If you look at the internet, large markets like search, social, video, have all gone down a free model, and those businesses have made money through the data that is there. I was increasingly seeing the same effect in fintech, with businesses like Robinhood doing free stock trading, and Credit Karma with free credit reports… the mission of our business is to use data and AI to make payments free for businesses.

We believe restaurants are still largely misunderstood and undervalued as entertainment assets. If you look at how restaurant companies are being valued at the high end of the market now, like Nobu and Carbone, you're seeing pretty sky-high valuations around a billion dollars… there is something about restaurants that make them fundamentally premium entertainment assets.

Restaurant payments are problematic because they cost restaurants a ton of money, 300 to 400 basis points, and they aren’t getting much for it. Restaurants themselves have no real tools when it comes to customer acquisition or retention… the average independent restaurant is competing with huge behemoths for customers, and they can’t win with the tools they have.

We were founded with a belief that AI was poised to be the solution to its own energy problem. Geothermal is the perfect energy source, it has a tiny footprint, no carbon emissions, and if you know where to drill, it’s already the lowest cost source of energy on the planet.

We train AI models to understand geothermal systems by simulating all physically possible subsurface realities, and we're now out discovering and developing geothermal resources at a speed and a cost and scale that just simply wasn't possible before.

There’s this concept that you’ve probably heard us mention before over the years called the "adjacent possible," which was introduced by our friend, the writer and entrepreneur, Steven Johnson. The idea is that innovation happens when you have new tools, new technologies, new societal shifts that allow for new combinations of things that were impossible before.

If you think about healthcare, there's always been a choice. You can have instant access, you can have clinical accuracy, or you can have affordability, and you only get to pick one of those. Two or three of them simultaneously could not be done at scale.

Matt from Doctronic asked, ‘What if AI agents could engage in collective intelligence — multiple specialists working together, debating diagnoses, and delivering instant and inexpensive care — to solve the historical trade off?'

The way Doctronic works is that any user can come to the website and talk with the AI for free, and by default, it's totally anonymous with no PII. At the end of any conversation, we give a full assessment with four diagnoses and four treatment plans, and anyone can take the information

We’ve had 17 million patient interactions this year, and our doctors and our AI are aligned on treatment plans 99.2% of the time. One of the cool things that happens with our AI is that it gets smarter every time somebody talks to it. So the more people talk to it, the more it learns. Our doctors are in the loop providing feedback on every single conversation.

We know that every technology bubble has burst. It goes as far back as the South Sea bubble where Isaac Newton famously lost his shirt, to the railway bubble, the roaring 20s, the dot-com bubble inflating and bursting, and then multiple crypto bubbles.

But there is some chance that this particular bubble is actually different. The notion that AI can be a self-improving technology makes this fundamentally different from any bubble that has come before. We've never had technology that accelerates itself as you build it.

Where does all of this leave us? I think all this leaves us in a place where we think there's a chance it bursts, but we also think there's a chance that it continues for quite some time.

Our general feeling is that the market will move increasingly towards a fundamentals based view of crypto protocols. This is the clearest in DeFi protocols, things around lending and swapping, where there are real on-chain revenues that are directly correlated to volumes and transactions.

At the moment, there's still somewhat of a substantial premium in the market, and that may continue for some time. But the medium/long-term trend will be more towards fundamentals-based pricing, which could lead to a substantial re-rating of some networks that don't have strong fundamentals in place, or that don’t have economics connected to the token. The other thing that this could lead to is a lessening of the boom-bust cycle, because things start to have fundamental, sustainable, lasting value.

Our last horizontal thesis was about transforming the structure of markets from the outside in, what we think of as the ‘edge’. What I mean by that is to approach markets in ways that avoid gatekeepers and transform how they operate structurally, rather than working to change them from the inside.

What clicked for us is that the best way to do this is by making them programmable. By making each of these industries programmable, you have more levers and better tools to transform how they operate in a structural way.

Think about what could happen next with companies that remain private, OpenAI, SpaceX, the list goes on. We are starting to see people buy those shares in secondaries, put them in custody, tokenize them, and put them onchain.

Maybe what we will see is some companies never go public in the traditional way, but have massively liquid, tokenized equity that's trading onchain. And I think that could be a huge new asset class. And that would look a lot like stablecoins. It would trade on these Layer 1s. It would be available in wallets and be available to be lent in DeFi protocols and so on and so forth. Pretty exciting what you can see if you peek around the corner.

If you look at the internet, large markets like search, social, video, have all gone down a free model, and those businesses have made money through the data that is there. I was increasingly seeing the same effect in fintech, with businesses like Robinhood doing free stock trading, and Credit Karma with free credit reports… the mission of our business is to use data and AI to make payments free for businesses.

We believe restaurants are still largely misunderstood and undervalued as entertainment assets. If you look at how restaurant companies are being valued at the high end of the market now, like Nobu and Carbone, you're seeing pretty sky-high valuations around a billion dollars… there is something about restaurants that make them fundamentally premium entertainment assets.

Restaurant payments are problematic because they cost restaurants a ton of money, 300 to 400 basis points, and they aren’t getting much for it. Restaurants themselves have no real tools when it comes to customer acquisition or retention… the average independent restaurant is competing with huge behemoths for customers, and they can’t win with the tools they have.

We were founded with a belief that AI was poised to be the solution to its own energy problem. Geothermal is the perfect energy source, it has a tiny footprint, no carbon emissions, and if you know where to drill, it’s already the lowest cost source of energy on the planet.

We train AI models to understand geothermal systems by simulating all physically possible subsurface realities, and we're now out discovering and developing geothermal resources at a speed and a cost and scale that just simply wasn't possible before.

There’s this concept that you’ve probably heard us mention before over the years called the "adjacent possible," which was introduced by our friend, the writer and entrepreneur, Steven Johnson. The idea is that innovation happens when you have new tools, new technologies, new societal shifts that allow for new combinations of things that were impossible before.

If you think about healthcare, there's always been a choice. You can have instant access, you can have clinical accuracy, or you can have affordability, and you only get to pick one of those. Two or three of them simultaneously could not be done at scale.

Matt from Doctronic asked, ‘What if AI agents could engage in collective intelligence — multiple specialists working together, debating diagnoses, and delivering instant and inexpensive care — to solve the historical trade off?'

The way Doctronic works is that any user can come to the website and talk with the AI for free, and by default, it's totally anonymous with no PII. At the end of any conversation, we give a full assessment with four diagnoses and four treatment plans, and anyone can take the information

We’ve had 17 million patient interactions this year, and our doctors and our AI are aligned on treatment plans 99.2% of the time. One of the cool things that happens with our AI is that it gets smarter every time somebody talks to it. So the more people talk to it, the more it learns. Our doctors are in the loop providing feedback on every single conversation.

We know that every technology bubble has burst. It goes as far back as the South Sea bubble where Isaac Newton famously lost his shirt, to the railway bubble, the roaring 20s, the dot-com bubble inflating and bursting, and then multiple crypto bubbles.

But there is some chance that this particular bubble is actually different. The notion that AI can be a self-improving technology makes this fundamentally different from any bubble that has come before. We've never had technology that accelerates itself as you build it.

Where does all of this leave us? I think all this leaves us in a place where we think there's a chance it bursts, but we also think there's a chance that it continues for quite some time.

Our general feeling is that the market will move increasingly towards a fundamentals based view of crypto protocols. This is the clearest in DeFi protocols, things around lending and swapping, where there are real on-chain revenues that are directly correlated to volumes and transactions.

At the moment, there's still somewhat of a substantial premium in the market, and that may continue for some time. But the medium/long-term trend will be more towards fundamentals-based pricing, which could lead to a substantial re-rating of some networks that don't have strong fundamentals in place, or that don’t have economics connected to the token. The other thing that this could lead to is a lessening of the boom-bust cycle, because things start to have fundamental, sustainable, lasting value.

Our last horizontal thesis was about transforming the structure of markets from the outside in, what we think of as the ‘edge’. What I mean by that is to approach markets in ways that avoid gatekeepers and transform how they operate structurally, rather than working to change them from the inside.

What clicked for us is that the best way to do this is by making them programmable. By making each of these industries programmable, you have more levers and better tools to transform how they operate in a structural way.

Think about what could happen next with companies that remain private, OpenAI, SpaceX, the list goes on. We are starting to see people buy those shares in secondaries, put them in custody, tokenize them, and put them onchain.

Maybe what we will see is some companies never go public in the traditional way, but have massively liquid, tokenized equity that's trading onchain. And I think that could be a huge new asset class. And that would look a lot like stablecoins. It would trade on these Layer 1s. It would be available in wallets and be available to be lent in DeFi protocols and so on and so forth. Pretty exciting what you can see if you peek around the corner.