Everett Randle

After 58 episodes of Uncapped it was time for a little format refresh. Benchmark Breakfast, where @EverettRandle and I will talk about whatever's on our mind or in the news as though it's our monday partner meeting. Sometimes with guests sometimes without. Here's the first one, let us know what you think 🤗 (0:00) Intro (0:45) Introducing Benchmark Breakfast (2:09) Anthropic S-1 drops (3:59) The revenue vs. compute chart (6:19) Growth volatility and consumption-based revenue (7:11) The race for the best model (10:21) Code gen saturation and software factories (13:39) The AI-bottleneck trade (17:39) Code gen as the most impactful PMF in history (21:27) Durability is hard to call (23:36) Investing in the trend vs. calling the next one (26:09) Circular revenue vs. outside customers (28:15) Open source vs. closed source steelman (34:25) Own your intelligence (36:29) Open source as a % of frontier spend (40:52) AI and cybersecurity (44:35) Abliterated models (48:08) Bio, robotics, and physical abundance (51:52) Why physical feedback loops are slower (54:12) Ev’s dad and the promise of bio (55:13) Halloween plans and the iPhone Duo

And now you can preorder the NOMAD LETTERS (out December 1!): press.stripe.com/nomad-lette… For years these letters have circulated (at first, unofficially) among investors, acquiring a devoted readership. We wanted to give them a permanent home in print. Nick and his partner Qais Zakaria’s record is extraordinary. The letters are the account of how they got there, featuring everything from studying Amazon and Costco (Nomad’s defining investments)—to visiting cement plants in Zimbabwe, and beyond. They’re candid about their mistakes and curious about the forces that shape investors’ behavior: incentives, psychology, and the wisdom (or foolishness!) of the crowd. Since closing the fund, they’ve devoted their time to philanthropy, a journey Nick recounts in the lovely foreword he wrote for this edition. I’m thrilled to continue adding to the investing corner of our catalogue, and I can’t think of a better work to follow Poor Charlie’s Almanack. ❣️

Today Hone launches Engines: AI that owns business outcomes. Chatbots give answers. Agents do tasks. Engines deliver outcomes, and we hold them responsible for creating real value, measured in actual dollars instead of tokens or vibes. You point it at a business metric, and the Engine figures out the rest. It onboards itself, builds the necessary agents, skills, and memories, collaborates with the right people, and gets better with experience. From AI leaders to global enterprises, our customers have already used Engines to: • Uncover millions in procurement savings • Optimize product funnels • Manage credit risk • Increase qualified pipeline in new territories • Accelerate implementations and improve account management To scale this impact across the economy, we’ve raised a $60M seed led by Benchmark and Index with participation from Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align. AI’s raw capabilities are far ahead of the value it creates in the real world, and Engines will help close the gap. Here’s how they work…

Cognition is Infoysys masquerading as Anthropic

Why a16z, Lightspeed and General Catalyst Cannot Go To LPs and Be Confident of a 5X Net: "@ravi_lsvp, @pmarca @bhorowitz cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5x net. If you look at the recent returns data, it suggests that. They will make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis but LPs are in the business to make high money on money returns." @EverettRandle Love to hear your thoughts on this Ravi, Ben, Marc @htaneja would you not argue that different LPs have different return requirements and expectations?

Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate. This milestone belongs to our customers. Here's how a few of them are building with Devin.

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

The world needs far more software than it can build. Cognition exists to change that. We’ve just raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Since our round in May, run-rate revenue has grown from $492 M to almost $900 M.

Some of the earliest money in Cursor (the largest vc-backed acquisition ever) turned a $750,000 investment into a ~$1 billion return. @davidtisch and his midas touch at Box Group strike again! Great profile here of one of the best early stage investors who wins while going against the grain @agarfinks fortune.com/2026/08/26/david…

Announcing Hone Intelligence has become abundant. Yet the world looks remarkably similar to how it did five years ago. With every model release, the gap between what frontier AI can do and the economic value derived from it widens. Closing the gap requires re-organizing work around organizational outcomes, not individual tasks. Hone builds AI that creates, orchestrates, and improves agents and software continuously to own organizational outcomes over weeks and months. We are ex-founders and early core contributors to Cognition, Mercor, Ramp, and OpenAI. We obsess over real-world value, not theoretical benchmarks. Our core beliefs on closing the gap in the thread below.

There's never been a better time in history to be a shrimp

Hoje a Decade sai do stealth, anunciando a maior rodada seed da América Latina. US$ 85 milhões investidos por @benchmark , @Greenoaks e Diffusion para inaugurar uma nova categoria de serviços financeiros, a Inteligência Patrimonial. Veja a matéria completa na @bloomberg bloomberg.com/news/articles/…