GA! It's Brett. Whew late this week. Can’t share why yet but there’s a good reason 😎.
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🔥 You won’t find yourself traveling around the world.
I posted this on Friday and a lot of people got fired up:
"Travel is the ultimate low status brain rot pastime. I traveled around the world for a year and realized the world is all the same minus a few places. You will find more meaning building a business, a body of artistic works, or a family than gorging yourself on travel."
Here's the thing. I'm not saying travel is bad. I'm saying most travel is consumption dressed up as self-improvement. You fly somewhere, take photos, come home, and nothing in your life has actually changed. The places blur together because you're the same person in all of them.
The replies were predictable. People said I wasn't paying attention. That I was going to tourist traps. That I'm an oblivious dude. I obviously have a more nuanced take here but I was saying things in a way that makes people who want to be mad about something get mad, which was great for distribution.
But the underlying point stands. Founders especially get sold on the idea that travel makes you more interesting, more creative, more worldly. Sometimes it does. Mostly it's just expensive time off that feels productive because you're moving.
The video in the original post is worth watching. It's the actual contrast I was pointing at. See it here.
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💥 The $900B company nobody outside tech has heard of
Anthropic just closed a $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation.
That puts it ahead of OpenAI's last documented valuation of $852 billion. It makes Anthropic worth more than Goldman Sachs, Ford, and Disney. It's the largest private AI funding round in history.
The numbers behind it: Anthropic's annualized revenue was $9 billion at the end of 2025. By April 2026 it had crossed $30 billion. More than 1,000 enterprise customers are each spending over $1 million annually — that count doubled in less than two months. The round was led by Greenoaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, and Dragoneer, each putting in $2 billion or more.
The reason for the urgency: Claude Mythos. Anthropic unveiled its advanced cybersecurity model in April, and the compute required to run it at scale exceeds what existing infrastructure commitments can deliver. The $30 billion goes largely toward buying that capacity.
The IPO is now the obvious next move. Bloomberg reports Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are already in early conversations about the offering. A potential listing as early as October would value Anthropic at a multiple that would make it one of the largest public offerings in tech history.
Three years ago Anthropic was a spinout of disaffected OpenAI researchers with a safety thesis and no product. Today it's worth more than Goldman Sachs. That's the AI moment in one sentence.
🧠 ON MY MIND
Five things on my mind this week:
Google I/O is happened — Gemini 4.0 is the expected centerpiece. It was mostly about Google pushing Gemini deeper into everything: Search, Android, Chrome, Workspace, dev tools, and hardware. The big theme was that AI is becoming Google’s main interface layer, not just a feature bolted onto existing products. Full recap next week. — AIxploria
Meta's Avocado is late and getting buried. Meta's next-generation model was expected in May. It's now more than two-thirds through the month with no announcement. Internal testing reportedly placed Avocado below GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 on developer benchmarks. With Google I/O dominating the news cycle today, Meta can't announce without being buried. June is now the most likely window — which means an uncomfortable direct comparison to whatever Google just shipped. — Build Fast with AI
Anduril raised $5 billion at a valuation that more than doubled in under a year. The defense tech company — founded by Palmer Luckey, backed by a16z — is now one of the most valuable private defense companies in the world. The round closed this week. It's a direct signal of where capital is flowing as AI and national security converge. The Anthropic-Pentagon story from last month is the same thesis from a different angle. — TechCrunch
Vapi beat 40 companies to win Ring's entire customer support contract. The voice AI startup now handles all inbound customer support for Ring — Amazon's home security brand with tens of millions of devices. One startup, one contract, replacing what used to require a large human support operation. Voice AI is no longer a demo category. — TechCrunch
Colorado repealed its AI Act and replaced it with a new law. Georgia enacted a chatbot law. California advanced four AI healthcare bills. State-level AI regulation moved fast this week. The patchwork is accelerating — and if you're building anything that touches automated decision-making, lending, or healthcare, you need someone watching this. — Troutman Privacy
👀 FROM THE FEED
Musk lost in under two hours. Here's how he responded.
❓ AI GENERATED OR NOT
Neon blue. Teal glow. Perfectly smooth organic shapes against a black background. Looks like a 3D render. Is it?
Last week's poll: Real. 55.6% of you got it right. The 44.4% who voted AI were fooled by the electric blue background and the dramatic bioluminescent lighting — both look exactly like what AI renders when you say "make it beautiful." But it was shot at an aquarium, with colored lights doing all the work. Real life is weirder than the model.
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