Brandon Simpson

The cheap thing now is letting AI build whatever it wants. The expensive thing is unwinding what got built. I wrote three reduction laws to stop AI's continual scope creep. The concept is inspired by Rick Rubin, Dieter Rams, and Naoto Fukasawa, three masters of restraint. brandon.cc/the-reduction-…

Much needed morning surf session

The market is not waiting for your product to be perfect. It's waiting for it to be useful.

@adamshuaib That's really interesting

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake: deeply unconventional lives. We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: odd hobbies, early signs of exceptionalism, extreme life choices, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal was deviation from the mean. Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors. Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on aren’t just noisy, they’re blinding. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, they don’t think like everyone else, and they certainly don’t build like everyone else. If you want to spot breakout talent before the rest of the market, stop screening for conformity. Back the founders the system was built to filter out.

@DanielSmidstrup just wrangling more complex cats

If ai is doing more of the work, what part of being a founder gets harder, not easier?

Very interested to hear how AI has failed you and your business. If you're a small business owner struggling with AI, let's talk.

@blader Agreed. I built Devil's Advocate for this exact thing, but it has structure in each review github.com/brandonsimpson… I use similar logic on every plan and feature build with keido.ai, and it's part of the foundation of making sure customers always get quality output

protip: adding a adversarial subagent review gate to my plans has been a HUGE unlock to make /goal runs higher quality, and longer running. prompt: "update this plan: before marking a task as done, validate the task with an adversarial subagent review"

I really wish AI was so good I could just paint my deck while it built whatever idea I had. Sadly, we're not there yet.

And then there's this... How the hell could claude code (opus 4.7) "fat-finger" it's own .claude worktree folder name to .claire?

If nothing else, I am building a tool that I can use to launch more businesses in the future, without vendor lock in to any AI company or cloud or IDE or cli tool. That's the goal... fully flexible framework for building services the way that I think they should be built.

One of the things I've been working on for myself and for @keido_ai is simplifying the ability to capture ideas and notes, random thoughts I have throughout the day related to my business. I've built a system to then let my agent distill them and triage those ideas into potentially actionable items. It frees up my mind for other things because I know I've already filed that idea away to come back to later and have time to focus on it.

Always love the way @rickruben simplifies things down to it's core.

@hthieblot Absolutely. I have a Founder's Circle just for this. Real talk with real customers shaping what is the next priority feature to build.

Please get addicted to talking to your customers as a founder

@balajis Agreed. I think we'll soon see a push for more community and physical relationships and tactile services. A demand for art and music things created with meaning by people and a rejection to cheap digital products.

The digital divide has reversed. Digital is cheap, ubiquitous, often fake. Physical is the premium product now.

@garrytan That is really interesting. Much better advice than "just ship something quickly".

Geoffrey Moore says startups die in the chasm because pragmatist buyers demand a "whole product." These folks won't tolerate gaps. They need references. They need the complete solution. The chasm is lethal because because the buyers won't buy without perfection. But Moore's model assumes there's an EXISTING solution the buyer is comparing you to. The whole framework assumes the buyer has a status quo they're comfortable with. When the *bar is zero*, when the alternative is literally "we die" or "we do this entirely by hand with 2,000 people" (Block's compliance team) or "we just don't have this capability at all"? The chasm doesn't exist for those. Buyers start acting like visionaries instead of skeptics, because they have to buy. The alternative doesn't exist. They'll tolerate a 60% solution, missing features, no references, because 60% of something beats 100% of nothing. The companies I get most excited about aren't disrupting incumbents. They're filling voids. 9 Mothers in the YC Spring 2026 batch is a counter-drone defense co for whom bar is zero, there is no viable close quarters defense otherwise! There's no chasm to cross for that. The practical implication for founders: if you're in a market where the bar is zero, stop worrying about whole product, stop worrying about crossing the chasm, stop worrying about pragmatist references. Ship the 60% solution. They're begging for it. If you're NOT in a bar-is-zero market (if there's an incumbent, a status quo, a "good enough") then Moore applies in full and you need the whole playbook (beachhead, bowling alley, whole product, the works). The question every founder should ask: is my customer's current alternative literally nothing? If yes, you're in a different game than the textbooks describe. Ship it in whatever form you have. You'll know. And it's a great place to be.

@danmartell That is the goal! But getting there is a lot of hard work.

The goal isn’t to work harder. It’s to build something that works without you.

@natiakourdadze Small businesses don't have time to learn AI. keido.ai

Startup founders, using only 8 words, tell me about the problem your business solves and I will share your story with 42,900+ founders in my upcoming MEGA post! 🍿

@hthieblot keido.ai - An extensible AI platform for small businesses

If you are a solo founder, reply here and tell me what you are building.

@alex_prompter This is very interesting. I'm all for adversarial reviews, so I am going to give this exercise a go.

🚨 BREAKING: Claude has a feature called Pre-Mortem Failure Radar. You can use it to find every way your project will fail BEFORE you launch it. Built on Gary Klein's Pre-Mortem framework. The same method used by Special Forces, NASA, and Fortune 500 crisis teams. Here are 7 prompts to access it: 👇

7/ Tie it together with Dependabot or Renovate on a weekly cadence. CVEs land in your repo the day they're disclosed, not whenever you next remember to update.

Protect your app from malicious npm packages 7 layers: 1. ignore-scripts=true in .npmrc 2. save-exact=true (lockfile is law) 3. npm ci --ignore-scripts in CI 4. npm audit gate (block critical CVEs) 5. lockfile-lint (catches URL swaps) 6. Socket scan (free in github - catches malware) 7. Install cooldown (7-day delay)