The Speed of Now

Andrew is traveling so we have an AI generated podcast this week

This week's newsletter captures something extraordinary happening in real time: the collision between exponential technological progress and linear human adaptation. We're witnessing what I call the Great Convergence - where AI-driven abundance meets institutional inertia, where billion-dollar startups emerge in months while venture funds take years to return capital, where everything is accelerating except our ability to keep up.

The Speed of Now

The numbers this week are staggering in their implications. ChatGPT compressed a decade of Google's growth into 300 days. Cursor went from zero to 360,000 paying customers with virtually no marketing spend. Databricks caught Snowflake at $3.7 billion ARR through pure AI-driven momentum. These aren't just business metrics - they're signals of a fundamental phase change in how value gets created.

But here's what's really happening: we're not just seeing faster growth; we're seeing the emergence of an entirely new economic operating system. When Andrej Karpathy talks about "Software 3.0," he's describing a world where English becomes the hottest programming language, where AI platforms absorb entire categories of B2B software, where the very concept of traditional SaaS becomes as quaint as punch cards.

This is abundance acceleration in its purest form. The productive capacity of civilization is expanding at rates that would have been inconceivable just two years ago. AI isn't just making existing processes more efficient - it's making entirely new forms of productivity possible.

The Friction of the Old

Yet everywhere this exponential progress touches existing systems, we see friction, delay, and dysfunction. Only 37% of 2019 venture funds have returned capital. The unicorn exit backlog would take 49 years to clear at current rates. Apple, one of the world's most valuable companies, is scrambling to diversify supply chains that took decades to build, spending billions to move production from China to India while navigating the messy reality that infrastructure and capability don't materialize overnight.

These aren't temporary glitches - they're the inevitable collision points between exponential and linear systems. Venture capital was built for a world where companies took 7-10 years to mature. Supply chains were optimized for stability, not agility. Corporate structures were designed for predictable, incremental change.

The Critical Choice

This convergence forces a critical choice that every individual, company, and institution must make: embrace the speed of the new or be relegated to managing the decline of the old.

The companies winning today - Cursor, Databricks, the AI-powered law firm Crosby - have chosen speed over safety, execution over deliberation. They're building in the new paradigm while their competitors are still optimizing for the old one. They understand that in an exponential world, the greatest risk isn't moving too fast; it's moving too slowly.

But this choice isn't just for companies. It's for all of us. The abundance economy isn't something that happens to us - it's something we actively create through our decisions, investments, and actions today.

Beyond the Tech Triumphalism

This isn't naive tech triumphalism. The challenges are real and significant. The venture capital liquidity crisis is creating genuine hardship for funds and LPs. Supply chain realignment is costly and disruptive. The concentration of AI capability in a few mega-platforms raises legitimate concerns about competition and control.

More importantly, as Kyle Harrison's essay on critical thinking reminds us, we must resist the temptation to accept compelling narratives without rigorous scrutiny. The same intellectual humility that leads us to question claims about telepathy should lead us to question our own assumptions about technological progress and economic transformation. Paul Kedrosky sums this up in his "Who's Weird - Maybe we're Weird" essay where he suggests questioning our assumptions.

The Path Forward

But skepticism without action is just intellectual tourism. The trends shaping our world - AI acceleration, capital concentration, supply chain fragmentation, the emergence of new economic models - these are not abstract forces. They're the result of millions of human decisions, investments, and innovations happening right now.

The abundance economy emerging from this convergence offers extraordinary potential: universal access to intelligence, dramatic reductions in the cost of production, new forms of human flourishing. But realizing this potential requires more than just building better technology. It requires building better institutions, better policies, and better ways of thinking about the relationship between progress and equity. Above all it requires humans to embrace change.

In the Arena

The future isn't predetermined. The fact that AI can compress decades of progress into months doesn't guarantee that progress will benefit everyone. The fact that capital is flowing toward abundance-creating technologies doesn't ensure that abundance will be broadly shared. The fact that we can build space-based solar power and AI-powered legal services doesn't mean we will build them in ways that serve human flourishing.

These outcomes depend on the choices we make and the actions we take. They depend on entrepreneurs who choose to build solutions rather than just capture value. They depend on investors who fund long-term capability rather than short-term arbitrage. They depend on citizens who engage with the complexity of technological change rather than retreating into simplistic narratives of either utopian or dystopian inevitability.

The Great Convergence is happening whether we're ready or not. The question isn't whether we can handle the speed of change - it's whether we can match the speed of technological progress with the speed of human adaptation, institutional reform, and collective wisdom.

Everything is accelerating. Nothing is guaranteed. The future belongs to those who choose to build it.

Essays

Weekend Reading: Who's Weird? Maybe We're Weird

Paul Kedrosky • June 20, 2025

Business•Strategy•Economic Theory•Finance•Cultural Analysis•Essays