The Wisdom Wall

“Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now because anybody can create it.”

“they're good at getting attention, which, by the way, is more important than making a good product.”

“I think vibe coding is fantastic for building tools that you can't buy, or these, like, um, like smaller utilities, where it's like, hey, this is sort of like a one-off piece of software that I need to use to solve a particular job. Fantastic. We're seeing so much more of that stuff happen. But for, like, load-bearing…”

“And so I think, uh, I think aligning with the customer on the outcome and charging them on the outcome instead of charging them on like a pure token basis is I think like sort of like the way AI based businesses are gonna, are gonna make sense.”

“the difference between now and 15 years ago is there's a handful of companies with such large distribution that they're the natural homes to do new things. Because even if they're five years late, they can just cross sell it, right?”

“the typical way that SaaS-type businesses, like software-style businesses, were built, scaled, and sold in the past 10 years was not going to be the same formula that was going to work in this new age because AI requires a ton more professional services, almost, to actually get the results from that application because…”

“The time spent on coding was probably 80% generation, 20% review. It's flipped that into 80% review, 20% generation. But the key is, is that the actual amount of like the raw time has dropped by like 10 X, um, when you make that kind of switch.”

“So once you hire the people to do it, and once you're supporting that, it's very hard to go the other way and come back to the automation.”

“I think it's hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when, when a startup asked me what they should do in SEO, I say, don't work on it and wait until you're larger. Wait until you're, you know, series A or later, maybe series B and later, because it's, it's, it's hard. Like maybe you could get a little…”

“the difference is that, um, the roads, even though things are complex and dynamic and all that kind of stuff on the road, the roads are the same. Like that's the same roads. Um, you're getting from point A to point B and the, the way that that works, like you, there's a zillion different ways you can do it, but like…”

“And they're not defensive because it's the AI telling you. It's not your manager telling you where you're like, okay, is this going to bet my job? This is the AI saying like, make a left turn or right turn. And you're like, okay, totally makes sense. I'm not even having second thoughts about that.”

“the days of hiring people for attitude and training for skill, the days of hiring the The kind of master all trades or jack of all trades, master of none that gets you seven to 10% growth, but it doesn't get you the hyper growth.”

“entrepreneurs have to be born with the entrepreneurial traits, and then they can be nurtured. But I don't think you can take a person and make them an entrepreneur. You're either entrepreneurial or you're not. And some of that is the craziness. It is the ADD, the bipolar, the Tourette's, the thinking out loud, the…”

“I think the value as an entrepreneur of having a million dollars in your bank account, for example, is that it does allow you to think longer term. And to think bigger. And so I do encourage other entrepreneurs if they have the opportunity to take some chips off the table when they raise their second or third or fourth…”

“the only consistent thing we could do to drive traffic was make Reddit faster. Because sometimes we'd add a lot of features and traffic would, would go down. Sometimes we'd stagnate for a month or two and traffic would go up. And we're always just like, who knows, let's just make site, let's make the site faster again.…”

“and, you know, the kind of thing we tell people, um, whenever we're giving advice is don't go for the Super Bowl launch. Um, don't go for one single thing. Um, you don't have to worry about exclusive story.”

“when you're using cloud code to create artifacts, you are actually causing skill atrophy in yourself. You have gone from the flow state of building stuff into what we call dark flow, which is the state you get into when you're using a slot machine.”

“if you let an engineering agent just vibe code its way into building something complex, it's gonna, it's gonna be hard at one point for it to navigate the code base”

“Every time some hype coming on, I was like, I'm the first one to put it. Might be a hype, might be not. People are going to use it, but this is like a very easy way to attract people in.”

“Mostly because I knew it will decrease my churn. Because when people need to post manually, if they get discouraged, if they don't post, they'll cancel the subscription. But when people are posting with automation, that's a whole different story.”

“The agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human. And so you're no longer advertising to the human. You are trying to get the agent to say, pick me, pick me, pick me. And that is often a very different skill set than marketing to a human.”

“agents care a ton about, like, clean documentation, like, fast webpages, so, you know, it's like, the thing I'm seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent, and so that content is, like, plain text.”

“humans will be the best at doing that because the AI is, the training model is always in the past, right? So they know what worked pre-AI a lot of the time, um, versus what works right now is different.”

“if you're a one to four trillion dollar market cap company, You need a line of business that's, I don't know, five, 10, twenty billion dollars in revenue eventually to move that number at all for you, and that means that something that looks like it's a couple hundred million dollars isn't that interesting, and so…”

“So I try to trust AI more than my own vibe sometimes.”

“I would say they have a typical conversion rate as any other cold call, especially since They have, they had a very negative experience with the whole entire process, not being able to list it. I mean, not being able to sell their home with an agent before, and they're more reserved to that idea of relisting again,…”

“There's zero preparation done. I'm literally learning AI while they're learning AI, and they are paying me to learn together with me, so it's not like I have to have some type of Capitalize certification.”

“What you want to do is you want to build like a service, something that actually is a service in which Subscription is just a feature of that service.”

“we were able to reduce the number of pictures required to literally just one, because then we're like, holy , you know, we can essentially just ask for one picture, generate the synthetic version of it, and then, and then say, do you like this? Great. So we generate a few more synthetic versions based on the same…”

“So one reason that traditional bookkeeping tends to be so, uh, painful is that it's often outsourced to, uh, people that are maybe overseas and, um, they, they're great, but they just don't have the context of what our software business is doing and what are the vendors that they're using. So they won't really actually…”

“QuickBooks, it, it can solve for any sort of business model because it's so generic, but because of that, it's sort of just, it's like I said, a blank slate, just a little database. You can write anything into there, and because of that, it can support any business, but also because of that, it doesn't do any one…”

“The developer relations feels very similar to like a founder role where you need to be on top of your community. You're the person that everyone reaches out to. You've got to build a product or understand the products in and out. You've got to grow the product. You've got to sort of be in charge of growth. And there's…”

“my mum still won't build an app even though you can use something like Lovable. It's, because I think it's still, you've got to want to do the building bit. Like, that's still the issue. It's either someone like my mother wants the app built, doesn't want to spend any time in the building of the app. So no code, you're…”

“And if in chat you say, what's the best website builder and Webflow's URL is the number one citation and nobody else mentions Webflow, then they won't win. And so for these popular questions, the way to win is not just a page on your site. It's pages off of your site.”

“So actually to do answer engine optimization really well, I think it's not doing pure answer engine optimization. It's doing all of these other channels, but doing YouTube and Reddit with the intention of helping you on answer engine optimization.”

“If I'm making viral YouTube videos and, uh, you know, a TikTok video and an Instagram story and a Reddit thread, I can be the best product tomorrow. So the time to impact is fast and I can grow on these other channels without really having a substantial brand.”

“one of the core beliefs is that the demand for software engineering is infinite. Uh, it's, it's completely, as price will go down, the, the, the demand will increase”

“An AI engineer needs to think like an architect. They have to think as if they're, uh, they're delegating all of their work to other engineers, and when they're delegating their work, how do they do that, right? And not only are they delegating their work to engineers, they're very special engineers, these AI agents.…”

“It's basically if, if traditional dev orgs or dev shops are labor arbitrage, we're intelligence arbitraging.”

“To that I say, basically, if you have a free or near free junior employee and you can't, and you have unlimited versions of this, you could spin up infinite numbers of these near free junior employees. If you can't find a way to generate leverage from that, that's a skill issue, right?”

“I think that software is now content. It's like so cheap to make that it's sort of like building an app is sort of like writing an essay or tweeting.”

“I think a lot of founders are worried about that early, but my sense is maybe it's premature worry because embedded in that is also the case text pivot that, you know, they got users and an understanding and a useful corpus of data All of which turned into a tremendous moat for them literally right at the correct…”

“it's better for people to, ah, become founders, learn how to create things for other people, and then either, you know, you manage to get product market fit, and you figure out a moat so that you can be, you know, as big a company as possible. Or even if you don't, like, everything about your life and career moves…”

“get the script to where I felt really good about it, and then at the last point, I would say, given, uh, what we did in this session to improve the prompt, output the next version of the prompt. And so now I've done this about 20 or 30 times, and so now I have a thing that has all of the different tricks”

“until 2023, Being really good at coding, whether that was JavaScript, Python, PHP, or anything else, meant you had essentially 10 X or more the earning potential and the ability to build quality solutions than everybody else in the world. And that has been the fundamental change that has turned everything on its head.”

“people often will complain and criticize about AI writing, but I think what those criticisms miss is that a lot of the writing that needs to get done for businesses to move forward is boring. And it doesn't really matter if it's like poetry or not. Like it just has to be correct and complete and there. Right. AI is…”

“our, also our guiding principle was, um, we're not going to do prizes. Because what happens with hackathons when you do prizes, you have a professional hackathon hunters and they go and just swoop in, you know, they take the prize there and they go off.”

“20 years ago to get a C level title, you had to be a major player at a major company. And about 10 years ago, we started giving away titles as well as equity, as well as compensation to Gen Y who are asking for big titles. And we've had title creep in a big way.”

“If you hire for attitude and train for skill, you get seven percent growth, but if you hire for attitude and proven skill set, That's where you get the incremental growth. A true a player has done the job before.”

“The true power COO wants to make the CEO iconic.”

“Nowadays we've had title creep where like to have a CMO or a CRO or a CT, like God, those were titles reserved for the fortune 100 or the fortune 500. We've had a lot of title creep down into these entrepreneurial companies where you've got 40 employees and you have a chief revenue officer and a chief marketing…”

“there are some countries where Telegram is the, um, number one communication channel, and people need a way to be represented there, so bots come into that, uh, space, uh, and they start to actually take on the role of websites, because people are not building websites, they're, they're jumping the website, uh, Uh,…”

“The best place to start is in your, is in your customers, because you have a lot of people in your customer list who Who understand they're very early in their journey, and it would probably be a smart idea to go work for a company for a year, and to, because you're going to pick up a lot of skills, and they're happy…”

“Knowledge is essentially a commodity, even at the highest levels. I mean, some of it's esoteric, some of it's harder to gain than others, and some of it's gained through experience. But at the end of the day, there's always going to be a larger pool of those people that have that knowledge, versus the pool of people…”

“we have this sort of weird societal unwritten rule that introductions kind of always trump anything else that's going on in a conversation, because If you don't introduce yourself, it's weird, and if you don't know who you're talking to, it's also weird. So you have that kind of ace in your, up your sleeve. If you need…”

“If you're an author and you start a podcast and you freaking suck at it, like a lot of them do, all the editing in the world is not going to make you more interesting, unfortunately, and there's a lot of authors that are not that interesting other than when they write, and so they don't, They don't have podcasts, and…”

“People who tell you they're doing that are either not making that much money, they've made money, then they're costing on it, or they're full of crap, and usually it's some mix of those three things.”

“the best way to improve cognitive performance is to improve physical performance, because of course the brain is an organ like any other.”

“So too often when you're an entrepreneur, you're always thinking, well, what do I need to look like? Or what do I need to, what mask or disguise do I need to wear to sell this client or this investor? And being open is often the key to success. Being honest, being open, avoiding, you know, any kind of dishonesty.”

“one of the things about, like, local marketing is you have this incredibly tight-knit network of potential customers. I mean, Lyft customers see each other every day, and Sprig customers see each other every day, and they eat dinner together, and that's a huge marketing opportunity, and so what we've done at Sprig is…”

“You'll typically increase your conversion rates. People, even if they say they don't mind paying monthly fees, they tend to hate it. They like the concept of, hey, here's a monthly price. Oh, by the way, here's a special one-time offer. For XRs, you can get unlimited access for forever. And you'll find that it converts…”

“focusing on a problem that you're, that really bothers you or that you're really excited about tends to Be better than trying to do a market analysis or a more kind of, you know, traditional, uh, kind of MBA approach.”

“not every business has to be a billion dollar business. I mean, there's, uh, you know, it's, bigger is not always, is not always better. Um, and one of the things is like a lot of, you know, something like, I think there was that whole unicorn club study that said like out of maybe, you know, 39 and 10,000 companies…”

“A chip on your shoulder's good. I'm looking, it's why I like the idea of funding immigrants. I want to fund people who are not part of the establishment, who are not country club, If you grew up with all the golfing buddies at all your prestigious country clubs, you're part of the system, you don't really want to upset…”

“the secret with goals is if you're hitting 75% of your goals, your goals aren't ambitious enough, and most people feel bad when they don't hit a goal. Um, I feel bad when I'm hitting too many of them, as ironic as that sounds. And so, you want your goals to be sufficiently ambitious, ah, that they're hard to get to.”

“You never adjust your goals. Your goals are locked for the entire year. Okay. You have to judge yourself against your original projection.”

“I think the role of the entrepreneur is to constantly, uh, minimize risk. As ironically as that sounds, your goal is to arrange land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability to create a value of outputs that's greater than the sum of the inputs and to hopefully create jobs and give back to the community and help them…”

“my rule of thumb for a CEO of a company larger than a hundred employees is you should be, you should rarely be working on anything that's gonna affect the current month. If you're working on something that's gonna affect the current month, you're working on the wrong thing. You need to be working on the things that are…”

“allowing users to have really long headlines, for example, was one thing that we did that, that other sites didn't, or, you know, not censoring swear words, or, you know, not censoring anything to the extent that we could get away with it, allows the community to, to bond and, and really find, find a home there.”

“taking money from other people is, is a, is a great motivator. Um, especially for me, it would have been tough, or I should say, it would have been easy for me to walk away from Hipmunk at any point. And I'd be like, Adam, you know, hey, this isn't working out. Let's take our money back and, you know, go do something…”

“The answer that it was, it always started as like an invert, like a pyramid and you always start at the bottom. And you work your way up to mainstream media. And the top of the pyramid is CNN, or New York Times. The bottom of the pyramid are all, any, any person that you could talk to, like a user, right?”

“I think if you don't, if you're not willing to do things that don't scale, you may never get to the point where you have to scale to begin with, right?”

“And the, the other idea, and this is actually something that Paul Buckeye is one of the speakers at Wycombe as well, he said, He said, make something that a hundred people love. And it may take a year, it may take two years for a hundred people to love it, but that's the hardest, you know, thing to do, is not to make a…”

“You sit in school in a straight row, number two pencil, filling out the little circles, no stray marks. What's that about? It's about training you to work in the factory.”

“The more agita I cause my publisher, the better the book's going to do. Right? Both the way the book is written, the way the book is packaged, and the way the book is marketed, the more they hate it, the better the book's going to do.”

“Rough edges are what we pay for.”

“My argument is that physical labor is not so good anymore. You can't make a living, really, with physical labor. So we get paid for emotional labor. Get paid for digging deep and doing work that maybe we don't feel like.”

“And on the internet, a world of digital goods, where accumulating more stuff isn't worth very much because it's all bits. Guess what the most valuable thing to accumulate is? Respect. Attention. People who think they owe you something. This idea of people opening themselves to your idea. That's where power lies.”

“I think that that courageous stand that they took, again, leaving aside the politics of it, just looking at it from a pure business perspective, Is an example of a very savvy business strategy that sees trustworthiness as an asset, like a business asset that can be intentionally cultivated and acquired. And in fact, I…”

“most founders are hopelessly naive about this point. They think that they're in control of the company, and they're always so betrayed when they find out that their own founding documents basically say that they can be removed at any time. And they don't realize that that's a choice.”

“When the AI says it's 10 of 10, now our work, now the work begins. See people stop there, but no, now we have reached the limits of its training data. Now it's time to actually do the creative act of writing”

“And that has to do with the mechanics of the attention mechanism. As the contracts gets larger, you're literally spreading the attention over more and more and more data. But also, it's learning from all the bad examples it gave. So it's actually much more likely, even though you corrected it, the fact that the bad…”

“Companies really need not just some training and education and show them what to do. They need somebody that is embedded into their company that is following up regularly and becoming part of that company.”

“A lot of people, they'll go directly to Replit and just say, I have an idea. I want to start building it. That's a great way to waste a lot of tokens that are more expensive, right? Go to chat GPT first, go to Claude, whatever you want, pick your, pick your LLM of choice and say, I've got this idea. I want you to work…”

“Like you might have a task that was going to take you six hours, but instead you could take 30 minutes and vibe code a tool that will do that task for you. And you may never use that piece of software again, right?”

“it's hard for humans to say no to, like, candidates that are good. It gets harder to say no as the interview goes along. So, like, two people before you said yes, now are you gonna be the person that says no? So you get more of that. And also humans I find are not often as like critical. And so, you know, they'll ask…”

“First cold email is something that like works less and less because people are flooded with it with AI.”

“I think it's, like, actually a surprising number of people go through the Surprise Me flow, and a surprising number of people are very sticky on the Surprise Me flow, because I think it puts a little bit of distance between the components being built, and they're, like, they're not as attached to the idea than, like,…”

“ChatGPT's, you know, the sort of like most amazing thing that it could do, in my view, was summarize things. So if you think about it, up until then, computers, and I've always loved them, The one thing they couldn't really do is summarize text, take a bunch of texts and make it a small amount of text. Like that struck…”

“a lesson I learned at Uber, which is if someone on the support line is like exhibiting extreme emotion, Whether it's positive emotion or negative emotion, that is actually a good indicator that you're onto something. Like, if you can make a customer so mad that you think they want to murder you, you might be onto…”

“what is AI, you know, allow anyone with agency can go and do something. That's still a very small percentage of the population. It's still not most people. It's not everyone. It's not even most people. It's like a subset similar to who could do it before, you know, but you don't have to be an engineer anymore.”

“What's common today is often not to use open, uh, because it'll degrade your sending score. So we just use click and bounce.”

“you're going to have an agent that has specific skills. That should be the agent that writes your content. That should be the agent that writes your emails. Like this is all the same entity.”

“Connecticut specific documents in Markdown, right? That are fed, you know, into the agent as a tool. So You got to give your agent the right tools in the right context. Um, but I don't think you need to do as much like external enrichment as people think.”

“now how I think about it is that this is the hub, and YouTube is a spoke. Yeah, that would be a really bad spoke to lose, but it will not kill the business.”

“who really cares about what it's made in or if it's custom or if it's Zapier, like the thing that you're, should be buying is the outcome for the business.”

“in the last year, people are now sharpening up their budgets. They're sharpening their pencils, and they're like, okay, we know AI is effective. We know it's a hundred percent going to be transformative. How? Like, what are the specific workflows, outcomes, ROI, KPIs that we can look at, um, and how can we justify this…”

“The thing that people have to understand is that with cloud code or any of these coding tools, they're just that they're tools. If you don't know how to swing a hammer, the nails could go in a bent. If you know how to swing a hammer, the nails to go in straight, right? And it's the same exact thing. Uh, why I say that?…”

“The headshot software that I built is actually a service for people because people don't want to use software. People, especially people on the internet, what they want to do is they want you to just deliver headshots for them.”

“People will pay you to teach them how to make AI music. People will pay you to put in a prompt into Suno and teach you how to make AI music. People will pay you to teach them how to go into Sora and make a prompt and make a video on Sora too. People will pay you.”

“And by the way, it's not even using AI credits cause it's all JS. It's all JavaScript. So you create a framework that you don't even need a backend for that you sell access to that they're either paying monthly, 10 bucks a month, or they're paying a lifetime access, 59 dollars.”

“And so I think if you give people the tools to creation, they will do things that are not necessarily an extrapolation of what we do today.”

“if you look at most comparable products out there, uh, usually they have one character just because the, the whole thing about having, if it's already hard to keep consistent with one character character, it becomes actually exponentially harder with multiple, not because there's more variables, but literally because…”

“particularly in the time where you have all these tools like, uh, you know, vibe coding, lovable, so on, so forth, where everyone can create the product. You can, you know, it, it's a great time in the sense that, you know, if you ever, you know, if you, if you were ever the person at a party saying that have a, you…”

“AI allows you to put brains in your business in places that was really hard to put brains in the past. Uh, it was very manual, very expensive, and mostly, especially for small business, you're just like, I'm just not going to do it.”

“this is the other place where AI is really exciting, is it's not just helpful as a tool inside your workflows. It's also really helpful for building workflows, because building workflows is kind of hard. Like, not everyone thinks in systems, thinks in structure”

“The more tools you give it, The harder it thinks, the more mistakes it's gonna make.”

“speed to lead. You, it improves your conversion rate massively. And when you improve your conversion rates, it means you can now be more efficient in how you deploy your advertising dollars, because now you're getting a higher, uh, customer lifetime value, higher ACVs. So now you can afford to pay more for those leads…”

“what I see the best automators do is they know ChatGPT is really good at this type of queries. Claude is really good at these types of queries. Gemini's really good at this type of stuff, and so they're using Zapier to say, hey, go route this request here, and route this request over here, and this one needs to go…”

“I have found that AI is an, is an exceptionally good coach. It is infinitely patient. It is neutral. It just observes what it sees and it tells you what it, it thinks it has observed.”

“People think that accounting is just numbers. Actually, so much of it is just understanding what's going on in the business. And so much of that is actually human written.”

“If you are waiting until the end of the month to understand what your finances are, the time has already passed to make the decisions that are important. You really need to be making decisions on a day-to-day basis, and that requires understanding the fundamental numbers of your business.”

“Well, that's, uh, one reason that the, the hybrid software and services model, um, is a great way to get started, uh, on a business like ours because that last mile edge case, we, we do have humans do, and it's helpful for onboarding and understanding the, our customers' businesses, and they also, like, they want that…”

“And I think that, by the way, I think that's the best way to just build a great product. Just really see the, uh, the dirty parts of it instead of just handing it off to, to someone else.”

“The past 15 years of SaaS businesses, everyone just assumes that their margins are incredible, but now companies are spending so much on the LLM API providers, and because traditional bookkeepers don't understand those new vendors and how to treat them, they often get lost in operating expenses and they're not being…”

“Really, uh, becoming a requirement in the AI era because your costs are so volatile and changing every day, and the margin profiles of software businesses have completely changed with how expensive, uh, their costs are and how those costs scale when their users use them more, which used to be something that was not big…”

“I would say for anyone looking to, uh, use AI to start a company to displace what was traditionally done very manually by humans, first, see what they're doing, uh, really understand it, uh, then, two, do it yourself. As you bring on your first customers. So do the work yourself. Don't outsource it. Make sure you…”

“the thing I didn't realize until, I don't know whether it was within the MakerPad life or after it, was like, I'm still teaching programming, but in a different format. Like, there's different, the tools just look different. Like, they don't look like a code base or a code file or GitHub or anything like that. It looks…”

“So you can see all the different tool calls and things it did. So I kind of just copied all of that and then said to Droid, like, give me step by step instructions exactly on what you just performed to get to this output. I said, okay, great. Now put that into an agents.md file. As instructions for another agent to…”

“When anyone asks, asks me for advice on community, the number one, I think, number one thing I say is, you're going to lead by example. Like, if you're not in there talking, no one else is going to be in there talking. If you're not in there asking seemingly stupid questions, other people aren't going to feel like they…”

“I think the best videos on Twitter are the ones that are just, hey, I've just clicked record, I'm just doing this thing, I've just posted it, and that's kind of it. And like, I like that. That feels like that's a community member talking to a community member. It's not like this company presenting to you this video…”

“just standalone tool won't help. You have to intricate this Deeply into the workflows. So like I've been giving examples this entire podcast about make it workflow oriented, which can give value to the customer so that it can compound growth. You don't solve for short term.”

“And the less entertaining your product is, the better, the more interesting video is. And the reason why I say that is because video is made to be entertaining and entertaining categories like food, travel, beauty, uh, are the most crowded and the least entertaining things are the least crowded. So website builders is…”

“help center is actually a great place to do that because help center is you talking about how your product works and what it does when it does not do. And so help center optimization is not something you would focus on for SEO, but you would for answer engine optimization. Because that's where you have all this…”

“Yes, you do not need to create millions of pages for every single question. You need to generally answer the question... It's grouping and theming them. And the AI is indeed smart enough to just find the answer. So you don't need it explicitly verbatim exact match for every single question.”

“The reason why the control matters is because LM's are growing a lot, and charts are just going to naturally go up because they're growing a lot. So if you don't have a control, you don't know whether or not you caused an effect.”

“when you think about costing based on outputs, what you're going to find pretty soon is you're going to want to narrow the things you start to focus on, like your example of the SDR thing, because then, you know, you can keep delivering it, delivering it, delivering it.”

“I have a recipe on there that I, that I made that I, I really liked it, that was really cool, which is, Go through all of my internal meetings and write our company handbook from what you see. And I want you to capture all of the unspoken ways that every works as a company, both good and bad and pull a read between the…”

“Good ghost writers. Uh, when you say, Hey, I want you to tweet about this or blog post about this ghost, ghost writers. Don't go ahead and say, great. I did it. Here it is. Um, what they do is they say, okay, well, what was interesting to you about this article? What was, what did you like about this podcast? Was it…”

“And, uh, to do all of the things you need to do in order to set up the eval is a job. And, um, and so the eval is what I'm saying is smuggling a lot of human intelligence into it because in order to take a like complex and dynamic activity, like doing a job and turn it into a test, it requires a lot of human, still a…”

“if you look at AI overviews, the last thing that they want to do is answer the question with a three paragraph answer. It defeats the purpose of an AI overview, just giving you the answer as quick as possible.”

“And let's say if you want to compare best CRNs for construction companies and you write your own article for that on your own blog and you go super in depth, that's a great way for you to drive more signups, right? And you would do it in a table format. Pricing. Features. Features specifically for construction. That…”

“if you can't help people save money, Why should they pay you? If you can't help them make money, why should they pay you? Because what we see is, if you can't help with those two things, you can still get signups, but your churn tends to be higher.”

“Telling people all your data in one place. Cool. No one really will log in or do anything with it. That's the real reality.”

“If you want to do well as a smaller business, we think it is a very tough market to get into unless you have a lot of connections on the sea level and you're better off, uh, verticalizing and going after specific categories like the medical industry, like, uh, plastic surgeons or dentists, or, you know, going after…”

“It's very easy to build a basic model. So transcription, you can do open source. You can buy some stuff. You can drop it into chat GPT or Anthropic and get a summary against it. And those are good. And you'll see there's this kind of table stakes of you should be able to do transcription. You should be able to do…”

“So when you get notes that summarize it in chronological order, those aren't effective notes.”

“The second thing was after the fact, taking those coaching metrics, because a lot of time it is going to be too much cognitive overload, especially for a more junior seller where they're not used to taking all these inputs because you've got a PowerPoint presentation, you're talking, the client's on the call, you're…”

“You and I might interrupt each other because we're still getting a cadence. Uh, we call it synchrony, but after five minutes, if you're still interrupting each other, that's almost intentional. That's, it's not a good conversation. You both aren't paying attention or you're both kind of, uh, irritated or aggregated…”

“somebody who has a limited amount of time, they're essentially a solopreneur or small business owner as a private practice doctor. Um, they've got some money to invest in speed. And automation, and they value their time a lot. They were very early adopters, even though they weren't techie in purchasing what we now call…”

“Where we find that chatbots and RAG, which is essentially Taking documents and putting them into a, uh, vector database so AI can read them, right? AI that can read your documents in a custom way is RAG. Uh, when you think about a chatbot in RAG, the value there is giving it to your internal team, right? At the company…”

“you don't even need it to be a super fancy automation because the amount of time that's being saved, even with the final copy step, and you want the human in the loop anyway, to do that review, you're still saving such a huge amount of time that it's worth it for people.”

“anybody who's spent 24 working hours with Claude Code can also build a prototype of your thing pretty much over a weekend as one person, right? So you've got competition from the big players. But you've also got competition from the tiny do-it-yourself players, which are just, you're kind of getting, you know, eaten…”

“The other thing is that consultants who are building bespoke projects for clients repeatedly are not exposed To those same challenges, because by virtue of hiring a consultant, the client is essentially saying the Google Gemini built-in tool is not appropriate or sufficient for me. So I'm going to bring Andrew in to…”

“Either you go and you find a big, big nuggets. There's just a couple of them, or you have a river and everybody sits alongside the river and they just, you know, like do this and everybody finds one small gold flake and a day. But if you have a thousand people and they do it every day, it's more than a big nugget a…”

“the world has changed, you know, after Corona, you know, I don't think that people are buying now just, you know, like by phone only or introductions or reference. Always, especially in our industry, there will be some, one technical who will want to try the software.”

“And, and so, you know, like, I think the, if you don't know, if you don't have technical things, what is your, what is your actual secret is your vertical knowledge. You know, and that's, that's, that's, that's the thing, you know, coding at least to MVP, not production, but MVP is like now easy, and anybody can go and…”

“if you don't have an assistant, you are one. And I often get CEOs will talk about wanting to hire a second-in-command And the first thing they need to do is hire a really kickass executive assistant to get a lot of this stuff off their plate to free them up for their unique ability.”

“When you're looking to hire a second in command, it really has to be a true yin and yang relationship for you. So you've got to take a look at the stuff that's on your plate that you love to do, that you get energized from, that you're really, really good at. The stuff that you don't want to give up, you know, the…”

“What you're looking for in a COO is someone who is a very high second and first number. Their second number should be the highest. Their first number should be second highest. So you want someone who's a high follow through, which is putting systems in place before they start something. Even if that system is a really…”

“Write it like an ad that pushes some people away and magnetizes people towards you.”

“your job in the first 90 days is to watch the ripples As they're getting up to speed, you have to watch for all the ripple effects that they cause. Most people miss that. They're so worried about getting the answer, the CEO up to speed that they miss all the things that are happening to the current team and customers…”

“if you're, if you have visitors on websites, those visitors are not your, like, They're not your customers yet. You don't know them. You know who they are. You don't know, like, what's, you don't have a connection with them. But if they're in Messenger, everyone that visits your bot is an active connection, and you…”

“with consumer projects, like, when you have the, uh, like, revenue per user, uh, less than a dollar a year, if you're, like, running ads or something, you have to have millions of users. And that you can get only, like, getting them for free, basically, virally.”

“with service businesses, they have, they don't have a trough in the cash flow model, but with product businesses, they have a very big trough. And by trough, I mean, you know, capital expenditure and outlay before revenues start coming in. So I just paired a service business model with a, ah, a product business model…”

“it's just really powerful to point out actual mistakes instead of going to someone and saying, I'm so good, I can help you. Everyone's first reaction is prove it, right? So it's, it's so much more powerful to go in and identify problems.”

“So instead of me saying those words to them, I ask questions which make them say that to themselves, because it's so much more powerful that way. If I come on and I'm like, I'm so good, I've got this amazing thing for you, it's gonna do all of these things for you, the person's first reaction is, I doubt it, you know.”

“No one buys yoga because they want yoga. No one buys Mixergy because they want Mixergy. They buy it to, to achieve something and to, to get a, to get a desired version of themselves which they've got in their mind.”

“your first impressions were made when you walked into the room, not when you decided to introduce yourself.”

“Well, uh, Steve and I disagree with this about the resistance, but I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem. That trying to make the fear and the lizard brain go away is what distracts us and takes all of our time and energy.”

“The goal of the next thing, it has to be scarier than the last thing, or else we've wasted our platform.”

“by diversifying your identity, say, with one athletic component, one sort of intellectual component, and one professional component, every week can still be a win, and you can gain that sort of positive momentum To do more things.”

“you tend to get more bites with a softer cell, so I always give them an easy way out.”

“As an entrepreneur, you just can't put all your eggs in one platform. You really have to have three or four different platforms, and I don't think we were quick enough to recognize Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, and other platforms we could have, uh, monetized through.”

“I always say the job of the CEO is chief psychologist. You need to be able to hire talented people, but then lead and manage them. The job of a VC, I think, is understanding the psychology of the people you're about to work with.”

“in order to get the level of a collaboration, you often need to align economic interests in some way by allowing them to invest in your firm or by potentially paying them on a monthly basis for their advice.”

“Well, there's a, you want it to be an abnormal time so people aren't late. If it's an, if it's a normal time, people are four minutes late. If it's an abnormal time, then people are right on time.”

“when we raised forty million dollars in, in series B preferred security, which is how you do venture capital, that forty million dollars is now senior in the capitalization structure, which means above, um, all of the common shareholders, which is me, my co-founder, all of the employees, and so if you don't sell for…”

“And so, I think when you get beyond, I think the magic number is a 150 employees, things become, ah, a multiple, ah, things become challenging at a, at a multiple, um, of the degree of difficulty that they were previously in order to drive change within an organization.”

“it generally tends to be that when you get to a scale of about 50 employees, you need these wonderful things called processes and you need these other wonderful things called metrics.”

“When you get to 10 or 15 people, you need to find, ah, the adjectives that describe your culture, and you need to take the time to write down the values.”

“One is, um, hire a chief operating officer. Um, when you get to about 30 employees,”

“And one of the decisions that we made on Reddit is that we don't want to be moderators. It's, it, it doesn't scale very well.”

“Most people have a, uh, have a desire to not look like fools, and so that they work really hard to at least, uh, feign usefulness, um, whether or not they actually have it, and most of them in the, in the process of feigning usefulness build something useful.”

“one of the things I learned on Reddit was, uh, how to not burn out, or I, I should say, like, on Reddit, I burned out a couple times. I just wouldn't get any work done for a while, because I just didn't feel like working on the same thing. And, and, and, you know, one of the experiences is, or one of the lessons is,…”

“So, you know, when you're a really small company, like, you have the opportunity to retell your story many, many times. As long as every time you tell it, there's something different about it.”

“my advice is for people to have already kind of figured out, like, so they already have something going. They've already kind of struggled through an idea and figured it out. I think those are the people that are at the best advantage. And then Paul Graham can, you know, I wouldn't use Wicomery to necessarily figure…”

“Paul Graham says, make something people want, and we kind of, You know, tweak that a little, and our, our, our kind of saying in the company is, make something people need. Like, we absolutely should make something people need”

“Now, if you were the first into the category, that would be a dumb thing to do. But if you're the 20th into the category, and you look like the other guys, it's already over.”

“The difference is once you get going, you have enough reserve that you can fail more quietly Because you can test market. You can put things into a different space.”

“What we've discovered is the lowest paid people in the company are your marketing team now. You have all these airlines, and all these ads, and all these runways, and all these buildings, and it all comes down to one, 18 dollar an hour junior person who decides to make a connection or not with the person on the other…”

“once you start automating a few things, you find that your own brain starts to get, um, better at spotting opportunities because you're like, oh, I remember this other thing I did that was kind of like this. I can probably do this in the same way or the same version of it. Uh, and so it's like a habit. Like, the more…”

“My, my, my approach is I usually do it the manual way first. It's like, I'll usually just like, you know, pop open a new chat, and I'll just start yapping at it. And then if I find myself doing the same thing kind of over and over again, then I'll build like a skill for it.”

“One thing I recommend if you're new to AI coding is to use a proven framework that real coders use that is, uh, you know, has a lot of documentation online so that when you ask it to do things, it's going to do it in its little opinionated way, uh, which will just make your life easier. So when you ask it, can you add…”

“It's an entirely different thing to build a product for other people to use it, like, you know, the, you know, with sort of some sort of symbols of quality and consistency, right? So again, you actually mentioned this, right? You go in, you do it, and eventually you get it, right? It takes many tries. And, you know,…”

“at that moment, uh, if you chopped it down to a bite-sized chunk, like you gave it some amount of, uh, context, That a human being, given the same context and the same prompt, would answer in a certain way. He found that he could, ah, you know, given inputs and outputs, have output that was usable, useful, and…”

“the decision filter is a one pager that has you outline what the project looks like at perfect or at complete. It shows the five success criteria. It shows the ROI. It shows whether you're going to make money or make people happier. It's a great way to hand off a project to somebody because they understand why we're…”

“I think so. You, you don't, you wouldn't believe how married founders get to their idea, and it's easy to go into denial on, you know, whether people actually use it, cause like that's the proof, right? If, if no one is, is coming back to your site, then there's something wrong, and you need to adjust it slightly or…”

“it really taught me a valuable lesson where, like, this valley is small, the internet is, you know, surprisingly connected, and it's really, like, stupid to go judge people without really knowing them, and so I actually really respect him, and, ah, it was interesting to listen to your story with, you know, when we were…”

“certainly there is this executive amplitude or leaders amplitude where people are afraid to come to you and tell you things. And so you just have to proactively reach out and be extremely friendly and do skip level meetings and things like that.”

“I think the, uh, the biggest example is just how much time is spent logging into a financial tool, downloading some sort of data, massaging it, and then uploading it into a traditional accounting system. That is so much of what, uh, bookkeepers are, are doing today.”