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The events of the last 6 months in technology are arguable amongst the most important in human history The tools now increasingly exist for recursive self improvement of models & agents We are likely in very early lift off & exponential Largely unnoticed outside of tech

@sweatystartup 👋

Any entrepreneurs with kids like to camp / mountain bike? And also live within 4 hours or so of Asheville?

Your startup's growth rate is also its learning rate. Setting an ambitious growth goal and trying to hit it is the fastest way to find out what's broken and how to fix it. Not just the obvious stuff. Wrong customer, wrong problem, product nobody wants. It also stresses the founding team. You find out fast whether you can handle hard problems under pressure. Bottlenecks only show up when you push. If you're not having uncomfortable discoveries early, you're not pushing hard enough.

I'm 30. I built an AI startup called GojiberryAI to $2.5M ARR. Got accepted into YC. If I had to start from 0, here's exactly what I'd do: 1. Sell it before I build it. No code. Just a simple slide deck (mine was 6 ugly slides) explaining the problem, the solution, the outcome, and the price. I made my first $10k that way, before writing a single line. 2. Pick a painfully specific customer. Not "B2B SaaS." Something like "founders at 20-person SaaS companies about to hire their first SDR." So specific that the right person reads it and thinks "that's me." 3. Start outbound on day one, but only to people showing intent. Not scraped lists. People engaging with competitors, changing roles, raising money, or publicly posting about the exact problem I solve. That's the gap between a 1-2% reply rate and 25-40%. 4. Lead with value, never a calendar link. Send a blueprint, not "got 15 minutes?" Let the resource do the selling, and the trial becomes the obvious next step instead of a pitch. 5. Pick ONE channel and go deep. For us it was outbound first, then Reddit (10M+ organic views), then LinkedIn lead magnets. I wouldn't touch a second channel until the first one was clearly working. 6. Talk to customers every single day. The product doesn't matter until you understand the problem better than they do. Spend 90% of every early call listening, not demoing. 7. Only build once people are actually paying. Then keep it dead simple and price it to sell itself. We landed on $99/mo with a free trial, so the funnel runs without me dragging anyone onto a call. 8. Do this relentlessly for about 12 months. That’s roughly how long $0 to $2.5M took us. Bootstrapped. No outside funding. Most founders don’t lose because they can’t build. They lose because they build too early, sell too late, and quit the channel before it compounds.

Unclear if a durable trend, but CEOs and CTOs are back to coding with a fury, thanks to coding agents. I have public company CEOs sliding into my DMs (and “InMail”) telling me about falling in love with shipping software again thanks to Claude Code and Vercel. “Dream accounts” that we always wanted to work with, where in the past the C-suite would hardly understand the infrastructure until much later in the game. Coding agents are the ultimate PLG-fication of the enterprise. Bad, legacy software can’t hide anymore. The stack that works is self-evident to the entire organization, from intern to CEO.

The reason most people never start building is the quiet assumption that someone smarter is already working on it, not a lack of skills or capital. Let me tell you, those 'smarter' people are usually not.

GPT Realtime 2.0 is pretty incredible 17 startup ideas that ONLY work because of what this model makes possible: 1. Real-time contract negotiation agent. Sits on a call between two parties, checks pricing tools and compliance databases in parallel, and suggests terms mid-conversation while both sides are still talking. 2. Voice-controlled trading terminal. Talk through your thesis, the agent pulls market data, runs models, checks exposure, and executes the trade while narrating every step. Five data sources checked simultaneously while you're still talking. 3. Live multilingual event host. Realtime-Translate does 70+ languages in, 13 languages out, while the speaker is still talking. Every attendee hears the speaker in their language. Conferences go global overnight. 4. Voice-first medical intake. Patient calls in, agent conducts symptom intake, pulls their chart, checks drug interactions, books the appointment. All in one call. Previous voice models mangled medical jargon. This one was domain-tuned for it. 5. AI dispatcher for field service. Plumber calls from the job site, describes the problem, agent pulls the parts manual, checks inventory, orders the part, schedules the follow-up. Plumber's hands never leave the pipe. 6. Voice-first coding companion. Talk through architecture decisions while it writes code, runs tests, and explains what it's doing. Crank reasoning to high for hard problems. Drop to minimal for quick changes. 7. Live auction agent. Connected to estate sales, equipment auctions, domain drops. It listens to the live stream, makes bidding decisions, and tells you why it's bidding or passing. Thinks harder on big-ticket items. 8. Deposition prep agent for lawyers. Listens to practice testimony, catches inconsistencies, cross-references case documents, flags problems mid-conversation. Actually understands legal terminology. Note: for more startup ideas for the AI age go to ideabrowser.com 9. Live podcast research agent. Feeds you stats through an earpiece in real time. You mention a company, it whispers the revenue. You mention a trend, it pulls the data. Real-time research team for the price of an API call. 10. Silent sales coach. Listens to your call in silent mode, whispers coaching cues through your AirPods. "Ask about budget now." "They hesitated, dig deeper." 128K context means it remembers the entire hour-long conversation. 11. Voice-first property walkthrough agent. Walk through a property, describe what you see out loud, the agent pulls comps, estimates renovation costs, calculates cap rate, checks zoning in parallel. Full deal analysis by the time you walk out the front door. 12. Baby monitor that understands crying. Listens through a nursery speaker, distinguishes hunger cry from pain cry, soothes with a voice, alerts parents only when it matters. Silent listening mode means it's always on but only activates when needed. 13. Voice agent that calls your past-due invoices and collects payment. Polite, persistent, 24/7. Small businesses lose billions in unpaid invoices because nobody wants to make the awkward call. 14. AI that calls insurance companies and sits on hold for you. Navigates the phone tree, talks to the rep, fights the claim, calls you back with the result. Charge $20 per call. Everyone hates calling insurance. 15. Voice agent that handles Airbnb guest problems at 2am. Troubleshoots, dispatches maintenance if needed, follows up. Host sleeps through it. $150/month per property. 16. After hours voice agent for law firms. Client calls at 9pm, agent does intake, assesses urgency, schedules a morning call or patches through. Missing an after hours call costs law firms thousands. 17. Voice first quality inspector for manufacturing. Worker wears a headset, describes what they see, agent cross-references the spec sheet, flags defects, logs the report. Hands never leave the product. Voice was always limited by intelligence, not audio quality. Now that it has GPT-5 class reasoning, the voice agent can actually think while it talks. That's the unlock. Everything above was impossible 6 months ago.

Pulled the fastest-growing startups by hiring velocity over the past 90 days:

Finding a startup idea is usually a mix of breadth-first and depth-first search. You look at a bunch of branches, then force yourself to go deep on the one that seems most promising. Repeat until something pulls you in. Tokenmaxxing helps with the breadth-first part. But the hard part is still building enough conviction to go depth-first for a while.

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

I made $87,507 in May 2026. ⭐️ TrustMRR — $27K 📈 DataFast — $20K 🏴‍☠️ Ship or Die — $20K 🧑‍💻 CodeFast — $8K ⚡️ ShipFast — $7K 🐥 Twitter — $3.2K 🦐 SuperShrimp — $1K 🍜 Indie Page — $715 🛡️ ByeDispute — $248 🎞️ YouTube — $111 🌱 HabitsGarden — $97 🧬 BioAge — $49 📚 WorkbookPDF — $19 💩 PoopUp — $18 To whoever bought PoopUp: Thank you ❤️

Watch me control my computer with just my voice. This is the future of operating systems. No hands. GPT-Realtime 2.0 is very, very underrated. Demo:

@alexkehr @tbpn We could do this live right here on X spaces

I think @tbpn should do an NYU girls roasting tech bros reunion show

"Being 21, offered to be a billionaire, and just having the audacity to turn it down." MTV co-founder Tom Freston on offering young Zuckerberg $1.7B for Facebook: Facebook was 3 years old with an $8M/year revenue. Tom's team offered Zuckerberg a ride on the company plane for Thanksgiving. Zuckerberg got on, and his parents picked him up at the airport. Still said no. Full Episode: youtu.be/7_65wOSC0Cw?si… @thesamparr

"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose". Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups. - The company works 7 days per week. - Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office. - He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7. - 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo. Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years. My condensed notes below: 1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose: Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it. 2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre: Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers. 3. Lead from the Front Lines You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them. 4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning. 5. Lifespan vs. Victories Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories." 6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting." If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility. Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.

What are you building? Share it with the startup community Get in front of 185,000+ fellow builders (we'll reshare some of the best if you like :)

@jasonfried Cool, I'm in

Next week I'll be giving live 1:1 "How We Work in Basecamp 5" workshops and walkthroughs. The sessions will be held over Zoom. These are especially tailored for companies drowning in too many tools, or stuck on the conveyor belt of working hard but getting nowhere. If you've been sold a bill of goods ("use this basket of tools everyone else is using...") but find that it hasn't paid off, get in touch. If you, or your company, has been down one of these paths (basecamp.com/paths), and you're curious how to step off that path and onto a clearer, simpler, straighter, and faster one, please email me. My email is in my profile. DMs here are fine too. In the walkthroughs I'll share our Basecamp 5 account. You'll see behind the scenes, from the inside out, how we run our entire company on Basecamp 5. No Slack, no Notion, no Google Docs, no DropBox, no anything else (other than Github, for our repos, of course). It's all in Basecamp 5. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Which AI tool creates the most problems for you?

@marclou 🫡

10 years as an entrepreneur and 1 takeaway: Don't you dare give up.