Some musings on crypto and morality on the web. I first met Jackson 4-5 years ago when Privy was embryonic and he was diving into crypto after 100 thieves. We've had a huge number of conversations since across so many topics -- loved recording one of them!

Damn I am extremely Claude CoWork pilled I think I can probably cut 5-6h of my work per week with this and the @rabois-style calendar audit can now happen automatically List out my top 3-4 priorities, and Claude can check if my time allocation matches to those So cool

if you are feeling ai technology is moving too fast pls clear some room in your calendar or on weekends to learn about these tools soon in a few months, there will be a new capabilities jump (~ Sept) preparedness is key

I get that business insurance is similar Nobel level type of pursuit as ground breaking physics and the Manhattan project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained. I don’t think the disagreement is whether hard problems require intensity. The disagreement is whether intensity has to become a permanent operating model, and whether working seven days a week is the thing that compounds. My argument is that for most startups, the real compounding advantage is not raw hours. It is clearer thinking, better judgment, learning, and a team that can sustain high-quality work for a long time. You can always spend a lot of time working, but the PMF might never arrive. There are moments where extraordinary effort is necessary. Launches, incidents, existential deadlines, customer commitments. Those moments matter, and great teams rise to them. But if the company requires heroics every day of the eek, that usually points to a system problem. It means the operating model depends on burning reserve capacity instead of building it. Company that is constantly on fire is company that is not operating well. Whenever you put something out there, people will argue and people can argue the way I run Linear. The reason I comment on these things to offer some counter point. There is a growing cliché in startup culture where founders and startups feel the need to perform intensity publicly. How hard they work, how little they sleep, how many tokens they spend, how busy they are, how much personal sacrifice they make. You almost never see this from the most successful companies or people. Even if they work that way, they usually don’t make it the story, because they have more important things to talk about, like the product, the customers, the insight, the strategy, the quality of the work. That’s my issue with the narrative and why I think startups shouldn't blindly follow it. Not that is bad to work hard but grindmaxxing narrative can become the greater goal and become counterproductive. The performative intensity becomes the thing, and loosing sight of what actually matters. Lets check back in 7 years.

“We are at risk of having an event on the scale of the Industrial Revolution where most of the new output is invisible even as businesses spend increasingly large amounts on AI services.”

Who is in charge? Would love to join.

The main question for AI-driven PE rollups is if they can actually accelerate growth. Margin expansion is obvious—assume AI automation can cut costs in the value chain. But how many PE-focused industries will *meaningfully* accelerate growth as a result of AI adoption?

Eli Lilly has done it. They've gone and made what seems to be a powerful, permanent gene therapy for LDL cholesterol. That means they'll be able to effectively prevent most heart disease with a single infusion!

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing: • Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many. • It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest. • The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take. • Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions. • AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider. • Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested. • There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

Nobody actually buys new Aeron chairs in SF. Every Aeron chair was created in a one-time Big Bang event during the first dotcom boom in 1999, and has been passed along from failed to new startup in an uninterrupted 30 year chain. It’s the Law of Conservation of Aeron.

TRANSCRIBE: ASK A TRANSCRIPT Every transcript page on usetranscribe now has a chat box. Ask it anything about the content. Type a question, get a streamed answer in seconds. Clickable timestamps inline: tap and the page jumps to that moment. The result: every transcript is now a queryable knowledge base. We made three product decisions here: • Open by default. Hiding the search box kills adoption. The drawer sits docked at the bottom, visible the moment the page loads. • Streamed answers. Tokens arriving feel fast. A 3-second wait feels slow. Same latency, different perceived speed. • Cite or don't say it. The model only references timestamps that actually appear in the transcript. We strip any hallucinated [M:SS] before sending. My goal is to build usetranscribe IO into the definitive home for every transcript on the Internet. Paste any YouTube or Spotify URL and we transcribe it, summarize it, and let you (or your agent) ask it questions. Free, no signup. There's a documented agent API at /AGENTS.md. Founders building knowledge tools: Every captured hour of long-form content becomes usable in seconds.

Most of us would gain 100x more from re-reading the original June '24 “Situational Awareness” essays vs trying to infer positions from their most recent 13F. Perhaps the most prescient analysis in the history of tech.

Two things coming soon that now seem inevitable: 1. An AGI Manhattan project; not nationalization, but some form of organized public-private JV 2. Labs and hyperscalers will soon pay locals to get datacenters built, effectively AI-driven UBI Both widely held POVs in SF.

Built a tiny search agent for my wife, then forked it for myself. @ExaAILabs for discovery, Vercel for the app cron, @neondatabase for memory dedupe, @resend for alerts. Not an “AI app.” Just a specific workflow and a private agent that quietly does useful work.

New tagline for @AnthropicAI: “Claude, the AI for keeping consumer energy costs low.”

On track for today’s Starship flight test. The launch window is from 5:30 p.m. CT – 7 p.m. CT and live coverage starts ~45 minutes before launch

Antonio Garcias has thirty entities invested in SpaceX. In case you were wondering what truly going long looks like