Jared Sleeper

At Avenir, we’ve followed the emerging bear cases on SaaS closely. This 46-page deck contains our reflections and research on the path ahead. We see opportunity and risk as SaaS companies vie with AI natives to be "systems of context." Link in replies, excited to discuss!

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!

We are not prepared for the economic populism that will happen when an actual recession hits.

This ended up taking a while, in part because @Railway was slow to deploy, but mostly because an app to improve vocab is actually WAY harder than, say, poker. For a start, you need to figure out a starting point for each user to challenge them. The iteration continues...

Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own

@rauchg GetBetterAt.xyz Microgames to get better at poker, blackjack, mandarin, and more. Opus 4.7 + @Railway / @github / @clerk / @posthog

Show me the thing you’ve built with AI you’re most proud of. Reply with a working product URL and what model / agent you primarily used.

@sadvalueinvestr Reading it now, great book!

Fun one - reminds me of reading books as a kid

You would have almost doubled your money on Crowdstrike in a few months if you had invested in the days after Anthropic released a completely unrelated cybersecurity tool. So much alpha in actually understanding what is going on today.

Thousands of rocket scientists and AI researchers getting fabulously wealthy on SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic is a very happy thing for society and should be widely celebrated. So much better than when crypto bros were getting rich.

This is the sort of idea that seems so obvious the second you read about it- of course JSON is a less-than-ideal format for LLMs. Long TOON!

Attended a board meeting today where one of the KPIs is "life-years saved." Up and to the right. Not all AI is bad!

@yin_amy I didn’t but it was just the records of my usage of the app/my streaks haha

@JaredSleeper omg did you get the data back?

Well, just had my first instance of Claude deleting a bunch of semi-useful data that wasn't backed up. Feel like this is a rite of passage or something. 🥲 "I'm sorry — yes, we wiped it... I made a bad call in that commit. I owe you an honest apology."

Decided to add a vocabulary module to this about 60 seconds ago. Let's see how long it takes to get something running.

@faggy_mcbutt yeah I did a test run on explanations and had mixed results (plus it cost 1/3rd of a cent per try which actually could add up at scale) but given the very high interest in poker going to keep exploring how to do that

@JaredSleeper fair enough, i am a poker novice so explanations would be awesome (and maybe some sort of ranking hand by difficulty - easy, med, hard) - this is such a fun project!

Soft-launching my first public app tonight without reading a single line of code. 😌 It's called BetterAt. The idea is to learn skills through real-time microfeedback. I've built six sub-apps so far: poker, blackjack, mandarin tones, and three for singing. How it works: Take poker. Advanced poker strategy is hard to teach, but there's a simple concept called equity, which is the % chance that you have the winning hand at the end, based on the cards you can see. Many novice players are terrible at estimating their equity. BetterAtHoldEm lets you estimate your equity in a variety of situations and get instant feedback on whether you were right or wrong. It's fun, and most importantly, you can feel yourself getting better over time as you build intuition for the statistics involved. Mandarin tones are another fun example where the concept works well- I know from experience that the four tones can be vexing for learners. BetterAtMandarinTones gives you real-time feedback on whether your pronunciation is consistent with the tones, including a live spark-chart showing the shape of the tones you produced. It's not perfect (in particular, it rewards pronouncing the tones a little slowly due to hardware limitations) but I've found it really does help nail the concept and develop an ear for tones. On top of all of this, there's a classic Duolingo-style streak tracker (for those who log in) for each individual app and in aggregate. No annoying bird threatening you if your streak is at risk, though (at least not yet). It is insane that I was able to build all of this on my own without writing or reading a single line of code. Grateful to my stack: @claude_code, @Railway, @github, @sentry (observability), @googlecloud (TTS for Mandarin), @posthog (product analytics), @clerk (auth), etc. So many great products out there. What a time to be alive. Check it out if you're interested (link in replies) and please send feedback/thoughts!

@faggy_mcbutt It's actually next on my list! But the demand for poker is so high I might double down on that first

@JaredSleeper also would it be hard to throw in backgammon?

@joe_philleo @Railway @stripe @github @claude_code @sentry @posthog @clerk @twilio @Lovable @Replit That's one way to get there, but why shouldn't it just be one platform entirely? Computer use is still buggy/computationally intensive/requires user intervention at times

@JaredSleeper @Railway @stripe @github @claude_code @sentry @posthog @clerk @twilio @Lovable @Replit Presumably it's just going to be Claude Code / Codex with better computer use, right?

Who is furthest along in building a Shopify-like experience for folks looking to build/sell apps? @Railway + @stripe + @github + @claude_code + @sentry + @posthog + @clerk + @twilio + marketing tooling is so obviously not the long-term equilibrium. @Lovable? @Replit?

Excited that I get to experience my first production outage not 24 hours later! @Railway 🥲

@auchenberg @Waymo This was this morning??

@JaredSleeper @Waymo Sadly, Mamdani kicked them out. centernyc.org/reports-briefs…

Now there’s a sight for sore eyes! Welcome to NY @Waymo

@jgaytandeayala 😅

@JaredSleeper maaaaaan You did Navan!

@JaredSleeper when is the tear down of Global-E coming? what is going on with this one!?