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New software companies emerged, too. Built on AI-native architectures with radically lower cost structures, they offered capabilities that didn’t exist in the prior generation. Enterprise software spending didn’t shrink for long; it got reallocated. By Q3 2027, total enterprise tech spending had recovered to 2025 levels but the composition was... See more

Enterprise software spending in the United States was roughly $500 billion annually in 2025. It was bloated, overpriced, and riddled with shelfware. Companies were spending millions on tools that 30% of their employees actually used. The AI-driven renegotiation and consolidation cycle cut that bill significantly. Where the bears lost the thread was... See more

The real estate example was instructive. The bears flagged the compression of buy-side commissions from 2.5-3% to under 1% as evidence of economic destruction. But the median home price in 2027 was $420,000. A 2-point commission reduction saved the buyer $8,400. Multiply that across 5 million annual home transactions, and that’s $42 billion per... See more

Consumer agents began handling purchasing decisions, subscription management, price comparison, and service negotiations. The bears modeled this as the destruction of the intermediation layer. They were right about the mechanism. Where they were wrong was in thinking that trillions of dollars in eliminated friction would simply vanish from the... See more

The bears saw this and modeled economic destruction. They were right about the mechanism — software margins compressed, enterprise spending was renegotiated, and the long tail of SaaS got repriced. Where they went wrong was in confusing the repricing of one sector with the collapse of the economy .

The jump ball between the loose grip and the tight grip is settling, and it's settling towards the tight grip, towards the transcendent. I don't see another mechanism strong enough to prevent everyone from going crazy. Our referees are gone. They've gone insane themselves and are spattered with blood and entrails and running around the streets... See more

Ever since the Second World War ended, we have spent decades holding everything with a loose grip. Loose-grip conviction is comfortable and it allows us to participate in every conversation, to be perfectly hedged in every order of life. It allows you to keep one foot in the market and one foot in the critique of the market and never commit to... See more

The jump ball doesn't get resolved by better data— both sides have the data and it's largely meaningless. It gets resolved by whoever uses that data, or ignores it entirely because they don't believe it exists in the first place, to tell a story coherent enough to feel like the ground under your feet. And we are entering a period where the capacity... See more

The markets we participate in are intensely gardened. The people doing the gardening have names. It is a set of choices that people with names and addresses and human souls in the process of making. The Citrini piece is written as if the gardeners do not exist — as if the spiral arrives, as if unemployment happens, as if the daisy chain unravels... See more