Speaker

Jeremy Giffon

Jeremy Giffon

Jeremy Giffon invests in technology companies through his fund, Octave, on a flexible mandate spanning venture, growth-equity, and special-situations deals. He was previously a general partner at Tiny, the Buffett-influenced holding company that acquires small, cash-generative internet businesses [?]. By his own account he started the fund after noticing that the amount of money software companies raise had become unrelated to the amount they need — the mispricing his work turns on. He is close to Invest Like the Best host Patrick O'Shaughnessy; the two describe their on-air conversations as a distillation of discussions they already have daily.

Giffon’s recurring subject is mispricing outside the obvious financial variables: which qualities and attributes the market prices efficiently (height, IQ, résumé, fund track record) and which it systematically ignores (a founder’s personal financial situation relative to the size of the fund they are raising, the philosophical and cultural currents underneath a technology wave, the storytelling ability that actually determines whether a private fund can raise capital). He is a frequent, self-aware observer of internet culture and posting, and describes having gone six months entirely off social media at one point.

Core positions

  • Narrative is what private funds actually sell. Because private-market returns take a decade to realise, a fund’s real product in the interim is its story. Giffon’s ‘billion-dollar PDF’ names the moment a narrative crystallises at the right time and capital follows it, correctness aside.
  • The timeline has become infrastructure, not just entertainment. He argues capital markets, venture rounds, and government policy are increasingly ‘timeline native’ — reactive to and shaped by a small set of highly read posters on X, which he calls a ‘uni-feed’ read by nearly everyone influential.
  • The billionaire class has lost cultural authority to the poaster class. Society keeps searching for a new priesthood as old sources of meaning (religion, science, physics) exhaust themselves; billionaires filled that role briefly but have both multiplied in number and lost real-world power, so people now defer to prolific, high-quality posters instead.
  • Professional fund managers are structurally worse at beating the market than amateurs. He reads Buffett’s advice to index as aimed at the general public, not at active investors, and argues the mandates, client relationships, and reputational stakes that come with running other people’s money make it harder — not easier — for professionals to hold concentrated, unexplained positions the way an amateur can.
  • Software’s zero-marginal-cost era is ending. SaaS margins rested on selling near-costless ‘copies of a string’; AI products sell compute that must be re-run on every request, which he expects to compress margins industry-wide and shift returns toward scale.
  • Most AI anxiety about white-collar jobs overstates how real those jobs are. He argues most white-collar work is not contingent on food, shelter, or medicine, and exists largely to keep circulating inherently inflationary capital — evidence he sees in how little real work many remote and four-day-week roles actually require.
  • People owe a duty to steward their own gifts. Success and failure, in his framing, are best measured by whether you are spending your time on whatever you are uniquely good at, not by external markers of achievement.

In the wiki