Jason M. Lemkin argues spite drives AI's biggest companies. Anthropic, XAI, and Twitter were built partly from competitive resentment. Zuckerberg may burn billions on AI not to lose relevance, choosing pride over shareholder returns.
I just think for venture, this is the era of the spite startup. I mean, Anthropic's a spite startup, XAI and Twitter's a spite startup. Now, we've got met as a guy who's doing a new spite startup. Like, I think if you want to make money in venture, you got to. You got to search out spite. This is driving the greatest AI companies of our generation is spite. And Zuck's. Zuck may burn every last penny he has, but some of it's out of spite that they got this far behind. Like, these guys just fracked around with pictures on Instagram and trying to get reels going when the world passes by. And they're pissed, these CEOs. I think a lot of these CEOs are pissed. I think Zuck's pissed.
So what you're saying is, so to bring it back to the acquisitions, what you're basically saying is Zuckerberg has probably internalized. I'd prefer to fail trying to be me and going for it than to be bland and mediocre and maybe because I'm willing to run the risk of spending, you know, a couple of hundred. He said it. A couple of hundred billion dollars and being wrong. And I'd prefer to do that for my psychic benefit than to be a boring ass bastard who's not relevant in AI even if it's better for the shareholders. That's really what you're saying, Jason, and I think it's quite insightful.
