Packy McCormick
Founder & Writer, Not Boring. On 5 shows, 8 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorinvestorfounderexecutive@packyM ↗LinkedIn ↗notboring.co ↗
Packy McCormick is the founder and writer of Not Boring, a business and technology newsletter. He also manages Not Boring Capital, an early-stage venture fund investing in tech companies.
5shows
8appearances
103statements
15resolved
13supported
0contradicted
87%fully supported
72said about them ↓ Everything Packy McCormick said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
McCormick: Cancer is probably gone in 10 years
“I think a hot take would be cancer is probably gone in 10 years, I think is one of my favorite hot takes. There's just so many different attacks on it, and CAR T cell therapies are doing well, and it's a matter of kind of scaling, scaling those out.”
McCormick: Most fast-growing AI software startups will flatten and fail to IPO
“By choosing to, like, not play in this space, I'm definitely missing a trillion dollar company or two, but I think for the most part, like, I think there's gonna be, like, a lot of these types of things happening, or even, like, these types of curves, where th…”
McCormick: AI will become 'super SaaS' rather than godlike AGI
“I called it super sass in, in that like 20, 25 prediction. And I think it is like, I think it's really amazing and like in no way godlike. And it's just like, I feel like I'm being psyopped whenever people are like, oh my God, this is like, this is, this chang…”
McCormick: Frontier AI will settle into an oligopoly among 3-4 labs
“A lot of the VC firms are getting in multiple companies because they don't think it's going to be winner-take-all anymore. They think it's going to be much more oligopolistic for the long term, and there will be competition between the major three or four labs…”
McCormick: AI labs will become profitable hyperscalers like cloud
“It seems like the labs will Turn into sort of new hyperscalers. There will be you know, increased competition, but still very, very good businesses a la cloud.”
McCormick: 2015 New Yorker Profile Marked End of Free-Speech Journalism
“We talked about this great, great tad friend profile in the New Yorker in 2015 that I referenced in the piece that, that I wrote on a 16 Z this past week saying that that kind of kicked off or was the last kind of point in an era where journalism cared about F…”
McCormick: Fuse recruited the former number two Iranian nuclear scientist
“The number of two, kind of, nuclear scientists in, in Iran who came over here to, kind of, work on, on our side here, and then just, like, everybody that I met who was, like, you know, working on the machines, like top to bottom, just like an unbelievably cool…”
McCormick: AI Will Produce a Couple of $10T Companies
“There's probably going to be like a couple of 10 trillion dollar AI companies that are going to pay for the whole thing.”
McCormick: Humanoid Robotics Will Erode Margins Into Consumer Surplus
“Humanoids scare the hell out of me as an investor, because it's like this really impossibly hard thing to do with a lot of really, really smart people working on it, where like, if you pull off this impossible thing, then you're competing against these 10 othe…”
McCormick: Large VC funds will survive while emerging funds fail
“I think it's like a really, I think like the big funds are actually super well positioned and all, there's going to be a lot of these like emerging ish funds who try to compete who I just think it kind of like wiped out.”
McCormick: Any strategic crypto reserve holding Cardano is a joke
“Any strategic reserve that has Cardano in it is just, it's a joke, right?”
McCormick: Literary nonfiction and deep journalism are best for early-stage underwriting
“That, like, Jim Simons at Rentac versus, like, Robert Carroll, like, who would be a better earlier stage, early stage investor? And I think it's actually, like, Robert Carroll. Like, I think, like, literary nonfiction done really, really well, or journalism do…”
McCormick: YC 'Request for Startups' Prompts Rarely Lead to Great Companies
“Like when YC puts out the request for startups, I'm like, I can't imagine that anything good is going to be built against these categories starting now because you've read the YC request for startups.”
McCormick: Anduril's early round was crowded at a $100M valuation
“But that, like, early story that, like, nobody wanted to touch it was actually, like, a pretty crowded round at a hundred million dollar valuation.”
McCormick: DeepSeek represents doing the same thing cheaper, not a qualitative leap
“My DeepSeek point is that, like, This, like, crack team that figured out all these algorithms, breakthroughs, and whatever, essentially just figured out how to do the same thing cheaper. Like, there hasn't been any leap that I've seen that I've been like, yeah…”
McCormick: I likely would have written a positive sponsored post on Theranos
“One of the tests that I always run for myself, and I probably actually would have failed this test, is if Theranos had come to me on a sponsored post, you know, however many years ago, chances are, frankly, I would have written something positive on Theranos b…”
McCormick: Independent creator-investors lose value when joining traditional venture firms
“As soon as I go in-house somewhere, Like I lose half of my value or, you know, X percent of my value as soon as I go in-house somewhere. And that is kind of one, even though, you know, I do do sponsored posts and all of that, there is like this independent voi…”
McCormick: AI labs obsess over competitor compute despite public denials
“And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion because you can tell that even though all of the leaders of the AI lab say, I don't think about the competition. I don't talk about the competition. I'll use general terms. They're all obsessed with …”
McCormick: OpenAI and Anthropic are the most unprofitable companies in history
“These are the most unprofitable companies in human history, I think.”
McCormick: OpenAI recouped all GPT-4 training costs and more
“GPT four is the really instructive is the really instructive example because I believe that model costs like a hundred million dollars to train, and it was really expensive at the time, but then very quickly they were on a multi-billion dollar run rate, and it…”
McCormick: Models mastering complex tax and legal nuances is six months away
“This is like a six month away thing.”
McCormick: Substack will grow 10x larger than legacy media companies
“You can see a world where, because it attracts kind of all of the best writers from all of these different places who can build their own businesses, Substack becomes 10 times larger than any of the media organizations that it replaces.”
McCormick: Fuse is already generating revenue by selling radiation
“The big difference I would say with Fuse and anybody else is they're already making revenue and that they're not going straight shot for commercial fusion power, but they're selling radiation kind of on the way up towards or down towards, depending on how you …”
McCormick: Claude's Writing Feedback Is Bad, Regresses Drafts Toward Mediocrity
“I will take my, if I'm, like, stuck in writing an essay, I'll, like, take the draft, I'll put it in Claude and ask for feedback, and, like, the feedback is bad, and it always, like, tries to move me more towards average, and I ignore it, but, like, I just have…”
The other half of the tape: Packy McCormick's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 71 times in 28 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most John Coogan 35Molly O'Shea 9Jordi Hays 7Kyle Harrison 3Zach Schendel 2John Andrew 2David Rosenthal 2Ben Gilbert 2
Statements about Packy McCormick, by other people (1)
Creators like Lenny Rachitsky and Packy McCormick built valuable media assets
“Like I think there are people like the Lenny's and the packies and folks like that, that have just really, I'm a big fan of Mario Gabrielle and the generalists, like those types of people I think have done an incredible job building a real asset.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
TBPN 47
Sourcery 16
Acquired 5
the a16z Podcast 3
2026 8 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- 300 Pages on Anduril: Inside Modern Warfare · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- GPT-5.6 Reactions, Phoebe Gates’ Phia Drama, Hollywood Chases Internet Horror | Diet TBPN
- Ben Horowitz on the Global Race for Tech, Power, and Influence
- Google I/O: Day 1 Reactions, Goldman to Lead SpaceX IPO | Diet TBPN
- Ben Horowitz on American Dynamism and the Future of AI | The a16z Show
- Why Claude Feels Different (And What That Means for AI) | The a16z Show
- We're all Jerome Powell, Apple and Google Make it Official, Anthropic Health Care | Diet TBPN
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 15 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
- Base Power's $200M Series B | Co-Led by Lee Fixel, A16Z, Lightspeed, & Valor Equity Partners · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- How Wander Raised Over $100M+ to Reinvent Luxury Travel · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- Inside Klarna's IPO CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- Apple in China: Tim Cook’s $275B Pledge | Patrick McGee · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- "Work at an outstanding organization first" - Keith Rabois Advice on Starting Companies
- The Character AI Controversy (Role Play)
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 43 mentions in 11 episodes 4 per episode
- What is the TRUMP BUBBLE? (ep11)
- How BILLIONAIRES dress for XMAS (ep17)
- The Secret Billionaire Party (ep6)
- Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic? (e12)
- FACT CHECKERS vs. tech article (ep14)
- CEO Assassination Deep Dive (ep19)
- How to Spend a Trillion Dollars Fast (ep13)
- Billionaires XMAS list (ep21)
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2022 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Packy's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACQUIREDLEDGER | Founder & Writer, Not Boring | 2 | 36 | 86% 6/7 | full record on Acquired → |
| SOURCERYLEDGER | Founder & Writer, Not Boring | 2 | 36 | 80% 4/5 | full record on Sourcery → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Founder & Writer, Not Boring | 2 | 17 | 100% 2/2 | full record on TBPN → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & Writer, Not Boring | 1 | 12 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Top Founders → |
| a16zLEDGER | Founder & Writer, Not Boring | 1 | 2 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |