The end of the zero-interest-rate period compressed lending margins, but it had a silver lining. It forced fintech companies to become 'full-stack' by acquiring bank charters and building significant revenue streams from customer deposits, ultimately making their business models more durable.

Counterintuitively, the period of slower market growth was more fulfilling for Plaid's leadership. The hyper-growth 'summer' felt like just riding a wave, whereas the 'winter' demanded true innovation and customer focus, leading to a 'refounding moment' and increased product velocity.

A long bull market can produce a generation of venture capitalists who have never experienced a downturn. This lack of cyclical perspective leads to flawed investment heuristics, such as ignoring valuation discipline, which are then painfully corrected when the market inevitably turns.

Major investment cycles like railroads and the internet didn't cause credit weakness because the technology failed, but because capacity was built far ahead of demand. This overbuilding crushed investment returns. The current AI cycle is different because strong, underlying demand is so far keeping pace with new capacity.

The traditional, long-term venture capital cycle may be accelerating. As both macro and technology cycles shorten, venture could start mirroring the more frequent 4-5 year boom-and-bust patterns seen in crypto. This shift would force founders, VCs, and LPs to become more adept at identifying where they are in a much shorter cycle.

In a technology boom like the AI trade, capital first flows to core enablers (e.g., NVIDIA). The cycle then extends to first-derivative plays (e.g., data center power) and then to riskier nth-derivative ideas (e.g., quantum computing), which act as leveraged bets and are the first to crash.

Venture capital isn't a constant sprint. It has distinct seasons, both in an investor's career (e.g., a 'deep learning' phase) and throughout the calendar year. Summer is for strategic thinking due to fewer meetings, while the period from Labor Day to Thanksgiving is peak deal-making season.

Historical technology cycles suggest that the AI sector will almost certainly face a 'trough of disillusionment.' This occurs when massive capital expenditure fails to produce satisfactory short-term returns or adoption rates, leading to a market correction. The expert would be 'shocked' if this cycle avoided it.

The predictable four-year crypto cycle isn't random. It's explained by two parallel forces: a macro trend tracking global M2 money supply fluctuations, and a micro, commodity-like pattern of supply shocks, speculative bubbles, and subsequent crashes.