Chris Treadaway

Steve Jobs: “My model of business is The Beatles” “[The Beatles] were four very talented guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” Steve continues: “The Beatles — when they were together — they did truly brilliant, innovative work. And when they split up, they did good work, but it was never the same. And I see business that way too. It’s really always a team.”

I went down an i-Ready rabbit hole a couple weeks ago. This is a edtech platform used by ~ 1/3 of K-8 students in the country. Students are spending a massive amount of instructional time using their product. Yet, there are NO RCTs (experimental studies) and few external evaluations that demonstrate that their adaptive learning platform works 😶‍🌫️🙃 What evidence does exist? It doesn't get better..

The CEO of a $95 billion company just said something that should TERRIFY every software executive on the planet. Patrick Collison, the man who built Stripe, went on TBPN last week and compared the entire software industry to frozen food. His words: "Software has been created years beforehand, freeze-dried, and then prepared at the moment of consumption." That era is ending. His new model for software? Pizza. Fresh pizza, made to order, right then and there. Exactly what you need, the moment you need it. That is the future Collison sees for all software. What does that actually mean? It means AI agents will build you custom software in real time. No subscriptions, bloated dashboards and one size fits all. Software cooked for you, that moment, then gone. This is already happening. Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January. Within weeks, $2 trillion in software stocks evaporated. IBM had its worst trading day in 26 years, legalZoom dropped 20% and the entire SaaS sector is in freefall. They're calling it the SaaSpocalypse. The old software model was simple, spend millions building a product, sell it to everyone and collect subscriptions forever. Fixed cost, infinite monetization and winner takes all. That game created trillion dollar companies: Salesforce. Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft. Collison says that game is now breaking. Why? Because AI introduces real cost at every use. Inference costs, custom creation costs, every single interaction has a price tag. No more build once, sell forever and he called it the non-Walrasian software regime. Translation: The winner take all economics that built Big Software are collapsing. When every user gets custom software built on demand, there is no single winner. There are thousands of winners or none. Think about what this does to pricing. No more $50/seat/month or enterprise contracts worth millions. Instead, you pay per task, outcome and for what the AI actually built you. The entire revenue model of SaaS is being rewritten. Klarna already ripped out Salesforce and replaced it with AI. Cursor ditched its paid CMS and built a replacement from scratch. Companies are doing this now. The dominoes are falling. The entire industry is being rewritten in real time.

PERSONAL PRIVATE PROGRAMMABLE I’ve been thinking more about the intersection of Claude Code and Obsidian. There is an upcoming tech stack here that I’m calling personal private programmable. Here’s a sketch of the idea. First, if you squint ahead a few months, we will likely have open weight AI models that work as well as Claude Code does today, and that can handle the context that Google Gemini does. We also already have many different kinds of file types that can be exported out of apps, from markdown files (like Obsidian) to git repos to mbox files (from email) to all the miscellaneous file types you store online or on disk. The open weight AI models can do a lot if they can see all these different data types at once. Finally, we have hundreds of millions of local crypto wallets, and scaled crypto name systems like ENS (Ethereum Name System) and SNS (Solana Name System). These give us tools for working with encrypted data, keys, and identity. So if you put all that together, the personal data becomes far more programmable (with local AI) and yet also more private (because it’s being computed on locally). And if you have a local crypto wallet, you can also encrypt some or all of your personal data and transmit it to another ENS/SNS name, such that you can collaborate with them in an end-to-end encrypted way. There are many networking details to be worked out regarding secure synchronization of packets between different ENS/SNS names across different machines, and you might need some kind of private cloud like Gitlab to really make it work depending on the application (because pure p2p is hard). Nevertheless, the Claude/Obsidian trend points at a powerful emerging concept where it’s now *better* to redecentralize and keep all your data local. Because local data is easier to encrypt with crypto and compute on with local AI. Thus: the personal becomes private and programmable.

Everest Nevraumont is a 11-year-old student at the Alpha School, which is based in Austin, Texas. Everest participates in AI-powered, personalized learning through her school. She is a public speaker, AI-education advocate, three-time Texas State Champion in History, and was on a winning International History Bowl team. She also delivered a TedX speech about how she uses AI in her education. 2026 State of the Union

This story is actually insane: • dude drops $2000 on a DJI robot vacuum like a lunatic • refuses to use the normal app like a peasant • Sammy Azdoufal fires up Claude to crack the API so he can drive it with an xbox controller • Claude delivers the goods • pulls an auth token from their servers, connects successfully • except the system thinks he controls 7000 vacuums • checks again • yep, seven thousand • DJI built authentication with zero device ownership verification • any valid token works for any unit on the planet • Sammy now has eyes inside homes across 24 countries • live vacuum camera feeds everywhere • full floor plans from the mapping data • some guy in germany eating cereal at 3am, unaware his roomba is snitching • one API call away from being the most informed burglar in history • all he wanted was to steer his vacuum with a joystick • does the right thing and reports it • DJI fixes it in two days • back to normal life with his stupidly expensive floor cleaner • IoT companies stay undefeated at shipping garbage security