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Meta is acquiring Manus for $2.5 billion.¹² Alongside the announcement, Manus disclosed $100 million in ARR achieved in eight months, 147 trillion tokens processed since launch.³

Can we use those figures to explain the acquisition price?

Publicly traded software companies have gross margins of 71-72%. AI companies run lower. Gross profit per token may be a better indicator of earnings potential. Some AI companies already use gross profit as a quota metric rather than revenue.

This year I traveled through systems, human & machine, from the mathematics of complexity to industrial espionage.

1. The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science: Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems introduced me to feedback loops a decade ago. This book goes deeper, surveying where complexity science stands today.
2. Math Without Numbers by Milo Beckman: A vivid & accessible tour of abstract mathematics. Beckman covers topology, infinities larger than infinity, & other mind-bending concepts, all without a single digit & with proofs to explain it all.
3. On Democracy by E. B. White: White, New Yorker editor, Charlotte’s Web author, Elements of Style co-creator, is among my favorite writers. These essays provide a time capsule to help us understand where we are today. Written as fascism spread across Europe & America debated isolationism, White’s defense of America provided a window into another era of rapid political change.
4. Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang: Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving : through laws in the US, or through engineering in China.
5. God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright: Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of the Lone Star State. Both California & Texas value independence & innovation. As a Californian, it was fascinating to see Texas through Wright’s eyes.
6. The NVIDIA Way: Jensen Huang believes Nvidia’s worst enemy isn’t competition but complacency. Kim’s portrait reveals a CEO who spends late nights alongside his team, torturing them into greatness.
7. The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies: Davies argues that modern organizations function like runaway AIs, making decisions no human intends. A hotel executive cuts staff to improve the balance sheet. Later, you can’t check into your room & the clerk can only offer a voucher. There’s no one to call, no way to communicate back. That’s an unaccountability machine.
8. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway: I’ve read every le Carré. His son Harkaway picks up where his father left off, adding a bracing entry to the canon.
9. Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway: Before spy novels, Harkaway spent fifteen years writing science fiction. Curious about his earlier work, I was not disappointed. Titanium Noir explores a world in which the wealthy have access to drugs that double their lifespan & double their size. The novel examines what happens when health becomes a function of wealth.
10. Boom: Bubbles & the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber: Why does transformative progress require financial bubbles? This builds on Carlota Perez’s work on technology innovation cycles. Hobart & Huber argue that bubbles’ poor accountability shelters the world’s most important breakthroughs.

What should I read in 2026?

Motive, the AI-powered fleet management company formerly known as KeepTruckin, filed their S-1.

Founded in 2013 by Shoaib Makani, Ryan Johns, & Obaid Khan, the company has grown from an electronic logging device (ELD)¹ compliance tool into a comprehensive physical operations platform serving nearly 100,000 customers across trucking, construction, oil & gas, & manufacturing.

Motive’s platform has since expanded beyond compliance to combine AI-powered dashcams for driver safety, GPS tracking for real-time visibility, & spend management cards to control costs. This suite acts as a central operating system for physical economy businesses, unifying data from vehicles, drivers, & equipment into a single interface.

Every year I make a list of predictions & score the previous year’s. You can find my 10 Predictions for 2026 here. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10.

1. The IPO market rips.

Score : 0.6.

Every year I make a list of predictions & score the previous year’s. You can find my 10 Predictions for 2026 here. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10.

1. The IPO market rips.

Score : 0.6.

Every year I make a list of predictions & score last year’s predictions. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10. I will release the scoring tomorrow. For today, here are my predictions for 2026 :

1. Businesses pay more for AI agents than people for the first time.

This has already happened with consumers. Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. ¹ Riders prefer the safety & reliability of autonomous vehicles. For rote business tasks, agents will command a similar premium as companies factor in onboarding, recruiting, training, & management costs.

Thursday is the new Monday for podcast producers. Analyzing hundreds of tech & VC podcasts over six weeks this fall through MotherDuck’s MCP server, I found 42% of episodes drop mid-week, between Thursday & Friday. Sunday? A publishing desert at just 3%.

Here’s what else the data reveals.

When Episodes Drop

Prompt: Count the number of podcasts published on each day of the week with %

The pattern makes sense : listeners consume podcasts during commutes & workouts early in the week, so publishing mid-week ensures fresh content when people are ready to listen.

Gemini 3 Flash represents a step function increase in model deflation : a gauntlet thrown.

Google’s latest model underprices the state of the art by 70% to 79%, with very similar levels of performance. At $0.50 per million input tokens & $3.00 per million output tokens, Gemini 3 Flash hovers within 9% of the best scores across 20 benchmarks.¹

How much better is the price-performance? How much cheaper can teams run inference?

Despite open-source AI models being 10-100x cheaper, proprietary providers haven’t lost pricing power. OpenRouter’s data reveals a market splitting in two.

Over the last year, open-source models’ market share has remained stable around 22-25%, briefly spiking to 35% during the explosive growth of Chinese models in mid-2025 before settling back down.

The weak price elasticity indicates that even drastic cost differences do not fully shift demand; proprietary providers retain pricing power for mission-critical applications, while open ecosystems absorb volume from cost-sensitive users.

It’s not often that venture capital thinks about the credit markets. I remember becoming a venture capitalist three months before Lehman fell, when mortgage securities topped the news of the global financial crisis.

Recently Oracle’s bonds have been weighing on my mind.

AI’s capital expenditure in 2025 represents about 1.6% of US GDP. In 2026, that number should top 3% of US GDP according to Goldman Sachs estimates¹.

Google, Microsoft & Amazon do not have the capital necessary on their balance sheets to fund this buildout without debt.