start again today no. 91: bentonville
search, phase shift, Compass, negative space, SaaS pricing, the jagged frontier
We sat in the sound room listening to Earth Wind and Fire on vinyl.
The record was hidden from view inside of a JBL Paragon. ~1,000 were made between 1957-1983, each requiring 112 man hours, and one of the the last remaining ones is at Blake St., a club in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The birthplace of Walmart has small-town vibes but big dreams. A cozier, earlier Austin or Denver, with the support of the Walton family to fund a $400m art museum, 63,000 sq ft performance center, and house >1,600 Walmart vendors.
The mountain biking capital of the world has a strong coffee game and regularly makes the list of best places to live in the US. It’s grown over 50% in the last decade as Walmart has grown and startup founders have leaned into the region.
I’d bumped into Charu earlier, who relocated her human-centered automation company to Bentonville in 2019. She’s raised $16m to date. Muriel talked about her weekly commute from St. Louis to Bentonville to build Venku, a marketplace to book hunting trips.
Brent shifted the conversation away from business, standing up and shaking out his ponytail to talk about traveling the Caribbean by boat for 6 years.
I’d wake up and read. Drink tea. Dive in the water when it got too hot. If I was hungry, I’d spear a fish.
Bob Marley played in the background.
What I read this week
🤖 AI search is a doomsday cult - Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day
There won’t be a before and after moment where suddenly AI replaces our existing search engines. (AI) slowly optimizes itself in drips and drops, subtly worming its way into our various widgets and windows.
🎧 NVDA, chips, AI compute build out - Bill Gurley, Partner, Benchmark & Brad Gerstner, Altimeter, B2G
All the money is made in the 2-3 years around a phase shift. You cannot miss a phase shift. If you miss it, then you miss all the value capture for the next decade.
💡 pursuits that can’t scale - Anu Atluru,
I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale.
💛 how vc ruined my love life - Andrew Chan
The real reason VCs can make terrible significant others, though, is that I, like many of my peers, cannot separate my venture capital life from my personal.
📚 no one succeeds alone - Robert Reffkin, CEO, Compass
I was never able to just let my guard down and be me. I had to do the work of figuring out everyone else around me all the time, and I got very good at adapting myself to make other people comfortable…when I was younger, I wished that I could be the one to be made comfortable sometimes rather than always do that for others.
🌊 how to see what others miss - John P. Weiss, artist & writer
Shooting in black and white allows me to see the essence of things, and street photography teaches me how to see what others miss. So much of life becomes consensus thinking at the expense of treasures found in negative space.
The pendulum has been shifting away from pure usage-based or pay-as-you-go pricing and toward “hybrid” pricing models that combine usage and subscription pricing in creative ways.
🤖 centaurs and cyborgs on the jagged frontier - Ethan Mollick,
I see you, I love you, sun is shining,
H
cowork with me | reading list | no. 90 | inclusive VCs
A wonderful compendium of thought pieces! Especially loved the piece on pursuing things that DON'T scale. I will be sharing that one - with attribution💯 Keep 'em coming❣️🙏🏾🙏🏾