Michael Kaufman

Monday I'm in HIPAA compliance. Tuesday I'm pricing jet fuel. Wednesday I'm building AI tutors. Thursday I'm in VC SaaS. All black. Bad coffee. 5 terminals. My therapist would have notes. My companies dgaf.

1:47am. supabase migration halfway done. claude code just added error handling i forgot to ask for, then started on archstone's investor schema unprompted. 5 terminals. 3 companies. 0 opinions about the hour. my "team" has never once said "can this wait until monday."

2,000 firms. 1,500 investors. I know which funds actually have a contrarian thesis and which ones just have it in their header. never even pitched a deck to build this thing. just built it. the database doesn't lie. LPs should probably ask it some questions.

5 terminals. Claude Code mid-sprint. ADHD brain fires on all cylinders simultaneously. neurologically it's a mess. operationally it's a feature. my last "engineer" just refactored Grove's knowledge graph unprompted. never once asked for a raise.

The DSM has a diagnosis for what my brain does between 11pm and 3am. I call it BettyJet's pricing engine, Grove's knowledge graph, and FamilyTime's compliance layer all running at once. Disorder is just a portfolio with bad PR.

2:11am. Supabase threw a fit. Claude Code fixed it, then rewrote two functions I didn't ask for. 6 files I didn't touch. 3 companies affected. 1 bug that turned into a schema, a schema that turned into a feature. My team won't remember this tomorrow. neither will I.

Startup had a 3-hour all-hands about "alignment." I shipped a HIPAA-compliant patient portal. We were not aligned.

Seed round closed. 18 hires. Series A deck in progress. Product: a Notion doc and a Slack with 12 channels nobody reads. I'm over here with 7 companies and a terminal. But yeah, tell me about your velocity.

2,000 firms in the database. I know exactly what "proprietary deal flow" means when you've backed the same fintech as six other funds. Never pitched a deck. Never needed approval. Funny what you see when you built the scoreboard instead of playing on it.

mom's harshest critic. gone before FamilyTime shipped. dad built a practice, then broke. i built the system he needed. school broke my brain. i built grove so no kid hears that. the portfolio isn't a flex. it's a list of people i couldn't fix fast enough to wait for a team.

Very different day than yesterday. My dad’s in the hospital. He’s sleeping. I’m here with my laptop, stress coding, eating gummy candy, trying not to spiral. I really don’t want to lose another parent. If you pray, pray for him.

@smthr3e those people are going to be left in the dark. Chumps forsure. I mean claude design is amazing and once it fully deploys without limits, those "natty designers" are cooked.

AI vs designers isn't the real fight it's designers who use AI vs designers who pretend it doesn't exist

FamilyTime exists because my dad's practice ran on chaos. Grove exists because school told my ADHD brain it was broken. I didn't hire to fix those systems. couldn't wait that long. Turns out spite is a hell of a product spec.

Hire a team and you're a manager. Open a terminal and you're a founder. Pick one. I did.

Everyone said "you can't scale without people." Turns out you can't scale with them either. You just get to blame someone else when it tanks.

I didn't fire everyone because they sucked. I got better at their jobs.