I soft-launched YouSpot yesterday (via a tweet). YouSpot is an AI-native Solo CRM. Fortune favors the focused. So, here's who YouSpot is NOT for: 1) If you have a GTM team (marketing/sales) and looking to grow, YouSpot is not for you. Buy HubSpot. 2) If are an e-commerce store, YouSpot is not for you. Product is focused more on B2B and "high consideration" purchases. 3) If you have raised venture money, you should look into HubSpot for Startups. That's the right product. 4) If you're hoping for an open source project that you can run locally, and connect your own local models and use the Karpathy wiki style knowledgebase -- you are *awesome*, but YouSpot is not for you. 5) If you're trying to manage your personal stuff and family life -- I honor you, but YouSpot is not a B2C product. It's meant for 1-person companies (businesses being operated by a single human). 6) If you're worried about connecting your Gmail and other systems to a third-party app you didn't build yourself -- I respect your worry. The world is a scary place. But YouSpot is probably not for you (you're not going to get value without connecting third-party systems that can be used to build your second brain). Other than that, would love to have you as a beta user! :). Just go to YouSpot.com. Waitlist for the free private beta, or skip the line by coming a $1/month subscriber (first 1,000 users and we're already 547 in). Building this in public, so if you have questions around what's in my head (and what's in my second brain), just reply to this tweet and ask. Cheers.

I thought this was funny. Though for the record, I don't think I've ever hung out at a bar. I'm not that cool. :)

Woo hoo! I passed the 600,000 follower mark here on Ex-Twitter. To celebrate, I'm going to go read some tweets and follow some people. Thank you for your support.

"We asked 10K what CRM should we use? It said to stick with Salesforce. But it said if we were starting over, it would look at HubSpot and Attio, and Affinity for @saastrfund. But most importantly, it said not to leave or migrate. "Keep Salesforce". 👉 If you want to steal a customer from a competitor, you gotta convince the agents. Not just the humans."

You can now build software that looks ready for a million users before you've learned what one person actually needs. That's a dangerous amount of room to fool yourself. Find people already doing the work. Give them early access. Watch what happens when they try to use your product in ways you never anticipated. The faster you can build, the sooner you need contact with reality.

99.3% of the people telling you that “distribution is the only moat remaining” have never distributed anything except that opinion.

This is the Apple we love. Creative, compelling and unexpected.

The biggest misread of anyone predicting the end of software engineering was imagining that the world only needed a certain amount of software, and bringing automation to the field would reduce the need for labor. Exactly the opposite is happening where essentially most things are actually turning into software. Because agents can use tools, work with computers, write software on the fly, and process data like humans (but far faster), we can now throw “software” at problems that never could reasonably be digitized before. What that leads to is the role of engineering taking on greater importance in the economy, because we can now engineer far more systems and processes than were possible before. If you’re a bank trying to do new forms of trading, engineers are often your first bet. If you are in life sciences, you expect more and more research and lab work to be engineering centric. If you’re in manufacturing, you’re trying to automate more of the supply chain, all that is engineering. More and more work is shaped like software problems. Yes we’re not going to be coding manually in the future. But almost everything will be code, which means those that understand it are in a fantastic position.

I don't give many interviews these days. This was surprisingly fun. My friend @RezaSatchu interviewed me for @HarvardHBS and seeing some of these clips just makes me laugh. He really knows how to pull it out of me. This is so me. Allergic to conventional wisdom.

The importance of TAM expansion Late night chat with @nakul led to a discussion about TAM expansion. tldr Every great company needs to constantly and continuously expand their TAM and launch products / services that go after new customer behaviors and new addressable markets. In fact, you cannot be a generational company with just the same product / addressable market that you started with. if Google had stayed search + ads + youtube only, we wouldn't have Chrome, GCP, Waymo, and many others. if Facebook had only stayed Facebook and not done Insta or WhatsApp (or Muse!), the company would worth a fraction of what it is today. Same for every other generational company Seems obvious in retrospect but worth stating.

Greetings, San Francisco! Here for my semi-annual trip during which I hit peak impostor syndrome.

I've finally invested in enough unicorns (at seed) that I have confidence in the traits unicorn founders have in common. If you fail to hone these traits, you will fail to build a $1B+ company in my experience. / 1. Velocity consists of speed Matt Loszak from Aalo showed me this the most: The best founders are viscerally uncomfortable with slow progress. They feel it as a physical irritant, not an abstract concern. They obsessively refactor how they’re pursuing goals to identify clever shortcuts and rethink their roadmap from first principles. Speed leads to high momentum and a compounding returns on knowledge and product. It’s necessary to maintain your headstart in a market, otherwise the faster competitor will beat you within a couple years. / 2. Velocity consists of direction The best founders regularly surface from heads-down execution to ask whether their path is still the right one — whether a better route to the destination has opened up, or whether the destination itself has shifted. Pathfinding prevents the common failure mode of executing brilliantly in the wrong direction. It requires intellectual honesty and the willingness to kill plans that no longer make sense. The best founders set a recurring quarterly calendar event to re-assess all their goals. / 3. Mission alignment The journey to building a unicorn is long. Without a mission that goes beyond financial outcome, most founders lose steam and start phoning it in. Then they get surpassed by competitors who are hungrier. The mission doesn't have to be world-saving — but it has to be genuine to you. / 4. Asking for advice and integrating it The best founders ask smart people for advice and implement the good advice immediately. The moment they’re shown a better way, they update their processes. They don’t assume they’ll stumble into better ways organically; they set aside time each week to learn from others and shortcut their development. They assemble a counsel of advisors who are the best in the world at what they do and they sell them on the mission. / 5. Brick-by-brick hiring Adam Guild of Owner showed me this the most. Unicorn founders treat each early hire as weight-bearing. They run a deliberate process to find the best person in the world for each role — not whoever is closest at hand ("hiring within arm's reach") from their existing networks. (Unless they are the best). The foundation built in the first ten hires sets the ceiling for everything that follows. A single mis-hire in a key seat early on compounds. Getting this right means the team itself becomes a competitive moat.

It’s feeling really magical inside of Shopify right now. It’s clearly the greatest time in the history of tech industry right now. I hope it feels similar everywhere else.

There’s an SEO consultant that makes $1.5m a year and has a few clients and no employees. Then you have Skool communities where the founder makes 7-figures teaching people AI. Then you have agencies doing 9-figures in revenue with the owner being an individual contributor. Then you also have founders like @dharmesh with a publicly traded company worth 11-figures with no direct reports. There’s no right or wrong way to play the game of business. You just have to figure out what works for you.

I love @dharmesh definition of success on that sense "Success is making those that believed in you look brilliant."

Is radical candor in the workplace the right call for CEOs? My co-founder @Dharmesh ran a 360 on me once. "On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend Brian as CEO of @HubSpot? Why?" He sent it to ~25 people: board, customers, employees. People wrote novels. He organized the results like a product spec. Features and bugs, with direct quotes. The first 10 pages were features. I'm reading thinking....I've got this nailed. Page 11 is where the bugs started. There were a lot! Year one, I tried to fix all of the bugs that people had with me. Didn't work. After that I picked 1 or 2 a year. @luke10ferrari, CEO of @bendingspoons, landed in the same place. He started with five things to improve, realized halfway through the year that was too many, and now picks one per year. The rest is radical candor. See something good or bad, say it. Right away, even in front of the whole meeting. Wording, accuracy, hurt feelings are all secondary to being honest. His one thing right now: telling great people how great they are. He says he's awful at saying it out loud. I got the exact same feedback pretty much every year. My fix was a 15-minute block on Friday afternoons just for compliments. Luca's version of the old "five positives for every correction" rule: "Let's use all six slots for corrections." Pick one "bug" that you have. Get a lot better at it. Then pick the next one. Episode to the full episode in the comments.

working at a higher level of abstraction has always required understanding the lower level ones, I don't think coding agents changes this

You don't have to commit your entire life to optimism, just try it on for a week. Start thinking "what if it all worked out?" and "what a time to be alive!". Then compare your state of mind to the week before filled with pessimism and doomer nonsense.

This is so good. Apologies to those who cannot watch this in their region.

During my career, I've always liked investors who asked good questions instead of spending the meeting demonstrating how smart they were. The best ones could challenge me hard... and then let me run the company.