Packy McCormick
Founder & Writer, Not Boring · 2 appearances on the record.
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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.
36statements → 14claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 3.53/5average certainty → 2.42/5average debate potential → 4.0/5argument clarity · the sources → 17said about them ↓
4 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 8 not checkable as stated how the 14 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 predictions · 7 assertions · 5 opinions · 12 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 14 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Packy argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
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…”
Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →
4.0 / 5
directness 4.2 · coherence 4.1 ·
precision 3.8 · compression 3.1
redirected or did not address 1 of 8 assessed questions (13%). Watch them ▸
This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Packy McCormick on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Packy McCormick said on Sourcery that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 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: 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: 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…”
McCormick: Reducing investment decisions to market maps or one-sentence theses fails
“And like anybody who like boils it down to like a market map or like a one sentence thesis on a company, I think is like just a very tough way to invest.”
McCormick: AI will prove concise answers matter less than immersive storytelling
“I think, like, AI will make us see, like, answers are, like, really not important, but you want to read Robert Caro, because, like, you want to read Thousands and thousands of pages that, like, really make you feel and understand what it was like to be in the …”
McCormick: Backing the right founder is a compression algorithm for research
“I do think, like, and people say this, and it's cheesy, and it's, like, also true, is that the founder really matters, and, like, there's definitely a midwit curve on that that I've written about before, which is, like, You think founders really matter and the…”
McCormick: Much of VC Diligence Is Performative Theater to Justify Deals
“Cause I do think there's like just so much venture theater. Where, like, you just have to do a bunch of stuff because, like, your boss, you know, your GP expects it, or their LPs expect it. Like, there's just a bunch of, like, shit that you have to produce to,…”
McCormick: Earth AI won't need future venture funding if its model works
“If this model goes well, like, They do not need to raise again. Cause they can sell state little, little stakes in their minds and use it to fund.”
McCormick: SpaceX suffered only ~50% dilution despite raising $10B in equity
“I think they're like 50% dilution over the past 20 years, even though they've raised ten billion dollars of, you know, of equity aside from secondaries.”
McCormick: Fuse monetizes pulsed power radiation before reaching fusion energy
“If you go with this one particular architecture, what you're really doing is selling radiation by building these pulse power generators, and you can use that for Radhart Electronics and nuclear arsenal testing and, like, all these things that can, like, genera…”
McCormick: AI could create a winner-take-all dynamic in corporate cards like Ramp
“AI is the reason that a company that might not have been winner-take-all before would be winner-take-all now. Like, I think RAMP is a really interesting example of, like, There might be a winner take all dynamic in corporate cards at some point. If like that s…”
McCormick: Consumer brand equity creates real value in AI despite commoditization
“That is a brand that like, you know, he might be with, like talking to ChatGPT for the rest of his Life, you know, or like some version of it. And so I do think there's real value in brand.”
McCormick: Nuclear reactor markets will ultimately be decided by brand power
“I think like nuclear ends up coming down, will end up coming down to like brand, like who got something working early on and like, you know, nobody ever got fired for buying like reactor company X that is good enough and cheap enough and whatever else and safe…”
Packy: Deep tech execution inherently creates uncopyable marketing content
“For these companies, there's just, like, actually an opportunity to just show off what you're doing, and, like, that in itself is differentiated because it's so hard to do. That like just actually getting the thing done, like kind of creates all of this unbeli…”
McCormick: Not Boring focuses on hardware-software vertical integrators beating incumbents
“Doing kind of this barbell where it's mostly these vertically integrated companies, I've written a bunch about these, we can talk about them but kind of thesis being companies that use both kind of hardware and software, build vertically integrated systems It …”
McCormick: Founder magnetism and fear of disappointing them drives peak performance
“It all comes down to people and like the team that you build and like what you get out of your people in the end. So if you have this like magnetism Or, like, there's almost, like, people have a fear of disappointing you and, like, they really want to, like, d…”
McCormick made a recent investment decision solely over a three-hour coffee
“It's one of the most recent decisions I made. It was, like, over a three-hour coffee. I didn't write a single word. You know, I met the guy and read the deck and loved him and invested.”
McCormick: Startups requiring compounding miracles to succeed never work out
“I can see like if this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then that happens and like things go just right here, like this could be a really big company and like it never works. Like you can't like, you know, there's the compounding miracle…”
The other half of the tape: Packy McCormick's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 16 times in 6 episodes on Sourcery. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Molly O'Shea 9Kyle Harrison 3Zach Schendel 2John Andrew 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
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2025 13 mentions in 4 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
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Nuclear Race to Power Superintelligence · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea | Aug 8, 2025 | 11m |
| How Writing Led To Investing In Ramp, Scale AI, Replit, Varda | Packy McCormick, Not Borin | Feb 14, 2025 | 47m |