Lee Hower

Yesterday Mark Cuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and told me to keep telling my story. So here it is. I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. 15 years pulling wire in Kentucky. Zero coding background. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to trade school. Every week I'd show up to a home where someone just bought a Tesla or a Rivian. And every time, someone had already told them they needed a $3,000-$5,000 panel upgrade to install a charger. 70% of the time? They didn't need it. The math is in the NEC — Section 220.82. Load calculations. But nobody was doing them for homeowners. Electricians upsell. Dealers don't know. And the homeowner just pays. I got angry enough to build something about it. I found @claudeai. No coding experience. I just started talking to it like I'd explain a job to an apprentice. "Here's how load calcs work. Here's the NEC code. Now help me build a tool that does this." 6 months later — @ChargeRight is live. Real software. Stripe payments. PDF reports. NEC 220.82 calculations automated. $12.99 instead of a $500 truck roll. I'm still pulling wire. I still take service calls. I wake up at 5:05 AM for work. But something shifted. Yesterday @vivilinsv published my story as Claude Builder Spotlight #1. Mark Cuban saw it. The Claude community showed up. And for the first time, I felt like this thing I built in my kitchen might actually matter. I'm not a tech founder. I'm a dad who wants to coach little league and be home for dinner. I just happened to build something that helps people. If you're in the trades and thinking about using AI — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try. EVchargeright.com

I'm joining Hummingbird as a partner. I've been fascinated by Hummingbird ever since I wrote about them in 2023. Though their returns were truly remarkable, what struck me most was how differently Firat (@ileri) and Barend saw the world. Their understanding of outlier founders had a depth, rigor, and originality I hadn't encountered anywhere else in venture. It mapped to what I felt was the reality of startup building, but with a clarity I had yet to develop. In an asset class that can feel like an echo chamber, these two were clearly playing their own game. I feel privileged to be a part of the team. Though The Generalist remains mine and I will continue building it, this does mark a new chapter - one I couldn't be more excited about.

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THE PARADOX OF LEVERAGE The CEO of YC, @garrytan stayed up late this weekend vibecoding. So did I, and so did thousands of other founders, engineers, and builders (and, frankly, insomniacs) because the gap between "idea" and "working product" has collapsed from years / months / weeks to hours. This should (and does!) feel liberating. But honestly I've also felt some existential dread, because of the following events and reads over the last week. 1. All the foundation models will win @EthanChoi7's excellent post last week, where he lays out why all the foundation model companies will win: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Gemini. The most consequential section (for me) was this one: Ethan calls out (correctly) that we're still in the first innings. While I (and others) have been celebrating all my superpowers with building, we're not paying attention to the fact that the capabilities are sprinting faster than we can keep up. 2. The value of knowledge workers is evaporating The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund published a case study where they deployed Anthropic to monitor their ~$1T AUM, with 9,000 companies, saving 213,000 analyst hours / year. That's 100 full-time employees. Gone. Absorbed into the model. From one function, at one organization. 3. Clawdbot taking X by storm I'm yet to dig in and install it. In the meantime, I read this excellent post by @TukiFromKL, reminding us not to outsource our memory, our presence, and our life experience by overrelying on tooling like that. 4. @DarioAmodei's The Adolescence of Technology. He reminde us that things are happening far faster than we're prepared for: The years in front of us will be impossibly hard, asking more of us than we think we can give. ~10 days ago I told a friend that I think there's a non-trivial (though still <10% chance) of reaching the singularity in 2026. I think the probability is significantly higher in 2027. You can see direct traces of this possibility in Dario's post. 5. Software is eating the world, and the foundation models are eating software In the last ~week, Anthropic has released released Claude Cowork, Claude for Excel, apps (whereby you can interface and export work to Figma, Box, Clay, etc. from inside Claude. Anthropic is utterly taking over every single enterprise application. In parallel, OpenAI is sprinting ahead on consumer apps (and enterprise, to a lesser extent than Anthropci), eating one startup at a time. 6. Months of work in days My wife and I did months' worth of work (for a 2020 startup) in a few hours on Sunday — a personal finance / portfolio management app with recursive querying, temporal data storage, external data integrations, the works. ———— The paradox and dilemma as a builder I have never had more leverage. And yet I've never had less clarity on what will survive the next 5 years. Because if the models keep compounding at this rate, what moat actually exists? What's durable? What won't get absorbed into OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini's next release? Paul Atreides, after drinking the Water of Life, describes the feeling of seeing the time-matrix for the first time: standing on shifting sands where even a single grain can cause landslides. He observes "not moving is a choice." I think that's where I am. It's where all founders of companies <$1M in ARR are. It's where most founders <$100M ARR are — even if they won't say it publicly. So where does that leave us? I think the only edge left is action, momentum, agency. The old startup playbook was: find a problem, build a solution, iterate until PMF. The new playbook might be: build fast, stay close to the frontier, and accept that the ground beneath you is moving faster than your roadmap. I say "might be", because I don't even have conviction in this. But the alternative is watching from the sidelines while the world rewrites itself. I will not give into the quiet desperation. There is no choice but to build. Thanks to Opus 4.5 for helping write parts of this post, and Barbara Pascetta for the discussion that sparked it + the Dune reference.