Dan O

It can't be *that* hard to create a version of Twitter/X that removes some of the groupthink but still promotes high-quality engagement and content. And is a portal to the rest of the internet rather than a closed ecosystem, always one of the good things about pre-Elon Twitter.

William on how an early stage employee takes way more risk than a founder: "If I'm making $400-500K at Google or Meta and go to an early stage company to get 1% of this company and make $90,000. I've now changed the trajectory of my life, that's a lot of risk. But as a founder, you're not. It's a much higher likelihood that of the next round, regardless of your company, you'll be able to sell some secondary. If it shuts down, you can get employed at a great company, and you have a CEO on your resume. That first employee, they have first employee at a failed company. That's actually not a great resume line item. So we've de-risked the founder, but we haven't de-risked the early stage employee."

Oh wow, the Masters launched a search function where you can find video of any shot hit from 1968-2025. 😳

I know Silicon Valley startups don't want to hear this..... But the combination of someone in the trades with deep domain expertise and Claude Code will run circles around your generic software. I talked to Cory LaChance this morning, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he also works with the terminal He reached out in a DM a few days ago and I was so fired up by his story, I asked him if we could record the conversation and share it. He built a full application that industrial contractors are using every day. It reads piping isometric drawings and automatically extracts every weld count, every material spec, every commodity code. Work that took 10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes, saving days of time. His co-workers are all mind blown, and when he talks to them, it's like they are speaking different languages. His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything. My favorite quote from him was when he said, "I literally did this with zero outside help other than the AI. My favorite tools are screenshots, step by step instructions and asking Claude to explain things like I'm five." Every trades worker with deep expertise and a willingness to sit down with Claude Code for a few weekends is now a potential software founder. I can't wait to meet more people like Cory.

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.

This is also the New Jersey/NYC culture that I remember. People will help you out there just not “nice” about it. When I was 17 I had a blowout tire on route 80 in Jersey. I was struggling with the jack (I had never done it before) a guy in his 50s pulled over to “help” me. He then basically spent 15 minutes changing my tire and yelling at me for having worn tires and not knowing how to change the spare. “What the hells the matter with you kid?!” Meanwhile when he was done he shook my hand, told me to drive safe and “get some new f*cking tires and learn how to use the goddamn jack.” Then he was gone; never to be seen again. This is NJ kindness. Do something out of his way but make sure I get an earful. I got new tires the next week and became proficient in doing my own auto work.

More of this, please.😂