The greatest joy of my job is building friendships with the smartest people on the planet. I have interviewed 1,000 of the best CEOs over the last decade. @nikesharora is one of the best (alongside Nik Storonsky, @alanchanguk). Nikesh's story is insane. He came to the US with two suitcases, $200, worked as a security guard, took notes for students and flipped burgers to pay tuition. Today, he is CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a $225BN cybersecurity giant. He is a dear friend and we sat down to chat the other day and he said he was happy for me to release my biggest lessons from the discussion. 🚀 6 Lessons from Nikesh Arora on Building a $225BN Company 1. Product Builds Brand. Not the Other Way Around. If you build a great product and execute well, brand follows. If you have a great brand and the product is poor, the brand dies. Sun Microsystems had a brand. Yahoo had a brand. It did not save them. In tech, brand is not a substitute for product. Brand is the residue of product excellence. 2. Consumer AI Is About Breadth. Enterprise AI Is About Depth. Consumers tolerate false positives. If ChatGPT gets something slightly wrong, you correct it, ignore it, or move on. Enterprises cannot do that. If an AI agent is making independent decisions in a company, false positives are catastrophic. The future of enterprise AI is deep context-rich intelligence. 3. Most Enterprises Are Using AI Wrong. The real opportunity is to rethink the workflow from first principles and let AI do 80% of the thinking. The winners will not be the companies that sprinkle AI on old processes. The winners will be the companies that redesign the company around AI. 4. SaaS Had No Opinion. AI Applications Will. SaaS applications are containers. You define the input. You define the output. AI applications will have opinions. That changes everything. Nikesh thinks many G&A functions — marketing, finance, HR — could have half the people over the next three years because AI will make the average employee dramatically more capable. 5. AI Transformation Has to Be Top-Down and Competitive. Nikesh runs a meeting twice a week called AIIO. The point is simple: get the top technical leaders in the company in one room and force the conversation. What are you doing with AI? Why are you building this? How are you using tokens? How are you changing the product? What have you done in the last three days? The brilliance is not the meeting. It is the social pressure. That is how you transform a 21,000-person company. 6. In Technology, Miss One Trick and You Survive. Miss Three and You Are Obsolete. Miss one trick, you can survive. Miss two tricks, you are partially impaired. Miss three tricks, you could be obsolete. That is the CEO mindset in 2026. Paranoia is not optional. The speed of learning is now the speed of survival. Thank you my friend. Forever learning from you. (Link in comments.)

Dario just declared war on open-source. Anthropic's message is clear: open source could destroy the entire AI business model, and Chinese open-source models are the cause. I sat down with @jasonlk & @rodriscoll to discuss it, along with the biggest news in tech this week: - Anthropic & Dario Declare War on Open-Source - Coinbase Slashes AI Spend 50%: Is the Token Bubble Bursting? - Kalshi's $40BN Valuation & Impending IPO - Bending Spoons: The Smartest IPO of 2026 & the $100BN SaaS Roll-Up Play My notes below: 1. Anthropic Is Laying the Foundation for a Deal With the U.S. Government on Chinese Models Anthropic accused Chinese open-source AI competitors of “brazen theft” through model distillation that violates its terms of service. Rory noted the hypocrisy, given that U.S. frontier models originally scraped external IP. Still, Anthropic appears to be laying the groundwork for a regulatory trade: complying with domestic access restrictions in exchange for a federal ban on distilled Chinese models. 2. Jason Lemkin’s Response to Brian Armstrong’s AI Tweet Jason dismissed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s 50% LLM cost-cutting post as “performative social media,” arguing that savings matter little if core revenue is flat or shrinking. He believes AI must actively drive top-line growth. Rory defended the move as “cost management 101,” saying cash-conscious enterprise executives will quickly emulate it to curb runaway frontier model fees. 3. CEOs Are Struggling to See the ROI From AI Massive enterprise spending on AI tokens is failing to deliver the expected revenue or productivity gains, leaving CFOs searching for measurable operational lift. Jason noted that adding millions in AI spend can still produce the same growth rates as prior quarters. Rory argued that AI spending must clearly accelerate software delivery or create definitive bottom-line savings as boards push back on reckless “token maxing.” 4. We Are All So Aligned in Wanting AI to Win Jason warned that the U.S. economy is structurally addicted to AI, with 40% of the S&P 500 tied to the boom, making society eager to prop it up to protect 401(k) portfolios. Rory countered that protectionism artificially inflates intelligence costs for the broader economy. He compared it to banning IBM PC clones in the 1980s just to protect IBM’s stock price, calling the blocking of low-cost open-source alternatives “fricking dumb.” 5. Bending Spoons and the New Playbook for B2B Revenue Arbitrage Bending Spoons’ $20 billion public valuation marks a shift toward tech roll-ups that drive profitability through price hikes and cost-cutting rather than organic user growth. Jason predicts this playbook will expand into mature B2B SaaS. By acquiring sticky but underperforming platforms like Marketo, Asana, or PagerDuty and injecting hungry talent, operators can rapidly improve retention and capture massive revenue arbitrage. (links below)

When the smartest investor you follow puts 16% of his entire fund into a single stock, you pay attention. That is what Leo Aschenbrenner has done with Bloom Energy. The largest single holding in his portfolio, by a distance. So I had to understand why. KR Sridhar, founder and CEO of @Bloom_Energy. Former NASA rocket scientist. Worked on Mars missions. Then spent 25 years building an energy company almost nobody believed in. The numbers today: $2BN in revenue in 2025. Up 37% YoY. Market cap ~$93BN Market cap. I now completely understand why Leo is so all in. I sat down with KR, took my notes, and have shared the biggest lessons below. 1. The Biggest Management Lesson From Andy Grove The best management advice is simple: walk the floor and talk to your team. They will tell you exactly why things are not working. Do not drown in training binders when you can learn the product by engaging directly. Success requires deep empathy for every part of the business, from shop floor technicians to customers’ real pain points. 2. When Intelligence Becomes Commoditized, What Is the Valuable Asset? When AI makes intelligence ubiquitous, the rarest asset will be wisdom. AI can manufacture information, but it cannot provide happiness, judgment, empathy, or genuine human connection. Because humans are social animals, automated bots will never fully replace real interaction. 3. The True Complexity of Building a Data Center but Why Power Should Not Be Your Constraint A large greenfield data center can take 12 to 18 months to build because supply chains for copper, cooling, and specialized labor are strained. But with modular solid-state technology, power can be deployed faster than the facility itself. Energy should not remain the bottleneck when generation can move to the edge. 4. To What Extent Should Governments Act to Prevent Monopolies? Heavy regulation and government equity stakes can destroy innovative culture and block better startups from competing. Dominant positions often shift naturally over time, as Microsoft and Google show. The best path is a level playing field where free competition lets breakthrough entrepreneurs win. 5. AI Will Do More to Hurt Than Help Income Inequality AI may concentrate enormous wealth among fewer players, but technology has historically been humanity’s greatest equalizer for raising living standards. Intelligence abundance creates a non-zero-sum game that can lift all boats. Leaders still need empathy for the transition generation so they are not left behind. 6. Why Energy Sovereignty Is So Much More Important Than Anyone Thinks After food security, energy sovereignty is the most critical supply chain challenge on Earth. History’s major conflicts have often centered on water, food, and energy. Decentralized power generation at the edge can make communities more self-reliant and reduce exposure to geopolitical conflict. (links below)