Defense, Deployment, & Distribution

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🛡️ Anduril: $5B Round & 1,000 Missiles a Year

Series H closed at $5B, doubling Anduril's valuation to $61B in under a year. Thrive Capital and a16z led. Revenue doubled to $2.2B in 2025. Total raised since 2017: north of $11B. The same week, the Department of War signed a framework agreement for Anduril to deliver 1,000+ surface-launched Barracuda-500M cruise missiles per year, with a minimum of 3,000 over three years. 100-pound payload, 500+ nautical mile range, 30 hours to assemble, 70% commodity parts. Production runs through a new 115,000 square foot Southern California facility and Arsenal-1, the $1B, 5M sqft hyper-scale plant in Columbus. The age of artisanal munitions is over. TechCrunch | Anduril

🛰️ SpaceX: Orbit & Spectrum, Same Week

Two big stories. Google and SpaceX are in talks to launch orbital data centers, part of SpaceX's pitch to investors ahead of its rumored $1.75T IPO later this year. Google's Project Suncatcher is flying prototypes by 2027. Separately, the FCC approved EchoStar's $40B+ spectrum sale: 65 MHz of nationwide D2D spectrum to SpaceX for Starlink direct-to-phone, 50 MHz to AT&T for 5G. SpaceX now holds exclusive nationwide D2D spectrum for the first time, with flexibility to use it for terrestrial, space-based, or hybrid networks. Compute in orbit, connectivity from orbit. The same company. Make of that what you will. TechCrunch | FCC

🏗️ OpenAI: Daybreak & Deployment Co

OpenAI is going wide. Daybreak, their new cyber initiative, combines Codex Security with three new models (GPT-5.5, GPT-5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber, and GPT-5.5-Cyber) for vulnerability detection and patch validation. Akamai, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler are integrating. That's the OpenAI answer to Anthropic's Mythos and Project Glasswing. Separately, OpenAI launched the Deployment Company, a $4B+ standalone unit led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-leads, plus Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey on the consulting side. The company is acquiring Tomoro for 150 Forward Deployed Engineers. Models, defense, and distribution. All at once. The Hacker News | OpenAI

🛍️ Anthropic: SMBs Get Their Own Claude

PayPal and Anthropic launched AI Fluency for Small Business, a free 9-lesson course for SMB owners who say they need AI but don't have the tools or training. Alongside it: Claude for Small Business, a plugin connecting Claude to PayPal for invoicing and refunds, plus QuickBooks, HubSpot, and Canva integrations. The pitch is simple. Eighty-two percent of small businesses say AI is essential. Seventy-three percent say they can't use it. Anthropic also reportedly now has more business customers than OpenAI per Ramp data this week. The frontier model fight just moved to Main Street. PayPal

🎬 Beast Industries: Programmatic for Creators

Beast Industries held its first-ever advertiser upfront on May 12 and confirmed it's building a two-sided creator marketplace to connect Global 1000 brands with creators. Vyro, the company's distribution engine launched last October, already runs 100,000+ vetted microcreators across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. A job listing leaked the bigger play: a "global creator platform" with an "AI-driven intelligence engine." CEO Jeff Housenbold: "We are no longer just a YouTube channel. We're building a next-generation media platform in the age of AI." The company says it reaches 1.3 billion people on a 90-day average. Creator economy goes programmatic. Digiday

👀 Watch List

💾 Cerebras: 68% Pop, $95B Market Cap

Cerebras debuted on Nasdaq Thursday and ripped. Shares opened at $350 against a $185 IPO price, peaked at $386, and closed up 68% at $311.07, putting market cap around $95B. The $5.55B raise is the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019. Last private valuation in February: $23B. Quadrupled in three months. Revenue jumped 76% last year to $510M, swinging from a $481M loss to $88M in net income. OpenAI signed a $20B+ cloud deal in January, AWS brought Cerebras chips into its data centers in March, and both hold warrants to buy more stock. Two new billionaires minted on the open. CEO Andrew Feldman is holding a stake worth close to $2B. The AI IPO window is open. CNBC

🗣️ Thinking Machines: Full-Duplex AI

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab announced "interaction models" on Monday: TML-Interaction-Small, a full-duplex AI that processes input and generates output at the same time, more like a phone call than a text chain. Response time clocks at 0.40 seconds, roughly natural human conversation speed and meaningfully faster than comparable models from OpenAI and Google. It's a research preview, not a product. Limited preview in the coming months, wider release later this year. Interactivity becoming native to the model is the right idea. Whether the live experience matches the benchmarks is the question. TechCrunch

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Create a premium vertical encyclopedia-style infographic about [TOPIC].

Make it feel like a collectible natural-history handbook page blended with modern editorial design. Use a structured, modular layout with one large detailed main image, zoomed-in callouts, rounded info panels, quick facts, taxonomy/profile sections, behavior/ecology notes, physical traits, comparisons, rating scales, icons, and small charts. Keep the text concise and educational. Use a clean light background, soft refined colors, gentle shadows, elegant typography, and organized spacing.

The final design should feel like a museum-quality reference card made for collecting and sharing.

📚 Content

🎯 Build an Asymmetric Life

Stanford professor Graham Weaver's "last lecture" is making the rounds again, and for good reason. The frameworks land harder than most "how to live" content: suffering is inevitable, run the 10-year test on every big decision, and watch for the "not me" and "not now" traps that keep ambitious people permanently in the on-deck circle. Brad pulled the 13 lessons into one thread. Worth the watch.

🌴 Spencer Pratt for LA Mayor

Reality TV's most famous villain is now running for mayor of Los Angeles, and the All-In crew sat down with him to talk wildfires, homelessness, and the corruption that turned Pacific Palisades into ash. Yes, that Spencer Pratt. Yes, he is serious. And he is saying things most career politicians won't touch. The most unlikely civic crusader of the year.

💥 Nothing Ever Happens, Until It Does

Naval's new podcast is a clean rebuttal to internet-poisoned cynicism. Drones democratizing violence. Biothreats democratizing next. AI interfaces unlocking hardware. The era of "nothing ever happens" is officially over, and the companies built in the next decade will look nothing like the ones built in the last. May you live in interesting times.

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