Brett Wischow
2.7K posts
Brett Wischow
@bwish55
Helping people start and grow businesses. Helping grow companies @ https://t.co/2icJjloXok. Writing at Up and to the Right. Commish of SF Links.
San Francisco, CA Katılım Kasım 2009
5.2K Takip Edilen631 Takipçiler
@peterjhasson If someone wrote this about me I’d be so embarrassed
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I cannot get over how embarrassing this is. Witnessing a normal way of eating salad and writing breathlessly about it as if you just witnessed a miracle
Adam Wren@adamwren
How @RahmEmanuel eats a salad. politico.com/news/magazine/…
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AI writing is taking over the internet.
Every fundraising announcement, every X reply, every blog post. It's not just replacing human writing, it's overwhelming it.
The problem isn't that AI writes poorly — it's that it writes plausibly. And plausible-but-empty is the most dangerous kind of noise.
Here's why that matters: when my brain picks up on those subtle AI tells, I write off whatever you're trying to say — even if the idea itself was good.
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@devahaz I mean to be fair she did say she's not great at numbers 🤷♂️
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These numbers presume that a woman identified through this laborious process can never be matched with another client if they don’t marry the person they are initially proposed to as a potential match
Blaine Anderson@datingbyblaine
Why is matchmaking expensive? To illustrate, here’s how I’ll lose money on a client’s $49,000 package. Client is 46, 6’2, exited tech founder. He’s looking for a woman 27-33, very specific criteria around match personality, appearance, and profession. Without diving into specifics, she: • Isn’t easily searchable online... • Isn’t likely to reply when we find her… • Isn’t likely to be single… • Often has a deal-breaker trait we can’t screen for without a phone call… • Isn’t necessarily interested in my client… I was expecting this to be a difficult search, so I quoted $49,000. I wasn’t expecting ~100 hours of labor to find each match, not including communication with the client! To date I’ve spent $45,000 on salaries for the women staffed on his search, plus $2,750 on styling and photos, and we still owe the client 2 matches... Before considering overhead (let alone opportunity cost) this will be a huge L financially. Things balance out though. Most engagements are profitable. Some engagements are quite profitable. For example, a new client in NYC paid $30,000 and paused after his first match, because he’s 99% sure we found his wife. That's still a new relationship, and engagements last 9 months (6 months of active matching + up to 3 months of pause), so we could be on the hook for more work in coming months. But you get the point 🙏
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
Let me explain what just happened 👇
5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil.
5 minutes…
These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch.
There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made.
Someone in that room picked up a phone.
And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars.
American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it.
This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions.
This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight.
You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question.
Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that.
The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…
unusual_whales@unusual_whales
BREAKING: Just five minutes before Trump's announcement to halt the attacks on Iran, massive trades reportedly hit the market. In one move, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 (ES) futures was bought while $192 million in oil (CL) futures was sold. These orders were 4–6x larger than anything else at the time. The trader seemingly made huge gains. Unusual.
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@scottastevenson @andrewchen Really like scrub mentality - definitely going to use that.
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lots of AI cos starting to experiment with paid marketing so here’s my take:
Paid acquisition is a tax on your product's defensibility. the moment you can't out-spend the incumbents and competitors, you die. build channels that get cheaper as you grow or you're just renting your growth
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
Having seen hundreds of businesses,
1. most big brands overstate the value of paid marketing
2. Lots of smaller brands with PMF never need paid even early on, plenty l get big because of paid and another % rely way too much on paid when they have PMF issues.
Bill Gurley@bgurley
Paid marketing is the crudest game you can play. It’s admitting you have no creativity. And actually restricts your creativity. Fire those that want to spend more. abovethecrowd.com/2012/09/04/the…
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@jasonfried Still think there could be a price compression due to increased competition, but absolutely most people aren't building their own software.
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A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it.
It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built wrong in all the ways.
Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software makers! Of course they're excited about building bespoke software — that's what they do. X is full of them. Your feed is full of people who love making software talking about making software. Of course they’re excited about the revolution. Echo, echo, echo...
Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all.
So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design.
They don’t hate technology. But building and maintaining their own critical systems isn’t their wheelhouse, regardless of how much faster and easier it’s become. It's another job on top of the job.
Will these people use AI? Absolutely, for all sorts of things. Will some outliers go deep and build real custom systems? Sure, but they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software. The curiosity was already there. They were dabblers before.
Giving everyone access to software building tools doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder. A powerful excavator doesn't turn a homeowner into a contractor. Most people just want the hole dug by someone else. They don’t want the responsibility either.
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@codyschneider Literally the day after they formally migrated it became completely unusable
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If I was the co-founder of Loom, I would unlife myself with how bad the product has become after Atlassian bought it
how do you make such a good thing so bad
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
If you believe this is the way, you have fallen for some top tier VC and Anthropic propaganda
First off their marketing team is much bigger than 1, research it yourself
2nd off they have a 1 in…1 billion business
This is meant to make you feel like Claude can give you similar results
It cannot
CG@cgtwts
This is INSANE, Anthropic ran its marketing with basically one person. Austin lau, a non-technical growth lead, was running paid search, paid social, email, and seo solo. Here’s the workflow: > export ad CSVs into Claude Code > AI flags underperforming ads > agents generate new headlines + descriptions > Figma auto-swaps copy across 100 ad templates > MCP server pulls live Meta data The results: > ad creation went from 2 hours to 15 minutes. > total marketing output grew 10×. > conversion rates landed 41% above industry average. One person doing what used to take an entire marketing team.
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This is pretty good. Gets the attention of masses while catering directly to an iykyk ICP at SXSW.
They must have posted thousands of these all over Austin.
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@Seanfrank Great example of an industry where lawyers who use AI will completely dominate the field. No chance someone in an actually high stakes scenario will be good with a Claude oopsie without a real lawyer checking it over. Disrupted for sure, replaced I give 0% chance to
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It’s obvious ai will change a lot of stuff.
Nothing will be disrupted more than lawyers. It’s as bad as software engineers.
I’ve spent over $10,000,000 on lawyers.
It’s a field that tries to be truth seeking. It’s highly process oriented.
Deadlines, fillings, responses.
Finding precedent that agrees with you and disagrees with the counter argument.
It’s token work.
And it’s the most expensive tokens in the market.
$1,000 an hour.
Nickle and dimed over 15 minute increments.
Partners expected to bill 2200 hours…
There is no better professional work for Claude to one shot.
It’s economical because the human costs are so high. It’s structured.
And the response will be SLOW.
The legal system is slow.
By design.
So they can charge more.
Why bill for 10 hours when we can make more process and bill for 10,000.
Lawyers will scramble to try and protect the profession.
But they only have 2 paths-
Legal challenges and regulator capture.
Congress doesn’t work anymore.
So it will be legal challenges.
Which will take 4 years.
And by then-
The models are out and working.
There is no going back.
Don’t let your kids become lawyers.
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
Growing suspicion that there are vanishingly few use cases for consumer agents. People don’t do work in their personal lives. The only people who do are sf dorks using spreadsheets to plan trips to tahoe
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
Oddly most of our clients want 10x output from current talent
Not massive headcount reduction
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings
I have spoken to 3 founders in the last 48 hours; all of them with 500-1,000 employees. Each of them is planning a minimum 20% headcount reduction. Said with great concern; this is about to get very real for labour markets.
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@blakeir Dozens being the operative word here. People trying to do too much volume sacrificing any shred of quality.
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I still send dozens of cold emails a week.
The upside is uncapped.
And the downside is someone doesn’t reply.
Andrew Reed@andrew__reed
Easiest business arbitrage: the risk/reward of a well-written cold email is so wildly favorable, and yet so few people will actually send one
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
actual moats:
*institutional liability insurance (I think it will be too hard to just intrinsically insure certain LLMs or agents, for a very long time, no matter what verification is added)
*meatspace presence/relationship-based stuff
*physical stuff robots suck at or is too uneconomical for robots to do
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It’s been a difficult week at Block with many losing their job 😞
But it’s important we all acknowledge Jason Calacanis was an early investor and never sold a share (since being a private investor btw. Early.) 🙏 😊
jack@jack
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack
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Brett Wischow retweetledi
