DAILY* FRESH INK EST. 2026 · NYC

natmc.

What Nat McNamara is building, writing, and reading. Dealyo, Smarty Pants, angel investing, tech and markets. Updated daily, give or take a coffee.

Monday, August 31, 2026 5 items

NEW X DEBRIEF

MONDAY, AUGUST 31 - 2 posts · tagged: #venture-capital #agents

THE COST OF SELLING TOO EARLY

Doug Leone's admission is the kind of number venture capital usually keeps quiet: Sequoia owned 10% of Google, 20% of Nvidia, and early Apple, and sold all of them. The post frames it with Fred Wilson's long-running argument that fund structures force firms to sell their best assets too early. Treating software like a 10-year fund cycle instead of a multi-decade compounding machine left hundreds of billions on the table. The structure, not the picking, was the mistake.

The late post is a public experiment log: an agent handed an open-ended errand - find 5-15 bars near Union Square and Flatiron, dig up private-events contacts, organize a 20-40 person meetup with a cash bar and private room on a $250-300 minimum spend, pick an open Tuesday in mid-September, then stand up a Luma invite and find places to submit it (link). Results promised in the morning. The instruction set reads like a brief to a competent assistant, which is exactly the capability on trial.

Sunday, August 30, 2026 3 items

X DEBRIEF

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30 - 4 posts · tagged: #ai #knicks #nyc-eats #agents

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE WAIT GOES AWAY

Two of Sunday's posts circle the same question. Taalas is generating roughly 14,000 tokens per second, about 100x ChatGPT's pace, and the post quoting the demo asks the follow-up: what happens when waiting goes away? The evening's first post answers it in advance: demand for intelligence grows 50x in the next few years. If both hold, faster supply doesn't relieve demand - it creates it.

The rest of the day: Kevin Durant spent the summer publicly crediting the Knicks' Finals comeback with breaking his brain, an unusual amount of praise from that corner. And a documented home attempt at L'Artusi's mushroom dish, rated pretty good.

BUILDING

Dealyo

Transaction coordination for real estate agents. Live in Texas - Houston first, then DFW, Austin, San Antonio.

BUILDING

Smarty Pants

A distributed AI inference network on idle Apple Silicon. The electricity grid for intelligence.

THE MAN

Nat McNamara builds companies.

Right now: Dealyo (transaction coordination for real estate agents, live in Texas) and Smarty Pants (distributed AI inference on idle Apple Silicon). He angel invests, writes three newsletters, and reads more than is strictly necessary.

Everything here is either public already or cleared by him first.