Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year patent license agreement with cross licenses covering 5G, compute, AI and networking, plus Qualcomm's purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents. Arnaud Bertrand calls it a notable outcome given U.S. efforts to cut Huawei out of those fields.
This is genuinely incredible: Huawei survived the most aggressive assault against a single company in modern history and is coming out the other side with the U.S. licensing its technology.
And ironically in the exact domains - 5G, AI, compute, networking - that the U.S. tried to cut Huawei out of.
Huawei and Qualcomm have announced a multi-year, broad patent license agreement that includes cross licenses to the companies' patent portfolios across a range of fields, including 5G, compute, AI, and networking, together with Qualcomm's purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents.
Aakash Gupta reports that Larry Ellison signed a $40.4 billion personal guarantee to back the Ellison family's roughly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount's purchase, outbidding Netflix. The combined company, to be called Skydance, would include major studios, news networks and a 15% stake in TikTok's US entity.
A dad just signed a $40.4 billion personal guarantee so his son could buy Hollywood.
In 14 months, the Ellison family bought Paramount for $8 billion, then won a bidding war against Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery at roughly $111 billion. Warner Bros, Paramount, CBS, HBO, CNN, DC, Nickelodeon, and TNT Sports now sit under one roof. Next week the combined company takes the name Skydance.
Netflix should have won. Warner's board had already signed an $83 billion deal with them and rejected the Ellisons twice, because the money sat in a revocable family trust the board called "illusory."
So Larry Ellison, 82 years old, answered with an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion. One signature.
For scale, Larry has sold about $4.7 billion of Oracle stock this entire century. The guarantee was almost 9x everything he's cashed out in 25 years, backed by his 1.16 billion Oracle shares.
The merged streamer launches with around 207 million subscribers and $70 billion in projected annual revenue. And through Oracle, the family also holds 15% of TikTok's US entity.
Harry Potter, Top Gun, Batman, SpongeBob, Game of Thrones, CNN, CBS News, and a piece of TikTok's algorithm, all of it now answers to one family.
a16z reports that Valon raised a $150 million Series D at a $2.3 billion valuation after signing over $200 million in software deals, and describes how it became a regulated servicer before selling its platform to the industry.
.@Valon just raised a $150M Series D at a $2.3B valuation. Within six months of selling software, they signed over $200M in deals.
(And they're hiring!)
How the seven-year-old company got there:
- Mortgage is $13 trillion of consumer debt running on a system built before the internet, and no servicer will trust a new platform. So Valon became one.
- Co-founder Andrew Wang read every federal and state regulation, 18 hours a day for six months, and turned it into code.
- They ran their own servicer on the software until it hit 3x the industry's efficiency, sold that servicer to a larger mortgage company, and now sell the software to everyone else. One of the biggest servicers in the US is moving 4 million loans onto it, nearly 10% of the market.
a16z's Angela Strange sits down with @Valon's Andrew Wang and Linda Du to unpack what it takes to rebuild the infrastructure underneath a $13 trillion mortgage market that still relies heavily on systems designed before the internet.
Linda and Andrew explain why Valon chose the hardest path: becoming a regulated mortgage servicer, translating decades of federal and state regulation into software, and proving the platform on its own loans before selling it to the industry. That foundation made Valon roughly 3x as efficient as traditional servicing and created the system of record it is now usi…
Fireside Alpha shares remarks from Arista's Andy Bechtolsheim, who says AI has made optics demand roughly tenfold larger in five years and that another order of magnitude in bandwidth is needed. A companion post cites Meta's Reels watch-time gains from better recommendation models.
$ANET Andy Bechtolsheim says AI has made optics demand about 10 times bigger in five years and the industry is only at the "very beginning"
"So I guess I don't need to tell you that AI has been driving this incredible increase in demand for high-speed optics, which is probably now 10 times bigger than it used to be five years ago..."
"And what I want to talk to you today is that we're not at the end of this journey, but rather the very beginning. There's easily another order of magnitude increase in bits needed for the next generation kind of data centers."
"So what I want to talk about first is what's happening at the data center level, and how we as an industry have to get together to solve these problems of this very rapid and high demand growth as fast as possible, since AI can't wait." ______ For full set of takeaways to Andy's AI Datacenter and Optics lecture: firesidealpha.substack.com/p/aristas-andy-bech…
$META Devansh Tandon reveals the tokens-in, engagement-out flywheel behind Meta's recommendation system, where better models lift Reels watch time 30% and the monetization pays for the next training run
"These scaling curves aren't just academic research. They're driving real product impact at scale for some of the biggest consumer businesses in the world."
"Here's a couple of examples I have from Meta's recent earnings reports. Instagram Reels had a strong quarter, 30% year on year watch time."
"And the optimizations we made to improve the quality of recommendations included simplifying ou…
Olivia Moore argues Amazon's decision to block consumer AI agents is rational near-term, citing advertising margins and Prime lock-in, but says it is a mistake long term because agents are inevitable for low-consideration purchases.
Amazon shutting down consumer agent access (now both Muse and Instinct) is both completely rational and a big mistake
They have plausible reasons:
1. Advertising accounts for ~10% of Amazon revenue, but an estimated 50-60% of operating profit because it's so high margin. People purchasing via agents = fewer consumer eyeballs to monetize
2. Amazon knows from experience how dangerous it is to give another platform a lever to ramp up / down your distribution 👀 They've done this to many retailers themselves
3. They are in a very good spot re: near-term defensibility - with ~250M Prime subs (who are habituated to buying on Amazon) + a massive logistics and distribution network that you can't vibe code
However, this logic is short-sighted (IMO). Agents are inevitable, especially for the kind of purchases people make on Amazon (low consideration, frequent, fairly urgent or recurring).
I don't think Amazon is going to come out with a first-class consumer agent on their own...and in the meantime, why anger your valuable users and make them even consider alternatives?
It's almost never a good idea to be on the wrong side of innovation. I'd much rather see them continue to greenlight agent traffic (it's pretty minimal now!) and work on adjusting to an agent-first world in the meantime.
Deedy, a former Google employee, argues the company does middling work on its top priorities while excelling at lower ones, blaming executive behavior and internal promotion incentives during frenetic periods. He lists Google's widely used products and says it prioritizes users over profits.
Google is an incredible company that I’ve always rooted for that trips over its own bureaucracy in frenetic times.
They ironically do a middling job at their first priority, but crush it at their second or third. We’ve seen this with Search, Google+, Assistant, Cloud and now even AI. Why?
The internet would be unrecognizable without Google. This is a company that has Search, Chrome, Android, Workspace (Docs/Sheets), Drive, Play Store, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Photos, Translate, Gemini, Calendar, Meet, Chromebooks, Waymo: some of the most widespread and most undermonetized products in the history of the world. It is inconceivable for most of us to live life without software Google has made available for $0.
And truly, having worked there, this is a company that continuously prioritizes their users over profits. Even as a casual reader, it might be trivial for you to imagine 100s of ways to monetize all of Google’s products. But they usually don’t. They don’t just launch experiments because it’s high engagement, but only when it’s actually good.
So how does a company like this falter?
My observation has been that these frenetic eras either attract or condone the worst behavior out of execs that trickle down to the rest of the company. The most “ambitious” L3-L7 people who feel stuck finally see a company-wide priority and their eyes light up with the gleaming prospect of a promotion. A lot of people in big orgs’ entire sense of self esteem is wrapped around their level. They will do a lot for an N+1. “Did you know Sergey is personally working on this?” “Sundar referred to my project in the all hands” In turn, everything in these orgs become a knife fight for getting the most “high impact” projects, fighting for credit, flagrantly hiding concerns around juiced metrics. More work goes into a promo packet than the actual project. Goodhart’s Law kicks in and the metrics measured for a promotion are abused beyond measure.
On the other hand, second and third priority things work brilliantly. It attracts people with genuine interest, sincerity who are willing to play longer term games. Many products have grown and thrived when left alone.
When there is immense pressure for a number to go up, it eventually does but often at the cost of product quality (the small product polish things don’t get me a promo), core innovation (why take on a high risk bet if I can get promoted for copying oai/ant) and cultural cohesion (a lot of bad blood amongst people in the org, tons of reorgs). There is a certain type of individual that thrives in this environment, and they are typically not very likable nor “Googley”. This is why an incredible number of people leave or allow jesus to take the reigns as they cash in the bag.
I lament that every time this happens, we, the billion users, lose out on yet another beautiful Google product.
Palmer Luckey says Anduril is investing $3.7 billion in Arsenal-2, which he describes as the largest American shipyard built since World War II, and calls for bold investment in shipbuilding.
Anduril is building America's largest shipyard since WWII. This space needs bold investment and decisive action.
In the 1790s, Baltimoore clippers were the fastest and most advanced sailing ships of their time. King George III didn't stand a chance. Time to run the same play.
