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Two Congress Passes for the Price of One
Code 2FOR1 gets you two WeAreDevelopers World Congress passes for the price of one — so don't make the trip to Silicon Valley solo.
San José, CA · September 23–25, 2026. 10,000+ developers, 500+ speakers, 20+ stages, and the full software development lifecycle in one place.
On stage: Kelsey Hightower, Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO), Christine Yen (Honeycomb), Olivier Pomel (Datadog) — the people building the tools you use every day. Three days of AI, agents, cloud, security, and architecture, plus workshops, live coding, and the official Congress party.
Bring the builder you'd want in the room with you.
Good morning, {{first_name|there}}. Nvidia just paid $6 billion for a company it insists it did not buy — and the structure is the whole story.
Read time: 3 minutes. Same time, every weekday — rate today's issue at the bottom.
🚀 The Big Story: Nvidia bought the factory, not the product
Nvidia is paying Poolside $6 billion to license its "Model Factory" — the pipeline that produced Poolside's Laguna coding model — plus $1 billion invested at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The investor letter's own words: "not an acquisition and it is not an acquihire."
The split: 109 engineers who built Laguna get Nvidia offers. The three founders stay at Poolside, which keeps operating and plans to distribute the $6B to investors by the end of next year.
The structure is the point: a non-exclusive license plus hiring sidesteps the merger review an outright acquisition would trigger. Nvidia ran the same play on Groq ($20B) and Enfabrica ($900M).
What actually changed hands: not a model. The system that manufactures models — data loop, training rig, eval harness, and the people who know why it works.
Jason's take: Look at what carried the $6B price tag. Not the model, not the customers, not the brand — the machine that regenerates the product. If your moat is a fine-tuned model or a clever prompt layer, you own the part that depreciates fastest. If you own the loop that rebuilds it cheaply — your evals, your proprietary data, your retraining pipeline — you own the part that got a bid. Spend an hour this week deciding which half of that sentence describes you.
⚡ Quick Hits
Nevada approved 5,000 Tesla robotaxis. Waymo and Uber got roughly 1,000 each in Las Vegas — the first US market where one operator's autonomous fleet is authorized at 5x its rivals.
CISA gave agencies three days to patch Ray. A CVSS 9.4 remote-code-execution flaw in the AI scaling framework. If you run Ray in production, that clock is yours too.
20% of OpenAI's inference compute is now overhead. Monitoring and security eat a fifth of the cycles on high-tier models — the safety tax is now a line item in your token price.
Binance launched Agent OS with no loss cap. Trading agents run on subaccounts with no ceiling on losses, across a platform with 300M+ registered accounts.
New York passed the Bay Area for tech jobs. 394,300 vs 375,730, with AI roles at nearly a third of US listings and up 45% year over year.
Pew: 52% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI. Up from 37% in 2021. Over 70% say it's moving too fast — worth knowing before your next launch email.
📡 Trending on X
"Reverse acquihire with better lawyers" is the line of the weekend. Eric Newcomer's scoop broke it, and the framing spreading fastest: employees left for $6B, founders stayed for $1B.
Nvidia's pattern is getting named. Groq, Enfabrica, now Poolside — the timeline has stopped treating these as one-offs and started treating them as a repeatable regulatory workaround.
Binance's no-loss-cap agents lit up crypto X. The argument is entirely about liability: whose fault is it when an autonomous subaccount blows up a book nobody was watching?
The Pew numbers became ammunition. Both camps are quoting the same 52% — one as proof of a real backlash, the other as proof that public sentiment never predicted adoption anyway.
📺 Trending on YouTube
🛠 The Workflow: The 20-minute vendor-absorption drill
Poolside's customers found out from a press cycle. Here's how to not be them.
List every AI vendor in your stack that has raised money and isn't profitable. That list is your absorption-risk register — it takes four minutes.
Next to each, write what breaks on Monday if the team leaves: the model, the API, the support, or nothing. Only the first two are emergencies.
Export your data today, not at renewal. Prompts, fine-tune sets, eval results, conversation logs. These deals almost never come with a migration window.
Pick one backup per emergency vendor and run 20 real prompts through both. Save the diff. That file is the difference between a Tuesday and a quarter.
Add a 60-day price-and-terms notice clause to every renewal from here. Free to ask for today, impossible to get once the letter goes out.
Reply with the word "DRILL" and I'll send you the vendor-risk checklist I run this with, including the eval diff template.
🧰 Trending Tools
Rork Max — builds working iPhone apps from plain-language prompts. For operators who keep getting quoted $30K for an MVP.
Framer AI Agents — restructures layout, copy, and page flow inside a live site. For creators who lose launch weeks waiting on design.
Fundraisly — finds matching investors and runs the outreach sequence. For founders raising while still running the company.
Context.dev — packages your site's data so agents can actually use it. For anyone whose traffic is shifting from search to assistants.
Acti — an AI keyboard that rewrites and replies inside any app on your phone. For anyone whose real inbox is their thumbs.
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That's a wrap
Monday: the 20% of your inference bill that never touches a customer — and what it means for your margins.
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