Tom Griffiths

Steve Jobs : how to design perfect products.

As I bid farewell to Congress today, I depart more deeply in love with my country and more deeply disgusted by the dysfunction of our government. We can and must do better, and my mission to awaken America's exhausted majority and make common sense cool again is just beginning.

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Think culture is a nice to have? Think again. Great entrepreneurs & leaders know the importance of using culture as an advantage. In this article for @Forbes I talk to @rahulvohra, @TomGriffiths, @Mclader, and @kimballscott about how to build culture forbes.com/sites/alisacoh…

I appreciate @FoxNews for affording me the opportunity to make the case for American repair and reconciliation. “Angertainment” would have us believe we are more divided than we really are. Just have to get off our screens and convene. 🇺🇸

It’s been 10 years since the original unicorn analysis (when we accidentally coined the term)🦄 So, our @CowboyVC team dug into new data. The tech industry has changed a TON! ✨ From 39 to 532 unicorns ✨ Pendulum swung HARD from consumer to enterprise ✨ Business types, founder backgrounds & geos changed a lot BUT 🥺 Unicorns became way less capital-efficient 🥺 93% are ‘papercorns’ & 60% are ‘ZIRPicorns” despite many fragile unicorns right now, we see many healthy ones too And with AI, we expect 1,400+ capital-efficient unicorns by 2033, which will make tech even bigger and more important🌟 It’s a long read (sorry!) but pls check it out - would love feedback. What resonated, what did we miss? 🙏 🙏 🙏 Full post 👉 bit.ly/3Sn9Flv

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time." — Charlie Munger

So week 4 of our fantasy record label opens tomorrow. Sign up here to check it out. We are giving away $1,000 in prizes (and a bonus $100 for the best label name) drop.vault.fan/fantasy

People like to talk about the importance of "vision," but ultimately running a startup is like doing science: you have to follow the truth wherever it leads. Vision is only valuable insofar as it predicts where you'll find truth.

"Jobs to be done" in a nutshell

This might be the best email I've ever read: • Steve Jobs email to himself 13 months before he died. We stand on the shoulders of giants everyday. Next time you speak to a cynic, ask them these 10 questions: 1. How does the electricity grid work? 2. If you tried to create your food purely from scratch, how long would it take you? 3. How much work is involved in maintaining sewage systems? 4. How much time did people spend building the roads you drive on everyday? 5. Who created air conditioning? 6. If you was dropped on an island and had to create a smartphone, how long would it take you? 7. What did the economy look like before the invention of money? 8. How many people died in the Black Plague? 9. What would your role have been if you was fighting age in WW2? 10. What daily modern item would Kings of the past trade their whole empire for?

I’ve been a hospital chaplain now for eight years at hundreds of deathbeds. I want to tell you something I’ve witnessed. Most people, at the end, realize they’ve spent a lot of their life hiding. Sometimes by choice, or because they could not safely choose to be themselves. ➡️

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case. Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising. Let’s start with the losers. Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money. The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy. Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @langchain and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way). In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round. (This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.) This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity. There are two causes for this: 1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended. 2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen. Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas." These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostma's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition. This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing. LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing. I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology. The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch. A few companies I would put in this group are: 1. cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written. 2. harvey.ai - AI for legal practices 3. runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for. If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious. Lets recap: 1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling. 2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups. 3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets. 4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns. It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see. And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category. If you're a founder in the same boat, I'd love to talk. My DMs are open. If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to follow me, Sam Hogan. I share one long-form post per week covering AI, startups, open-source, and more. That's all folks! Thanks for reading. See you next week.

The US 🇺🇸 economy and the EU 🇪🇺 were roughly the same size in 2008. The US is now nearly twice as big 📊

The @OBR_UK assessment of the sustainability of the UK government's debt is off-the-charts alarming. It paints a picture of shocking Treasury incompetence over the past fifteen years in managing the debt burden - which has left the UK's public finances much more exposed to rising inflation than any other comparable country. For example 1) QE has turned a third of government liabilities into overnight debt at floating rates, 2) the UK has borrowed twice as much in the form of inflation-linked bonds than any other government, and 3) the proportion of government bonds in flighty foreign hands is the second highest among G7 rich nations. One immediate consequence is that what the government pays to borrow - the yield on ten-year debt or gilts - has risen by 2 percentage points, compared with a G7 average of just 0.5 percentage points over the past 12 months. In the OBR's words, "the rise in global interest rates has fed through to the UK's debt servicing costs more than twice as fast as in the past or elsewhere". And we have the wrong kind of inflation, in the sense that compared with other countries, nominal GDP or national income isn't rising fast enough to offset the increase in the nominal debt burden, and wages aren't rising fast enough to generate additional tax revenues. As the OBR says, UK general government debt is forecast to rise by 3.1 per cent of GDP this year, compared with average falls of 1.8% in other European countries. So the obsession of Hunt and Sunak with defeating inflation is understandable - because in the absence of any significant fall in inflation, there is a risk that investors will shun UK government debt and interest rates for the government and for all of us would then rise to crippling levels. This parlous debt backdrop explains why the Bank of England and the Treasury are prepared to risk recession to bring down inflation. It is what you need to know ahead of the imminent announcement of how the government will fund pay rises for teachers, nurses and other public servants.

I'm not claiming experienced founders are humble. In fact a certain amount of overconfidence is probably a prerequisite for the job. But even in the best case startups knock you around so much that no experienced founder has anything like the arrogance some founders start with.

🚨 Webinar Alert- Tomorrow, May 17th, 10amPT/1pmET 🚨 Hone's CEO and my Co-founder @tomgriffiths will be sitting down with @tylermuse, CEO & Founder of Lingo Live to discuss, "Transforming your workplace culture: How learning &…lnkd.in/eXqwYSR8 lnkd.in/emqeeYSA

This Reddit post made me smile. Time period selfies 📸 (AI-generated) 1. Polynesian Warriors:

Everyone will be able to be anyone soon. MegaPortraits by SamsungLabs uses new neural architectures that produce high-quality avatars from medium-resolution videos and high-resolution images. Deepfakes are getting scary good.

SVB Founders I’ve pooled together funding partners for emergency capital. Funds with >$5B to: → Lending new money. → Buy deposit claims outright. Apply for help: