Investor and entrepreneur. curious learner. winning never stops
San Jose, CA
Joined September 2012
- Tweets2.2K
- Following450
- Followers674
- Likes646
Pinned Tweet
Building infra where growth is actually happening.
Financial systems, food systems and digital platforms across emerging markets.
“The deals that clear carry the dollar inside the asset: export receivables, metal sold off a global price, stored grain a lender can hold as title.”
~ @drewcrawford_
Brazil's next 25 years will be decided by three numbers almost nobody watches.
Most people judge Brazil by the currency, the elections and the headlines, and all three swing too much to show where the country is heading.
These three move slowly, and they show whether the country is actually being built.
The first is how much of Brazil's grain storage sits on farms.
A farmer who can store his crop sells when prices are good, and a bank can lend against the grain sitting in his silo.
In 2026, only about 16.5 percent of Brazil's storage sat on farms, against 53 percent in the United States.
Watch for that share to pass one fifth.
The second is how many kilometers of railway private companies build at their own risk.
In 2026, trucking a tonne of soybeans from Mato Grosso to the coast cost more than shipping it from the coast to China.
A new railway in Mato Grosso, built by a private company under a state permit, opened its first 162 kilometers in 2026 and is planned to run more than 700 kilometers to Lucas do Rio Verde.
Every kilometer it adds makes Brazil's longest and most expensive trip shorter.
The third is how much Brazil pays in interest compared with what it spends on its people.
In 2025, Brazil's public sector paid about R$1 trillion in interest, more than double federal spending on health and education combined.
When that gap shrinks, long-term money gets cheaper for everyone building a farm, a mine or a port.
If all three move the right way, Brazil in 2050 feeds and supplies a world that has run short of safe places to buy from.
I wrote an open letter on that future, and on the people and the capital it will take to build it.
Read it here:
Gav Reardon retweeted
When I was a first-time founder, I cold emailed a GP at Sequoia.
At the time, I'd just moved to Silicon Valley with no credentials and no network. That cold email got me a pitch meeting. Same thing happened at Founders Fund and Khosla.
I won't name GPs, mostly because I don't want anyone getting swarmed with cold emails. But this is what I love about Silicon Valley: nobody here is too successful to take a meeting with someone starting out.
Gav Reardon retweeted
🚨 THE NEXT MONETARY WAR BETWEEN THE U.S. AND CHINA HAS ALREADY STARTED
THE U.S. IS BETTING ON DIGITAL DOLLARS (STABLECOINS) - CHINA IS BETTING ON PHYSICAL GOLD.
Trump and the Treasury have now said the quiet part out loud.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: "We will keep the dollar as the world's reserve currency and will use stablecoins to do it."
Trump's January 2025 order put dollar-backed stablecoins at the center of U.S. policy. The GENIUS Act then formalized the structure: compliant stablecoins must be backed 1-for-1 by cash, T-bills, and Treasury repos.
THAT'S THE KEY. AMERICA CAN'T PRINT GOLD. BUT IT CAN CREATE NEW DEMAND FOR ITS OWN DEBT.
Here's how it works:
Billions of people who may never open a U.S. bank account can still hold a digital dollar token. As stablecoin supply grows, issuers need more reserve assets - including short-term Treasuries. Dollar demand gets pushed onto crypto rails, helping extend the reach of the dollar beyond the traditional banking system.
IT'S NOT A GOLD STANDARD. IT'S CLOSER TO A DIGITAL T-BILL STANDARD WRAPPED IN CRYPTO.
Meanwhile, China is moving in the opposite direction.
The PBOC just posted its 21st straight month of gold buying. Official holdings: ~2,366 tonnes. They're accumulating physical metal at a remarkable pace.
Hong Kong has already opened the first offshore Shanghai Gold Exchange vault. The city is targeting 2,000+ tonnes of storage, while additional vault locations are being explored in Singapore, Dubai, Riyadh, and Moscow.
The idea is simple: hold yuan, then convert it into gold that can actually be delivered. Physical collateral. Offshore vaults. Yuan-linked settlement backed by metal rather than promises.
TWO DIFFERENT STRATEGIES. ONE BIG PROBLEM.
At the same time, the London Metal Exchange's Treasury chief has moved to a crypto firm focused on tokenized commodities - while China continues building out a yuan-gold settlement network.
ONE SIDE IS DIGITIZING THE DEBT - THE OTHER IS ACCUMULATING THE METAL.
The real question is which system the rest of the world will trust more when the next major shock arrives!👀
🚨WARNING: THE U.S. MARKET OPEN COULD BE A BLOODBATH
Two of the biggest holders of U.S. debt just started heading for the exit at the same time. And almost nobody is connecting the dots.
Japan offloaded $71 billion in Treasuries, its largest sale in decades. China is quietly doing the same. But the real story isn't the selling, it's what they're buying instead.
Both countries are dumping dollars and stacking gold to record highs. That's the tell. When the world's largest economies swap U.S. debt for hard assets, they're voting on where they think this is headed.
And Japan's hand is being forced. It's still nursing ¥15.3 trillion in bond losses and has to keep selling Treasuries just to defend a collapsing yen. That selling isn't going to stop. It's going to accelerate.
Here's the loop that makes it dangerous:
More Treasury selling → Higher yields → More pressure everywhere → More intervention → More gold buying → Less dollar dependence. Round and round.
Now zoom in on the timing. When U.S. markets reopen from the long weekend on September 8, they have to price all of this at once, record foreign selling, climbing yields, a softening dollar, and they'll do it on thin, post-holiday September liquidity.
That's the trap. Rising yields quietly pull the floor out from under stretched valuations. And a market held up by five names has nothing to catch it if bonds start cracking.
This is how a financial order shifts. Not with one crash. Slowly, then all at once.
I've tracked these cycles for over 12 years and called nearly every major turn. This is me flagging the next one.
Follow and turn notifications on. A lot of people are going to wish they'd been watching this sooner!
Gav Reardon retweeted
What if your dinner could fly over traffic instead of sitting in it? We are now scaling to provide Uber Eats more than 1 million autonomous deliveries a day. Uber is becoming an investor in Zipline. We’ve entered the scaling era for robotics and physical AI.
Gav Reardon retweeted
Another MUST READ essay from the visionary Craig Tindale on the critical topic of copper.
The essay challenges one of the most important assumptions that has underpinned current energy, industrial and national-security policy for some time… which is that capital markets efficiently allocate physical critical metal supply.
During times of abundance, markets allocate metal flow… but during times of scarcity, governments allocate metal flow. Today, we are now in a world of increasing material scarcity.
The somewhat provocative conclusion is that the energy transition doesn’t merely compete against conventional copper demand, it now competes against national security interests… and those national security interests themselves are also changing from ‘conventional ballistics to artificial intelligence and advanced silicon’.
We used to think that copper, as well as other equally important critical metals, would solve our energy-transition problem… but their scarcity means that what is available is actually being prioritised towards solving our national-security problems instead.
Craig uses many great sound bites that summarise this situation… my favourite being ‘capital can’t buy what the Earth cannot physically supply in the window it needs it.’
We highly recommend you take 20-25 mins to read what Craig has to say.
7/ More efficient capital means better returns, better risk profiles.
When capital is efficient,
- it turns quicker
- at a lower cost
- producing better returns
Love your views and insights from alongside the trenches. Thx @shaunmmaguire
