What about founder mental health?
And: Wealthfront sets an IPO price range
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business and power.
Tuesday. It’s SaaS earnings week! Today we’ll hear from CrowdStrike, Okta, Box, Asana, and Gitlab. Tomorrow it’s Salesforce, Snowflake, UiPath, nCino, and Sprinklr. Thursday brings Docusign, ServiceTitan, and SentinelOne. I’m goddamn hyped.
In an early taste of new operating data, Credo obliterated market expectations for the trailing quarter and the current period ($247.6 million revenue expected, while the data center interconnect company guided to between $335 million and $345 million). Given concerns about AI infra spend, what did Credo tell investors during its post-earnings chat? That “customer forecasts have strengthened across the board in the past months.” Onward! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Phablets … AWS-GCP-Azure alignment … good work with terrible branding … Celestial AI … betting on everything, everywhere, all at once … China-Japan tensions … Russia-India relations … venture capital in MENA? … Internet connections …
Company of the Day: xLight, which is raising $150 million from the Federal government thanks to CHIPS Act monies. The domestic state capitalism push continues.
📉 Trending Down: Apple’s AI future … corporate earnings in China … the future of tariffs by fiat … Internet freedom at home … Chinese factories …
Things That Matter
What about founder mental health? Building a startup is not for the faint of heart. But even if you have the courage required, the stress of building a company from nothing is no joke. James Oliver, a founder who is building an early-stage venture capital firm, told CO in an interview that “72% of founders have mental health challenges,” adding that in his anecdotal experience, the figure is closer to 100%.
In today’s 996-friendly startup culture, taking care of one’s mental health becomes both more challenging and more necessary.
To bring more attention to founder mental health, Oliver co-authored a book on the subject entitled “Burn Bright, Not Out,” which employs a series of interviews with founders to dig into “what happens when the dopamine wears off, when the fundraise is over, and when the anxiety refuses to leave.” As a big fan of caring for our collective mental health, I dig what Oliver is up to. (The book is a fundraiser for the author’s mental health fund, which offers therapy to founders.) I ordered a copy, and will review it here when I get it into my hands.
OpenAI knows it’s behind: After Google and Anthropic blew the doors off state-of-the-art AI model quality before Thanksgiving, we wrote that praise for the new models indicated that “OpenAI’s grip on the AI market, weakening in recent years as other companies caught up, has reached a new low in terms of forearm grit.”
Sam Altman agrees, declaring a “code red” internally to improve ChatGPT, pushing other goals (“advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse,” per the WSJ) to dedicate resources to improve its popular chatbot.
Why do we care? OpenAI’s massive infra commitments that have buoyed share prices around the world are predicated on the usage of its AI products growing steadily. If ChatGPT loses a trick to Google’s Gemini (consumer) and Anthropic’s Claude (enterprise), it could find itself in the middle of the AI pack with a market-leader’s worth of cash outlays planned. Not good.
What OpenAI needs to do is release a new, better model that trounces the competition and shows that it still has its earlier mojo. A bit of the old magic, if you will. Such is the pace of AI. From the DeepSeek R1 crisis at the start of the year, to Google racing from behind to the front of the AI pack, while Anthropic continues to win by marching to the beat of its own drummer to close out the annum.
I am still an OpenAI guy today, due strictly to inertia. ChatGPT is a very useful tool for commands like “Credo revenue history current quarter last four years quarterly,” but I suspect that its competitors are just as good at the same work. Or perhaps better. Do I need to change my allegiance? That’s what Sam needs to fix.
The soul of an AI model: Want to know what Anthropic told Claude Opus 4.5 — today’s leading AI model — about its creator and itself while it was trained? Here’s 14,000 words — now confirmed — that the AI lab fed its new model while it was still baking. It’s well worth a skim, if not a full read.
Apple stands up to India: Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in India, and we all should be, was likely worried when news dribbled into public view that the nation intended to force smartphone makers to install a “state-owned cyber safety app,” as Reuters put it. The app, called Sanchar Saath, is putatively designed to help prevent phone theft and stolen handset abuse. Critics called the app, which would not offer Indian smartphone owners the option of deleting it, a privacy nightmare.
I was curious what Apple would do in the face of the push by Modi and company. As it turns out, Cupertino is offering a flat no. Thank you, Apple. The move is not without risk. Not only is Apple already in a scrap with the Indian government over antitrust rules, but it has worked mightily to shift some of its device assembly to the country to diversify away from China. Telling New Delhi to get lost on the Sanchar Saath front is bold. And needed.
If we allow backsliding democracies to backdoor the phones of critics, we’re heading for a world of more autocracies and fewer elected governments.
L’affaire Airwallex: There are limits to founder friendliness, and Keith Rabois is busting through them all. After publicly scrapping with Replit founder Amjad Massad, a technology founder of Palestinian descent, the Khosla investor unloaded on Airwallex, a startup that offers payments and banking services to international companies. Rabois accuses the company of becoming a “Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data like from AI labs and defense contractors.” Holy shit.
Airwallex has raised capital from Salesforce Ventures, Visa Ventures, Sequoia Capital China (RIP), Lone Pine Capital, and others.
It recently claimed to have reached a $1 billion run rate.
If Rabois’ allegations regarding Airwallex are true, he has a point. His attacks on Massad, however, were disgusting.