Carlos Puig

is this normal?

Entrepreneurship is a lonely game that can’t succeed without a proper support mechanism around you, mainly from your loved ones. Proof me wrong.

i grew up watching my dad build from nothing. He never talked about it as hustle or grind. He just worked, and the work compounded. i didn't understand that until my late twenties. By then i'd already burned through a startup, lived in Jakarta for three years, and started BUNCH in Manila. The lesson was the same one he'd been showing me since i was a kid. Stay in the game long enough for it to compound.

i used to think the hardest part of building a company was the idea. Then i thought it was the product. Then i thought it was the team. Now i think it's the transition. The moment where you have to stop doing the work and start building the system that does the work.

This is how deploying agents in a real business work: Week 1: the CEO loves the demo. Week 2: the ops manager says "our process doesn't work like that." Week 3: you're rewriting everything. The process on the pitch deck is never the real process. The real one lives in someone's head, a WhatsApp group, and a spreadsheet from 2019. So you start there. You sit with whoever actually does the work. You map what they really do, not what the SOP says. Then you find the one thing that breaks their day. The boring, repetitive thing they hate. You automate that. Just that. Get it working in production, with real data, with real edge cases. It takes 3-4 weeks. Not 3-4 months. You move fast or you lose the window. Attention dies fast inside a company. If it works, they trust you with the next thing. That's how you go from one agent to five.

Every company has two versions of its operations. The version in the handbook and the version that actually runs. After 50+ deployments i can tell which companies are healthy within the first meeting. Healthy: the CEO describes how things work and the ops manager corrects him on two details. Unhealthy: everyone agrees with the CEO and the real process lives in three people's WhatsApp groups.

There's a specific moment in every OpenClaw session. Everything works fine. Then you need to actually do something. And suddenly the browser times out. It's like it's just been waiting for you to ask something real.

Listened to the All-In episode on Anthropic's $30B run rate. One number that stuck: they went from $9B to $30B ARR in under 4 months. OpenAI took years to hit $9B. From where i sit deploying Claude for actual businesses: the revenue makes sense. It's the only model that comes back with fewer surprises when you run it on real ops workflows, week after week.

Good operators fix problems. Great ones build systems so the same problem stops mattering.

i always ask clients: who actually owns this process right now? Usually there's a pause. Then someone names a person who's been there 11 years and hasn't documented anything. That's not an automation problem. That's a knowledge risk. The agent just made it visible.

#claudeai #obsidian #mac

Claude just ate 45.95 GB of my RAM 🤯 is this the new normal or did I actually cook my machine?

Creating value where there's nothing is the most fun part of business. What's the last time you did it?

First hours of the day are sacred. No Slack. No email. No phone. No agents. Meditation. Work Out, Thinking, then the work i actually chose. In that order. Every day. Those are fully mine, before rest of the hours of the day go into someone/something else.

Early entrepreneurship days: 18 years old. Bedroom in Barcelona. i had figured out that if you ranked on Google, people called you. First client: a restaurant I was working for as a waiter. Paid me 300 euros a month to be on the first page. i had no idea what i was doing. But neither did he. He was on page one in six weeks. Phone never stopped ringing. i remember thinking: this is how it works.

tbh the AI hype cycle is doing real damage. Every vendor is selling transformation and delivering tools. Transformation requires changing how you work. A tool just sits next to how you already work. Most companies are buying tools and expecting transformation.

The best thing about building across time zones: you stop treating 'office hours' as a metric. Work happens when work happens. Results are the only output that matters.

The businesses that survive downturns aren't the leanest. They're the ones that know their actual margin. Most founders have no idea. They're tracking revenue, not survival.

We built a tender analysis agent for a mid-size consulting firm. First run: 40 tenders reviewed in 3 hours. Previously that took 3 people a week. The team didn't celebrate. They panicked. Then they spent the next week figuring out what to do with the time. That's always the real project.

Simplicity is a luxury only after you've failed in complex ways.