A memo from 2024

I found a note I wrote in August 2024. It wasn't a pitch to anyone and it wasn't meant to be published. I was trying to pin down a feeling about where things were going. I find it a good practice.

It was the post 2022-2023 crash, there was big uncertainty about the market as it started to recover. Many thought the move would fade. I was unsure too, but clearly saw the trend of AI adoption, and the move from bits to atoms. I missed how memory companies would be such a bottleneck though!

This is the note, untouched.

Biotech

• MRNA: Frontier mRNA-based treatments. Beaten down post-covid. People lost trust due to government mandates, but it actually sped up testing their platform and raised a ton of cash! I think people are underestimating what synthetic RNA treatments might unlock.
• CRSP: Gene editing. We are very far from getting this to work for medical treatments. There are even more risks than MRNA, but it might accelerate with AI.

Defense

• PLTR: The future of warfare is intelligence and automation. Palantir has been working on gathering information from multiple sources and making sense of that. It will be impossible to operate a battlefield with those capabilities. Also, defense expending will be expanding in the following years, and in the US will be protected at all cost. This company will receive a share of that.
• NET: Powers half of the Internet, it's a great product, I use it myself. With the advent of AI it has tremendous opportunity to catch attacks and make sense of an ever more complex web. Anything that is put into the Internet and not protected by a "smart firewall” could be easily exploited. Cloudflare is one of such firewalls.

Energy

• SMR / NNE / CCJ: Every industry including datacenters will have their own small modular nuclear reactors to power their operations, not only because of their output but reliability. It's amazing that we discovered how to split the atom and not using that tech.

Atoms

• TSLA: Looking at 5 years in the future, they have the greatest chance to have a working robot.
• INTC: It has been completely trashed and sidelined by the AI opportunity. However, I see value in that they have an integrated process, and represents the western silicon fab. If anything happens with China vs Taiwan, the demand for its services will skyrocket. It also has an edge in a fractured world (east vs west).

The Future of Money

• COIN: The future financial system will be built around crypto rails. Traditional financial institutions don't have a clue how to custody or manage an ever increasing amount of tokens and chains. Coinbase will be at the core of that future, they have been doing it since 2012. Their valuation is a joke compared to JP Morgan.
• MELI: Leader in e-commerce and financial services in LATAM. They have much more room to grow. I'm bullish the region and I'm an assiduous user. They have a foothold in logistics, extremely hard to replicate, but the real opportunity is as financial services company, since LATAM is unbanked, underserved and they have already created a big network effect through commerce.
• HOOD: They are replacing every vertical of a bank with tech. The US market has been deprived of fintech companies compared to EU and rest of the world. Robinhood is the definitive fintech from the US, they started as a broker but they will eat banks businesses, providing credit, etc.

Data

• SNOW: The vault where all enterprise companies are storing their datasets.
• RDDT: It's really a trove of the most “human” conversation about any topic on the planet - fuel for AI, second to Twitter maybe, but Reddit has an advantage that threads are more structured around topic. I find myself using it more and more along with AI agents, and less Google.
• CRWD: At the forefront of stopping the incoming attack of the bots. I'm surprised that is being used by so many companies, I realized this after their massive bug. Same thesis as NET but more focused on cyber defense.