Second Movers Advantage…It Has Come To Betting and Is Coming To AI – and An Era Of Abundance….Sunday Reads And Listens
Happy Sunday…
I have become Fred Flinstone
I have gone from ZERO lifetime bets on apps to 3 over the weekend (on Robinhood).
Back in February I wrote ‘If You Build It, They Will Bet Parlays’. Robinhood has since launched NCAA tournament betting and made it easy enough for dummies like me to place small wagers.
I got my first of two ‘win’ notifications last night after Houston -a heavy favorite – won:
This just confirms what I wrote last week:
Robinhood, and possibly even Stocktwits (we are working on it), could be big beneficiaries of ‘second mover advantage’ in the betting industry/
Moving to AI, many smart technology entrepreneurs believe ‘second mover advantage’ is now coming to the sector. Here is Suhail:
AI will move into a window (later this year) that I would call “second mover’s advantage.” That is, the first obvious moves that could be big are played out given the technology/funding cycle. The rest of us get to watch how it worked out, take stock of the pace, understand how
— Suhail (@Suhail)
2:25 PM • Mar 22, 2025
Balaji came over the top of Suhail with his ‘10 points/predictions’ (click on the tweet below to read them all):
What happens if high quality AI models become free, ubiquitous, and inexpensive to run on even low-spec hardware?
(1) First, you can rebuild every productivity app AI-first. That starts with Microsoft Word, Google Sheets, and Apple Keynote. But it extends to wholly new kinds of
— Balaji (@balajis)
6:50 AM • Mar 23, 2025
We have many financial ‘apps’ in our portfolio that will benefit from what Balaji says in his third point:
(3) Third, moats move to the app layer. As others have remarked, the GPT wrappers may end up more defensible than the GPT model itself.
At Stocktwits for instance, with the help of AI, we launched ‘why it’s trending’ last week and it is already very popular.
Assuming AI does off second mover advantages, the next few years of technology and business will be wild.
Have a great Sunday.
PS – Ezra Klein is out on a book tour for his book on ‘Abundance’ as a political movement (center left). I enjoyed this podcast about it. I am for common sense no matter what side of the spectrum the ideas are coming from.
