Bookmarked from Blake Emal @heyblake
Steal this to write a little better ↓
i hope my emails find me well
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Steal this to write a little better ↓
i hope my emails find me well
“If you don’t like someone’s story, you write your own.” —Chinua Achebe
best pre-seed founders I know:
spend 80% talking to customers
20% building
worst ones:
reverse those numbers
@garrytan also the No. 1 reason high-performers quit jobs. They look around and notice people doing the bare minimum getting the same pay/credit/etc
High agency razors:
1. If unsure who to work with, pick the person you'd call when stuck in a 3rd world jail cell.
Shrooms are for the people 🧙♂️ @FatherMcKennaa
new one minute blog: underdo the competition
Package your obsession into something that compounds.
stuck building random apps that go nowhere? 💀
go to the app store
pick a category
sort by "top grossing"
check the least polished apps
see how much they're making
build something 10x better
profit in 30 days
i found 3 utility apps making $50k/month with UI from 2014
don't build what's trendy
build what people already pay for
your goldmine is hiding on the app store 💎
We've wanted to build this product for around a decade, and it's now happening.
Charisma is actually just a transfer of self esteem. Does interacting with you make people feel better about themselves? If the answer is yes you’re a powerful mf.
important to remember that Marcus Aurelius was essentially a guy stuck in a job he hated
The less your business depends on you the more it’s worth.
Start delegating before you ever think about getting acquired.
No love leads to cynicism
No action leads to anxiety
No progress leads to anger
No talent leads to mockery
No writing leads to confusion
No training leads to insecurity
No clear goal leads to lethargy
No reading leads to superficiality
No generosity leads to loneliness
Noticing myself adopting a certain rhythm in AI-assisted coding (i.e. code I actually and professionally care about, contrast to vibe code).
1. Stuff everything relevant into context (this can take a while in big projects. If the project is small enough just stuff everything e.g. files-to-prompt . -e ts -e tsx -e css -e md --cxml --ignore node_modules -o prompt.xml)
2. Describe the next single, concrete incremental change we're trying to implement. Don't ask for code, ask for a few high-level approaches, pros/cons. There's almost always a few ways to do thing and the LLM's judgement is not always great. Optionally make concrete.
3. Pick one approach, ask for first draft code.
4. Review / learning phase: (Manually...) pull up all the API docs in a side browser of functions I haven't called before or I am less familiar with, ask for explanations, clarifications, changes, wind back and try a different approach.
6. Test.
7. Git commit.
Ask for suggestions on what we could implement next. Repeat.
Something like this feels more along the lines of the inner loop of AI-assisted development. The emphasis is on keeping a very tight leash on this new over-eager junior intern savant with encyclopedic knowledge of software, but who also bullshits you all the time, has an over-abundance of courage and shows little to no taste for good code. And emphasis on being slow, defensive, careful, paranoid, and on always taking the inline learning opportunity, not delegating. Many of these stages are clunky and manual and aren't made explicit or super well supported yet in existing tools. We're still very early and so much can still be done on the UI/UX of AI assisted coding.
i highly believe that if you eliminate all of your side projects, focus on ONE THING, and go very deep on it for a year, you will win
“This world belongs to the energetic.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like this image by @lehoho248.
Three Financial Statements
Elon and Steve Jobs are both famous for pushing people to simplify their designs. I don't think this is a coincidence. Large organizations naturally generate complexity, but if you have a CEO who hates it, this tendency is kept in check.
Be Alec Radford.
Join OpenAI.
Create GPT as a side project.
Everyone says it won’t work. Build it anyway.
Change the course of the world.
Quit.
Don't even put OpenAI on your resume.
Disappear from society.
The most expensive metric in SaaS is:
🟣 CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
It’s not your infra, not your time, not even churn.
CAC will silently kill your margins if you don’t control it.
Find 1 channel where CAC = $0
→ You're free.