Woke capitalist @m8ventures, Angel investor. Podcast host of Pick My Brain. Startup whisperer. I pitch in so you don’t flame out. Mainly on BlueSky now.
Gadigal
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I could happily live the rest of my life never having to futz around designing an email template. And now, it looks like I may live the rest of my life, happily!
Email dashboards had a good run.
Two decades. Billions of emails. I built two companies on them.
But the dashboard was never the product, it was the bottleneck.
We removed it. This is Nitrosend.
→ nitrosend.com
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Last September, I had surgery to remove my prostate, which was almost entirely cancerous. So far, so good — my blood results suggest they got it all, and aside from a few little scars on my belly, I'm my usual active and loving-life self again...
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So I'm going to run 72km in The Long Run to raise money for prostate cancer research, most likely on the same day (22km run and 50km cycling)...
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And, you've guessed it — I'd love it if you'd make a tax-deductible donation, no matter how small. I've set myself a $500 fundraising goal because I like to blow my goals away, and I'd love your help to see how far we can blow it! thelongrun.org.au/s/19682/23… 🙏
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My son’s on Substack and I ain’t too proud to ask you to like and follow his movie reviews open.substack.com/pub/wordsw…
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alan jones retweeted
Funny how the pendulum shifts
1. "GPT wrappers are worthless" → the value acrues to application layer
2. "AI will eliminate white collar jobs" → someone needs to manage all these AI agents and everyone is now saying white collar workers will rise due to AI
3. "Open source will never catch up" → Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of tasks
4. "I only use Claude Code, Codex is mid" → Codex is becoming a super app. Coding, docs, browser, computer use, automations, all in one surface.
4. "You need to pick a model and go deep" → model loyalty is dead, the best founders swap weekly based on the task
5. "SaaS is dead" → This was mostly true but for some SaaS margins actually improve when agents pay for their own tokens and need their own seats
6. "AutoGPT is the future" → AutoGPT died. Then agents actually got good 2 years later with Hermes, OpenClaw, and managed agents. The idea was right. The timing was wrong.
7. "Prompt engineering is a career" → lasted about 18 months as a job title. Workflow engineering replaced it.
8. "Computer use is a gimmick" → "sent from computer use/ai agent will be the new sent from iphone
9. "AI design looks generic" → the generic look is a taste problem not a technology problem. The founders feeding their agents references from Japanese packaging, brutalist architecture, and 1960s print are getting beautiful output.
10. "Fine-tuning is the moat" → a well-structured Obsidian vault with good markdown files outperforms fine-tuning for most use cases and costs nothing.
11. "Benchmarks tell you which model to use" → benchmarks tell you which model won a test. I think we're all waking up to this lol.
12. "AI will consolidate into 2-3 winners" → AI is fragmenting into thousands of vertical applications built on commodity models. The consolidation is at the model layer. The explosion is at the application layer. Both are happening simultaneously.
13. "The hard part is building" → the hard part is choosing what to build. Building takes a weekend. Choosing the right thing to build takes taste, domain knowledge, and customer conversations. thats why i built ideabrowser.com to make it easier for you.
14. "The terminal is the future" → desktop apps just ate the terminal. Claude Code desktop, Codex app, both shipped GUI versions in the same month. The next 100 million agent users will never open a terminal (thank god).
I guarantee you I'm holding at least 2-3 beliefs right now that will look stupid by Christmas. I just don't know which ones. Neither do you. No one does. Build anyway.
Keep moving because this is the greatest time to be building.
I'm rooting for you.
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alan jones retweeted
"hey man what do you do?"
"im building the future"
"thats awesome. but what do you actually do"
"i sleep 3-4 hours a night and grind all day with the team"
"that seems... unhealthy and unproductive. what are you guys working on"
"its not WORK. its a LIFE GOAL. if i dont put in 140 hours a week i LOSE! id rather die young and rich than live long and poor"
"dude thats grueling"
"thats the MISSION. everyone at the company agrees. they have the logo tattooed on their ass. if theyre not willing to die for this they're OUT"
"holy shit. what are you building, i bet its some future tech that changes history"
"an insurance company"
"..."
"it has AI in it"
"got it"
"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".
Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.
- The company works 7 days per week.
- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.
- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.
- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.
Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.
My condensed notes below:
1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:
Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.
2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:
Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.
3. Lead from the Front Lines
You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.
4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning
Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.
5. Lifespan vs. Victories
Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."
6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."
If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.
Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.
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I feel better about my token spend now thanks perplexity.ai/page/unnamed-f…
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Sometimes the Black Mirror episode writes itself…
Today, we're launching shift. We're starting by cleaning your apartment in New York City, for free.
Here's how it works. Book a shift cleaning. A vetted shift operator comes to your home wearing one of our devices. They clean. They leave. You pay nothing.
In exchange, we record the cleaning. Robotics is being built on data about how people do daily tasks, and the value of that recording is what funds the service. Anything personal in it is anonymized before the recording is processed.
By now, you have heard about the shift to AI more times than you can count. About the shift toward you, the part where you actually feel it, you have heard almost nothing. Shift is what starts to make it concrete, in specific cities, with specific services.
Today, cleaning in New York. Soon, handymen, repairs, and errands across the globe. And this is just one side of shift, with more on the way.
Comment “shift” and we’ll send you an early access link.
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alan jones retweeted
Claude can't search LinkedIn. So we fixed that.
Super Carl × Claude indexes 1B+ profiles and returns direct LinkedIn links right inside your Claude chat. Searches that used to take recruiters hours now take seconds. Free beta for recruiters + founders. Setup 👇
media.supercarl.ai/claude-se…
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