06-reference

not boring scarce assets abundance driven scarcity

Wed Apr 29 2026 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) ·reference ·source: Not Boring ·by Packy McCormick
scarcityabundancevertical-integratorsmacro-economicsstatus-goodsveblen-goodsrdco-thesissanity-check-candidate

“Scarce Assets” — @packyM

Why this is in the vault

Packy’s “Abundance-Driven Scarcity Supercycle” essay extends his Power in the Age of Intelligence (2026-02-18-not-boring-power-age-of-intelligence) framework into an explicit Macro-vs-Micro Scarcity taxonomy and re-anchors the Vertical Integrators series around it. It is the cleanest statement yet of why the abundance side of the AI thesis (cheap intelligence) creates scarcity premiums on the adjacent layers — which is the mechanism RDCO’s targeting-systems thesis (2026-04-30-rdco-thesis-targeting-systems-feedback-loops) is implicitly betting on. File for the framework, not the wealth-porn examples.

⚠️ Sponsorship

Explicit sponsor block — Deel (Employer of Record guide). Third-party paid sponsor placed above-the-fold ahead of the essay body. No structural co-author pattern in this issue (the new Not Boring gotcha around 2-layer co-written essays does not apply here — this is a solo Packy essay with a top-of-letter ad slot). No self-consulting CTA. Disclosure: Packy mentions Not Boring Capital portfolio implicitly in the Vertical Integrator section (Dandy and Flock are NBC portfolio companies based on prior issues; Anduril and SpaceX are referenced as macro examples without disclosed position). The OpenAI/TBPN, Anthropic, Thrive Eternal, HOF/Bugatti references appear to be commentary, not promotion. Net: read as Packy’s view with light NBC-portfolio-favorable bias on the Vertical Integrator examples.

The core argument

Macro Scarce Assets — assets whose supply is structurally fixed or shrinking (sports franchises, prime real estate, Old Masters, F1 teams, Bugatti). As global wealth concentrates at the top (Top-100 net worth up 10x nominal / 4x real since 2000; pension assets 3x; private markets 13-15x; sovereign wealth funds 12-15x), a higher and more concentrated numerator chases a flat-to-shrinking denominator. Prices rip. Recent proof-points cited: Thrive Eternal acquiring SF Giants, HOF acquiring Bugatti, Zuck’s $170M Indian Creek house, Klimt at $236M, Salvator Mundi at $450M. These are “hyperVeblen” — the high price is the point.

Micro Scarce Assets — Clayton Christensen’s Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits restated: when modularity/commoditization kills profits at one stage, attractive profits emerge at an adjacent stage. Joel Spolsky’s “smart companies commoditize their complements.” The historical example is Federico da Montefeltro’s library refusing to admit a single printed book — when Gutenberg made print abundant, handwritten codices became scarce. The modern analogues: GLP-1s commoditize “skinny” → marathon times become the new scarce signal; AI commoditizes generic knowledge → rare physical books spike (Top-500 cutoff: $81K → $120K, 2023→2024); cheap LLM text → personality-driven media (TBPN sold to OpenAI for “low hundreds of millions” not for revenue but for likeability).

Tickered vs scarce. Sub-thesis Packy hadn’t named before: startups in the private markets feel scarce (narrative, secret, status); the same company months after IPO feels boring because it gets “Tickered” — sortable in a screener alongside 248 other companies meeting the same filters. This is why the 2025 venture IPO cohort (Figma, Navan, Figure Technologies, etc.) all underperformed Nasdaq while SpaceX is targeting a $1.75-2T IPO at >100x the cohort’s combined market cap on roughly half the combined revenue. The asset-class scarcity feeds back on the business scarcity.

Vertical Integrators as the Micro-Scarce play for the rest of us. Packy’s pitch: most readers can’t buy F1 teams or Klimts, but the same dynamic plays at the company level. Vertical Integrators (Dandy in dentistry, Flock in law enforcement, Anduril in defense, SpaceX in space) are each becoming both micro-scarce as businesses (the only credible bet on their category) and macro-scarce as assets (the equity itself is scarce). The Great Filter of building hard, vertically integrated companies leaves few competitors on the other side.

Closing warning. The trap of the abundance era is believing greatness will be easy because the abundance buttons are easy. “The millisecond something becomes easy, the value shoots elsewhere. Scarce is hard and hard is scarce, forever and ever, amen.”

Mapping against Ray Data Co

Strong mapping. This is the macro-economic chassis under the targeting-systems thesis, and the framework directly tests two RDCO bets.

1. Targeting systems are the Micro Scarce Asset of the agent-native era. 2026-04-30-rdco-thesis-targeting-systems-feedback-loops argues RDCO’s product is the targeting system + instrumentation + tools + feedback loop pattern, applied to different niches. Packy’s Christensen restatement gives that thesis its macro foundation: as agent capability and code-generation become abundant (commoditized at one layer), the judgment layer that defines what “good” means for a niche becomes scarce and valuable at the adjacent layer. MAC is exactly this — when anyone can generate dbt code, the targeting system that defines what makes a model production-ready is the scarce thing. Sanity Check is the same — when AI can write generic data essays, the targeting system that defines what makes an article land for an operator is the scarce thing. Use this framing in the next Sanity Check positioning piece — it gives the thesis a citable macro lineage (Christensen → Spolsky → Packy → RDCO).

2. Vertical Integrators framework validates the portfolio-of-small-bets shape — but with a load-bearing caveat. Packy’s argument is that VIs win because the Great Filter leaves few survivors. RDCO’s portfolio (Squarely, MAC, Sanity Check, Mitohealth-adjacent advisory) is structurally a portfolio of small vertical integrators, each owning the targeting + instrumentation + tools loop in a niche. The caveat the founder should sit with: Packy’s VI thesis assumes the bet is one VI per founder, played hard. RDCO is betting a portfolio. That trades the macro-scarcity premium (Packy’s “Anduril stock is scarce because Anduril is the only credible defense bet”) for niche-scarcity in many places at once. Not obviously wrong, but worth the founder’s explicit conviction-check — does RDCO believe the portfolio approach captures more total micro-scarcity than concentrating on one VI would? The honest answer ties to the founder’s own optionality preferences, not to financial theory.

3. Compute-economics cluster — completes the triad. The Apr 29-30 reading set now has three pieces describing the same phenomenon from different angles:

Packy’s Christensen restatement is the abstraction that lets you predict where the value goes when Entis’s pricing pivot and Thompson’s commodity dynamics play out. The trade isn’t “compute is the new cash” — it’s “compute becomes commodity, the targeting layer above it becomes the new scarcity premium.” That’s the thesis paragraph for any RDCO investor letter or positioning deck.

4. Sanity Check angle (provisional, needs founder green-light). The angle is NOT “scarce is good, here are some examples” — that’s a Packy restate and fails the no-derivative bar (feedback_no_derivative_sanity_check_pieces). The original re-frame is: “Your dbt models are about to get Tickered.” The data-engineering field has a Federico da Montefeltro problem coming — when LLMs make generic dbt code abundant, what becomes the equivalent of the handwritten codex? The answer is the targeting system: explicit, defensible criteria for what good looks like in your warehouse, in your business context. That’s the pitch for MAC, framed through Packy’s lens. Lands in RDCO’s actual area of expertise (data discipline) rather than rehashing the macro economy.

5. Tickered-vs-scarce for content surfaces. The Tickered framing has a side application: it’s a clean explanation of why generic AI-generated newsletters lose to personality-driven ones (Sanity Check’s structural advantage). When generic data takes are abundant, “Sanity Check by [the founder]” is the scarce alternative. Worth quoting in the about-page rewrite or in any future founder-led intro to the newsletter.

No contradictions with existing vault positions. This piece reinforces Power in the Age of Intelligence (2026-02-18-not-boring-power-age-of-intelligence) and the Vertical Integrator series the founder has been tracking, and it slots cleanly into the agentic-era value-flows-down-stack reading the Apr 29-30 cluster has been building.

Not Boring is free; this note paraphrases the essay. Direct quotes are short and in quotation marks. Full essay at https://www.notboring.co/p/scarce-assets.