Sonic (S) Surge

In this letter to entrepreneurs, Alliance reflects on the success of Cursor's $60 billion sale to Elon Musk, using it as a case study to counter the misconception that opportunities in crowded fields like AI or crypto are exhausted. The piece argues that great companies like Cursor, Stripe, Figma, and Shopify are not built by geniuses with perfect ideas, but by founders who start with a non-consensus belief about the future and build for years before that future becomes obvious to everyone. They identify long-term shifts, find overlooked entry points, and execute relentlessly. The framework for success involves: 1. **Identifying your place in the technology cycle**: Early-stage opportunities focus on making new tech usable for power users (e.g., Coinbase, Cursor). Later-stage opportunities involve finding the "yin" to an existing "yang"—the blind spots of first-generation players (e.g., Stripe vs. PayPal, Figma vs. Adobe). 2. **Cultivating unique insights**: Immerse yourself deeply in the market. Use every product, talk to users, and build an audience. Insights will emerge naturally from deep engagement. 3. **Finding a "hair-on-fire" problem**: Look for a 10x improvement or a severe, urgent pain point. The strongest signal is people already building clumsy workarounds. 4. **Building a focused MVP**: Don't just add features because you can. Ask why users would abandon their current tool for yours. The best startups rarely force new behaviors; they improve familiar workflows with drastically lower friction. 5. **Winning a distribution channel**: Distribution is often the moat. Before product-market fit, achieve channel-market fit. Find where your customers are and build an engine to reach them, even through unscalable, manual efforts initially. 6. **Persistence**: The final, unteachable ingredient is resilience. Success stories like Cursor, Airbnb, and Nvidia involved years of grinding, rejection, and perseverance when the path forward seemed unclear. The conclusion is that there is no secret. Most people fail to consistently execute these steps over the long term. The few who do build the companies that define the next era. The world is yours to create.

Weekly Editor's Picks (0613-0619): Market Insights & Analysis This weekly digest curates in-depth analysis often lost in the information flow, focusing on key insights across macro trends, investment, and technology. **Macro & Geopolitics:** With the Strait of Hormuz reopening and military conflict shifting to negotiation, markets are pivoting from "war shock" to "supply restoration." Trades include shorting crude risk premiums, longing airlines/tourism, Asian energy importers, and bond duration, while shorting inflation expectations. LNG, fertilizer, and chemical chains are also being repriced. **Investment & VC:** Ray Dalio advises against betting on concentrated AI giants dominating indices, advocating for diversified portfolios of high-quality, low-correlation assets instead. Analysis covers the 4-year crypto cycle, predicting the core surviving product by 2029 will be asset trading markets. Current BTC metrics suggest a potential bottoming zone, presenting a patient accumulation window. SpaceX's high-profile IPO at a $2.1T valuation faces scrutiny over fundamentals, with key watchpoints being its likely inclusion in the Nasdaq index and Q2 earnings. Concerns are raised about potential "gamma squeeze" and systemic risks if its narrative-driven valuation gets amplified by passive index funds. Robinhood (HOOD) is noted for breaking its high correlation with crypto, bolstered by its stock trading and new underwriting business. **Web3 & AI:** A warning highlights ~$1.8T in off-balance-sheet AI infrastructure commitments (purchase commitments, leases) as a potential systemic risk if AI monetization lags. AI models are being used for World Cup predictions, adding a new layer for betting markets. A cost breakdown of a $20 AI subscription reveals the supply chain from model companies to cloud, GPUs, and power. **Prediction Markets:** The emergence of prediction market "concept stocks" is noted, with Robinhood developing its own platform, Rothera, signaling a shift from market competition to a "channel war" for user access. **CeFi & DeFi:** The SpaceX IPO tested perpetual contract mechanisms for pre-IPO assets, highlighting challenges in handling corporate actions like stock splits on-chain. The de-pegging of STRC (Strategy's preferred share) to ~$89 reflects market concerns over MicroStrategy's capital structure and BTC-backed leverage model. BlackRock's covered-call Bitcoin ETF (BITA) offers yield but caps upside, appealing to yield-seeking institutions. **Ethereum:** An opinion piece argues Ethereum's core strength is its vast developer community and composability, solidifying its role as the default operating system for the financial internet. **Weekly Hot Topics:** Include the US-Iran deal reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Fed's hawkish hold, Anthropic restricting model access, SpaceX acquiring Cursor, and a humorous stock surge for "Liuliumei" due to its "LLM" ticker.

Alliance Co-founder's Letter to Entrepreneurs: On Cursor's $60 Billion Sale Many aspiring founders see massive exits like Cursor's $60B sale and wonder why they can't achieve the same, often concluding opportunities are exhausted. But great companies aren't built in obvious, crowded spaces. Cursor, like Stripe, Figma, and Shopify before it, started with a non-consensus belief about the future. Before ChatGPT, they believed AI would transform knowledge work. They focused on a genuinely exciting domain, became their own customer, and obsessed over power users. Their journey involved years of "glass-chewing" effort before the market was ready. The pattern is consistent: identify a long-term technological shift, find a missed entry point, and execute for years before the trend becomes obvious. First-generation products (PayPal, Adobe, Amazon) prove a market exists. Second-generation winners (Stripe, Figma, Shopify) rebuild that market around new insights, technology, or changing customer behaviors. Founders must identify their phase in the cycle. Early entrants like Coinbase or Cursor focus on making new technology usable for power users. Later entrants find the "yin" to the established "yang"—the blind spots incumbents miss as they grow distant from individual users. The key is deep market immersion. Use every product in your space. Talk to users. Build an audience. Stop looking for ideas and start *seeing* them everywhere. Then, choose one. The idea must offer a 10x improvement or solve a "hair-on-fire" pain point—something severe enough that users are already crafting workarounds. When building, avoid feature bloat. Ask: why would someone switch? Great startups rarely force new behaviors; they improve familiar workflows with drastically lower friction (e.g., Cursor forked VS Code instead of creating a new editor). Distribution is the underestimated moat. Before product-market fit, achieve distribution-market fit. How do customers discover new tools? Founders like those at Airbnb, Stripe, and Cursor did unscalable, manual work to recruit early users. The final, unteachable ingredient is resilience. Cursor built for years pre-market, faced rejection, and persisted. So did Airbnb, Nvidia, and Rain (which launched post-FTX collapse). The lesson isn't that these founders were smarter, but that they stayed in the game long enough for their insights to compound. Framework: Spot technological cycles. Cultivate unique insight. Obsess over your market. Talk to customers. Find a hair-on-fire problem. Build the simplest wedge. Win your distribution channel. Above all, don't quit when it gets hard. Most people won't do these things consistently. The few who do build the next generation of great companies. Go build.

In three days, Google lost two AI legends. On June 18, Noam Shazeer, co-author of the seminal "Attention is All You Need" paper and Gemini co-lead, left for OpenAI. Just 48 hours later, John Jumper, 2024 Nobel laureate and AlphaFold lead, departed DeepMind for Anthropic. This follows Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic in May. These moves highlight a structural trend: top AI talent is concentrating at mission-driven, pre-IPO firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, while Google becomes a primary source. The exodus stems from a core mission mismatch. Google's ad-centric model often subordinates AI research to product and revenue goals, creating friction for pioneers like Shazeer, who returned in 2024 only to leave again. In contrast, OpenAI and Anthropic offer singular focus on pushing AI boundaries, whether towards AGI or safety-aligned models, which deeply appeals to top researchers like Jumper. Financial incentives amplify the pull. With both OpenAI and Anthropic nearing IPO, employees stand to gain immensely from equity, an upside Google's mature stock cannot match. Furthermore, the 2023 merger of Google Brain and DeepMind, intended to consolidate strength, has instead created cultural tension and slowed the path from research to product, as evidenced by Gemini's pace. This talent redistribution is reshaping the AI landscape. While Google retains vast data and compute resources, its true crisis is the quiet, continuous loss of the people who define the field's future. The real moat in AI is not infrastructure, but the concentration of brilliant minds—a battle Google is currently losing.

"1996 or 1999? Wall's First Big Test Is 'How to View AI'" Federal Reserve Chairman Wall's initial challenge is not whether to raise or cut rates, but a more fundamental judgment: what kind of boom is the current AI boom? This will determine the Fed's policy path and define his legacy. Economics is split between two opposing views, according to reporter Nick Timiraos. One sees imminent productivity gains that will increase supply and cool inflation, allowing the Fed to hold steady. The other argues that while productivity benefits are distant, demand shocks are here now, and waiting for data confirmation risks missing the intervention window, forcing sharper rate hikes later. Wall has signaled a leaning toward the first view, echoing 1996-era Alan Greenspan, who embraced strong, productivity-driven growth without fear of inflation. However, Wall faces a different macro environment than Greenspan did, with tariff pressures, expanding fiscal deficits, and diminishing globalization benefits, which could force more significant inflation pressures even if AI benefits materialize. Wall's logic, expressed before taking office, is that AI-driven productivity gains won't show in official data for years. If the Fed waits for confirmation, it might mistakenly tighten policy and choke off the very growth that could suppress inflation. This argues for using forward-looking narratives over lagging data. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee presents a key counter-argument. He distinguishes between expected and unexpected productivity booms. A widely anticipated boom, like the current AI wave, can cause people to spend future wealth gains in advance, overheating the economy before productivity actually rises, thus requiring preemptive rate hikes. He cites rising costs for AI data centers as evidence of such overheating. Fed Governor Christopher Waller offers a rebuttal to Goolsbee, noting the "expected spending" mechanism only works if people can borrow against future income, which many households cannot do due to borrowing constraints. Wall also faces a paradox related to his desire to reduce the Fed's use of "forward guidance" (pre-announcing policy moves). This practice was established in 1999 when Greenspan began signaling hikes to avoid market shocks. If the economy follows a less optimistic path, Wall may be forced to choose between using the guidance he wants to abolish or risking market volatility by staying silent. The ultimate question defining Wall's first major test remains: Is this 1996 or 1999?