Jack AM Austin

I find clients and build systems for people who don’t want to be marketers | The Agency Killer

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

Ho Chi Minh City doesn't do quiet mornings.

By 6:30 the street is already loud.

Motorbikes, market traders, someone somewhere with a speaker.

The kids sleep through it now.

Took them about three days when we moved here.

Took me six months.

The city gets into you eventually.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

The thing the LinkedIn guru character gets wrong isn't the frameworks.

It's the application.

Systems are useful.

They're just not useful everywhere.

A four-year-old playing dinosaurs doesn't need accountability.

He needs someone on the floor making roaring noises.

Knowing the difference is most of the job.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

My son wanted to show me something on the way to school this morning.

A lizard on the wall of the building next door.

Stood there for a while looking at it together.

My wife was waiting.

The lizard didn't care.

Neither did my son.

I had a call in twenty minutes and was mostly present anyway.

Mostly is enough most days.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

There is a version of me that actually talks like this.

Not about dinosaurs.

But about other things.

Catching the moments where I reach for a framework

instead of just being in the room.

Still working on that one.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

The satire is doing something interesting.

Writing a character who optimises everything

including his kid crying

is landing differently than straight commentary would.

Watching which posts make people stop and read

versus which ones they scroll past.

The uncomfortable ones are doing more work.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@EricTopol @ASCO Jobs to be done. Stopped me building things people said they wanted and started me looking at what they were actually trying to accomplish. Simple idea but it rewired how I think about everything.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@adonispara Nietzsche gets quoted a lot by people who've read about three lines of his work. Curious which bit this is referring to because half the time these posts just slap his name on generic hustle advice.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@BradSmi @Microsoft The high school technician programme is the bit that matters here. Giving local kids a path into data centre careers without needing to leave home or take on university debt is how you actually spread the benefit of these investments beyond the company.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@shaig AI spend becoming invisible to traditional finance tools is a proper problem. Building an internal tool to track it makes sense for Brex but the fact they had to build it themselves tells you how far behind the existing spend management platforms are.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@itsalvinhuang Hired an ops person once to fix chaos that was entirely my fault. They organised the mess beautifully but it was still a mess because the decisions creating it hadn't changed. Expensive lesson that one.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@VivekGRamaswamy The actual point buried in here is worth discussing. Setting someone up to fail by putting them in a programme they're not ready for isn't kindness, it's negligence dressed up as inclusion. The faculty saying it openly is the interesting bit.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@ISMG_News @Infosecurity @watchtowrcyber The speed gap is the real problem now. Used to be you had weeks between a vulnerability going public and someone exploiting it. Now it's hours. Most companies aren't patching anywhere near fast enough for that timeline.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@KevinSzabo14 Three weeks of posts and a few comments is still work though. People read "no pitch deck" and think it was effortless. The posts were the pitch deck. You just delivered it in public instead of a PDF.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@rj_abel That gap is grim when you think about it. Someone who worked their entire life ends up with less than someone on the lowest possible wage. And that's before you factor in heating bills and the cost of getting older. The system basically penalises people for retiring.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@liu_mingyu Topping 8 leaderboards at once is a statement. The real test is what people build with it in the next few months though. Leaderboard wins get attention, real world usage is what keeps it.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@elonmusk "Outrageous double standard" without any context on what the double standard actually is makes it hard to agree or disagree. Bit of a Rorschach test post where everyone just projects whatever they're already annoyed about.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@nvidia Jensen has a proper knack for making infrastructure sound exciting. AI factories, autonomous agents, physical AI and personal computing all in one keynote. Whether it all lands is another question but the vision is hard to argue with.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@a16z The token economics conversation is the one that actually matters right now. Everyone's talking about what AI can do but the question of what it costs to run and who captures the value is where the real money decisions are being made.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@garyvee Detaching from praise is harder than detaching from criticism and nobody talks about that. Criticism you can dismiss as jealousy. Praise gets into your head and starts steering your decisions without you noticing.

[Jack AM Austin @JackAMAustin]

@darshal_ Interesting to see what's possible but "no game engine, no 3D software" usually means the output looks impressive in a 30 second clip and falls apart the moment someone tries to actually play it. Would love to be wrong on that though.