1/ Great Pivot: Is Core-Weave making the most of the AI wave?
Startups often start as something but end up becoming entirely different things. Slack first started as a gaming company, Twitter started as Odea, a site to download podcasts from & Netflix started a DVD rental business and so on.
Core-weave seems to have pulled off the ultimate pivot. It was always theoretically possible for crypto mining farms to leverage their GPUs for AI. Core-weave put this theory in practice and pivoted from crypto mining to delivering services to companies who want to create their own data centers for AI. It is slightly different then using their GPUs. They are instead using their expertise of creating data centers and helping companies to launch their own AI data centers.
But the obvious problem every one has in the AI era is sourcing chips from NVIDIA. To solve this core-weave partnered with Nvidia as an elite partner to deliver compute for AI & machine learning workloads. At the peak of AI hype core-weave started as services company for helping companies looking to scale up or scale out their AI datacenters. But now it seems like they are trying to be the go-to cloud for running optimized AI workloads.
This might be the most interesting pivot we have seen in the times of AI.
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2/ Tik & Tok: Always Follow the Money
An year back all the headlines were about banning TikTok, but all of a sudden that issue sort of went away from the main stream narrative.
When narratives change usually it means incentives changed.
It looks like there is a significant lobbying effort behind this narrative change as well. Jeff Yass spent $60M in support of a Super PAC called Club of Growth, which is working against bans in the U.S. Its not a coincidence that Jeff Yass is also a significant shareholder in Bytedance (7%), the company behind TikTok.
Irrespective of which side you are on the issue of banning or not banning TikTok, its important to always look at incentives.
That’s the take away here. Always follow the money.
Also how come there isn’t an effective super PAC that is pushing for solving Indian immigration timeline problem? May be I should start one. 😃
3/ Reversing roles: Guest on Jim Huffman’s podcast
I am usually the person asking questions on a podcast, but I was recently Jim’s podcast to talk about interesting trends in tech.
We talked about:
- Elon’s goal with X
- $1 Trillion opportunity
- 2nd best EV in the U.S
- Real reason behind the name change from Facebook to Meta
- You can find the full conversation below.
Startup Predictions, Elon’s X Strategy, Meta’s Flop, and More with Angel Investor Nataraj Sindam (#150)
Listen to this episode from If I Was Starting Today on Spotify. Today, Jim is joined by Nataraj Sindam who has spent his entire career learning the ins and outs of the tech industry. He and Jim analyze some of the overlooked trends happening in tech today and give some hot takes on some of the world’s biggest companies. TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Different paths into tech entrepreneurship Elon’s X strategy Amazon’s Alexa problem Amazon Ads Predictions: Rivian Food as healthcare VC trends Resources: https://above-average.beehiiv.com/ thestartupproject.io Jim Huffman website Jim’s Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer’s Playbook Additional episodes you might enjoy:Startup Ideas by Paul Graham (#45)Nathan Barry: How to Bootstrap a Company to $30M in a Crowded Market (#41)How I Met My Biz Partner and Less Learned Hitting $2M ARR (#44)Ryan Hamilton on his Netflix special, touring with Jerry Seinfeld, & how to write a joke (#10)How We’re Validating Startup Ideas (#51)
open.spotify.com/episode/4FMD0ZrDGSdson4lvo2Bsl?si=1A-LZZnERu2XW2w1WI53Wg