Andry

The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things. Courage beats intelligence.

SaaS CEOs, if your CFO hasn’t used Claude for Excel by now, you need a new CFO. Only the curious will survive.

Recursive self-improving AI is here. I had heard people talking about self-improving AIs at some of the frontier labs but wasn't sure how real it was. One of the neo labs in the current @hf0 batch had a breakthrough and now it’s running in our basement. It’s real.

I might be too much of an optimist but I just don’t buy the permanent underclass thing. I just think no matter how smart AI gets, there’s no way a motivated person will wake up each day and be unable to contribute to society.

As a founder, you can get a lot of things wrong. But if you're unwiling to die, it will eventually work out. Be optimistic, and try to be right. But even if you're not right, don't die.

Good Products are Opinionated. “Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. @Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”

2) I truly believe that while many entrepreneurs brag about 80-hour workweeks, many of them aren't actually productive during those hours. Your goal should be maximizing productive hours, not just bulk hours. Quality over quantity.

A startup told me that one of their investors didn't like it that they were selling to newly founded startups, and wanted them to sell to bigger companies, who have more money. If investors tell you this, write them off as idiots. Selling to startups is the best thing you can do.

wtf is tech week? every week in sf is tech week?

Venture capital runs on conviction, but courage is what separates the good from the great. Every legendary firm was built on one crazy-sounding bet. You can’t train courage. You just have to recognize it when you see it.

We’re ready to add to our team at Alt Cap! We love being a small team and want to stay small-ish forever, but we have more to do these days than we can manage so it’s time to grow. A bit about us: - We’re investing out of our $275M fund II in San Francisco; mostly seed and series A, but there are no hard and fast rules. We just want to build something great and work with founders who inspire us. - We love what we do; we could (and do) talk about startups and venture all day. For better or for worse, our work lives and personal lives are deeply integrated and we’re thrilled about it. - Joy comes before excellence. We want to be as good as possible at what we do conditioned on it never coming before loving our work and our lives. We strongly believe you can have both. - We think fortune favors the bold, that a small number of things make most of the difference, and special people are what make special things happen. - We’re highly independent people who love our time together. No one here wants to be told what to do, but no one here is a lone wolf. We think, grow, and improve as a team. A bit about you: - You’re friendly and empathetic, but you’re competitive and want to be great. - You’re a student of startups and business. You know a little about a lot in tech, and when you don’t understand something that you can tell is important you’re driven to learn about it. - You value signal over noise. You don’t like being busy for the sake of being busy, you prioritize sanity for yourself and people around you. You’re okay to be patient and wait for great. - You never root against a company under any circumstance; you have a deep respect for what every founder is pouring into their startup. - You’ve done some work (maybe you were a founder or a VC before) but your glue isn’t dry and you strongly feel that your formative work years are still ahead of you. - You’re highly flexible and want a fun journey more than a particular destination. - You’re allergic to the politics of deal attribution and just want to win as a firm. - You’re motivated to be hugely successful, for whatever reason is meaningful to you. If you or someone you know might be a great fit please get in touch!

A lot of younger people who’re new to the industry ask me how to do “networking”. How do you go from knowing no one in San Francisco to having a network of people that you can do business with, learn from, hire, etc. The trick is I never set out to “network”. Maybe due to Tylenol exposure in womb, or just pure intuition, but I could never fathom that I’d go to an event or reach out to someone to “network”. “Hi this is G and I’m here to network”. Instead what I focused on was creating value for others and focus on positive value exchanges. Creating open source projects is the “hyper scale” version of this. You’re networking with the world, but you’re doing so by leading with value and with content. Writing essays, teaching people things, giving lightning talks, vibe coding an experiment, all more valuable. What you’re going to notice is that networks build around value, not the other way around. Even today, whenever I reach out to someone, I try to lead with some insight, datapoint, maybe a bug report or suggestion for their product… something tangible. If they have a product or platform with APIs, I start by networking *our systems*. I’ve made amazing, close connections to people who I frequently chat with and I’ve never met IRL. I also make it a point to talk to everybody. Anons, interns, juniors, seniors, CEOs, board members, trolls. tl;DR: Focus on creating value, think long term, don’t be transactional.

took me a while to write this post this is everything I've ever learned about virality and hype over the last six months should be helpful for founders of all stages

Wild convo with two F500 execs today. I asked them to give me a specific example of how AI is giving leverage to their teams right now. Both separately answered, “AI meeting recording and summaries.” It’s hard to overstate how low the bar for enterprise AI adoption is & how early we are in this cycle.

The CEO of IKEA was just elected Prime Minister in Sweden. He should have his cabinet together by the end of the weekend.

the AI consumer playbook by a16z

I ran into an investor friend who was summering in California. He ordered a glass of Santa Barbara pinot and told me: “I didn’t drink for a year. Then on New Year’s I woke up and realized how boring my life had become. So I had a few drinks that day, and suddenly life had color again.” When I asked why he quit in the first place, the answer was simple: better sleep, fewer distractions, full immersion in work. He’s the type who goes all in, which is part of what makes him world-class. So when he discovered longevity, he didn’t dabble. He installed a hyperbaric chamber, bought an infrared sauna, and swapped happy hours for tennis matches. A year later, he’d landed on a middle ground. Still disciplined, but now sipping a couple of glasses of wine. Nothing extreme. And he seemed lighter, even happier. Listening to him explain his new regimen, I realized how far we’d drifted from our twenties. Back then it was shots of top-shelf tequila. Now it’s top-shelf supplements and IV shots of NAD+. In Los Angeles, status used to mean a G-Wagon in the driveway, a Nobu reservation, a Riviera golf membership, or a Bird Streets house “next to Leo.” That game isn’t gone, but the subtler flex now looks less like Rodeo Drive and more like a medical lab. The question isn’t “What car are you driving?” It’s “What’s your protocol?” Designer closets have given way to microdosing GLP-1. Hollywood Bowl tickets have been swapped for Hyrox race entries that sell out faster than Coachella. Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia are the new A-listers. Nobody’s quoting movies anymore, but everyone’s comparing T levels. In tech WhatsApp groups, biomarker screenshots now circulate with the same energy Porsche waitlist confirmations once did. Even the biggest celebrities have joined in, turning their “health journeys” into content. In August, the Kardashians flew to Mexico for stem-cell therapy banned in the U.S., a ban that only made it more exclusive. Naturally, it became both an Instagram flex with a million likes and a tabloid headline. Part of it is just age. My friends are getting older, and the ones with early-adopter instincts—and money—have found a new playground in personalized medicine. The same people who once hunted obscure apps or underground music are now swapping supplement stacks and sleep hacks. COVID accelerated it. Locked indoors, people built home gyms, experimented with diets, and turned longevity from a fringe hobby into a mainstream obsession. The old signals also got boring. A Ferrari says money. A cold plunge says enlightenment. And it’s not only millennials and middle age. For younger New Yorkers, longevity isn’t about hacking DNA. It’s about escaping the chaos of city life and maybe finding a date. On Saturdays, Bathhouse in Tribeca is the new brunch table. Forget bottomless mimosas. The real weekend move is sweating with strangers and hoping your soulmate shows up somewhere between the sauna and your third cold plunge. Contrast therapy is the new Tinder. Sure, the longevity craze might look ridiculous from the outside at times. But it’s ridiculous with benefits. A Patek Philippe watch tells you the time, but an Apple Watch tells you your heart rate, sleep score, and how much stress you’re under. At some point in my thirties, I realized health is the best ROI. Lose it and you’re only half-present at home, at work, and everywhere in between. I’d take a Prenuvo scan over another luxury purchase any day. Health compounds; things depreciate. But like my friend who found a middle ground, I’ve come to see that joy matters too. Sometimes longevity means the glass of wine, the night out, the moment that keeps you human. The old adage was that money can’t buy time. These days, that may no longer be entirely true. Now excuse me, my biomarkers are waiting.

Definitions of Chief of Staff in my replies: - promotion for an EA - equivalent to a COO - someone who enables communication between execs - someone who tracks strategic objectives of the CEO - someone who does people+marketing - someone who does biz ops / fin ops 🤷‍♂️🤔