24 August 2026
11 new episodes (9.4 hours listening) published by the 38 podcasts on the list. 11 highlight clips below (36 mins total).
Investment 24 August 2026 · 11 clips
20VC
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
Jason Lemkin is a SaaS investor whose portfolio includes Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat and Salesloft, and he says he is an investor in Mercor, Poolside and Perplexity. Rory O'Driscoll is a general partner at Scale, where he led investments in Bill.com, Box, DocuSign and WalkMe.
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1 of 2 framework
NVIDIA's vendor financing changes what it has to be right about: selling chips only requires being right in the end, while lending against them requires being right every year along the way.
Aschenbrenner's fund is the same structure seen from the other side: the thesis may well have been right over five years, and four-to-one gearing meant it had to survive each quarter in between. Citadel is set against both, never trying to be right over five years and selling anything up 10%.
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2 of 2 framework
Stripe tells its investors to treat intelligence as capital rather than as seat-based software, because uncapped consumption has to be allocated and rationed the way money is.
A chief financial officer cannot introduce automation and then report that earnings per share fell 10%, so a rising token bill has to come out of another line, usually people. Their figure for the two labs' revenue is an appreciable share of total US corporate profits, which is the arithmetic that forces the trade-off rather than any preference for cutting.
Animal Spirits
Ed Zitron
Zitron founded the PR firm EZPR in 2013 and has written the newsletter Where's Your Ed At since 2020, where his 2023 essay on the rot economy circulated widely. He hosts the Better Offline podcast and says he holds no position in any of the companies he writes about and gives no financial advice.
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1 of 2 contrarian
Ed Zitron puts $24.1 billion of Microsoft's $34.33 billion in fiscal 2026 AI revenue down to a single customer, OpenAI, which leaves everything else Microsoft sells into AI a single-digit-billion business.
Microsoft is being paid out of money OpenAI raises, and the last round drew only $12 billion of its $122 billion from venture capital, the rest from Nvidia, SoftBank and Amazon. Zitron sets his own break point: at 30% concentration he would drop the argument, at 70% he calls it existential.
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2 of 2 prediction
Ed Zitron names four events that would break the AI spending cycle, and all four are financing events: a hyperscaler quitting the race, a hyperscaler downgraded, a widely held AI startup running out of money, and an IPO that fails.
He watches bond books for the first sign: Amazon's data centre issue cleared at 1.6 times oversubscribed against four to five times for Google's, and a fall towards 1.1 or 1.2 would be the tell. Ratings agencies meanwhile put CoreWeave's debt at investment grade on the strength of its hyperscaler customers.
In Good Company (Norges Bank)
Sir Paul Marshall, co-founder of Marshall Wace
Marshall co-founded Marshall Wace in 1997 with $50 million, half of it from Soros, and the firm now runs around $90 billion with roughly 750 staff, over 200 of them in technology. Assets fell from $14 billion to $3.5 billion through 2008 because the firm chose not to gate while competitors did. He wrote "10½ Lessons from Experience" and sold a minority stake to KKR in 2015-16.
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1 of 3 explainer
Paul Marshall sets out why a short book fights its own risk management: the position grows as it moves against you, and the borrow rate has already priced what every other hedge fund thinks.
Brokers and the press sit on the long side of every company they cover, so the argument a manager hears runs one way before the trade is on. Marshall's comparison is the losing long, which shrinks as it falls and can be averaged down at a better price, a discipline that has no counterpart when the position runs the other way.
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2 of 3 contrarian
Paul Marshall expects markets to get more competitive without getting more efficient, because AI pushes retail's share of trading up and retail does not arrive with institutional risk management.
Good firms now receive and process the same data in the same moment, which is how he explains an information edge disappearing while an analytical one survives. He points at China, Taiwan and Korea, where a high retail share has historically left alpha on the table.
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3 of 3 prediction
Paul Marshall says the US semiconductor index sits at a five or ten year low on valuation, so the AI bubble he expects has not started, and twice-levered GPU securitisations would be his signal that it has.
He wants three conditions before calling one: rates low enough to encourage speculation, valuations extended, and leverage at unsustainable levels. Korea gives him the second reading, at an all-time low on the same measure, and its leveraged ETF market falling from $60 billion to $20 billion in five weeks is a leverage episode he treats as already formed and cleared.
AI 24 August 2026 · 11 clips
Invest Like the Best
Neil Movva
Neil Movva co-founded Sail Research, which sells inference on open-source models through an API and hosts long-running agent virtual machines for tasks measured in hours or days. Nvidia was his first job, while he was in college, and he worked on the software team squeezing performance out of the first generation of tensor cores from around 2016; he says he has spent his whole professional life on GPUs and kernels.
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1 of 2 explainer
Nvidia's Blackwell stacks 298 gigabytes of DRAM around a logic die carrying roughly 500 megabytes of SRAM, and that gap of three orders of magnitude is the whole reason Cerebras and Groq exist.
Static cells sit beside the arithmetic units and read at petabyte-a-second rates, but a six-transistor cell eats die area, so even a full wafer of them holds only tens of gigabytes. Weights fit that budget and the conversation cache does not, because the cache grows with how many users arrive and how long they talk, which is why the wafer-scale parts get paired with a conventional GPU rather than replacing one.
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2 of 2 framework
Neil Movva puts the practical ceiling on new United States data centre capacity at about 10 megawatts a site, with one megawatt plentiful and a gigawatt effectively unbuildable.
Training needs one concentrated site because nobody wants to train across data centres, which is why developers still hunt for the hundred-megawatt parcels. Inference does not, so he buys the scattered one-megawatt pools instead and accepts what comes with them: no backup generators, a single fibre trench, no redundancy, and uptime he expects to fall to 95% at some sites.
In Good Company (Norges Bank)
Sir Paul Marshall, co-founder of Marshall Wace
Marshall co-founded Marshall Wace in 1997 with $50 million, half of it from Soros, and the firm now runs around $90 billion with roughly 750 staff, over 200 of them in technology. Assets fell from $14 billion to $3.5 billion through 2008 because the firm chose not to gate while competitors did. He wrote "10½ Lessons from Experience" and sold a minority stake to KKR in 2015-16.
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contrarian
Marshall Wace runs 750 staff with over 200 in technology, and Paul Marshall says AI has reduced headcount on one of fifteen fundamental teams and nowhere else in the firm.
Payroll climbed toward that level over three years and has not moved for two, while Marshall reports large gains in productivity and in the quality of decisions. Nobody inside the firm expects to need fewer people; what he expects to change is the kind of person they hire.
20VC
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
Jason Lemkin is a SaaS investor whose portfolio includes Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat and Salesloft, and he says he is an investor in Mercor, Poolside and Perplexity. Rory O'Driscoll is a general partner at Scale, where he led investments in Bill.com, Box, DocuSign and WalkMe.
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explainer
The 20VC panel reads OpenAI's IPO announcement as forced: an 18% quarterly step from roughly $5 billion to $6 billion could not be left standing next to Anthropic.
Broadcom and NVIDIA are the audience that matters, since they are planning to sell something like $200 billion of chips into a growth rate a flat quarter would call into question. The panel puts Anthropic near $60 billion mid-year and reads the reacceleration story as the defence of a ranking rather than a disclosure.