What Happens When the AI Boom Slows Down

The gist

1. Casado describes four investor mindsets: financial, productive, frontier and speculative, and says investors who don't know theirs end up justifying personal bias.
2. Casado argues network effects are widely misunderstood, and that what matters is whether a moat grows superlinearly, linearly or sublinearly with scale.
3. Casado says frontier models take 80% plus of spending and last only three to six months, so a slowdown could shift value to open source.
4. Casado says AI lets you turn capital directly into progress, while hardware supply and power, not money, are the real constraints today.
5. From the Cursor, Open Router and World Labs deals, Casado says strategic acquisitions run on trust and good faith, and leaking deals destabilizes them.