Bram Sugarman

Claude can now see when I'm struggling and offer to connect me with a real person who can help me

@harleyf @ruffoloj @startupfest Heartbreaking. Thanks for standing strong and continuing to get back up and fight 👊

What happened at @startupfest yesterday was antisemitism. Pure & simple. Disguised under a thin veil of advocacy, and everyone in the room saw right through it. I was on stage with Georges St-Pierre talking about entrepreneurship. Not politics. A man burst in screaming horrible accusations at me anyway. Third time in 2 years, including at the opening of a Jewish community centre. My parents were in the front row. I'll never forget their faces. When the target is always the Jew and never the topic, it's not advocacy. It's hate. The room booed him down and cheered as he was walked out. I'm grateful for that. Hate got escorted out. We got right back to building.

@narbe87 I still might…

@bram I thought you were going to break some news on NBA trades

👀

We’ll look back at the Midjourney reveal as a turning point. VCs will wonder how they missed it and rush to find the next. The best talent will recognize the opportunity to attach creativity to technology to solve enormous problems in completely new ways. The future is bright.

we have the most powerful tech in history and we keep pointing it at gambling slop. more midjourney level ambition plz. less of these re-skinned gambling apps.

This has completely taken over my feed. I hope it’s taken over yours as well…

Disturbing.

Provocative read. Chilling parting words: “The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not.

Five dimensional chess doesn’t exist. Everyone is furiously improvising all the time. The future is utterly uncertain.

This seems important…

Really fun profile from Evan. @bwertz & @angelatytran fight relentlessly for founders because they know what it takes to build. That’s obvious if you’ve ever worked with them. The story of how they became partners - less obvious. Two amazing people I’m lucky to call friends.

@pushmatrix @jacobmparis 💯

@jacobmparis Not quite The true beauty of Quick is in its constraints. People don’t have the choice to install a custom backend, or pick a database, or do any other setup. It’s the ultimate convention over configuration, and it’s really freeing.

We have this at Vercel, it’s called Vercel

Being the best in the world requires hard work. No matter what your craft, understand there are no shortcuts.

@ankurnagpal So you’re saying this could work in Canada…🤔

Bending Spoons works because of the disparity in salaries between America and Europe They pay engineers a median salary of 65K euros which makes them a top paying employer in Italy They get the best technical talent at a fraction of the price of the US engineers they replace

@TaliaGold @evernote @bendingspoons Not just consumer and prosumer with a lot of bloat. The same acquire -> headcount ⬇️ -> product focus ⬆️ -> revenue, profit ⬆️ is happening with SaaS. Bending Spoons focus on consumer and prosumer is smart though, historically less attractive target...

Bending Spoons, like Elon and X, shows there's a lot of bloat in consumer & prosumer apps, and less is more. Reduced headcount by 82% from 341 to 60 between '23 and '24. Product releases grew 50% in '23 and doubled in '24. After declining new users for years, 2024 and 2025 increased 20%+. Revenue grew 30%+ and now highly profitable.

@scottastevenson “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” -HST

Another reason I’ve been unphased by VC pitch weirdness is: high performance looks weird And it looks weird in founders too—you want investors on your side who understand that The world of mediocre performance is designed to create a sense of order, surface level politeness, predictability, warmth When you push to the extremes of performance, and operate from first principles, the outcomes look alien to many people It takes weird people to operate at this level The last person you want on your board is a conformist bureaucrat who doesn’t understand the extreme chaos of running a high growth startup—because the reality will scare them and then you’ll have to put on a performance to manage them—distracting you from getting any real deliberation done This dynamic is not super obvious because very smart, very weird people have a lifetime of practicing seeming normal on podcasts, in public, etc. But in the environments where these people get together—it’s a totally different wavelength of communication, chaos tolerance, contrarianism, intensity As a founder you also need to be able to identify weird and spikey people in hiring It’s super important to understand how to work with these people and to understand why they think the way they do It usually does not come from a bad place—it comes from consequentialist ethics and extreme optimization

Full IPO filing here: sec.gov/Archives/edgar…

Enter Bending Spoons. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, this sets a strong tone for the type of company they're building and how they succeed.

Tough beat for @internetvin. Hearing he was runner up headliner.

@scottastevenson @rabois @jmwind So much alpha in unproven people. The simple act of believing someone unproven is an amazing catalyst.

Working with @rabois and @jmwind, I noticed a rare trait they have in common: They both continue to bet on the unproven, long after they need to. It's easy to risk your time and brand when you are young, unsuccessful and have nothing to lose. But many investors and executives stop taking real risk after they climb to the top of Mt. Status. They go from one big logo to the next, playing it safe and compounding their wealth. @rabois and @jmwind have a true love of the game that is rare. You should be grateful to meet these people, who are willing to take their time to hike back down the mountain and hike up with you all over again. I'm not sure if it's crazy, altruistic, or just fun for them -- but either way, we are lucky to have them onboard Spellbook. And they will end up producing a massively disproportionate amount of value in the world. If you have made it to the top once, and want to do it all over again, shoot me a DM :)