Nvidia Was a Gaming Chip Company, Until...

Hi Double D here. Below is our new guest writer. He’ll be writing on Tuesdays and Thursdays and as usual, please write me back and let me know what you think.

Technology follows a pattern...

And investors who learn to see it early can make a fortune.

Nobody can tell you where the Mag 7 will trade tomorrow, which startup becomes the next Nvidia or what Elon Musk will post at 2:17 in the morning.

The direction technology moves, though, is shockingly predictable.

Information moves faster. Computers process more of it. Networks connect more people. Software makes more decisions.

Now, AI learns to see, hear, reason and act.

Every time a new capability appears, it creates the conditions for the next one.

There's a hidden structure underneath technological progress. Learn to see it early enough, and you can retire wealthy without ever looking back and saying, "I should have seen that coming."

That's what I'll explore with you every Tuesday and Thursday here at Moonshot Minute: the companies, the builders and the breakthroughs.

Above all, I'll keep asking what today's technology becomes tomorrow, and how we invest before everyone else sees it.

My name is Harry Seldon.

Yes, that's a pseudonym.

And yes, there's a reason I picked it, which I’ll get into at a later date.

From Working on Porsches to Buying Them

I got where I am today partly by working on cars I couldn't afford.

In high school, I fixed electronics, cars and computers. For a while, that included Porsches.

One day when I was 16, I spent four hours on a Volkswagen bus in the summer sun. I was sweating, covered in grease and nursing sheet-metal cuts on both hands. It was miserable.

When I finished, the owner handed me my pay, only it wasn’t cash. It was a tie-dye shirt.

I knew it meant a lot to him but it didn't mean much to me.

I remember wiping the sweat off my face with that shirt as he drove off, thinking I was NOT doing this for the rest of my life.

I'm sure you've had some version of that moment where it seems like everything changed. For me, it pushed me deeper into technology.

I started programming on an 8-bit computer and kept taking systems apart to understand how they worked.

Along the way, I got to work with some of the world's wealthiest investors and write code for them.

I learned how they thought about risk, how they hunted for asymmetric opportunities and how they separated a compelling story from a truly great investment.

Over time, I found my own way of predicting the future.

It put me into Amazon, Nvidia, Bitcoin and Ethereum early.

I invested in an options fintech that eToro later acquired, and I helped build and sell a SaaS company.

The investments and markets were different each time, but the same question kept paying off:

What does today's technology become next?

These days, I tinker on my own Porsche, which is part of how Double D and I became friends.

While he races his GT cars to the limit, I prefer spirited drives through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Cars gave us something to talk about, but the markets gave us a lot more.

Science Fiction to Live TV in 19 Years

Anybody can get lucky once, buy a stock early or catch a huge cycle early on and then spend ten years explaining to anyone who’ll listen how brilliant you are.

Repeated success over many years points to something deeper.

The best opportunities tend to tell the same story. Something became possible that wasn't possible before...

And the market hadn't worked out the consequences yet.

Those are the opportunities I plan to bring you here.

DD has already brought Moonshot Minute readers some extraordinary winners. My goal is to hold the technology side to that same standard, finding the breakthroughs, companies and investment themes before they become obvious.

I get excited when someone calls an idea science fiction, because science fiction is often technology that's one missing piece away from possible.

In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke wrote about parking satellites in orbit to relay signals around the globe. Nineteen years later, one of them beamed the Tokyo Olympics live to American television.

That gap between impossible and inevitable can be a very profitable place to look.

4,000 Years, Then 400, Then 125

Technology has a logic underneath it.

One breakthrough lowers a cost, unlocks a market, creates more data and improves another technology.

You can see the pattern most clearly if you start with information.

1. Life stores it in DNA.

2. Humans transmit it through language.

3. Preserve it through writing.

4. Copy it at scale with the printing press.

5. Move it almost instantly through the telegraph, telephone and radio.

6. Calculate it with computers.

7. Connect it through the internet.

8. Centralize it with cloud computing.

9. Learn from it with artificial intelligence.

Now AI is beginning to act on it. Information no longer needs a human in the loop to become action.

Give machines tools, then vision, memory, and autonomy, and eventually, they get hands and a body.

Look at the spacing between those steps.

Writing took more than 4,000 years to lead to the printing press. The press took about 400 years to lead to the telegraph, and the telegraph took about 125 to lead to the internet.

Each step arrives faster because it stands on the one before it.

That's the hidden structure.

A Bookstore, a Gaming Chip and a $1 Billion Pizza

Most investors ask… What is this company today, and will it make more money?

That's a useful question.

The better one is… What does this company become as the technology keeps improving, and how much bigger does that make the opportunity?

Amazon's 1997 IPO prospectus called it "the leading online retailer of books." Nine years later, it started renting out the computing infrastructure it had built to run that store.

That business, AWS, now produces more than half of Amazon's operating profit.

Nvidia made graphics chips so gamers could get smoother frame rates. In 2012, a small University of Toronto team trained a breakthrough image-recognition network called AlexNet on two of those gaming cards.

Modern AI has been running on Nvidia ever since.

Bitcoin looked like weird internet money. In 2010, a programmer paid 10,000 of them for two pizzas. Those coins have since been worth more than $1 billion.

Every one of those descriptions was accurate at the time, and every one missed what the technology underneath could become.

The expensive mistake is failing to imagine what something might become tomorrow...

Because that's where the 100X opportunities tend to live.

My Lane: Technology

DD has spent years helping Moonshot Minute readers navigate the macro forces moving markets: inflation, commodities, hard assets, geopolitics and capital flows.

I'm adding another lens: technology.

That means the central characters in the race to the singularity, the science underneath it, the networks forming around it and the breakthroughs that change what's possible.

And I'm not afraid to get technical.

We'll talk about neural networks, computer vision, information theory, world models, robotics, data moats, network effects and autonomous agents.

I'll always make the mechanism clear, because I want you to see the future the way I see it.

Then you can look at something everyone else still calls impossible and think, "Wait, I can see how we get there."

Six Years for a Railroad, Two Months for ChatGPT

I think we're entering the most consequential technological transition of our lifetimes.

Call it the AI revolution, accelerating technological change or, if you want to name the destination, the Singularity. Whatever the label, the direction looks like this:

Machines are getting smarter. They're gaining senses. They're learning to use tools, write software, make decisions and perform work that recently required a human being.

That will create enormous winners and losers, in the stock market and in life.

Some companies will use AI to produce more with fewer people. Others will be automated out from underneath.

Some workers will become extraordinarily productive. Others may see software replicate decades of expertise.

Entire industries will change. Entire careers will change. Entire fortunes will be made and lost.

Railroads had to be laid mile by mile, and the first transcontinental line took six years to finish. Factories were built brick by brick and power grids stretched across entire continents.

Even the computer revolution required decades of chip design, fabrication and hardware deployment.

AI needs its own physical buildout.

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are on track to spend more than $600 billion this year, much of it on data centers.

But once that infrastructure exists, a new capability can reach billions of people and millions of businesses with a single software update.

ChatGPT went from launch to an estimated 100 million users in about two months.

People who saw the railroad coming had years to prepare. This time, the window may be measured in months.

So we pay attention.

Which capabilities are real? Which are hype? Which companies capture the value?

Whether you're investing, building a business or thinking about the world your kids will inherit...

You need a plan.

That's what we want Moonshot Minute to give you: a framework for recognizing change early enough to profit from it and prepare for it.

What We'll Be Watching

Here's some of what I'll be covering:

• THE WHITE-COLLAR WIPEOUT: AI is moving from helping knowledge workers to performing entire workflows. Which jobs disappear? Which workers become more productive? Which companies capture the gains?

• AI GETS EYES: Computer vision is teaching machines to see things humans can't. Who owns the models, sensors and data?

• THE ROBOT ECONOMY: Humanoid robots and intelligent machines are moving into the physical world. Who supplies the brains, chips, cameras and infrastructure?

• THE MAG 7'S NEXT TRILLION-DOLLAR BETS: The biggest tech builders are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to what comes next. What are they seeing before Wall Street?

• WORLD MODELS: AI is learning to build internal representations of reality, predict what happens next and take action.

• MACHINES THAT SEE WHAT HUMANS CAN'T: Infrared, thermal, radar, lidar, depth sensing and hyperspectral imaging. What happens when machines perceive a richer world than we do?

• THE HIDDEN STRUCTURE OF NETWORKS: Why some technologies produce winner-take-most markets, and why even powerful moats eventually break.

• THE CODE OF LIFE: DNA is information. Now AI and gene editing are giving us increasingly powerful ways to read, predict and rewrite it. Which breakthroughs become medicines, and which become the next great companies?

• THE NEXT HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACE: We went from keyboard to mouse to touchscreen to voice, and vision, agents and robots are next. Every transition creates new winners.

Each of these shifts has two sides.

One has you carving through the Santa Cruz Mountains in a Porsche.

The other leaves you halfway up the mountain beside a stalled Volkswagen in your tie-dye shirt, thumb out, watching the Porsches zip by.

So let's make sure we're the ones driving.

Always be prospering,

Harry Seldon

P.S. On Thursday, I want you to see technology as a monster.

The one I have in mind is much older than the Terminator, and we've been feeding it for centuries.

It doesn't think, feel, or care, and you can't negotiate with it.

It has one appetite: more capability for less.

Again and again, it takes things that were rare, expensive or difficult and makes them common, cheap and easy. It did that to information, computing and communication. Now it's doing it to intelligence.

Once you see that pattern, the future starts to look a lot less random.

On Thursday, I'll show you what I think the monster wants next.

I'll be back.

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