Finn Hegarty

The best use case and life hack for ChatGPT? Making up personalised kids bedtime stories with them as main characters #parentinghack #chatgpt

@eoghan 👏big fan of the name

High agency is often mistaken for speed. People assume it belongs to the ones who decide quickly and move without hesitation. That version looks impressive, but it is not what actually drives results. The real marker of high agency is quieter. It appears the moment someone stops protecting their assumptions and puts them in contact with something that can push back. Most people hesitate because they operate too far from the facts that matter. They think through scenarios, build arguments, weigh options, and wait for a feeling of certainty. They want clarity before they act. They want proof without the discomfort of exposing their thinking. They want to be right before the world has a chance to disagree. High-agency people do something different. They shorten the time between an idea and its first collision with the real world. They build the smallest version that can reveal a truth. They ask the customer before polishing the story. They test behavior before optimizing the process. They trade speculation for evidence, not because they enjoy being wrong, but because every collision with reality sharpens their understanding of what actually works. That shift changes their relationship with learning. Mistakes are not signs of incompetence. They are the natural cost of moving forward. The most valuable insights rarely come from perfect planning. They come from constraints, surprising reactions, unexpected metric shifts, and outcomes no one predicted. This behavior compounds. Every early interaction with reality creates a faster cycle of adjustment. Every adjustment increases clarity. Over time, decisions feel fast because dozens of small signals have already done the work. To an outsider it looks like intuition. In practice, it is earned through repeated exposure to the world. High agency is trained. It builds through the choices you make when uncertainty shows up. It strengthens every time you expose your thinking to something that can reshape it. Speed shows up because the environment favors teams that gather evidence quickly and adjust without ceremony. Their focus is on contact with reality. They waste less time debating ideas that have not been tested. They look for the next piece of information that moves the work forward. Founders who operate this way avoid the trap of endless planning. Product managers avoid the trap of presenting polished ideas that have never touched a user’s world. Engineers avoid the trap of optimizing solutions before validating the problem. Teams shaped by this habit reduce the distance between ideas and truth. You take an idea, remove the parts that do not matter, and place the remaining piece somewhere it can be disproven. You let the result inform the next version. You let the world reveal the gap between what you believe and what is true. The discomfort never disappears. It becomes familiar. You learn to recognize the moment when you are delaying the collision because the idea feels fragile. That moment is the signal. High-agency people move toward it. Everyone else moves away. If you want to raise the agency level of a team, focus on faster confrontations with reality. Encourage smaller tests. Encourage questions that can be answered in days instead of weeks. Encourage conversations with customers before the work becomes precious. Encourage an environment where truth carries more weight than confidence. You become high agency by removing the distance between what you believe and what the world is willing to teach you.

@jasonfried What? no AI?! More fizz needed

INTRODUCING FIZZY Have you noticed that every issue and idea tracking tool you loved slowly morphed into boring, sluggish, corporate bloatware? Trello put on 40 pounds of cruft. Jira started charging by the migraine. Asana tried to become everything to everyone. GitHub Issues slipped into a steady state of decline. The whole category is a 20 car pileup of complexity. Time to route around that mess. Today we’re introducing Fizzy. Kanban as it should be, not as it has been. Fizzy is a fresh take on cards and columns, with a few twists, human-nature inspired defaults, and a vibrant interface that’s the opposite of the bland and boring software the industry has been flinging at you for years. Kanban has been around since the 1940s, and Trello brought it into the mainstream in 2011. Since then, some version of column-based kanban-style organization has found its way into any collaboration tool worth its salt. But most have over salted the dish. What was simple is now complicated. What was clear is now cluttered. What just worked now takes work. Fizzy presses reset, reconsiders what really matters, and presents a refreshing way to kanban that just feels right. It’s friendly, colorful, straightforward, and fast as hell. We still use Basecamp for our big, intensive projects, but lately we’ve been reaching for Fizzy to run the smaller ones. It’s perfect for tracking bugs, issues, and ideas, and it shines for lighter, self-contained workflows like podcasts or video production. We didn’t expect it, but Fizzy’s so good it might even cannibalize Basecamp on the lighter side of project management. We’d be thrilled. How much is it? It’s not much for so much. Everyone gets 1000 cards for free. Beyond that, we’ll host your account for just $20/month for unlimited cards and unlimited users. One price for all and everything. No tiers, no “contact us.” No pricing chart at all — just a price tag, like on a pair of jeans. And here’s a surprise... Fizzy is open source! If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever. Have a great idea? Submit a PR to contribute to the code base and improve the product for everyone. It’s the best of all worlds. No excuses. Every idea comes back around. It’s time for take two on kanban. Fizzy’s our hat in the ring. Let’s make this platform insanely great, together. Come on in! Visit fizzy.do

@patrickc As Joyce had it ‘silence, exile and cunning.’ It’s in us… but just have to change the narrative to stay and build?!

Today I had lunch with twelve young Irish people -- a wonderful bunch in their early 20s working on rockets, biotech, software/AI, etc. I enquired about whether any were planning on leaving Ireland over the next 3 years. All hands but one went up. I asked the holdout why he was staying; he clarified that he was also going to leave, just not in the next three years. Mobility is a wonderful thing, but it feels worrisome if everyone in such a group concludes that they ought to emigrate. This desire seems to generalize. A 2023 study suggested that more young people want to leave Ireland than any other EU country.

I wrote a piece for the @IrishTimes on why Ireland can’t build anything these days, and how to fix that.

@levelsio @joelgascoigne Curious, do you have a gym membership as well? Not many options in Portugal outside of a few CF boxes

I hereby invite @joelgascoigne to come lift in my home gym in Portugal 🏋️‍♀️ 😊

"But here's the unexpected thing. And let me be a little vulnerable here. Since getting back to strong growth and profitability, I've felt a little lost. I've been feeling lower motivation. I've done a lot of soul-searching, gone on walks, written countless journal entries. I've been trying to understand: why do I feel lost, clouded, lower motivation? Surely now that we're growing and profitable again, I should feel on top of the world? What is going on?" The answer is you have to lift weights + cardio 4 times per week Trust me I've tried all the other things Get a personal trainer to start and build up to actually lift heavy, that's when I started feeling the life changing mental benefits It changed my brain to a perpetually high performing fully satisfied zen state without any anxiety, depression, neuroticism or existential angst All of those are just signs of lack of physical exertion Both men and women should lift + cardio IMHO

@HarryStebbings @chamath 🇪🇺📑📑

Listening to All In on a walk this evening: Chamath: “Europe is largely uninvestable.” @chamath love to have you on 20VC to discuss.

@HarryStebbings @mercor_ai Rookie numbers

If speed is the most important element in startup success. @mercor_ai will win. They work 9-9-6. That is 9AM-9PM, 6 days per week. The average age of Mercor employee… 22. Insanely good.

@eoghan Enterprise Ireland to the rescue! 😬

Ireland: Thanks to regulation, you can forget about building a crypto company there. Thanks to regulation, you can forget about building an AI company there. Thanks to regulation, you can forget about building a data center there. What do they think the future of Irish industry should look like??? Farming? It’s quite something to see a well educated nation voluntarily dismantle its prosperity.

@themichaelowen Let’s not forget he also switched his international allegiance. If he was willing to change his country, it’s fair to question where his deep loyalties or alliances truly lie. Fans react emotionally because they expect loyalty to run deeper

Jack Grealish 2 of 2: I don’t know Jack; I’ve interviewed him a couple of times and that’s as far as it goes. I also don’t generally stick up for footballers purely because I was one myself. But Jack’s story is as near to perfect as it gets: He joined his local club and rose through the ranks from a six year old boy to Club captain. He has played over 200 games for the club and has stamped his mark as one of the best players to ever wear the famous claret and blue shirt. After gaining promotion and as club captain, he undoubtedly did more than his fair share of turning his team into a respectable and established Premier League side which arguably formed the foundations for how the club is viewed today. He then moved to one of the world’s best teams, one that has won absolutely everything and will go down in history as one of the greatest teams ever to set foot onto a football pitch. Who knows what will come next but Jack could retire tomorrow and will have had a career most footballers can only dream of. I’ve said it many times but I’ll say it again. Footballers are generally fans before they sign their first professional contract and when they retire they become fans once again. In between it’s a job! Fans who don’t ever become footballers can happily declare their undying love for any particular team and that’s absolutely great. Footballers on the other hand, have a limited time in the game and clearly want to be as successful as possible in that short time between first and last contracts. It’s impossible for 99% of players to stay with their team throughout their careers because if they are good players the best teams will want to sign them and if they’re not good players they’ll be shown the exit door pretty swiftly. When fans see their team going through a bad run, they all clamour for the club to buy new players. When a new player is signed, do fans of the new club call them Judas and boo them for leaving what could easily have been their boyhood club? Of course not; they sing their name and welcome them with open arms. Why then is it so different when it’s the other way around? In Jack’s case he is and always will be very proud of where he comes from and so it must be heartbreaking for him to have to endure the mindless and pathetic booing that he had to listen to yesterday.

@levelsio @hmziqrs @cannyHQ @FTC The FTC rule isn’t enforceable yet. Definitely a dark pattern here but this specific rule isn't live just yet

The @FTC law now states that you should be able to cancel a subscription the same way you signed up to it, that is if you signed up on the site, you should be able to cancel immediately on the site Without having to contact customer support Even worse here, @cannyHQ does NOT let you cancel as their customer support is an AI bot that cannot functionally cancel anyone's plan So it's a catch-22, very illegal

⚠️ So @cannyHQ has made it literally impossible for customers to cancel their subscription To downgrade or cancel your subscription, they force you to contact their support: "We'd love to know why your current plan isn't working for you. Please contact support to downgrade." But their support is an AI bot that won't let you cancel your subscription! Nice catch-22, and 100% illegal in the US and EU: This tactic is usually used by companies who are losing MRR and try to force customers to stay. It's horrible and illegal but it works: the harder you make it to cancel, the lower % your churn goes, but of course all for the wrong reasons: Recently the @FTC has implemented the “Click-to-Cancel” rule, mandating that businesses make canceling subscriptions as straightforward as signing up. This rule prohibits companies from requiring consumers to contact support to cancel and applies to most subscription services I hate doing business with these kinds of companies So I'm switching all my bug boards to @FeaturebaseHQ, they've been super responsive and don't use shady tactics like this

NEW: we may have passed peak obesity 🎉📈📉🙏 In what might be one of the most significant trends I have ever charted, the US obesity rate fell last year.

Founder Mode: paulgraham.com/foundermode.ht…

The US builds while Europe meticulously regulates... but can we talk about US coffee? The Americano needs a European touch 🤮 #EuropeanPriorities

@levie Regs FTW

I don’t entirely understand this sentence: “The #AIAct is much more than a rulebook — it's a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race.”

@ThierryBreton Hooray for regulations to “lead the global AI race” 🎉

Historic! The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI 🇪🇺 The #AIAct is much more than a rulebook — it's a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race. The best is yet to come! 👍

@zebulgar Need to remove dependency on 🚗in MIA

It's the 3-year anniversary of the "How can I help" tweet that kicked off the Miami movement How's it going? Pretty damn well for year 3. Wynwood is jam packed w/ startups, comp sci students & accelerators Still need a few unicorns to keep the momentum but those are coming!

@anothercohen Snap

I have now seen two different people say "invent" a modern social club with: * Pool/slides * Pickleball * Kids area/kids club * Gym * Sauna/steamroom/cold plunge * Cafe * Co work space * Bar * Salon I present, Lifetime Fitness:

@zebulgar @mikekarnj Or the new @LifeTime_Life south Miami at Pinecrest

@mikekarnj The Bath Club in Miami is this

first and last time i ever wear one of these