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July 3, 2026

Failover Weekly: Nvidia Puts and Toaster Ovens

Two stories collided for me this week and I can't stop thinking about the overlap. One is about a 24-year-old ex-OpenAI researcher who's turned a $200M fund into $20B partly by getting out of Nvidia early and into Anthropic instead. The other is about a Cards Against Humanity ad campaign built around a rant about toaster ovens that people still talk about a decade later. Different worlds, same lesson: everyone's trying to figure out what's actually load-bearing versus what just looks impressive right now. GPUs and ad impressions have more in common than you'd think.


From the Network

The Enterprise AI Show – AI News of the Month, June 2026

Brian and Aaron run through the biggest AI stories from June in one sitting. If you've let your RSS reader pile up for a month, this is the fastest way to catch up.

Software Defined Talk 579 – The Headless Lifestyle

Anthropic's Fable is back after an 18-day export control timeout, the "is AI actually killing jobs" debate keeps going (Ford just rehired the engineers it let go), and OpenAI's trillion-dollar IPO problem. Plus SoftBank's shareholder slides, which are somehow both real and a joke.

The Cloud Pod 360 – And You Thought AWS Was Out of Features for S3. Surprise!

Justin, Matt, and Jonathan cover Claude Design's new brand-consistency tools, AI-assisted Kafka migrations on Amazon MSK, Databricks' Data+AI Summit announcements, and yes, AWS somehow found more things to add to S3.


Podcast of the Week

Limitless – Updates from the #1 AI Investor: Leopold Aschenbrenner's Nvidia/Anthropic Strategy

Leopold Aschenbrenner left OpenAI, raised $200M about two years ago, and has since turned it into roughly $20B — largely by rotating out of "picks and shovels" plays like Nvidia and into the AI labs themselves, including an early bet on Anthropic at a $60B valuation that's now worth 15x. He's currently holding $9B in Nvidia puts while the company raises debt it doesn't obviously need. You don't have to buy the whole thesis to find this a useful read on where the smart money thinks the next leg of this cycle goes: power, memory, networking, and fiber, not more chips.

Non-Tech Pod of the Week

Phonograph – Knob Feel: The Story of the Greatest Podcast Ad Campaign of All Time

The story of how Cards Against Humanity and John Siracusa (Accidental Tech Podcast, Hypercritical) turned a routine sponsor read about a toaster oven into one of the most beloved ad campaigns in podcasting history, and a good explanation of why that golden age of podcast advertising is hard to recreate now. Required listening for anyone who thinks about ad reads for a living, which, hi.


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