brunny

Most software for home cooks sucks and charges you a subscription forever. Saving recipes, swapping ingredients, handling dietary needs, making grocery lists... It's all a mess. So I built a tool called Olea to fix it. It's live today and free to use. ⬇️⬇️

@romlib_ Crypto is a legit and indeed inevitable technology. Usually such things are net positive.

I don’t care how long they last. You’re out of your damn mind if think I’m storing herbs like this in the fridge.

the hardest part about meal prep is keeping your meals healthy AND interesting so i've been sharing my weekly meal prep routines with friends and family for a couple of months subscribe if interested 👨‍🍳

@cooper_kunz @kevaundray i will always read what you write, my friend!! keep shipping relatedly you should peep my weekly food substack lol substack.com/home/post/p-19…

@blulinski @kevaundray thanks for reading fam. kev is pretty great.

@phklive @Bouazizalex maybe we @AztecLabs_ can provide something nice here :) in the works!

@Bouazizalex That's really cool! Very excited to see Stablecoins be adopted by Deel, will def start using it for our employees. Would also love to see if there is an opportunity to make these flows go private to not leak our employees salaries...

With Deel, a company in NYC can now fund payroll in dollars and their employee in Berlin can receive it in stablecoins within minutes 🤯 On one platform, no workarounds. Stablecoin salary payouts are available for employees in the EU and US - the UK and LATAM are coming soon. You choose how to fund it. They choose how to get paid

Aztec Labs CEO @jaosef on the UK Digital Identity bill: "The UK, with its Online Safety Act, is banning end-to-end encryption and throwing away our opportunity to lead." Read more on @Finextra: tinyurl.com/muy2ette

New day, new post. Today is about why having a superhuman AI available at all times might not change your life much.

agreed travis kalanick starts black car app after first company goes bankrupt ev williams founds twitter after prior podcasting startup rendered obsolete by itunes steward butterfield starts gaming company after his first gaming company had to pivot to photos and so on

the Animations on the Web course by @emilkowalski is very very good, highly recommend

@wminshew Splits hard pivot?😁 consider posting this in a reddit forum, e.g., r/weedbiz or r/coloradommj

REQUEST FOR HELP does anyone here work in the cannabis industry or have a friend who does that would be willing to chat with me for ~15m?

@MichelleBakels @opencode congrats Michelle!! first things first, start an OpenCode Miami conference

Day 1 at @opencode, what should I do first?

@CharleyMa @bunsen is building accessgrid which seems like the solution to this type of problem

Who is building AI security for office buildings because i just spent 10 minutes at a front desk watching them scroll through a spreadsheet to try and find my name, not find it, ask my host to come down 60 floors to come pick me up, aaaaand now our meeting time is half over.

@13yearoldvc @smpalladino hi jessy, lets chat follow up to dinner in Amsterdam 5+ years ago if i'm not mistaken :)

@smpalladino @blulinski lets go

I went through the founding stories of the world's top 50 talent-dense companies right now and tried to figure out how they actually got to pmf 7 patterns kept showing up. The Practitioner's Revolt - founder hates their own tools, builds the replacement. Linear's three founders literally bonded over hating Jira at a bar. One of them had already built a Chrome extension to fix Jira at Airbnb and it went viral internally. They took Big Tech jobs on purpose to build pedigree and savings, then quit to build what they actually wanted. Profitable in two years. Still under 30 people at the time. The Platform Shift Surfer - a new platform shows up and you build the definitive tool for it before anyone else figures out what's happening. Cursor's founders were obsessive Copilot users who realized the whole IDE needed to be rebuilt around AI, not just have it bolted on. $100M ARR in 12 months with zero marketing spend. That's not a growth hack. That's just being right about what developers need at exactly the right moment. Wedge-and-Expand - you enter through something so narrow it's almost embarrassing, then you never stop expanding. Ramp started as a corporate card. Then expense management. Then bill pay. Then procurement. Then travel. Then treasury. They shipped 270 features in six months last year. Their bill payments volume is now bigger than their card business. The Talent Magnet - team is so stacked that the company's existence is the gtm. Thinking Machines Lab raised $2B before they had a product. Meta offered one of their engineers $1.5B to leave. He said no. (He eventually said yes, but still.) Unsexy Infrastructure - you build the boring plumbing everyone in a growing ecosystem needs. Modal Labs is like 120 people building serverless compute for AI workloads. Nobody writes breathless Twitter threads about it. Developers love it. Stripe bought Metronome for $1B and all Metronome did was usage-based billing metering. Community Marketplace - you build the community first and let the product emerge from what they actually need. Whatnot started selling Funko Pops. Their CTO coded livestreaming in six weeks. First stream sold $5K in a few hours. Now they do $6B in annual sales and users spend 80 minutes a day on the app. They talked to over 100 investors before anyone would give them $300K. Vertical AI - you take general-purpose AI and make it dramatically better for one specific industry. Harvey is the wildest story here. A securities litigator and a DeepMind researcher were roommates. They pulled 100 questions from Reddit's legal advice sub, ran them through GPT-3, and 86 passed review by practicing attorneys. Cold-emailed Sam Altman. Got the OpenAI Startup Fund's first check. Then four people operating out of an Airbnb signed Allen & Overy - one of the largest law firms on earth, 4,000 lawyers - as their first customer. Every single investor told them to start with small firms. They ignored all of them. $190M+ ARR now. The thing that surprised me most: the strongest companies hit three or four at once. Cursor is a Practitioner's Revolt and a Platform Shift Surfer and a Wedge-and-Expand all at the same time. They just wanted a better code editor and the rest fell into place because the timing was right and they were the right people. A few other things that kept coming up across all 50: Repeat founders won at a disproportionate rate. At least 20 of the 50 companies were started by people who'd already built and sold something. Ramp's founders sold Paribus to Capital One. Decagon's founders both had exits. Whatnot's CEO previously sold Kit to Patreon. The playbook knowledge compounds. "Go straight to the top" almost never happens cold. Harvey got to Allen & Overy through OpenAI's network after the investment. Mercor got to the top AI labs by first proving they could reliably place engineers at smaller companies. The shortcut is either a warm intro through your investors or a proof of concept so undeniable it functions as its own introduction. And in the AI era specifically - building speed is not the moat anymore. Everyone can build fast now. The companies surviving against the big labs aren't technically smarter. They're just deeper inside their customer's daily workflow than any lab wants to go. Harvey has ex-lawyers embedded inside law firms doing change management. That's almost a services business and OpenAI probably doesn't want to run a services business. The single clearest takeaway from all 50 stories: PMF comes from compression, not expansion. Make your world smaller. Own it completely. Then expand from strength.

Look, was LIV Golf successful? No. Did it bolster the reputations of everybody involved? Also, no. But was it fun? Once again, no.

I believe self custody of assets with private keys is legitimately one of the most powerful tools for sovereignty we have ever devised but the industry has completely bastardized this term to the point of uselessness. The original notion (in my mind at least) of self custody was having a string of letters and numbers or 12 words that unlock your assets. “Self-custody” when interacting with smart contracts and defi has become virtually meaningless at this point, encumbering coins with layers and layers of risks and dependencies, incredibly misleading A lot of this narrative was ostensibly for regulatory reasons: “we don’t take custody of your assets, you deposit them in this pool or contract with self-executing code” but that’s so obviously not true at this point it’s an insult to our lived experience. Or, if it is “true” in the literal sense that the code technically always does what it is allowed to do, the “self-custody” component is very far down the list of what is actually important with these systems, a red herring really. Clearly Drift depositors didn’t (don’t) have “self-custody” of their funds. And the common retort is “well Drift doesn’t really either.” ok but North Korea does now. At this point I liken self-custody in the context of defi to saying that you are the only one with the keys to the front door of a bank vault but there’s another door on the other side of the vault that criminals (or regulators, who knows) can enter with impunity and take your assets. Is it really that relevant that you’re the only one with a key to the front door? The reason this is jading is because truly securing your wealth with private keys if you choose is a 0 to 1 unlock for some people (maybe the only real 0 to 1 unlock in this space) but that was conflated with all of these systems that have multisigs, upgrade keys, oracle dependencies, layers upon layers, turtles all the way down, often times with very obvious single points of failure. What is the value of self custody when a multisig can reorg your assets out of existence? The whole thing is very disillusioning

@GregoireGambatt @GuillaumeMbh he looks exactly like Rafa Nadal!

a run with the legendary @GuillaumeMbh and Diane. $50m ARR (not run rate :P), fully bootstrapped. i try to convince him to move to sf 👀

@omw_to_the_moon @ethereum @aztecnetwork @jaosef @lisacuesta congrats Rahul! always fun working with you. wish you all the best in your next chapter, my friend

I am pumped to announce that, as of April, I have been working at @ethereum foundation as the EVM Dev Tooling Lead. Bittersweetly, this does mark the end of my 3 (!!) years at @aztecnetwork. Thank you to @jaosef @lisacuesta and many others for the amazing memories, offsites and the massive learning opportunity, as I pivoted from engineering to product management. I am excited for what Labs will do post Alpha launch and serving as an example for privacy products in crypto. There is a lot in store there. In my new role at the EF, I hold myself accountable for making it easier to build EVM apps. I plan to tackle: 👉 Fixing top developer pain points and working with @HardhatHQ @solidity_lang, foundry, @etherscan, other SDKs, tooling and even all core devs. And yes, I have a list of the pain points. 👉 Ensuring tooling stays up to date with latest forks (glamsterdam, hegota etc) 👉 Working with the one and only @austingriffith and his team to ensure Claude code and other LLMs can build good, secure dapps (checkout ethskills.com btw!) 👉 Outlining broader language and tooling vision, funding strategies with appropriate teams, 👉 Sunsetting not needed tools or finding other maintainers. I have serving in this role for just about a month now and there is so much cooking. You will be hearing many fun announcements and big frustrations being solved over the next few weeks. Solidity devs - if you ever encounter any problem/frustration with any tooling - do reach out. My DMs remain open! To the X algorithm - help me be the point of contact for solidity devs! I want to know your biggest issues when building on Ethereum or L2s. PS: Is it cringe to say evm/acc?