The View from the Office.

I caught up with Howard Lindzon in Soho at La Colombe where we talked about markets, media and machines over cappuccinos.

Howard is the founder of venture firm social leverage and the online community Stocktwits. We met 15 years ago while I was at Bloomberg. We’ve continued to collaborate.

Howard’s been energized by the emergence of AI in general and Claude Code in particular. He said it is transforming his business.

AI has increased the value of data created by Stocktwits, a community of 500,000 daily active users who post about stocks, crypto and the markets.

AI can be used to identify shifts in sentiment and detect stocks the traders in Stocktwits focus on.
Howard cited several trends he’s seeing. The big ones include:

–The emergence of research beyond traditional Wall Street analysts – people like Michael Burry on Substack or Citrini – suggest we are likely to see a lot more individuals writing insight.

–He expects more specialized media. There could be a YouTube channel similar to TBPN for every ticker.

–On social media, distribution matters more than follower counts, which increasingly are a vanity metric.

–The new operating system is the LLM, and distribution means being there. Forty years of plumbing built to push data to terminals gets obviated by a connector in Claude.

–Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should. Defensibility lives in brand, distribution, and customer service, not code.

–If you’re not pushing code, no one notices.

–You need a sales force more than ever. Founders think a tweet replaces a quota. It doesn’t. The product is cheaper to build and harder to sell.

–Algo trading is going retail. A Mac Mini and an Alpaca account can turn anyone into a one-person quant desk.

–The first transformation was information, now it’s transaction. Twitter, Bloomberg, and Google rewired how we found things. LLMs plus MCP rewire how we do them.

–Reading news and buying the stock collapses into the same prompt.

You can connect with Howard via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.