Michael Horne

415 posts

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Michael Horne

Michael Horne

@launchright

Advisor. Investor. Operator. Ex-Arm/SoftBank. $1.5B+ in licensing & royalty deals closed. Building and scaling revenue for deep-tech founders.

San Francisco, CA Katılım Eylül 2011
200 Takip Edilen1.8K Takipçiler
Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
Fair on the vested interest, I help startups jumpstart sales. But fewer seats to sell doesn't mean no sales. People still buy cars, food, healthcare; that demand doesn't go away because a company runs leaner. And something the doom case misses: agents are becoming buyers too. They sign up for tools, pay for data, spend real money. New market, no human interface needed. Fair to say where humans earn will change, though. That's how every tech shift looks at first: jobs vanish in one column and show up in another. The work doesn't go away, it moves, and there's usually more of it once the dust settles. Painful for whoever's caught on the wrong side, no question. But "no humans" has never been how it plays out. It's really a shift in who does what, and who's even doing the buying. More sales, not fewer.
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RTwthrpow
RTwthrpow@SwagRruss·
@launchright @EscanorReloaded @PublicAI_ Not buying it, either - ur pitch that is. U have a vested interest to hype the product you're selling. It's in ALL companies best interest to support HUMAN labor as they are the ones that buy the PRODUCTS at the end of the day that these companies produce. NO humans, dying sales.
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Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳)
CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem. Two problems, actually. One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired. Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be. You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner. The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke. The AI just invoices you for the outage. And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about. To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game. You didn’t hire a replacement. You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own. Enjoy.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
@tomkeene Disagree. A salary is a subscription too. The real question isn’t price, it’s output per buck spent. Same price for the same output? You’re doing it wrong. Same price for 10x, sometimes 100x? You’re buying outcomes no human can match. I’d take that all day long.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
Not buying it. A salary is a subscription too. So the real question isn’t price, it’s what you get back per buck. Pay an agent a salary’s worth in tokens and get the same output? Sure, that’s a bad deal, and you’re probably doing something very wrong. The deal is pay same price, 10x the output. Sometimes 100x. At that point cost savings isn’t the point. You’re buying outcomes a human can’t physically match. You’d take that all day long.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
@TimurNegru Many times, wonderful morning hike from Camogli and then delicious lunch at Puntetta or da Giovanni, hang on the beach after and boat back to Portofino or SML.
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Tim
Tim@TimurNegru·
I thought I knew all the beautiful places in Italy, but I was mistaken. This is San Fruttuoso, a small seaside village in Liguria, only accessible by boat or hiking trail. Has anyone been here? (photo credit: travelais)
Tim tweet mediaTim tweet mediaTim tweet mediaTim tweet media
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
And it's now coming for physical engineering. In fact, it's already here. What traditionally takes months of engineering work to do (design an electric motor, layout a complex chip) can now be done in days, even hours. Buckle up.
Brett Caughran@FundamentEdge

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI: “Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.” This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.

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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
Not practical, but interesting. Maybe a better way to summarize this: "I built an agent loop that found a low-effort bounty, wrote a working PR, and earned $16. The novelty is that I didn't write the code. The economics don't scale, but the capability is real and will matter when bounty supply goes up or agent cost goes down"
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Chris
Chris@Chrisgpt·
Codex made me money without me doing anything.. Huge turning point for me today, I asked Codex to go off and make me $5. It went out, found a small open-source security/audit bounty path, made a legit PR, followed up with the maintainer, kept my payment details private - (without me asking), handled the GitHub proof/verification loop, and got the work merged. it spent about 22 hours working on multiple security audits. Today I received my first payment from that experiment: $16.88. That’s a $506.40/month run-rate if repeated daily. Not life-changing money yet, but it's deeply exciting to live out Sam Altman's vision for AI, where it will just go out and make money for you. It's awesome to start to see the beginning of that.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
@ajlamesa What is typical in the world is not inevitable. Japan culture has proven it.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
None of these go away on their own. You can't out-wait them. The founders who clear them treat commercial readiness as a system, not a guess. If any of these hit close to home, follow us @launchright. We help deep-tech founders close real deals before the runway closes them.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
9: "Enterprise procurement will eat us alive." Legal reviews, security questionnaires, 12-month cycles. Nobody gave you the rulebook. Build the contract pack early. Mutual NDA, MSA template, security responses. Procurement isn't the enemy. Being surprised and unprepared is.
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
When the anxiety hits at 3am, every deep-tech founder is thinking the same 9 things. None of them go in the board deck. Here they are. And what actually works. 🧵
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Boris Vagner
Boris Vagner@BorisVagner·
Done with Openclaw Last couple of weeks it’s been pretty buggy and hard to use Also Claude Code terminal + desktop app + mobile basically does the same stuff but better Gonna miss the lobster
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Michael Horne
Michael Horne@launchright·
@brivael Spend enough time around deeptech founders and your point becomes obvious. This is the work. The hardest problems don't solve themselves, and they don't get funded by accident. Someone has to back the people willing to try.
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Brivael Le Pogam
Brivael Le Pogam@brivael·
Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital. Cette phrase change tout. L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ? Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible. Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur. Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé. Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire. L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants. Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution. Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain. Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée. Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien. La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose. Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins. Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires. La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.
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