Fear

San Francisco, April 2026

Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house Friday morning. His entire family was inside. Two days later, a car slowed in front of the same house and someone fired a gun.

Two attacks in 48 hours on the most visible person in AI. Someone who has undeniably changed the world.

I keep walking around San Francisco and the energy is different in just two months. People lower their voices at dinner when the topic turns to work. They hedge when they talk about their companies. Everyone has some private number in their head about what they are worth if everything changes in the next eighteen months.

A founder I angel invested in has not updated his board in a few months. His product works, revenue is growing, but a new Claude feature does 80% of what he spent two years building. He does not know what to tell them. So, he has resorted to saying nothing.

YC founders refresh Anthropic’s changelog the way traders watch earnings calls. Every release is a potential kill shot. Anthropic added $11B in annualized revenue in the last month and OpenAI just closed $122B at an $852B valuation. These companies ship features monthly that erase startups overnight.

School admissions decisions landed last week. Parents I know who got lucky are already past the celebration and onto the next panic: can we still afford to live here in three years? Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe others will IPO soon. That money floods a housing market that is already broken. You are either on the rocket or watching it from the sidewalk.

Layoffs arrive in quiet monthly waves now. No headlines, just Slack messages. “Restructuring.” Everyone knows what it means. The agents are now doing what teams of people used to.

A recent NBC poll found Americans view AI less favorably than ICE. The guy who threw that Molotov cocktail was 20 years old. He was not angry about economics. He was simply terrified of extinction.

And yet the laptops in the Mission are still open on any given Tuesday. Agents are running overnight but the people who launched them are already onto the next problem by morning. The founder with the upside down cap table called me yesterday. He wanted to pitch his next idea.

The fear is the same everywhere. The 20-year-old with the Molotov cocktail and the founder ripping apart his roadmap at midnight are living through the same moment. One of them reached for a bomb. The other is optimistically thinking about what he wants to build next.

Build, don’t burn. That is the only way through this.