Slow Takeoff: 2026
The Knicks, my new MCP server, COGE, and our mini conference
Late send due to bad airplane wifi.
The agony and ecstasy of Knicks fandom is profound. I fell in love with basketball around 6th grade, c. 2005, the first innings of nearly 25-year, uninterrupted run of mediocrity and pain for the franchise.
While some of the bing-bong antics today are over the top, it all comes from a place of profound love and desperation. New York is a basketball city and this team/organization/coaching staff has finally given a team worthy of our love.
Knicks in four.
Slow Takeoff
Last week in New York we hosted Takeoff our now bi-annual mini-conference for young partners, principals, and emerging managers - and our counterparts on the limited partner side.
We are betting on this cohort to be the next generation of important investors in this asset class (and I’m lucky to call many of them my friends and peers). Some of them are running funds already, some are still building careers inside larger firms, all of them are doing the work without the security of knowing they’re right. We get to follow and support them, co-invest with them, and steal their best ideas. The least we can do is buy them a drink and put them in front of each other (and LPs) once a year.
The event itself was off the record so I won’t repeat/reveal much but we had a phenomenal group of speakers:
Emerging Managers: Taylor Greene (TwelveBelow), Finn Murphy (Nebular), Niko Bonatsos (Verdict)
Our Thinky Boys: Aaron Harris (Magid), Jeremy Giffon (Octave), Mike Dempsey (Compound)
Fireside chat with Hunter Walk (Homebrew / Screendoor)
LPs: Erik Strobel (Granite) and Matt Auxier (University of Chicago)
There were a few threads and themes that really jumped out.
Heart in the game Skin in the game used to do the work of binding people to outcomes; it doesn’t anymore. Everyone trades in and out, gets paid regardless, can leave for a portco or a frontier lab. But who would make a decision that costs them in the moment because they actually give a shit and are planting a long term stake in the ground?
Firms are products You don’t get to bolt together separate decisions about fee structure, fund size, partnership composition, check size, and LP base and call it a firm. They have to cohere or you get the bootleg cassette effect: a third-generation partner playing back a model built for and around people they’ve never met, audibly degraded each copy.
What comes after the navy The alternatives world ate venture. The platforms behave less like risk-taking partnerships and more like large institutional asset managers, because that’s what most of them have become. The pirates became the navy. The interesting question, which we did not resolve, is what comes after. Almost everyone in the room is making a bet, with their career and their LPs’ money, on some version of that question.
Tremendous thanks to our supporters who help make this possible: Cooley (Slow’s law firm), JP Morgan (a very deep partner to the firm), and Sydecar (our friends and thought partners).
Ask Yoni
This week I shipped something fun: a Yoni’s 99D MCP to know what I think/have written about stuff (this newsletter). I made this for myself as a more efficient/portable way to surface relevant context for writing and investing projects after getting annoying by constantly trying to manage project memory/context. I do tons of copy and pasting links which is annoying.
I figured someone, somewhere in the world my want to read my newsletter (or have their agent read my newsletter) within chat. One step closer to Yoni GPT.
You can try the MCP server here and the github is here.
COGE
Mamdani announced the Comission On Government Efficiency, which is an obviously dumb name for what remains an obviously good idea. My immediate skepticism about DOGE (since vindicated - it was a complete a failure) came from my (correct) read that it was a bad faith effort by unserious leadership. But we shouldn’t let that poison us against the thought that government can/should/must work better.
It’s also obvious that tech/software/AI should be a big part of improving public service and delivery. Democrats, progressives, and technocratic abundists (check, check, check for me) should be rooting for ideas like this.
Cost overruns, delays, bad service, etc. all undermine faith in government and spur the death spiral of state capacity. The only way to reverse the trend is to reverse the trend. Personally, I want to be involved and supportive in any way I can.
Remember, efficiency isn’t just less money in, it’s outcomes achieved per unit of work.Mamdani announced COGE - NYC’s Commission on Government Efficiency. This is a very dumb name for a very good . I was/am on record that DOGE was/is a complete failure because it was never a serious or good faith attempt but
Making government work better and be cheaper is obviously good
Software/tech/AI should obviously be part of that
It is absolutely incumbent on democrats, progressives, and technocratic abundists (check, check, check for me) to demonstrate that government can actually deliver, not just spend more money. We have to start in places like New York which have an immense pool of talent and capital and still face dire budget problems.
I hope to support COGE and be involved in any way I can (step one is coming up with a better name).
Being Public Seems Hard
Seems basically impossible to be a public company right now.
You’re simultaneously getting the feedback that you need to be an AI leader AND that you predictable high margins but:
You’re spending tons of tokens, and increasingly, more than the tons you had planned on spending (“we blew our whole budget in 3 months”)
All the spend is highly experimental and you don’t know if the results will be there (good or bad) or how they will materialize (more growth, more profits, etc.)
Public markets love predictability (the only better than good news is the expectation of good news, and the only worse than bad news is unexpectedly bad news).
That is basically impossible to deliver right now.
From elsewhere
Is this a new 5th job or just a new meaning to slop cannon?
I am extremely into neighborhood restaurants getting “day jobs” as popups/coworking spaces/coffee shops. Margot/Winner has become a staple for me. I’m pretty curious about the economics since part of the appeal is low density/low turnover but hey, if it works!
The MCP is fantastic. I just had it go through 2 of my plans for companies I'm working on and got right to core issues I'm grappling with. Happy to send the results if you want to see. The output is a bit long for a comment.