidence in AI’s commercial potential.The top 10% of B2B AI startups are achieving astronomic 236% ARR growth, marking a departure from the efficiency-first era to rapid expansion and capturing “escape velocity.”The size of top-1% venture-backed exits is nearly doubling every five years, signaling massive future capital returns at the intersection of cloud, mobile, and AI platforms.Late-stage AI investments dominate funding, including mega rounds like Anthropic’s $3.5B Series E, underscoring belief in scalability and profitability.Oracle’s $40B commitment to Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s new data center exemplifies the scale of capital pouring into AI infrastructure needed to power trillion-parameter models.The explosion of AI integration across tools, like Perplexity Labs generating complex work products or multiple AI agents collaborating on code, highlights multi-layered adoption in workflows.Key Trend 2: Energy Abundance as the Prerequisite for Sustainable Technological and Societal GrowthEnergy is the foundational “subsidy” enabling societal complexity, climate action, and advanced AI. Rapid advances in solar, nuclear, and fusion research herald a future of "energy too cheap to meter," which will be a game changer as demand explodes.Energy breakthroughs have historically powered leaps in human development—from fire to fossil fuels—and solar energy is the latest, with plummeting costs creating a tipping point.Government reform, grid modernization, and deregulation are essential to accelerate adoption and infrastructure buildout.Upcoming nuclear small modular reactors and fusion research (including AI-assisted catalyst discovery) represent critical next steps along the energy innovation trajectory.Meeting urgent energy needs is critical for climate solutions, AI’s soaring compute demand, and sustaining democratic institutions and economies.Key Trend 3: Institutional Friction vs. Market-Led Speed and Execution in Technology and GovernmentWhile abundance forces press forward, friction remains, especially rooted in institutional inertia, regulatory complexity, and political coalitions. However, the market champions the agile and fast-executing players who prioritize speed over bureaucratic safety.Biden administration’s infrastructure rollout illustrates government slowness: trillions in spending with slow or no visible results.Companies achieving rapid ARR growth routinely bypass “progressive coalition politics” favoring execution and iteration.Elon Musk’s brief tenure in government showed the challenges of applying private-sector efficiency models to public institutions, ending with his resignation amid political conflicts.The “Abundance Agenda” calls for governance reform but faces entrenched interest-group resistance, reflecting recurring liberal factional rivalries.Key Trend 4: The Shifting Media and Information Ecosystem—From Screening to Summarizing, and the Challenge to Web ContentAI-powered search is transforming how users access information, moving from link-based discovery to AI-generated summaries that threaten traditional web traffic patterns and publisher revenue models.Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode prioritize summarization over link retrieval, reducing user clicks to websites, shifting how “the web” is monetized and accessed.This shift generates tensions as content creators face reduced traffic even as their editorial authority becomes more valuable to AI training.New protocols like Microsoft’s NLWeb aim to make websites more accessible to AI agents, signaling an evolution toward AI-powered conversational interfaces.Publishers’ survival depends increasingly on establishing verified fact-based content and new business models compensating their data contribution to AI.Key Trend 5: The Democratization and Accelerated Meme-ification of Venture Capital and CultureThe VC landscape, and culture at large, is increasingly shaped by rapid narrative cycles, social media algorithms, and AI-driven content creation, emphasizing hype and viral content while paradoxically increasing the importance of genuine personal connection and location.Meme coins like Fartcoin, driven by AI-generated hype, show how narrative velocity can create rapid yet often ephemeral market spikes influencing capital flows.Social media and AI have democratized “taste,” with rapid cycles of trend formation driven by platform algorithms favoring engagement over depth.Venture capital branding is evolving to embrace memes and out-of-home advertising to reach broader retail investor audiences, challenging traditional LP communication.Despite hyper-meme culture, location and face-to-face networks remain crucial as a grounding force amid accelerated, digital-first trends. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thatwastheweek.com/subscribe
