Ron Palmeri
6K posts
@RonP
builder, investor
🇺🇸 U.S. adults: “Ban AI in schools.” 🇨🇳 China: students (and adults) lining up by the thousands to learn OpenClaw. 🚀 Alpha School: our students getting recognized by OpenClaw’s creator @steipete and presenting at ClawCon. One of them is 15 and has earned $30,000+ in contracts. American schools are debating whether kids should touch AI. Our kids are building with it. 🛠️
Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent “What you want to do with every single employee every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks… and that’s the role they should stay in.” Keith tells the story of giving an intern the task of getting smoothies to arrive at the office at 9pm to reward Square’s engineering team. And once the intern proved they could solve this task that had stumped multiple people at the company, he gave them something more important and consequential to do. Everybody has some level of complexity that they can handle, and you want to keep expanding their responsibility until you see where it breaks—as Keith points out, some people will surprise you: “There will be some people who you don’t expect—with different backgrounds, without a lot of experience—who can just handle enormously complicated tasks. So keep testing that and pushing the envelope.” Keith also argues that you should monitor who is going up to other people's desks. If you see people frequently going up to a person's desk, it's a sign that that person can help them. Promote these people and give them more responsibility as fast as you can. Video source: @ycombinator (2014)
I'm a remodeling contractor and 14-year Army Special Operations veteran. For almost 10 years I've fought the same battle every trade business owner fights. Admin, lead follow-up, emails, scheduling, estimating, invoicing. All the stuff that isn't building. Then I got an AI agent. It now manages most of that for me. I stay in the field and build actual stuff for my clients. So I thought, why not put this in the hands of other tradesmen? I built Blue Collar OS. Here's what the data says: construction, installation, and repair trades have massive AI capability but almost zero actual usage. The tools exist. Nobody's built them for blue collar. So I started putting agents in the hands of tradesmen. Here's what happened: Rodney is a 62-year-old local plumber. He paid me to set up an agent on a Mac Mini in his office. He canceled a $40,000 consulting contract and built a pricing app for his field techs. In the first weekend. Matt owns Flo Glass Company. Built an entire customer portal for his business, including pricing apps for his technicians. His words: "We removed the biggest limiting factor in growing my company. Coders are in trouble." These aren't tech founders. They're tradesmen. A plumber, a glass guy. Building software because AI met them where they are. On their phone. In plain English. There are 30 million trade businesses doing over $2 trillion in revenue in the United States. Less than 1% are using AI. Not because they can't. Because nobody built it for them. 4 out of 5 of those businesses have zero office staff. The owner does everything. We gave them a chief of staff for less monthly than their cell phone bill... (not including tokens)
Something I've learned the hard way is that a 2x4 isn't actually 2 inches by 4 inches. It used to be, but not anymore because of course.
I've been teaching 100,000 fake students for 2 weeks. and used them to build the best AP prep system in the world. I took Qwen 3 8B models and gave them simulated human memory. Now every night thousands of simulated students start with zero knowledge of the social sciences. Their only training is our adaptive curriculum. They work through it, then take a full AP (advanced placement) practice exam. The first batch averaged a 3 on their exam. (~45th percentile) Then the agents looked at where they failed, and improved the algorithm. Again, and again, and again. Two weeks later, the average is 4.43 (~80th percentile) This is such an insane number because the curriculum they worked through is ONLY basic knowledge and comprehension. They were never taught how to build an argument, contextualize evidence, or even shown the exam rubric. ...And yet they're averaging 80th percentile on an exam that requires all of it. Basically built a machine learning feedback loop for edtech. Spoke about this at @clawcon & @sxsw last week. This is just the beginning.
We asked Texas Sports Academy students to describe their school: - "This is the first year I've ever been happy after school" - "Moved up from 6th grade to 11th grade reading" - "2 homers and we've only played 4 games" - "I just want to be at school all the time" Texas Sports Academy students get 2 hours of AI-powered academics and 3 hours of elite sports training - all before the school day is over. Hear from our students:
I just applied to @ABCSharkTank. 3 days ago I was pulling wire in Kentucky. Then @mcuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and personally introduced me to Shark Tank casting. Today I submitted my application for Season 18. Here's the wild part: I'm not a tech founder. I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. Zero coding background. I built @EV_ChargeRight — a $12.99 tool that saves homeowners $3,000-$5,000 on unnecessary electrical panel upgrades before EV charger installs. 70% of EV owners don't need the upgrade they're being sold. The math proves it. NEC 220.82. I built the entire product with @AnthropicAI's Claude. No dev team. No funding. Just a tradesman with a problem worth solving. This week: - 860K+ views on my story - 16K likes - 2.4K reposts - Mark Cuban in my DMs A week ago I was just an electrician with an idea and a laptop. Now I'm applying to pitch in the Tank. If you're in the trades and thinking about building something — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try.
so interesting that both Katie Porter and Matt Mahan started strong then crater.
0% state income tax for California families making under $100,000. That’s thousands of dollars back in your pocket where it belongs. As Governor, I’ll work the issue at both ends—lowering taxes for those who are struggling and raising them on the biggest corporations that can afford to pay.
Make $1m by graduation. Or get 100% of your tuition refunded. That's the promise of the new high school for entrepreneurs Cameron and I are launching this fall through @AlphaSchoolATX. We need 2-3 coaches to help make it happen. DM us or apply!
With the United States' abundance and density of bombs, especially as it mobilizes a coalition against its enemies, China can produce, for the price of a daily drink, models of everything that depletes and exhausts the enemy. Models of oil fields and vital installations can also be manufactured, and these models could be a more effective weapon than the Patriot missile system.
