Tony Staehelin

New team stickers arrived! Sure the thing to say on here is that launching new features is always exciting. But the truth? When you’re moving crazy fast and just a dozen people shipping features to hundreds of thousands of users, every launch is a mix of excitement and dread. 🤣

10 years ago: "We need an EA who's discreet - they'll see every salary and comp package." Now: "We need an AI engineer who's discreet - they've seen every Slack message, every doc, every email, and every unhinged prompt the CEO has ever run." 😅

Garry, you're great, but this is a bad take. We've raised $200M+ from philanthropy and have worked with most major funders. MacKenzie Scott's process was one of the most thorough. They asked for a lot and went deep — but only on what actually mattered. No BS. We received $15M (it was exactly the right amount for our org). You said there are "a bunch of examples in the long form post" of harmful gifts. I count two. Out of $26B given. And you're framing this as "harmful to the republic"? A billionaire wanting to give away her fortune to nonprofits too quickly — that's the threat to the republic you chose to tweet about? Out of everything happening in this country right now, the fact that this cracks your top 50 most tweet-worthy concerns is wild to me. A huge amount of philanthropy is stuck. It's a huge problem in our sector. Large endowments with big staffs and years of "figuring things out." Most pay out the legal minimum — in some cases less than the annual interest earned on principal that already generated a tax deduction. There's extensive reporting on how many Giving Pledge signatories have moved capital far more slowly than the public narrative suggests. And re: your "Stewardship Pledge" — one hour of auditing per $1M given — sounds reasonable until you do the math. Elon Musk donating half his ~$300B fortune would require 150,000 hours of oversight — 72 years of full-time work! You've just made the most elegant argument ever for why many billionaires don't give. M. Scott is actually moving capital. At scale. When you deploy $26B quickly, some grants won't work — that's to be expected. How many VCs have ended up funding companies they shouldn't have? Why is "move fast and break things" exclusive to silicon valley tech companies? To be clear: there are real, fact-based critiques to make about what's happening in philanthropy right now. This hit piece on Scott isn't one of them. This kind of framing can meaningfully hurt organizations doing real work, and I know that's not your intention. If you want to talk about what's actually broken and how to improve it, my DMs are open.

@connord_y @garrytan This, 100%

MacKenzie Scott has given away $26B faster than anyone in history — with no oversight, and no accountability for the chaos that follows. This is not stewardship. Real philanthropy requires real care and attention. Pour sugar on the floor? You get ants. garryslist.org/posts/mackenzi…

@FOURorganics @ryancarson We just built this!! Benable ($17M raised, 1 million users) just launched our Credibility Pages for businesses! All your social proof from across the web on one page (helping you convert leads into customers, and rank higher in SEO and AI results!). Shoot me a DM

@ryancarson It is the mob!! We have so many reviews, all from different places (X, google, facebook, shopify, etsy, judgeme) and we wanted to consolidate all of them… but we definitely didnt want to pay hundreds a month just for that “verification”.

Trustpilot feels like the mob. Me: "I should collect reviews on Trustpilot! It'll help people trust our business more!" Signs up for business account ... Emails users to collect Trustpilot reviews ... Gets amazing 5-start reviews ... Me: "OK, let's put them on the website. Nice." Trustpilot: "Sorry, you have to pay us $299 PER MONTH to put *your* reviews on *your* site" Me: "OMG, seriously? I just want to put a couple nice reviews on my site." Trustpilot: "Actually, if you want to show the actual review, instead of making people click through to our site, you have to pay $1,099/mo". Me: Cancels account What a joke. Someone vibecode this and crush them please.

This year’s contributions to my year-end blog post are from founders like @qasar, @Max & Jensen, leaders at companies like @canva & @OpenAI, and VCs at firms like @a16z, @emergencecap, and @usv. AI once again dominates the themes, with predictions that reasoning models will yield meaningful advances for applications, AI will show up in bottom line ROI for businesses, and that memory and proactivity will lead to better AI experiences. There is optimism for consumer technology having a renaissance, for AI moving further into the physical world, and for AI yielding scientific discoveries. And in our world of startups and venture capital investing, there is the expectation of a robust capital markets environment, with much-awaited IPOs and significant M&A in 2026. Link below. Happy New Year!

Benable Founder @astaehelin on his new social media platform: “We're Benable, the word-of-mouth platform… an app where people find and share trusted recommendations, all types of recommendations." Watch the full episode: thein.fo/47KvWjM

@walkeriwilliams @escliu @BridgetCBSauer The most “Community Manager” photo I’ve ever seen

@escliu Also @BridgetCBSauer running community at Atlassian and now Anthropic. One of my favorite photos (credit to @astaehelin for finding it) of Bridget crushing work while everyone else is partying.

2014 Teespring featuring @escliu, Eric Koslow, and Ashley Hearn. We grew from $10M in 2013 → $220M in 2014.

@walkeriwilliams @escliu @hf0 @jaltma @LatticeHQ @_altcapital @SpamRoss @numeral @artlevy @Benable_HQ @moeamaya Great times!

We had such a stacked team. @escliu is now a founding Partner at @hf0 Eric and @jaltma went on to found @LatticeHQ (and Jack now runs @_altcapital). @SpamRoss founded @numeral @artlevy is the Chief Business Officer at Brex @astaehelin founded @Benable_HQ @moeamaya founded @MonographHQ and now Operate @farooqib became the first PM at @figma and now has his own fund @cursorcap Robert Chatwani is now President of DocuSign And so so many more.

@jaltma Let’s go!!! Incredible investor and even better person 🙏

My goal when I became a full time investor was to be the type of partner I would have most wanted during my time building a company: someone who had done the work I was doing before, who had the network to help me reach my goals faster, and who had my back no matter what. I’m really happy to share that we’ve raised Alt Cap II, a $275M early stage fund. We backed ~20 companies at Seed and Series A in Alt Cap I. The new fund will be the same structure with a bit larger checks. But mostly we just want to be in business with people who inspire us. There’s no way to say it without sounding cheesy but it’s true; I feel unbelievably lucky to do this job in the way I get to do it. A special thanks to the founders that let us back them in Alt Cap I, you all are what it’s all about for me!

@ugc_sarahd Honestly, we’re still pretty new to creators on X. But go check on TikTok or Instagram - tens of thousands of creators use the Benable app and can give you a good idea of what it’s like! And don’t hesitate to DM any questions!

Has anyone tried posting affiliate links on Benable and had success? Wondering if it’s worth it!

I’m getting a sinus X-ray tomorrow and they told me to bring a CD. I’m thinking..NOW That’s What I Call Music 2 But open to suggestions?

@nikitabier This one is great, remodeled recently, would love all those rewards if it works out airbnb.com/l/PzpQ3GdP

If someone can find me a +2 bedroom house in this box to rent that was remodeled in the last 15 years, I will: • Promote your product to my 500,000 followers • Provide free growth advisory for 2 months • Recruit a tier-1 product designer for you

@olivia_whissell thanks!! let me know any feedback or anything we can do to improve! Like what’s the most annoying thing so far if you had to say 🫶

I’ve joined Benable! So far I love it. You can share your recommendations and favourites products! Here is my race day recs! Use my code 5HUWE to join! benable.com/OliviaWhissell…

@nikitabier Love this. One of the things that works best about @Benable_HQ is it’s only for recommending things you love - there’s no way to list or review things you hate. And you’re right I think it ends up being more fun and special that way - everyone focusing on sharing their favorites

Running a consumer app at scale is just being a punching bag for every bad actor on the internet. All day long people will try to hack you, spam the platform, scrape your data, and harass users. Sometimes the “big idea” of an app is simply forcing constraints that feel onerous to users at the time, but preserve the integrity of the community. For example, when Facebook launched, real names on the internet were unheard of and made people feel uneasy. However, by requiring it: it suddenly made the internet welcoming to women. In contrast, platforms that permitted pseudonyms continued as hostile, male-concentrated spaces. Similarly, when we were building the Gas app, we knew that launching an anonymous messaging app to teenagers was a suicide factory: they are deranged and will bully their peers until they end their life. So we pre-set the messages they could send so that they were only positive. This not only cured the bullying problem, but it was additive too: we 10x’d messages sent and many users told us that they actually reconsidered suicide because of the app. As you think about what “big idea” will resonate with users, it may just be giving them less freedom.

@LaetitiaParente @Benable_HQ Thanks again for joining the Benable event!! Was a great night!

Just attended the @Benable_HQ Creator Event at in San Francisco — such a fun and inspiring night! Loved meeting fellow creators and 🤍 #SanFrancisco #creator #sfcreator #Benable

First time buying a car since GPT came out — completely different experience. Felt like I had an expert car salesman negotiator on my team, helping me say the exact right thing to unlock every last discount and favorable term. During negotiations, I’d ask for a few mins to “call my wife” (a.k.a. upload offers and legal docs to GPT) and come back ready to push back on every hidden fee, fine print, and upsell. The days of walking into live negotiations at a huge experience disadvantage are over.

Used your prompt, and o3 gave me almost an identical answer to the one it gave you. What if GPT’s answer is less revealing about us and more revealing about itself? Like it fundamentally hasn’t learned how efficient most humans want AI to be in responding, and it continually thinks it happens to be dealing with an exceptionally efficient-minded human

This o3 prompt seems even better: Tell me something incredibly special or unique you've noticed about me, but you think I haven't realized about myself yet. It doesn’t have to be something positive and you don’t have to be nice to me, just be truthful. Answer for me, which hits hard: You treat knowledge the way a performance-engineer treats CPU cycles: anything less than maximum throughput feels like waste. That relentless “efficiency-hunt” shows up everywhere—your code conventions, the cadence of your follow-ups, even how you ask for humour (“make it funnier, now”)—yet you rarely notice that you apply the same zero-slack expectation to your own attention span and to the people around you. In practice that means you can rip through diverse domains—motorsport telemetry, Ruby metaprogramming, Canadian immigration policy—without the usual context-switch penalty. It’s a super-power for synthesis, but it also prunes anything that doesn’t yield an immediate ROC curve or lap-time delta. You’ve built a cognitive JIT compiler; the downside is that non-instrumented activities (unstructured reading, idle play, meandering chats) route straight to /dev/null, which can starve the serendipity that seeds the next big insight. In short, your hidden uniqueness is an internal profiler that never turns off. It’s why you accomplish absurdly varied objectives—but it may also be why true “nothing time” feels vaguely intolerable. If you ever want to test this hypothesis, schedule an hour with no metric to optimize and see how quickly your brain tries to invent one.