founder of @spec (hiring, DM me!) // prev yc w19 (acq)
Joined November 2014
- Tweets 2,652
- Following 1,056
- Followers 2,388
- Likes 43,555
197 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
2 Oct 2025
Your Mac just got a brain. đź§
Spec proactively drafts replies, summarizes docs, and helps before you ask. It connects knowledge and memory across iMessage, Slack, email, and your calendar, finally making your apps work together.
Goodbye silos and context switching.
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Ben Taylor retweeted
Jun 8
Prediction markets need a fun button
Introducing Daily
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Apr 21
Congrats to the legend himself @Harryoc493!
Apr 21
Welcome 2026 Thiel Fellows!
WHO ARE THEY?
Victor Boyd: Birmingham, AL - @VictorWBoyd
Cavalla is on a mission to get anything anywhere in under 5 hours. Starting by building autonomous forklifts, through to developing hypersonic highways.
Samuel Carvalho: Recife, Brazil - @samuelclcc
Praso is building the new infrastructure for wholesale commerce — powering procurement, credit, and workflow tools for SMBs across underserved areas in Brazil.
Nick Dobroshinsky: Sammamish, WA - @NDobroshinsky
EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the entire U.S. stock market, including the thousands of smaller companies Wall Street ignores.
Ishan Gupta: Kanpur, India - @ishangpta
Juicebox is building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions. Agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy.
Antoni Kiszka: StrzyĹĽowice, Poland - @antoni_kiszka
Derpetual is building the infrastructure to create a market for any asset — with leverage.
Milan Lustig: Cold Spring Harbor, NY - @HighPriestOfSWO
Opt32 is building modern compute infrastructure to put AI onboard objects in the physical world — from robots to cars and drones.
Galen Mead: Chapel Hill, NC - @g413n
Standard Intelligence is building aligned general learners, pretraining large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet.
Aubrey Niederhoffer: New York, NY - @needaubrey
Swoop is building the super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services across the continent.
Harry O'Connor: Cork, Ireland - @HarryOC493
Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments.
Alex Shieh: Salem, NH - @alexkshieh
The Antifraud Company is a fraud bounty hunter defending American taxpayers with AI and investigative journalism.
Claire Wang: Los Angeles, CA - @clairebookworm
Claire is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans. Developing a simulated brain that researchers can communicate with helps lay the foundation for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.
Kyler Wang: Portland, OR - @kylerywang
Action is an artificial intelligence company in stealth.
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Ben Taylor retweeted
Mar 11
Introducing Fort, a wearable that automatically tracks strength training.
Strength training is one of the best things you can do for your health and longevity. It deserves better tools.
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Ben Taylor retweeted
Feb 26
everyone just keeps building the same thing:
2024: deep research and “operator” (browser clickers)
2025: actual browsers and prompt-to-app
2026: some version of openclaw
there’s a lot of alpha in original product thinking while big labs (and many startups too) are all busy building identical products
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Feb 7
running coding agents overnight and waking up to see what disaster they created is the new checking your drunk texts
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Feb 6
If your emotional state is a direct pipeline to your MRR dashboard you need to log off and touch grass not raise a Series A
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Feb 5
I don’t miss being bored. I miss being bored without feeling guilty about it. Now, if you’re not doing something you feel like you’re wasting potential, which is a terrible way to live.
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Feb 4
We’re surrounded by optimization
But almost no one is optimizing for peace
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Feb 3
The question what do you do in SF is never about what you actually do...
It's about whether what you do could eventually help them do what they do
The whole thing is a trap
If you say anything with the word associate or junior you might as well have said unemployed
But if you mention anything that sounds like ownership or founding suddenly they're asking follow-ups
Oh, what's your traction
Oh, who's on your cap table
Oh, have you thought about enterprise
I watched someone at Starbucks ask a guy what he does and the guy said he's a teacher and I swear the first guy just said oh and then stared at his phone until the conversation died
No shame, no subtlety, just immediate disinterest
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Feb 2
When you've poured everything into something, every piece of feedback stops sounding like help and starts sounding like someone telling you your kid is ugly. So you defend instead of listen and the people around you notice. They stop saying what's actually broken because watching you spiral isn't worth it.
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Jan 30
having a car is insane because it’s literally Claude code for going places
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Jan 29
Don't think people are scared of AI because it’s dumb. They're scared because it’s competent enough to sound right while being subtly wrong. If you already know the domain, you catch it instantly and move on. If you don’t, you walk away more confident than you should be. That’s how the gap widens. Not intelligence vs stupidity, but people who can smell when something’s off versus people who assume polish equals truth.
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Jan 28
I once saw my ability to live anywhere as adaptability. In reality, I was good at enduring distance from loved ones and framing it as drive.
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Jan 27
The fastest teams aren’t talking more, they’re repeating themselves less. That’s not culture, that’s tooling.
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Jan 26
Treating models like interchangeable batteries is why your product feels dumb
You wouldn’t hire one person to do every job, so why do this with AI...
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Jan 23
The biggest YC shock isn’t speed, it’s accountability. A week with nothing to show feels embarrassing. At big companies, that same week would’ve been six meetings and a doc. Different worlds...
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Jan 22
I spent my teens at McDonald’s; it sounds silly to say, but it taught me more about team collaboration than any high-paying tech role ever could.
At McD’s, there is zero room for ego. You don't get "Individual Contributor" awards while the drive-thru line is stalled. You either win as a unit or you drown in the rush.
A lot of people in big tech and hot startups are only interested in their individual accolades and personal recognition, then wonder why things move slow or fail. You win or lose as a unit. Tech could use more of that mindset.
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