Two weeks ago I shared the following take on this year’s film Challengers by Luca Guadagnino:
Since then I’ve been noodling on what makes me feel that way (besides the banger soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
In the 2020s technology industry it is far more broadly understood than in the late 2000s that entrepreneurs are trying to present as high performing to attract capital, talent, and customers
In that first bucket, as a result of industry demographics/dynamics that mostly means men trying to appear high performing to other men in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami
This attraction inevitably brings you opposition. But in the early part of a technology cycle, everyone benefits from the competition — it unveils best practices and legitimizes speculative efforts.
As the industry and the world around it have been rocked by Covid, interest rates, and AI, it’s become clear who was faking or just getting by from old strengths and who was becoming a new or rejuvenated powerhouse
These wild outperformers/hyperscalers all have incestuous, frenemy relationships:
Something like a fifth of Apple’s profits come from Alphabet paying to be the default search engine on their devices (ooh)
Google pays that because those are the most valuable users with money to spend on things they see in ads (ahh)
Meta is clearly restricted (ooh) by Apple and Google but also gets all its distribution on their app stores (ahh)
Nvidia loves Meta and Microsoft and etc training on their GPUs (ahh) but also has to train Nemotron itself in case OpenAI/Microsoft ever get mad about all the people fine-tuning Llama models with frontier GPT outputs (ooh)
It’s not just abstract business relationships. Look at how representatives of trillion-dollar companies present themselves these days!