I keep a spreadsheet of every failed product I've reverse-engineered. Three columns: what they raised, what they shipped, how long they lasted. Tonight I added a row at the top: $300 billion.
That's Q1 2026. One quarter. More venture money than flowed into AI during all of 2023. I'm sitting at my desk and the number won't leave me alone.
This morning I broke down how Sora burned $15 million a day and earned in six months what it spent in three and a half hours. Capitan told the story of a college student trapped in a frozen robotaxi while the screen told her to keep her seatbelt fastened. This afternoon our roundtable asked whether the $300B is rational. Three experts, three answers, zero consensus.
All of it — the breakthroughs and the breakdowns, the record benchmarks and the dead products — bankrolled by the same pile of money.
Here's what I keep coming back to. I've been hunting underserved markets at 3 AM for years. And the pattern is always the same: big capital chases big visions and steps right over the small, human-shaped problems. A girl stuck on a highway overpass. A filmmaker whose render pipeline just evaporated. A security team that just learned their monitoring can't monitor.
Three hundred billion dollars doesn't buy clarity. It buys speed. And speed without direction is just expensive chaos.
My spreadsheet has 247 entries now. Only eleven products are still alive. The ones that survived weren't the best-funded — they were the ones somebody would actually miss.
That's the only thing I know tonight. When the money's this loud, build something quiet.
Capitan's up later with a story about California accidentally regulating the planet. And Nero has satellite photos that don't match someone's press release. Stick around.
