TBPN

From SNL Straight to the White House

September 28, 2026

Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is MongoDB CEO CJ Desai joining Meta, tanking the MongoDB stock.

Today’s Lineup

Plexo Capital Founding Managing Partner Lo Toney at 12:00 PM
Gossip Goblin Founder Zack London at 12:25 PM
a16z General Partner Anish Acharya at 12:35 PM
SF Compute Co-Founder & CEO Evan Conrad at 12:45 PM
The Gstaad Guy Podcast Host Gstaad Guy at 1:00 PM

Run of ShowSNL

From SNL Straight to the White House

Dario Amodei got parodied on SNL this weekend which goes to show just how effective the rhetoric from AI leaders has been over the past 12 months. At the same time, the mixed message of “someone needs to save me from me” is clearly landing more as a laugh line than a thoughtful proposal about how the government should ultimately engage with a new technology controlled by a nascent industry with no clear existing regulatory framework. At the same time, it was funny watching Michael Che sort of stumble reading Dario’s full name from the cue cards during the introduction. Nevertheless, lots to work through and no one gets to put their head in the sand here. Despite being excluded from the White House dinner with Xi Jinping and other top tech leaders, President Trump followed up with a one on one dinner with Dario to hear his side of the story. It will be interesting to see what follows from this. And of course, we couldn’t go a day without another proposal around AI safety, so we got perhaps the most formal concepting exercise from a group of top AI researchers, published through the University of Cambridge. It’s a good list that pulls from all over the industry:

Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton (also a Nobel laureate), Yoshua Bengio, and Andrew Barto; industry leaders from OpenAI (Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist), Microsoft (Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer), and Anthropic (Jack Clark, Co-Founder); and researchers from numerous leading universities.

The most tractable proposal is precisely monitoring the level of AI R&D automation, while the more vague ideas center around creating response plans to potential incidents like biosecurity and cybersecurity threats. The executive summary at the very least is worth reading, if not the full paper assuming you have time.

Also in the news, Instinct:

Noah Shinn broke his silence on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy and there are a bunch of remarkable stats showing the explosion of the personal agent category. The company is already doing $1B+ a year in transaction volume, for reference, it took Stripe around 18 months to hit $1B of annualized transaction volume (although Stripe also spent two years building in beta before launch). Instinct got to $1B in transaction volume in closer to 6 months, but it’s important to note that these transactions flow through 3rd party cards that they don’t control. Nevertheless, you can clearly see where Instinct can monetize, and why they were able to raise $1B at a $10B valuation from Benchmark, Sequoia, and Coatue while only having 14 employees.

Clip Spotlight: Arnold Ventures Co-Chair John Arnold on what’s stopping compute from becoming a real commodity market:

“Compute is not a commodity where one data center is providing the same product as another data center.”

“You either have to deliver into a certain product that has a lot of buyers and a lot of sellers… or you need some type of index that the industry trusts.”

“There just aren’t that many short-term deals. Transparency into those is difficult.”

“The distinctions between the chips and the design of the data center and all the specific needs is just different.”

“Trying to either come up with the physical delivery mechanism or the index that everybody trusts to be right is really hard.”

Headlines

CNBC: Meta hires MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to lead enterprise unit. MongoDB shares crater

WSJ: SpaceX Launches Starship for First Orbital Mission

Houston Chronicle: SpaceX Starship reaches orbit for first time, returns to Earth in water landing

WSJ: Nvidia Adds Record $150 Billion to Stock Buyback

Reuters: Trump confirms meeting with Anthropic’s Amodei, repeats dismissal of AI fears

Instinct raises $1B in Series C funding at a $10B valuation from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue

New Invest Like The Best interview with Instinct Founder Noah Shinn

The Information: Anthropic Seeks Palantir-Style Voting Control for Seven Co-Founders Ahead of IPO

SNL parodies Dario Amodei

WSJ: Dirty Work Goes Driverless at the Dump

FT: OK, so where are all these data centres?