Haroon Choudery

When I was 5, we immigrated to the US & slept on the floor of my uncle's 1br apartment for two years. When I was 10, we moved to a poultry farm in rural Maryland. I spent my evenings and weekends working on the farm. My childhood led me to dedicate my career to AI. Here's why:

@SumeraNabi thanks Sumera!

@haroonc Huge congrats, wonderful to see that businesses can now deploy these agents while protecting their data.

I started my first company less than a month after my daughter was born. People thought I was crazy (maybe I was). But I'd had this idea stuck in my head and I couldn't let it go. So I built Autoblocks while learning how to be a dad at the same time. Then last year, right around the time we found out we were having our second, I went through something that changed how I think about time: a health situation that was serious enough to make me question whether I'd get to watch my kids grow up. Fortunately, I'm past it now and healthier than ever. But it rewired something in me. I shut down Autoblocks. Not because it wasn't working - we had real customers, real traction. I shut it down because life got short and I needed to build something that mattered more to me. My daughter is three. My son is six months. I want to be there for as much of this as I possibly can. And I think for the first time in my career, the technology exists to make that possible. That's why we built Clutch. Not just because AI employees are a massive opportunity - they are. But because I believe the companies that figure out human-AI collaboration are going to give their people something back: time. Time to be with your family. Time to do the things you've been putting off. Time to actually live while you build. We made a short film to try to capture that idea. PS - Clutch is live (in reply) - it's the safest way to deploy AI teammates for your company.

Request early access at clutch.so

Huge day for Readwise nerds (me)

@paulg Reading this was like a breath of fresh air.

If you wondered why we're attacking Iran, Trump's counterterrorism head explains.

~Canva~ -> Gamma

@PhilipJohnston @Starcloud_ @nvidia absolute legend

I just watched Jensen walk on stage to the deployment of @Starcloud_-1 😱🤯😲 @NVIDIA GTC

@amasad It's so hard to fathom how morally depraved someone needs to be to do this to a 4 year old, and then justify it.

Wild thing about this article was that it was concerning the mental health impact of such actions on soldiers.

First they came for the engineers, and I didn't speak out. Then they came for the grannies...

@BrennanWoodruff the more I’ve realized scientism is a trap door

The older I get the more I believe there are things at play we will never fully understand, and I think that’s a beautiful thing

@SahilBloom the biggest challenge of less social media for me is dealing with the anxiety of “am I missing out on something?”. esp as someone in the AI space and given there are so many situations to monitor rn.

I broke my phone addiction in 30 days. • Screen Time down ~70% • Phone pickups down ~50% I reclaimed 4 hours 30 minutes per day. That's 1,635 hours across a full year. 68 days of life from a single behavior change. Here's exactly what I did (save this): 1. Grayscale Mode Put your phone on Grayscale Mode for the entire day. Grayscale Mode removes the colors to make your phone immediately less appealing and addicting. It takes 30 seconds to set up. If you have an iPhone, follow these steps: • Settings • Accessibility • Display & Text Size • Color Filters -> On • Grayscale Next, create a simple shortcut: • Settings • Accessibility • Accessibility Shortcut • Color Filters Now, if you triple-click the side button, you'll be able to toggle it on and off. For non-iPhone users, you can find instructions​ with a simple search. I kept my phone on Grayscale at all times and only removed it for specific reasons (like posting something that required me to see the color, looking at photos, etc.). It made me less interested in grabbing my phone for the random "just checks" during the day. 2. No-Phone Zones Set specific locations, times, and events where you won't have your phone on you. I called them No-Phone Zones: • Downstairs (kitchen, living room) • Creative flow time (from ~5-8am) • Family flow time (from ~5-7pm) • Family gatherings During these windows, my phone would be in a lock box or in a drawer in my office. If we were out at a family gathering, I would leave it in the car or in my wife's bag where I couldn't feel it. Specifically listing out these No-Phone Zones had the benefit of making it a clear rule that I could cement in my mind. Create your list of No-Phone Zones. Write it down if you need to. 3. Strategic Friction Even with the Grayscale Mode and No-Phone Zones, my phone addiction intervention would have been difficult to execute without this final piece of the puzzle. Motivation and discipline are never enough when you're trying to crack a deeply entrenched behavior. There's a theory in cognitive science called Choice Architecture, which is the idea that you can design your environment to make good choices easier and bad choices harder. Basically, I wanted to add strategic friction to make it much easier to adhere to my rules (and much more difficult to break them). Three primary ways I did that: 1. I locked my phone in a ​lock box​ during my morning creative flow (5-8am) and evening family flow (5-7pm). It was a timed lock so I couldn’t get it without emailing the company. 2. I left my phone far away from where I was going to be working. If I wanted to get it, I'd have to walk to the other side of the house or down a few flights of stairs to get it. 3. I added really low screen time restrictions to social apps. If I wanted to overuse them, I'd have to keep approving more time, which felt like letting myself down when I did it. Breaking the addiction is going to be difficult at first. Create strategic friction that helps you stick to the change. Make it difficult to make a bad choice. The Life Impact I'm not going to sugarcoat it at all: This was the single most powerful behavior change I've ever made in terms of the tangible impact and ripple effects on my life. That is not an exaggeration. I was more present, less stressed, and able to connect on an entirely different level. In short, I showed up more aligned with how my ideal self would. My capacity for deep work expanded significantly from simply placing my phone in another room or a lock box. I got more done, faster, at a higher quality bar. It was like the holy trinity of productivity improvement, with no fancy productivity tool required. Reviewing the research, this isn't surprising: There is clear ​scientific evidence​ that even having your phone in your pocket or on your desk reduces your cognitive capacity. I felt happier and less stressed immediately upon making the change. So, just keeping score... This was a single, zero cost behavior change that had the net effect of: • Improving my relationships • Improving my work • Improving my happiness To be completely transparent, just a few days in, the only negative thought I had related to the intervention was simple: Why didn't I do this sooner? I hope this is the push you need to make this change in your life. Start small and stick to it. Aim for a 10-20% screen time reduction week-over-week. Keep yourself accountable with a friend. Having now gone through it, I can guarantee you'll see and feel the positive impact immediately. Onward and upward.

@hwchase17 @samrodriques @steipete @vincentweisser @saranormous @Alfred_Lin stacked panel!

If you're going to be at GTC this week... come say hi. We'll be there talking about open source agents! 🎬 Mon AM — GTC Live Pregame: "The Agentic AI Inflection Point" with @samrodriques @steipete @vincentweisser @saranormous @Alfred_Lin 🎤 Mon 4pm — "Open, Trusted, and Observable: Deploying AI Agents at Enterprise Scale" talke 🗣️ Wed 12:30pm — Panel moderated by Jensen Huang on "Open Models: Where We Are and Where We're Headed" alongside @AravSrinivas @MiraMurati @arthurmensch @michaeltruell and more see ya there!

@twlvone @dharmesh @travisk @HubSpot I think they’re talking about selling to SMB, not building as SMB

The SMB hard mode problem is fundamentally a resource allocation issue — small teams can't maintain the specialization depth that enterprise throws people at. AI changes that equation: the SMB founder who can prompt well now has access to functional depth of a much larger org. The economics start to shift.

Can confirm what @travisk said. Has certainly been true for @HubSpot. Figuring out how to make SMB work is playing in "hard mode". The good news is that if you figure out how to make the math work in SMB, it is its own form of moat.

My fam runs a chicken farm. We grew up doing manual labor every day so us kids could eventually get “white-collar” jobs. Fate loves irony. 😅

One of my most random encounters was in June 2022. On the first day of a month-long getaway to Fort Lauderdale, I ran into @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and Adam Neumann in a huddle at the Sonder we were staying at. 2 months later, Marc announced @a16z's $350m investment in Flow. Here's the photo I took from a meeting room. I call it "deal Flow".

“There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see"

@Kazanjy true or false: bald overweight middle-aged white males with Napoleon complex engage in higher frequencies of mass shootings in the US as compared to their share of the population?

@haroonc True or false: Muslims in the United States (and elsewhere in the west) engage in higher frequencies of terrorism as compared to their share of the population.

So just two days after Haroon tried to cancel me for documenting the clear, public math associated with Islamic terrorism in the US in response to the failed islamic terrorism bombing in New York, there's been not one, but TWO new Islamic terrorism attacks in the US - both at schools. It's a problem. It's ok to talk about it. Don't let people silence you.

@Kazanjy for the bajillionth time 👇🏼 tbh you're more of a threat to society than the average Muslim

@haroonc True or false: Muslims in the United States (and elsewhere in the west) engage in higher frequencies of terrorism as compared to their share of the population.

@zaarheed @shaunmmaguire gotta respect the hustle!

@haroonc Lmaoooo @shaunmmaguire what’s going on lad? There are better ways to drum up deal flow from the ME if things are drying up for you elsewhere 😰

guys what are we even doing ISIS gestures in city hall? they're playing with you