Headcount Is Falling While AI Infrastructure Spending Soars
Read Oracle’s filing again and watch the capital, not just the jobs. In the same annual report where Oracle’s headcount fell by about 21,000, it laid out an enormous AI infrastructure buildout. Oracle spent 55.7 billion dollars on capital expenditures in the fiscal year that just ended. For the current year management guided to about…
Read MoreThe Forty Million Dollar Offer That Pays Fifteen at Close
If your buyer is backed by private equity, there is a growing chance you are not being acquired as a new platform. You are being acquired as an add-on to one the firm already owns. That single fact changes what the offer on the table actually means. Add-on acquisitions have quietly become the dominant way…
Read MoreThe Man Building AI Just Described the Window Closing
Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) runs Anthropic (@AnthropicAI), one of the largest AI companies in the world. This week he published a long essay on how policy should respond to what he calls the AI exponential. Most of the coverage will treat it as a Washington story about regulation and tax. I want to pull out the…
Read MoreDue Diligence Is Taking Longer and AI Is the New Trap
Signing the letter of intent feels like crossing the finish line. It is not. It is the starting gun. And the scrutiny waiting on the other side is heavier than ever. A study from Bayes Business School and SS&C Intralinks looked at more than 900 global deals and found that average pre-announcement due diligence has…
Read MoreWhy Buyers Are No Longer In A Hurry To Buy You
A headline this week declared that mid market deal activity continues to plummet. It is a strong word. Then you read the numbers underneath it and a different picture appears. Through the first five months of this year the total value of these deals is up. The average deal size is up. The thing that…
Read MoreAnthropic Filed Confidential IPO Paperwork. The Real Story Is Who Already Owns It.
This week Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC. That is a confidential first step that gives the company the option to pursue an IPO after SEC review and market conditions. It appears to put Anthropic ahead of its rival OpenAI (@OpenAI) among the major frontier labs moving toward public markets. The…
Read MoreThree States Have Adopted Their Own Merger Notice Laws
The dollar figure that decides whether your sale triggers a mandatory federal antitrust review just went up. As of mid February it sits at 133.9 million dollars in transaction value. Plenty of mid sized deals fall below that line. If yours is one of them you might assume the regulators are not part of your…
Read MoreAltman and Amodei walk back their AI job-loss warnings, weeks before trillion-dollar IPOs
Two years ago the two most powerful people in AI told you your job was in danger. This week, weeks before they take their companies public at valuations near a trillion dollars, both of them changed their tune. Sam Altman now says he was “pretty wrong” and is “delighted to be wrong” about entry-level jobs…
Read MoreThe Pitcher Who Forgot How to Throw Strikes
I used to be a pretty good pitcher. Then one season I joined a new team. I showed up thinking I would be on the mound. The coach had other plans. His son was a pitcher, and from the first practice I was told in a hundred small ways that I was not good enough.…
Read MoreThe Cuckoo Effect Just Showed Up at Meta
There is a trick in nature called brood parasitism. A cuckoo bird lays its egg in another bird’s nest. The host raises the chick as if it is her own. Soon after hatching the chick pushes the host’s own eggs and chicks out of the nest. The host kept feeding the cuckoo the entire time.…
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