Random thoughts about technology, research, investing, and economics by Jerry Z...
Over Memorial Day, I drove by the HP garage. There's a plaque on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that calls a one-car garage the birthplace of Silicon Valley — California Historical Landmark No. 976. In 1938, two Stanford students, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, built an audio oscillator there by hand rather than joining established firms in the East. You could walk past it without looking up. It…
The vibe has been bad since the start of the 2020s. Pandemic, then inflation, then war, then more war and inflation, then AI doom. So I wanted to write something more optimistic. Nothing serious, just some technologies that are exciting to me. Chips One of the bottlenecks for LLM inference is memory bandwidth. As it is increasingly difficult to shrink transistor size, we will rely more on advanced…
1 In 2021H2, I wired $225K into an SPV to buy SpaceX shares at a valuation of ~$100B. It turned out to be a fraud. I was fortunate to get the principal back. SpaceX then looked like a monopoly: ~80% of mass to orbit, pricing power on launch, and a connectivity business that no other company can build, and I wanted a piece of the pie. The S-1 dropped this week. We finally got to see the numbers,…
May 10, 2019. Uber prices its IPO at $45 a share, opens at $42, and closes at $41.57. The most anticipated consumer tech listing since Facebook is a dud. The product works, and the growth rate is healthy. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It has reshaped cities, labor markets, and the consumer expectation of what “getting somewhere” costs. And yet on the day it finally had to show its numbers…
The crypto maximalist pitch goes something like this: fiat currency is fake money, printed at will by corrupt central bankers, destined to inflate to zero. Bitcoin fixes this with an algorithmic guaranteed supply and ledger, no trust required. This argument sounds compelling until you realize it's built on a model of money that we abandoned centuries ago, not because we forgot how it worked, but…
"T‑1" is rocket countdown speak for "we're 1 second from launch". For a stock, one year is close. In 2022, I wanted exposure to the space economy. SpaceX was the obvious choice, but private. I tried to buy through an SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) that turned out to be a scam, a story for another day. Meanwhile, Elon's attention started splintering across politics and Twitter, making me nervous…
In 1989, Richard Gabriel wrote ' Worse is Better ', the argument that Unix and C won not by being elegant, but by shipping and iterating relentlessly. Early Tesla embodied "worse is better" in spirit: ship an imperfect car, fix it over the air, move faster than anyone else. Somewhere along the way, Tesla became what it beat. I first heard about Tesla around 2012, when "208-265 miles of range"…
In September 2015, I sold all my NVIDIA shares and made about $450. Earlier that month, the Fed had said something to the effect that it would raise rates in the near future, and I got spooked. It was potentially the first rate hike since the 08 recession. I'd held the shares for two months. I was a new investor, an intern, and I had no idea what I was doing. So I did what felt safe: locked in my…