💪 Mighty Brief
Friday, March 13, 2026 — 3:30 AM CT
⚡ TL;DR — Top Stories
- Meta delays Avocado model to May — performance can't match Gemini/Claude. Discussed licensing Gemini as stopgap. NYT
- Anthropic + Blackstone forming AI consulting JV — selling Claude to PE portfolio companies. Direct Blank Metal competitive signal. The Information
- xAI hires two senior Cursor leaders — Andrew Milich & Jason Ginsberg report to Musk. Talent war for coding agent dominance. The Information
- Atlassian cuts 10% (1,600 jobs) — explicitly because Claude Cowork threatens core products. Stock down 84% from 2021 peak. CNBC
- MCP backlash goes mainstream — Perplexity CTO moving away from MCPs, Garry Tan "MCP sucks, vibe coded a CLI in 30 min." Uber built a full MCP Gateway but the complexity validates the skeptics. @morganlinton, @garrytan
- Anish Acharya (a16z) drops pre-AI transition playbook — "be the point of economic diffusion." Mentions OpenClaw by name as enterprise terminal surface. @illscience
- Aaron Levie: inference explosion incoming — coding agents using 100x more tokens than a year ago, and this is just the start. @levie
- Khamenei confirmed dead — Iran/Strait of Hormuz situation escalating. Pentagon underestimated willingness to mine the strait. memeorandum
🔗 Capture Themes (last 48h)
MCP Backlash → CLI Renaissance
@morganlinton (Perplexity CTO moving away), @garrytan (MCP sucks, built CLI in 30 min), Uber's MCP Gateway complexity (Pragmatic Engineer)
→ Validates OpenClaw's CLI-first architecture. When the YC president and Perplexity's CTO both say the same thing, the protocol hype cycle is cresting. BM client guidance: APIs > MCPs for production.
Coding Agents Reshape the Org Chart
Harrison Chase (EPD collapse), Ethan Mollick (non-coder building complex apps), OpenAI racing to catch Claude Code (WIRED), xAI poaching Cursor talent, Atlassian cutting 10% citing Claude Cowork, Amazon's AI mandate backfiring
→ The "builder" archetype IS the FDE. Chase's article is the BM talent thesis in public. The split: organic adoption works (Mollick, Uber), mandated adoption backfires (Amazon). Training is the bridge.
Pre-AI Company Transition Playbook
Anish Acharya/a16z (economic diffusion framework), Atlassian layoffs, Claude Excel/PowerPoint enterprise embedding, Amazon Guardian investigation
→ Acharya's framework IS the BM consulting pitch. "Helping them be sufficiently ambitious will be as hard as aligning the technology." Share with Mark/Elli immediately.
Agent Skills as Architecture
@garrytan (gstack — 6 Claude Code slash commands), @arscontexta (skill graphs > single SKILL.md), @hooeem (full Claude Skills course), OpenClaw 2026.3.12 release
→ Skills are becoming the software development paradigm. Garry open-sourcing his setup = distribution moment. The skill graph concept (progressive disclosure via wikilinks) is worth prototyping for BM client engagements.
🏗️ Blank Metal
📊 Pipeline
| Deal | Status | Last Activity |
|---|
| EQT Partners | Meeting TODAY | Intro call 11:30am w/ EJ + Jason Dehler |
| Gauge Capital | Active | Mar 11 — Claude Cowork Training scheduled Mon Mar 16 3-4pm |
| Tufin | Active | Mar 11 |
| TritenIAG | Active | Mar 11 |
| PowerPusher | Active | Mar 11 |
| Great Northern | New | Mar 11 — Intro w/ Jovan & Brianna (via Aaron/Eric network) |
| PointsNorth | Active | Mar 10 |
| Bond Sports | Cooling | Mar 3 |
| BBG | Stale | Mar 3 |
| Dasvandh Network | Stale | Mar 2 |
| Bento | Stale 24d | Feb 17 |
| PivotalAdvisors | Stale 24d | Feb 17 |
~7 active, 5 stale (14+ days no activity). 2 commits in last 24h (Issue 13 headlines, auto-sync).
⚡ Dan's Plate
- 11:30am: EQT Partners intro — BM + EJ + Jason Dehler meeting with EQT team (Dominika, Daniel, Brian, Fredrik). Prepare: this is PE firm intro, likely exploring AI consulting for portfolio cos. Note: overlaps with Eric Dayton lunch at noon.
- 12:00pm: Lunch with Eric Dayton — Cafe Yoto, North Loop
- 6:30pm: Gala with Mary — McNamara Alumni Center
- Mon 3/16: Gauge Capital Claude Cowork Training 3-4pm
- BM unread: Zach Meierhofer — Virtual Escape Room invite (Apr 13) + Gauge Capital training confirmation
🚨 Competitive Intel
Anthropic + Blackstone/PE consortium forming AI consulting JV — selling Claude directly to PE portfolio companies. This is exactly BM's lane. The play: BM brings implementation depth + domain expertise that a vendor JV can't. But the distribution advantage of a Blackstone channeling deals to an Anthropic-branded service is real. Worth discussing with Mark.
🧠 Munger Observer
Confirmation Bias Check: The Bret Taylor / Cheeky Pint episode validates the entire Wick thesis — markdown > MCP, process not person, hyper-generalists ascending. All probably true. But when an hour-long podcast confirms every belief you hold, that's exactly when to ask what it doesn't address. Sierra's $165M ARR came with massive funding and Bret's Rolodex. The architecture insight transfers; the go-to-market doesn't.
Opportunity Cost Alert: Day spent consuming + processing content (podcast deep dive, email triage skill transfer, bookmark digests) while two items sit 11 days overdue (Vibma, SOTA model review). Infrastructure work is real work — but the overdue queue is a signal about prioritization drift.
— "Invert, always invert."
📧 Key Emails (last 24h)
- The Information: Nvidia Cloud Ally Nscale buying major US data center site ahead of IPO — Gmail
- The Information: xAI hires two senior Cursor leaders to catch up on coding — Gmail
- The Information: Anthropic in talks with Blackstone/PE firms to form AI consulting venture — Gmail
- Every: "The Science of Why AI Still Can't Write Like You" — Gmail
- Ben's Bites: Gemini Embedding 2 (multimodal), Replit Agent 4 + $400M raise ($9B val), Perplexity Personal Computer (always-on Mac Mini — "sounds like openclaw"), Meta acqui-hires Moltbook team — Gmail
- Pragmatic Engineer: "From IDEs to AI Agents" with Steve Yegge — Gmail
- Lenny's Newsletter: How I built a 1M+ subscriber newsletter — Gmail
- The Information: OpenAI betting on ChatGPT Apps—people need to find them first — Gmail
- Bessemer: Will world models unlock general purpose robotics? — Gmail
- The Information: Microsoft in talks to lease large Texas data center site after Oracle walked away — Gmail
🐦 X / Twitter (last 24h)
Leaders
- @levie: Inference explosion — coding agents using 100x more tokens, about to hit all knowledge work. "It's about to get very interesting in inference land." →
- @garrytan: RT on unusually clear/in-depth blog post (still studying after an hour) →
- @hnshah: "I was up until 2am doing DevOps last week... haven't done DevOps in 20 years, and I could because of AI" →
- @jasonlk: PagerDuty at $667M market cap on $500M ARR (1.3x). Enterprise value ~$120M after cash. Growth at 1%. "You MUST accelerate today." →
- @garrytan: Khamenei confirmed dead (multiple RTs) →
Tools
- @AravSrinivas: Perplexity Computer sandbox uses temporary proxy tokens per session — defending against security criticism →
- @openclaw: OpenClaw 2026.3.12 — dashboard v2, /fast mode, ollama/sglang/vllm → plugins, ephemeral device tokens, cron fixes →
- @paolino: RubyLLM workshop at Ruby Community Conference, companion code open source →
Twin Cities
- @grove (Steve Grove): "Powerful column in today's Star Tribune" →
- @pdouglasweather: Second Winter won't last long — big warmup by next weekend. Snow models still gyrating on band placement. →
- @BusinessMN: Aeon withdrew from New Nicollet (former Kmart) redevelopment — Trellis Co. sole developer candidate →
📰 Headlines
Techmeme
- Meta delays Avocado AI model — performance concerns vs Gemini/Claude, discussed licensing Gemini. NYT
Memeorandum
- Iran mining Strait of Hormuz — Pentagon/NSC underestimated Iran's response to US strikes. Oil implications. CNN/NYT
Drudge
- Unprecedented March heat — Phoenix to 106°F
- Moscow internet blackouts spark web censorship fears
- Silicon Valley's image takes dark turn in pop culture
- "Techies' New Obsession: Watching Bots Do Their Grunt Work" — WSJ
- Frozen brains reawaken in medical breakthrough
Des Moines Register
- Joshua Jefferson the maestro for Iowa State basketball
🧩 Trending Skills
- inferen-sh/skills — 67.2K total installs, dominant ecosystem player (+11 new skills)
- microsoft/azure-skills — 115.3K total (+20 new), enterprise Azure automation
- microsoft/github-copilot-for-azure — 36.3K total, Copilot+Azure bridge
- pbakaus/impeccable — 33.4K total (+15), Paul Bakaus's quality toolkit
- googleworkspace/cli — Multiple entries, Google Workspace automation expanding
Microsoft dominating the skills leaderboard with Azure + Copilot. Google Workspace CLI proliferating. The enterprise skills market is heating up — relevant for BM training curriculum.