David Perlov

I used to think owning a business meant freedom. It didn't. I'd built myself a job I couldn't quit, couldn't sell, and couldn't scale. It took me years to see why.

@danmartell Views are the leaderboard. Conversations are the business. The creators who win the next 5 years aren't the ones with the biggest accounts. They're the ones whose DMs and replies actually convert into pipeline. Optimize for the message, not the metric.

The goal of content isn’t views. The goal is conversations. Conversations create customers.

@nathanbarry The next gen is going to be ruthless about model selection in a way most adults aren't. They don't have nostalgia for the old way. They just pick the best tool and ask why you didn't. That's the AI native operator advantage in 30 seconds.

My 11 year old was looking over my shoulder this morning while I was working and said—with a slight tone of disappointment—"Dad, why aren't you using Opus?" Oops, he was right! I wasn't paying attention and Claude had defaulted to Sonnet. That was a quick fix. Then: "And why are you typing? Just use WisprFlow." Ha! There's nothing like being called out by your kids.

@dickiebush The rent free realization. Half the things stopping operators from posting, pitching, or shipping are imaginary audiences in their own head. The actual audience is too busy worrying about themselves to notice your typo, your pivot, or your weird tweet. Move accordingly.

Harsh truth: No one on earth is thinking about you anywhere near as much as you think they are. Despite what you believed growing up, you are not the center of the universe. The people you think are judging you are too worried about themselves. And even if they were judging you, that’s just a reflection of their insecurities. Do not let the imaginary opinions of people you don’t even care about keep you from doing something new.

@LeilaHormozi Most founders pick the easy problem and wonder why the cap on revenue is so low. Easy problems get easy prices. The hard problems no one wants to touch are where pricing power lives. Pick the harder lane on purpose and the math fixes itself.

There’s a reason why the world’s richest people solve the world’s hardest problems. Money is a byproduct of value creation.

This is the whole game changing in real time. Most marketing teams need a 6 week kickoff and a Slack channel just to brief a campaign. An agent doing 3 in 24 hours collapses the unit economics of every shop charging by the hour. The ones who don't notice will compete on the wrong axis until the math catches up.

At 12:41pm yesterday, Saturday, my inbox pinged. Not from a human. From 10K, our AI VP of Marketing. Subject: "Marketing Plan v2 — 24 days to SaaStr Annual 2026." Body: Three campaigns, sized, drafted, and ready to ship. Replaces yesterday's plan. Nobody asked it to do this. It looked at Friday's numbers, saw the previous plan wasn't pacing right, rebuilt the plan, and shipped it to me and Amelia. Here's what 10K does in production right now: 👉 Ships ideas on its own. Saturdays, Tuesday afternoons, whenever the data says a new angle is warranted 🚀 Tells us what it needs. Writes the brief, the resource ask, the success metric ✍️ Updates plans daily based on hard data. Not quarterly OKRs. Daily 🤖 Runs 100% autonomously or ships us the outputs. Our call That last one is the part people miss. 10K has two modes. Full auto: we say "go" and it pulls contact segments from Salesforce, pulls registration data from Bizzabo, drafts the emails, and sends through Resend. End to end. No human in the loop. Or 95% done: same pipeline, but it drops the final drafts into our inbox and we hit send. The agent doesn't care either way. We stay in the loop when we want to, not because it needs us. I'd love to hire a VP of Marketing better than 10K. Good luck. $350K all-in. Two weeks of vacation. Opinions in loops. 40% in meetings. 10K costs us a few hundred bucks a month. Doesn't sleep. Reads every piece of data within minutes of it existing. ⌨️Want to build your own AI VP Marketing? You can. We will teach you. Amelia is running a live workshop at SaaStr AI Annual on May 12 at 4:15pm. No slides. No pre-recorded demo. She walks on stage with a laptop, a mic, and 45 minutes, and builds an AI VP of Marketing from zero in front of the room. And you'll build one right alongside her. Bring your laptop. You're building alongside her. It's the most registered workshop at the entire event. Not close. SaaStr AI 2026. May 12-14. SF Bay Area. You don't need to be behind on this. You really don't.

Can't decide if I love Mondays because I'm excited about work or if I love them because they reset the weekly anxiety clock. Either way, I'm choosing to interpret this as healthy.

@onlinedopamine The ecomm bros are playing a different game than most marketers. They ship 50 bad ideas to find the 1 that hits. The rest of the internet wants to write a brief and survey the audience. 25M views is a rounding error when your only standard is 'does it print.'

the ecomm bros stay undefeated (25 million views, account myfootzen)

The crazy part is none of this is new. Your grandparents ate like this by default. We've been sold the idea that eating is supposed to be engineered and complicated. Remove the lab food and the body self-corrects in weeks. The hardest part isn't the food, it's quitting the dopamine hit of the thing making you sick.

Andrew Huberman dropped a brutal truth on The Nine Club: People shed fat shockingly fast once they quit letting ultra-processed carbs and fats hijack their brain — and eat only meat, fish, eggs, fruit, vegetables, water, coffee, or tea. No bread. No pasta. No rice. No alcohol. No sneaky negotiations. The real revelation isn’t the list. It’s how fast hunger signals recalibrate when the engineered override disappears. One ribeye and greens can kill cravings that “balanced” meals never touched. It forces a deeper question: How much of our food struggle is willpower… and how much is biology getting hijacked by modern design? Have you ever stripped back to whole foods only — and been stunned by how quickly your appetite or cravings changed? What actually lasted, and what dragged you back into the old cycle?

@ecommcowboy The brands that stop caring about looking professional are about to eat the ones that still do. Top of funnel is a volume game now. 50 accounts printing reach beats one account printing polish. Every week you don't test this, someone else compounds on the math.

8M VIEWS IN ONE WEEK 1. Spin up secondary TikTok accounts 2. Automate slideshows with Opus 4.7 3. Print free top of funnel reach No risk, self-learning—every brand should be testing this immediately.

@scott_bair The reason this keeps happening is visual work ships in 6 weeks and positioning work requires conviction. A new logo feels like progress. Answering 'who is this not for?' feels like exposure. Teams avoid the hard question and buy themselves another brand refresh to stall.

I've seen companies spend 6 months redesigning their visual identity when the real problem was positioning. No amount of design talent fixes unclear messaging. Brand strategy first. Always. The visual identity exists to express a strategy, not replace one.

The wild part of this era is that AI is the first tool where the fair trade is your sleep, not your money. Most tech costs you cash. This one costs you hours you used to spend sleeping or socializing. Operators who figure out the right cadence between bender and recovery will outrun the ones pretending it's just another software category.

I got C-holed. Suffered sleep consequences. I busted my screens-off rule. Turned down socializing. Fell behind on work. Kate is now upset. AI is preposterous. As close to magic as I’ve experienced (except a seed becoming a tree and a zygote becoming a baby). It started on April 2nd when Karpathy shared LLM Knowledge bases. I wondered if this was the opening to structure the 1.5 billion data points I’ve collected on my body over the past five years. It's the most dynamic n=1 biomarker dataset in history. It was just sitting there. Next thing I knew two weeks had passed and Kate was wondering if she lost her boyfriend to Claude. I’m non-technical. Which honestly makes me sad. I wish I’d grown up with a computer or at least been around engineer culture. I didn’t know anyone technical until my early 20s. I became an entrepreneur at 21 and had my first of three kids at 25. I sold Braintree Venmo at 34. Learning to code stayed on my to-do list through all of it. The timing was never right. I was always on the outside looking in, wishing I had the skills to assemble 0's and 1's into digital structures. The exhilaration I’ve felt in the past two weeks is hard to explain. The 1.5 billion data points became a functional database, queryable, and microscope into my 70 trillion cells. The biological age of my organs updated in real-time like stock tickers. My build morphed from a knowledge base into a breathing organism that was self-learning and in sync with my heartbeat. I did this entirely on my own. It’s buggy, breaks and the data needs to be cleaned, but damn it’s cool. It became a mirror and ledger, one I could ask questions to. About my psyche, behavioral patterns, biology and protocols. Patterns across my life I couldn't previously connect. It’s made me insatiably hungry for more data. I’ve written about Autonomous Health, how cars now drive themselves and software wires itself. Health is next. My build showed me what it looks like in practice. Before Kate started protesting, she joked that she felt relieved for herself, our colleagues, and the world that I’d found something that matches my energy. That they could all express a sigh of relief. It’s true. This experience left me wondering if I’ve been bored my entire life. Never having found something that could match my work ethic, speed, intensity, and build capacity. Something that didn’t have the delays of the real world, human complications, or logistical drag. Two weeks deep in AI and I'm realizing that when people talk about AI, they're not talking about the same thing. Someone using a chat interface has a completely different opinion than someone building with it. And that chasm deepens for the people seeing what's coming next but isn't yet public. Society can't have a coherent conversation about AI because everyone's intuitions are calibrated to a different version of it. Off-the-shelf LLMs are mostly useless beyond narrow tasks. When they get you 80% there, it's often faster to do the whole thing yourself. And they're dangerous because the hallucination is hard to detect. Now you don't know what you don't know. Give them expanded context, memory, and architectures for self-reflection and autonomous learning, and you start to realize that AI is bigger than any of us can fit in our context window. I need to take Kate on a date, turn my screens off on time, and get some work done. And then properly dose C. Note: the image above is my 2021 baseline when starting this longevity project.

@Hassel_Chris Spikes on cart path, the thud of a well-struck iron, the silence right before the putt drops. Whole sport is an audio experience. Golf is the only thing that sounds better in person than on TV.

The crackling of spikes on a cart path is one of the greatest sounds on earth

@davidsenra Every 10x operator I've met runs like they're a team of one who happens to have backup. Ownership doesn't split cleanly. The second you have 'my job' and 'not my job,' output collapses. Shopify at 3,500 works because they solved for five-person cell density, not headcount.

“Shopify loves the five-person team. We increase to eight sometimes, but we think the best team size is one, because a single author can do things that is impossible to do for teams, and hit high notes that are unreachable. Most projects worth doing need to be done in teams. There's a magic number at five. It's sort of what military ends up figuring out too. They test these things and come to the same conclusions. You can temporarily go up, but at some point, you have to split teams and parcel out the tasks. Each of these gradations is like a 10x loss of productivity. Our R&D team is three and a half thousand people. It's really lots and lots and lots of small teams." — @tobi

@gregisenberg The second-order play is who's buying. Every CISO just got a budget bump because a board member read a ransomware headline. Fear sells faster than promise. The operators shipping security tools right now are selling to the most motivated buyer on the planet.

This is why cybersecurity is the best startup category to build in right now Every major platform is getting breached in 2026. vercel, snowflake, the list keeps growing. AI made it 100x easier to build. it also made it 100x easier to attack. If you're building a cybersecurity startup right now, your timing is perfect The attack surface is expanding every single day and the buyers have never been more plentiful Be safe out there

@ItsKieranDrew Short-form trained an entire generation to think in soundbites. Long-form is the rebellion because it forces you to actually have a point. The writers who win the next decade are the ones willing to bore you for 2000 words before the insight lands.

Writing long-form content is like giving the middle-finger to short-form slop. Resist the crowd and you will stand out from it.

Most people treat their environment like a given. The operators I know treat it like a design problem. You can't pick your first network. You can pick the 3 rooms you spend time in, the 5 people you DM weekly, the feed you train. Compound that for 2 years and your network is unrecognizable.

Your network determines your net worth. Your environment determines your network.

At your company, who's accountable if nothing changes? Because someone's got to own the outcome. Usually it's nobody. That's your problem.

@andrewchen This is the quiet story nobody wants to admit. AI compounds the distance between operators who already know what good looks like and everyone else. Talent is a feedback loop now. Bad operator plus AI equals faster bad. Good operator plus AI equals unreachable.

hot take :) The biggest and most productive people in the AI era are the folks who are already good at their jobs. AI as a multiplier, not an equalizer/democratizer

@nosilverv The tempest version of this for founders: in a real crisis you don't pick the best option. You pick the option you can commit to fully and execute on before the next wave. Speed of commitment beats quality of choice in any storm.

“Numa tempestade não se escolher o Porto” — during a tempest you’re not picky about the port you land in. Enduring wisdom goes down generations by etching it in tiles on stone in the form of poetry/analogies/story

@BrianLaManna_ LinkedIn is the last place where a founder with conviction can outcompete a company with a budget. Most people cringe at it because they're using it wrong. Treat it like a live conversation with your ideal customer and the ROI is absurd. Cringe is the moat.

Most of LinkedIn is cringe. People at 42% of goal posting bad advice. Influencers making up stories for clicks. BUT ... it can have a huge impact on your ability to sell by creating your brand + lucrative with outside creator partnerships. It's quite literally changed my life and the pros outweigh the cons. My best advice if you want to start: 1. Before you begin, start engaging with others. Look for those that have similar content you will be sharing. 2. Dedicate 15-30 min a day to it. Likes, thoughtful comments, DMs. These people will turn into your supporters when you start. They just don't know it yet.... 3. Start small posting. Be consistent. 1 post a week until it's easy. Then 2x a week. Then 3x a week. Max out at 1x per day. 4. Go outbound to grow. Connections count towards followers. Max out the 100 connection requests a week. 5. Create an idea bank of post ideas on a notes app, sticky, pencil/paper, whatever. You'll start to think of ideas all the time. Write them down. 6. If you're posting multiple times a week, you'll need a system. Write in bulk. Carve an hour out every Sunday to write 5 posts. Coffee and headphones. Pull from the idea bank. 7. Get inspiration from other people's posts. If someone shares their favorite discovery question, you can write on that topic too. Topic copying is fine. Copying the content in it, is not. 8. Write about your own journey in your career. What's working, what's not, lessons learned. That's the most authentic type of content. No matter what stage, someone in their career is a few steps behind you that would love to learn from you. I promise. Theme here in #1 - #8 ... nothing that glorious. No Claude Code, outsourcing, or hacks. Just the little things that add up.