tomtunguz.com / Page 2

The CIO's choices are clear in 2026. Across 87 public SaaS & platform companies, only Infrastructure & Dev Tools (+68.5% 1Y) & Security (+17.6% 1Y) are positive; the other three sectors are down. Category, not growth, separates winners from losers : ...

Anthropic spends 2.3x its payroll on compute -- $515k per engineer per year at today's $224k fully-loaded salary. The top 1% of software companies spend $89k, the median $137. Three 2029 scenarios bracket how that gap closes.

At the application layer, moats are lagging, earned through scale & brand. At infrastructure, capital intensity demands a leading moat at founding.

The inference market is the largest in software. AI workloads are shifting from synchronous chat to asynchronous, multi-turn agents that run for hours. Sail Research builds fleet-aware orchestration to maximize throughput per dollar of inference ...

Sunil Agrawal, CISO at Glean, joins Office Hours to discuss what security readiness looks like when attackers use frontier models for reconnaissance, phishing, deepfakes, and exploit generation.

Stablecoins hold $165b in US T-bills, more than China or Switzerland. Hyperliquid generates $610m annualized fees. Gold, oil, & stocks trade 24/7 on crypto perpetual markets.

Reselling inference at cost is a zero-margin business. The margin question is cost-plus vs. value-based pricing. Optimization is a cost lever under either, with distillation defensible for a while. BYOK breaks cost-plus & spares value-based.