🚨 Some Personal News 🚨 I’m thrilled to FINALLY lift the suspense 👀 and share more about my next move Beyond pumped to share that I'm joining @Netlify as “Head of Community” to continue my life's work: empowering MORE builders and developers to push MORE ideas to the world 🌎 Pinch me because.. this is a dream role (you’ll see why in the story below) It's an incredible honor as I will get to work with @biilmann and the Netlify team who serve a community of 9m developers today and are gearing up to welcome millions more in the coming years Here's the story of how al of this came about ⤵️

The most important piece in this writing is: “A couple days later I was talking to the founder of a startup I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth. Later that day I was talking about her case online, and someone replied that having a few million and growing at 93% a month was radically different from being a billionaire. I suspect many people would agree with this statement. But it turns out not merely to be false, but false in a very illuminating way. So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you. I'm going to have you do the most common kind of calculation I do as an investor, and the experience will bring home to you what startups are all about. If we interpret his statement in the most conservative way and assume that a few means 2, her company has to grow 500x for her to become a billionaire. So we are going to calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 500x. To do this we want to calculate the log base 1.93 of 500. The easiest way to do that is to go to Google search, which lets you do calculations right in the search box. So go to Google search and type log(500, 1.93). If you typed that right, the answer you get is about 9.45. That is how many months of 93% growth it takes to become a billionaire, starting from 2 million. A couple million and 93% growth are not, in fact, radically different from a billion. They're nine and a half months apart. Now you see why, when I meet a founder, the first thing I ask about is their growth rate. But I don't want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let's take a more conservative growth rate. Let's see what happens at 15% a month. That's not rare at all. I constantly encounter startups growing at 15% a month. If your revenues grow at 15% a month, how much more will you be making 5 years from now? To calculate that, we need to find 1.15 to the 60th power (since 5 years is 60 months). So go to Google again and this time type 1.15^60. The answer should be about 4384. Meaning in 5 years your startup will be making 4384 times as much. If you're currently making ten thousand a month, in five years you'll be making about 44 million a month, or 526 million a year. And at that point, if you own as much of the company as founders typically do, you will be a billionaire.”

Beautiful

STORY TIME: In 2008, a rocket company working out of a warehouse was three failures from dead. Today it flies more often than every other launcher on Earth combined, carries astronauts, and just became the most valuable company ever to go public at $1.77 trillion. This is how SpaceX rewrote access to space. The bet from day one: build almost every part in house. Aerospace had always bought from suppliers and moved slowly. SpaceX chose to control the whole stack instead. That meant they could push the cost down and iterate fast, answering to no one. It nearly killed them first. Falcon 1 failed three times. Engine fire. Loss of control. Stages colliding after separation. By the third, the company was almost out of money in the middle of the 2008 crash. Flight four reached orbit. The first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket ever to do it. A $1B NASA resupply contract followed and kept the lights on. Then the cost curve broke open. Falcon 9 became the most-launched rocket in the world and dropped the price of reaching orbit from $54,500 per kilogram to roughly $2,700. Cheaper space stopped being a pitch and became a fact. The milestones stacked up: • 2015: first rocket booster landed and reflown. Reusability went from punchline to standard. • 2020: first private company to fly humans to orbit. • Starlink: 6M subscribers beaming internet from low orbit, now most of the company’s $18.7B in 2025 revenue. Now the frontier moves again. SpaceX has filed to launch 1 million solar-powered satellites: a data center in orbit, drawing energy straight from the sun, off the grid entirely. The idea is that space becomes the cheapest place on or off Earth to run AI. None of it works without Starship, the fully reusable heavy-lift rocket built to carry 100 tons and, eventually, people to Mars. Blue Origin and Google are chasing the same future. Only SpaceX has the rocket flying at the scale it needs. One warehouse. Three failed launches. A company that almost folded in 2008. 24 years later, the largest IPO in history, and a road to Mars that runs through orbit. $SPCX

One of the reasons I love America 🇺🇸 The audacity to dream big and pursue it for 24 years is rewarded immensely by the financial system in place No other country comes close Aim for the stars ⭐️

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Amazing week of #HotAppSummer Nearly tripled the submissions from last Friday to today Here are the winners 🏆 👇 of this week

AI Gateway is one of my fav @Netlify features netlify.com/platform/ai-gate…

ICYMI: Check out our livestream where we reviewed #HotAppSummer latest impressive submissions, last week winners and celebrated builders 🎉 Live shoutouts start at 22:03 and include: @davidvkimball @buildwithmaya @AshAmplifies Kush @halfmage @NealFrazierTech @markbowley and more

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Woooooahhh What an epic build! Kudos @MisbahSy

S-tier launch video terrific work @googrish now I am extra invested in the product

AI used to be magic 🪄 The narrative around it was inspiring and magical Somewhere along the last few years we lost our way The next generation is counting on us to tell stories of hope and inclusion Reject pessimism Encourage folks to build with AI Techno optimism is the way to go

Join us - we are talking about #HotAppSummer and latest in AI (ie Claude Fable)

Stoked to have hunted @praneethpike’s @slashspaceai (again) on @ProductHunt 🚀 World-class founder with a world-class product for power users of AI who think visually Go check it out & support today: producthunt.com/products/sla…

The best AI builders don’t have secret prompts. They have better context. In this clip, @domitriusclark and @awamstad discuss why great results come from knowing how to combine tools, workflows, skills, MCPs, and platform capabilities into a repeatable process. Prompting is just one piece of the puzzle. 👇

“The sheer amount of creativity velocity is mindblowing.” Couldn’t agree more I have a feeling the best is yet to come