Direction often outperforms straight effort

Imagine being hook up all day🤣🤣🤣

These guys @_HermesAgent @Teknium really are working in another dimension. I’m constantly blown away at the depth and breadth of support and thorough updates. Truly executing at the highest level

I think the world needs fewer SaaS companies. That's not a popular thing to say when the barrier to building one just dropped to zero. Vibe coding made it possible for anyone to ship a product over a weekend. That's cool. But what I'm seeing is thousands of micro-SaaS products solving the same narrow problems with slightly different UIs, and nobody competing hard enough to actually build something great. This was a problem before vibe coding, though. The fragmentation started with how venture capital selects founders. VC firms love writing thought leadership about their founder selection process. Reading some of these posts, you'd think they've developed some kind of divination ritual for identifying generational talent. That skill does exist. I've talked to people at firms who have real hypotheses and track records picking great founders. But a lot of the time, a firm needs deal flow, or they have a thesis about an industry and there aren't many people building in it, or the timing is just right and someone's in the room. There are a hundred reasons someone gets funded, and "this person is an exceptional operator" is only one of them. Not every venture-backed founder is some sort of ubermensch. Problem is that founding a VC-backed company has the highest ROI of almost any career move in tech. Maybe it doesn't work out. Maybe you pay yourself $120k for five years and the company folds. But even then, you've built a network you'd never have access to otherwise. You've connected with investors, operators, other founders. You can go get a job at a VC firm. You can put "CEO/Founder" on your resume and land a senior role at another company. As long as you don't screw anybody over (sometimes even this isn't an issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and do your best for however long it runs, your outcomes are almost certainly better than someone who optimized for less upside. So I get why everyone wants to be a founder. The math works individually. But zoom out and the collective result is thousands of funded companies building marginal improvements on problems that don't matter that much, staffed by people who could be contributing to something bigger. Now think about what happens when you add AI to this. The pic included is what's what's happening to SaaS. LLMs are trained on the open internet. That's the substrate. When you use that brain to design products, to write copy, to build features, everything converges toward the same middle. The same UI patterns, the same messaging, the same feature sets. I'll use my own company as an example. AirOps helps brands rank and get cited in AI conversations. A lot of companies in our space sell prompt tracking, which is fine, but the technique to track AI prompts is a commodity at this point. Anybody can build that over a weekend. And people do. I watch new AI visibility companies pop up constantly. But tracking prompts isn't the hard part. The hard part is the years of data, the techniques baked into the product that help you actually turn visibility into outcomes. Stuff that takes time and reps to build, not a weekend. Every time I see someone spin up another AI visibility tool, I think: why would you start something with that low a chance of success when you could come build something generational at a company that already has the foundation? But that's the system working as designed. The incentives say "start something," not "join something." I'm not saying the people building them are bad, or that there's no room for competition. But the system optimizes for the ask, not the answer. And now that building is nearly free and the AI doing the building is pulling from the same data, we're getting more asks than ever, and they're all converging. I don't have a clean solution. I just think it's worth noticing that "more companies" and "better products" aren't the same thing, and we've been conflating them for a long time.

💯💯💯💯

I appreciate the frustration here and the agency it took to fact check all these lames 🫡

the means of learning are more abundant than ever. its the desire to learn thats scarce man

the only true test of intelligence is that you get that you want out of life x @naval

Choose inspiration over envy.

ALEX FINNed Up

Had this looping last night didn’t even turn the bowl on

respect and resonate w/ the duh DIY mentality

Cooking

bro this shit just made me wreck

Dope dealss Solving Hard Problems in Complex Codebases – Dex Horth... youtu.be/rmvDxxNubIg?si=VXhD… via @YouTube

locked in big dawg 🫡☂️📊 @ryancarson