Q1 / 2026: A QUARTER OF THREE ANNOUNCEMENTS
Q1 / 2026 was a quarter defined by three announcements — announcements that at first glance appeared unrelated, but whose combined impact irreversibly altered the logic of AI adoption.
We saw it coming.
Markets did not. Instead they defaulted to a familiar pattern: panicked at efficiency gains, compared valuations to dot-com peaks, and treated historical records as ceilings for what was possible. Each of these reactions made sense through an old-world lens. Each was, in our view, more or less wrong.
In our Q4 / 2025 letter we wrote about Jevons’ paradox — how lowering the cost of compute does not dampen demand but explodes it. This quarter we received confirmation of an equally important truth: technology does not cross the chasm to markets alone. Alliances do.
Geoffrey Moore said the mainstream customer does not buy technology. They buy a solution. This quarter the most powerful actors began doing exactly that — assembling the whole product, in a way markets do not yet know how to price. Our job is to hunt precisely these misunderstandings. This quarter there were plenty.