Building @wideframeai (YC W26). Previously bought 1B in ads for tech companies. Always learning. Almost always having fun.

Joined February 2009
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Wideframe just launched on @ycombinator! Do hours of video work in minutes with @wideframeai. Check out our launch: ycombinator.com/launches/PUI…
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Every problem we attribute to billionaires is because of land use policy.
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
I’ve always felt that abundance makes excellence relatively rarer. Today I figured out why exactly. And it’s not doomer news, because it makes excellence also more likely:
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"its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available." they always find a way to slip in a little zest for things to come
Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use. Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.
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Make Something People Want or else...
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
Good take My guess is - demand for intelligence is near infinite - but 80% of workloads will be running on 99% cheaper models within 12-18 months - 20% of workloads will still run on latest gen models where IQ maxing is important (scientific breakthroughs, higher level ochestrator agents?) - rough analogy might be what % of macbooks or gaming PCs sold have the maxed out specs for CPU/GPU, prices are falling much faster than Moore's law here though - this leads me to think the limiting factor will be energy and compute, not better models At Coinbase we're working hard on routing prompts to cheaper models where appropriate, and in some cases have been able to keep costs roughly flat, while token usage continues to grow exponentially.
The most basic way AI could blow up imo. I'm not saying it does but this is the most obvious way I can see it happening - Per seat subscriptions are massively subsidized. The flat fee was priced way below what heavy usage actually costs - For real business use you have to move to the API anyway. Data protections, work integrations and compliance officer approval - On the API you pay metered rates, and businesses are burning credits way faster than the per seat pricing ever led them to expect - This is everywhere right now. Internally for us, Codex users, Uber torching its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months, the Microsoft comments. Just go try an API I shared more on this here: x.com/Shaughnessy119/status/… - And I don't think most businesses have the money to keep paying increasing API rates without a real change to how they operate (caps needed) - Because they have a cheap alternative. They can reach open source models through any aggregator (OpenRouter, Venice, Baseten, Together) and still get strong privacy. Venice private data centers, or E2EE/TEE serving GLM 5.1. More on open source inference provider raises here: x.com/Shaughnessy119/status/… - And the discount is enormous. DeepSeek V4 codes within a hair of Opus on SWE bench at roughly 1/30th the price, and the cheapest open models run closer to 1/100th - Chinese labs open source frontier grade models. The model is the single biggest cost an inference provider has, and they get it for free - This idea dies if China goes closed source. That is actually bullish web2 AI labs, because if everyone is closed you pay up for the best intelligence. China goes closed source if they are tired of giving away an asset and they want the revenue and data flow to train new models - Is this showing up in web2 AI lab revenue yet? No. Revenue is off the charts. Anthropic went from 9B to 47B run rate in five months - So go forward, what happens? - I think revenue slowly starts leaking to the open source inference providers (see Venice usage, OpenRouter's $113M raise, Baseten is raising at $11B or triple its valuation in three months, on revenue that went from $200M to $600M annualized in a single quarter) - It doesnt move overnight, but it caps the labs ability to raise prices, and margins are already deeply negative. OpenAI is reportedly running near negative 122% - With margins that bad there is no cash flow, so the labs are fully dependent on outside capital to buy GPUs, train models, and keep subsidizing usage (I.e. see Google tapping $80b equity sale, granted 30b for employee RSU taxes. Clearly they think Equity is overvalued or you wouldn't sell it) - The break comes when that capital stops. Pricing is capped so margins cant improve, and the moment investors lose conviction on payback, the whole flow reverses - Why would they lose conviction on payback? Back to the start - the inability to improve margins or get businesses to pay more - This is also limiting, if we start making new drugs with AI or create entirely new businesses, you better believe people will pay up to the max for AI usage
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
Distribution is the new moat
I think the challenge is that everyone can now build apps But 1) almost nobody has distribution (like an audience), or 2) the money to pay for distribution (ads or UGC), or 3) the creative genius to get distribution for free (classically called guerilla marketing)
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Time for a new anniversary edition
Replying to @AnthropicAI
Today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did compared to 2021-2025.
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. radar.cloudflare.com/traffic…
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
Having high standards for clarity is useful in lots of other kinds of work too. It's very useful when I'm advising startups at Y Combinator. I ask founders what they plan to do. Their initial answer is a muddy pool. Then we make it clear — not just what to say, but what to do.
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
The most important component of writing clearly is simply to have high standards for clarity. Then if you write something unclear, you notice, and ask: what did I mean to say? You can just keep doing this over and over. And if you have high standards for clarity, you will.
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Super interesting data and sort of wild to think that the current market is "normal"
San Francisco home prices by neighborhood Looking at prices over long term (2000 to april 2026) this AI boom is a reversion to pre-covid trend rather than new inflection. At least so far What's really notable is how SOMA and mission have fallen off since 2016 and not recovered
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With these massive private rounds now done, is there any possibility of OAI or Anthropic going public via direct listings?
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@spenserskates someone sent me this earlier in the week trying to validate whether their retention was good or not.. curious your thoughts or whether this is like an SEO blog post or something: amplitude.com/blog/7-percent… 93% user churn after a week seems insanely high to me in nearly every segment. how could one build a business off of that leaky of a bucket? Or is this post saying you need to convert 7% of leads into customers quickly or something? The post is very confusing as it uses retention and activation interchangeably throughout in reference to the 7%. contrast this post with this too: lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-…
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you can dm me too :) this was not meant as critique, just genuine interest and I want to make sure folks (me included) know what Amplitude's data suggests!
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Idk ya’ll I think it’s kind of cool
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
The best advisors invest. Anyone asking for just advisor shares is telling you what they actually think your company is worth.
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
1% of assets sounds small. But if you're compounding at 7% per year, a 1% fee actually costs you 14.3% of your returns each year. Here's a chart illustrating the idea we talked about on our Vanguard episode.
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Daniel Pearson retweeted
I was once told by @ericvishria that there are people who do work and people who create work. Excited for more doers!
AI isn’t going to take all jobs. But it will fulfill the prophesy of Peter Drucker from 71 years ago: more builders, more sellers, fewer measurers. wsj.com/opinion/how-i-choose…
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The bull case for SaaS is that AI expands software TAM so much that it serves as a tailwind for everyone in software, not just The Labs™️. Abundance mindset has always resulted in the biggest returns. Is this time different? Probably not.
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Example: Spotify (consumer SaaS) AI tailwinds x.com/Techmeme/status/205501…

Sources: Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital told its stakeholders that it has invested ~$100M in Shopify, framed as a bet on how AI could lead to gains in commerce (@nmasc_ / Bloomberg) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
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