Talk Your Book
Our MD Emily slacked me not too long ago (acknowledging we were on an extended Spring Break) that Block, formerly Square, under the leadership of clown-car-that-fell-into-a-gold-mine CEO Jack Dorsey, was laying off nearly half of its employees.
“Holy shit,” she wrote.
“That is a substantial reduction,” I replied.
Then I found this post on Jack Dorsey’s old company’s website showing his new company’s historical employee count. It was suggesting that Block, formerly Square, had perhaps overhired in the past and was now rightsizing, citing AI as the catalyst rather than past bad decisions.
I sent it to Emily.
Her cynical thought was that any ventured-backed operator might be predisposed to take actions like this whether based in operational reality or not.
I agreed. Because if you’re invested in AI, and you can feed the AI hype-train beast, you might more than make up any severance or other costs you might incur through multiple expansion alone.
She responded with this clip of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin declaring that AI is hype simply because it needs people to write it $500B of checks this year alone just to keep on keeping on.
That’s some incentive.
Jack Dorsey stands to make a lot of money if people jump on the AI hype train. Which raises a question: How much of the world is just people talking their own book? And is that real or no?
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome” is something Charlie Munger said. The guy was onto something.
– Tim
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