Man Issachar

Husband, Dad, Tech Sales. AI + Human Intelligence. The TRUTH will set you free.

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows not fear, I have never seen a brave man.

All men are frightened.
The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on.

GENERAL GEORGE PATTON (1885-1945)

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

What you do when you don’t have to,

determines what you will be when you can no longer help it

RUDYARD KIPLING

[Matthew Chang @MatthewChang]

10 years ago I was making $135k/year traveling the country as a factory designer. I owned a townhouse and an old jeep.

Then I entered a covenant with God.

“Dear God, I will start a Christian engineering company”

Then, the greatest adventure of my life began. Contracts, guerilla warfare engineering, 4 kids, dream beach house, bizarre private equity exit, HELOC on beach house, family surf shack in Central America, launching 4 new companies, recruiting world class leaders, paying distributions, executives on pay freeze, got our first patent, got 30 more patents, every industry award out there, national TV, new friends on 𝕏, learned standup paddle boarding, learned tennis, family mission trips, partnered with the largest industrial suppliers on earth, technology development in 5 industry verticals, got invited to write official US tariffs, 4 non-profit boards, got a Cybertruck, won USDOT driverless city grant, built a corporate HQ, deployed an ERP, obtained a 3 year PCOAB audit, wrote the national hygiene policy on covid, started buying majority of my clothes at Costco, entered litigation, won litigation, got customers I’ve never met, got employees I’ve never met, opened offices across multiple states, still work from my attic (it’s a nice attic), got a Herman miller chair, traveled the world, had 6 years with zero resignations, funded orphanages, funded hungry children, funded missionaries, funded homeless rescue, gotten shacked in 12’ waves, mastered the Komodo grill. All of it, in Jesus’ name.

That’s the shortlist. Most of it is in my book.

Walking with Jesus is not easy. Not if you’re living out the great commission.

But I cannot imagine living life another way. I cannot imagine chasing another promotion to get to VP or C-suite of a company with another guy’s name on it. I cannot imagine coming home and telling my wife about the “mood” of my boss.

I cannot imagine what my faith would be like, had it not been tested.

God gave me abundance, and I acted biblically.

God took it all away, and I acted biblically.

And l’ve made mistakes. Big mistakes. And my team has stood by me. And with God’s help, we fixed it.

Through the success, failure, and conflict, I’ve done my very best to be transparent and optimistic. To be a leader. To be pragmatic. To work harder than anyone else out there. To take Bible sized risk.

Whatever your work is, bring Jesus into it. Live a life of integrity. Love your wife. Play with your kids.

🥢🙏❤️

[The Deal Director @thedealdirector]

Anthropic wants to go public at 900% net revenue retention, a number no software company has come close to before, even if it's not apples to apples with classic NRR.

The main GTM takeaways:

1. The focus is on capturing demand, not creating it: "By the time our direct teams engage a customer, Claude is often already in use." The rep's job is converting a handful of power users into an exec sponsor and a budget, not running email sequences.

2. The future of the direct sales motion is Applied AI, driven by forward deployed engineers, not just sales reps and sales engineers.

3. 48% of H1 revenue went through the AWS, GCP and Azure marketplaces. They have been able to leverage the hyperscalers in ways that few companies have done before.

4. 80% of revenue is consumption. Enterprise users who don't touch Claude Code average under $75/month, while the top 5% of Code users spend ~20x that. Run rate = trailing 28-day usage x 13 + monthly seats x 12.

5. The headline number is run-rate, not bookings or backlog. The business is managed on velocity, which flips the industry-standard GTM comp model on its head.

6. Over 80% of Q3 revenue came from models released in the prior six months. Every release is a free excuse to go back and revive the use case that failed eval last quarter.

7. ~250 customers already pay $10M+, and Fortune 500 customers still spend under 0.1% of their total expenses with them. Concentration risk is real though: the top 5 customers were ~25% of revenue through the first nine months of 2026.

8. Most enterprise customers hold back agent permissions until they get auditability, monitoring and access control. Getting agents right from an observability and security perspective will matter more than model quality.

[john milinovich @jmilinovich]

# Black October

For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books.

You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles.

We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.

In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses.

Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.

In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening.

These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1.

From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW.

For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever:

Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo.
Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password.
Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta.
Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this.

And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php."

This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world.

Much love.

[Nina S. Murphy 🌻 @ninaslostnfound]

🖌️ Eduard Niczky, "The Family Idyll" (1892; oil on canvas)

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/rv1SShz6q8

[Andrew Seddon @seddonandrew]

PCBs made in America. Twice as fast as Shenzhen.

Today @CircuitHub is unveiling The Grid, our factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds circuit boards on demand.

No changeovers, no per-design setup. Prototypes and production batches, fully automated.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Seems like quite the opportunity for American open source models to eat a chunk of the market

If open source inference eclipses closed source big lab demand, then there is a viable business model for open weight labs and they could become competitive in terms of talent / capital

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

@WhiteHouse Great for AZ!

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

@a16z Yup

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Today Boom unveils our first completed supersonic turbine core, a 2GW Superfactory, and—one more thing—the world's most advanced all-digital foundry to cast single crystal turbine blades and vanes https://t.co/q2KpL3dZi2

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

@VoicesofWW2 Great tribute to the Grumman Hellcat

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

Incredible

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

Daniel Boone saved by Simon Kenton

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

Since the time of Bacon the world has

been running away from,

rather than toward,

first principles,

so that, on the verbal level,

we see fact substituted for truth.

RICHARD WEAVER (1910-1963)

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

This is super cool

Will be using soon

[Rocket Lab @RocketLab]

We have completed breakover operations for the Neutron Stage 2 tank assembly, rotating the stage horizontal – a critical step in the handling of large rocket sections for integration and assembly.

Here’s a last look at Stage 2 on the Neutron Factory floor before it’s wrapped up (literally) for barge shipment to LC-3 on Wallops Island where its fluid systems will be tested and its Archimedes vacuum engine installed.

[Romit | SpaceXSI @RomitMirchi]

we’re hiring 👉 https://t.co/xWt5QEf9wD

(we’re merging websites across the SpaceXSI portfolio in the coming weeks)

[Man Issachar @ManIssachar]

This is amazing tech

Congrats Marathon team

[Marathon Fusion @MarathonFusion]

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.

Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.

Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

If you find an idea that you love, and want to take it forward, we are working to either make funds available or connect you to investors who might be willing to fund. My whole goal is to cause more great startups to be formed via https://t.co/ZiWhu8IAX8..