Ryan Gaertner

“Ryan’s Reflections” #0: 🚀 Kicking off weekly tastes I recently stepped down as CEO of DubClub after 4+ years growing it from scratch to $100M+ GMV. I learned a lot and enjoyed the growth alongside our customers, our team, and our investors. Along the journey and especially now, it seems obvious to me that I could have built + led + scaled much better in many ways. While supporting my co-founders in the transition, I am carving out time for deliberate reflection that I hope is useful to a growing audience of aspiring builders regardless of where you are on your journey. Starting next week, I am launching “Ryan’s Reflections” — weekly bite-sized “tastes” with an essential learning that blends literature and personal experience. Every post will follow a specific format and cover topics like building, leading, and scaling. The main post will share a short “taste” or insight, with a pinned comment for viewers to get both a content recommendation and practical context from lived experience. Everything you read will be coming from my brain and my gut, hence "Ryan's Reflections"… not "ChatGPT's Reflections" or "Perplexity's Reflections". I’ve personally seen AI very quickly take on lower-leverage work. Going forward, I believe the real challenge for many of us is to deepen our knowledge about how we can use our time in the highest-leverage ways possible. I am excited to see what others think and learn from your perspectives. Please comment on the posts or send me a DM — I will read everything. And if posts receive crickets, that is fine too. My goal is to build, learn, and grow in public. As we established at DubClub: Win More Together™.

Giddy to finally have @perplexity_ai Comet browser mobile app

@AskPerplexity A good but long related article:

My suggestion is to think of something you do daily that is kind of annoying, then @AskPerplexity if it can do the task for you

Every week something happens that makes me more excited (and nervous) for what’s coming with AI Speaking to Perplexity Computer for 15 minutes resulted in 3 agents that now make starting my day so much easier… - Filterable web-hosted dashboard showing status of deliverables (which I keep in @NotionHQ) - Emails from contacts that aren’t in my CRM yet - Suggestions for who to add to my CRM and proposed actions based on the inbound context Kind of shocked me in a good way 3 years into using Perplexity too! Thanks @AskPerplexity

@akothari Mine is starting to look similar 🤣 Trying to figure out how to integrate them closely with one another via Notion AI so it doesn't feel like I'm switching between the different parts of the ecosystem

My new black & white dock. I love it!

"Not having a coding experience is becoming an advantage." Replit CEO Amjad Masad: "You don't need any development experience. You need grit. You need to be a fast learner." "If you're a good gamer, if you can jump in a game and figure it out really quickly, you're really good at this." "Coders get lost in the details." "Product people, people who are focused on solving a problem, on making money, they're going to be focused on marketing, they're going to be focused on user interface, they're going to be focused on all the right things." "I think this year it's gonna flip, and I think not having a coding background is gonna be more advantageous for the entrepreneur." @amasad with @jackhneel

@yourfinanceeguy @perplexity_ai @ChatGPTapp Yeah, 100% I remember when ChatGPT would hallucinate because it didn't have real-time information. It actually got some people into a lot of legal trouble, including lawyers being disbarred

@Ryan_Gaertner @perplexity_ai @ChatGPTapp the real time search thing was a bigger deal than people gave it credit for at the time. it made ai feel grounded

I'm thankful for my early use of @perplexity_ai way back in late 2022 Because of its real-time web search, Perplexity felt more reliable than @ChatGPTapp in the early days This accelerated my comfortability with AI as a highly useful lever to get more of the right work done

@AILearningPaths @perplexity_ai @ChatGPTapp Totally from the outside looking in, that feels like a huge leap, but honestly, as a user, it's felt pretty natural

@Ryan_Gaertner @perplexity_ai @ChatGPTapp wild how perplexity went from "chatgpt with google" to full autonomous computer agents but that foundation of reliable, current information was always the differentiator they built trust first, then expanded from there

New in Claude Code: Remote Control. Kick off a task in your terminal and pick it up from your phone while you take a walk or join a meeting. Claude keeps running on your machine, and you can control the session from the Claude app or claude.ai/code

"One person builds it, the whole company benefits". 🙌 @NotionHQ @ivanhzhao @akothari

Confirmed, this is pretty sweet Built a custom daily digest agent in 5 minutes Feels like I'm just scratching the surface 🤯 @dreamer

I've saved 10 hours of typing 🤯 Simple voice dictation that sits wherever I am on my laptop or phone Nice touch @WillowVoiceAI

@NotionHQ Adding new contacts into my Notion CRM Currently I talk to @NotionHQ AI but still have it find the LinkedIn profile to populate the page. All using voice. Wish this was automated! Can't seem to figure out how to create an agent for it that is reliable

If you could automate one part of your job, what would it be?

Exciting news from Notion's @ivanhzhao: Notion is working on a standalone chat app, to talk to and orchestrate your AI agents. "A chat-first Notion to manage calendar and email."

Signed up for the beta 🚀 Realizing computers as bicycles for the mind... Excited for what's under the hood @dps @dreamer

My POV - the reliability of the connectors For example if you could reliably prioritize comm’s from different places i.e. @SlackHQ @gmail etc. Could @NotionHQ be the single command center with context ... And agents to carry out tasks accordingly Example: 25 emails come in along with a slew of Slack messages yet there really is only one to three important things to get done based on company objectives. My first instinct is to ask: How can Notion help me triage? @akothari @sarahmsachs I tried to build a prototype to solve this problem but realized Notion is far more well-positioned, happy to chat anytime My use case skews business but overlaps with personal. So I do think there are multiple potential birds with one stone here

@Ryan_Gaertner @openclaw @NotionHQ @ivanhzhao @akothari We love to hear it!! What can we work on and do better?

What could be more useful than @openclaw 🤔 For me that's been @NotionHQ for over 5 years 🤯 The lesson - consistent user value comes from sweating the details For example, Notion AI agent task execution times have subtly gotten about 10x faster Shoutout @ivanhzhao @akothari

@akothari @openclaw @NotionHQ @ivanhzhao Yes can definitely tell. Loving it

@Ryan_Gaertner @openclaw @NotionHQ @ivanhzhao Love to hear it. Working hard to make it a lot smarter and faster!

@NotionHQ @openclaw @ivanhzhao @akothari Easy to do when the product just keeps on getting better Both the single player and multiplayer modes

@Ryan_Gaertner @openclaw @ivanhzhao @akothari Thanks for sticking with us throughout the years, Ryan🫡

There's some incredibly cool stuff that @openclaw can do, don't get me wrong Generally I have a lot of respect for teams that continue to deliver incremental value amidst all the hype happening around them Incremental value compounds to make real people's lives so much easier