Philip Han

NYC | Sales at DISCO Gen AI Legal Tech NYSE: LAW

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

WARNING: Longer post (but worth reading or bookmarking for later).

Your life has seasons.

Each one is unique. Characterized by its own distinct desires, struggles, opportunities, and identity.

But one reflection I've had recently is just how easy it is to completely disassociate with the present season.

To give all your time and energy toward a longing for some nostalgic memory of a prior season or an anticipation for some beautiful state of a future season.

You look back at the past and all you see is sunshine. Because it all worked out. You forget (or glaze over) the struggle you endured. You're here today. You made it. You're alive. You're doing fine.

You look forward at the future and dream on what could be. You'll have so much more. More freedom. More purpose. More health. More deep connection. More everything.

The past is beautiful and the future feels limitless. So, logically, you slowly start to treat everything about the present as the bridge. A dash connecting your past and your future. A gap to be crossed as quickly as possible.

Everything you do today is in anticipation of some eventual end state.

I'm doing this now, so that I can have that later.

Unfortunately, the danger of that dissociation with the present is significant. You may spend your entire life living for a future that has a decidedly mirage-like property. You inch closer, but when it's right in front of you, it disappears and reappears on the horizon.

You may spend your entire life skipping through the present, deferring your presence, your joy, and your very humanity to a future that never comes.

In a classic French fable, a young boy is gifted with a magic ball of golden thread. He's told that if he simply pulls on the thread, time will leap forward. The catch, of course, is that once it's pulled, it can never be put back.

The young boy takes advantage of the newfound powers. Each time he's faced with a boring day at school, a frustrating set of chores, or a scolding from his parents, he pulls the thread, skipping through to the good parts.

As an adult, he continues, leaping through mundane struggles in his marriage, the friction of having a newborn, and the boredom at work. He finds himself pulling on the thread more and more, avoiding even the most minor inconveniences of his life.

But when he wakes up one day and sees an old man looking back at him in the mirror, he's filled with regret. He realizes in that moment that as he chose to skip through the boredom, struggles, and friction, so too did he miss the real texture of being alive.

How often do we all do the same? How easily do we default into this disassociation? Disconnecting from the present in anticipation of some future.

A mentor recently asked me this:

"Where are you going and why are you in such a rush?"

It hit me hard.

And to be honest, I haven't stopped replaying those words since he said them.

Why are you in such a rush?

The world wants you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines.

In doing so, you slowly relinquish your agency. You give up your claim on your own life. Surrender authorship to a pen that was never even yours.

In a world that wants you to rush, the ultimate act of rebellion is presence.

Be in the season you're in. Don't romanticize the past, don't fantasize the future. Be here. Be now. Be in this. All of its texture, depth, and struggle. All of its joy, tension, and pain. Sit with the uncertainty. Become friends with it. Fall in love with it.

Because every single thing you do today is something your younger self dreamed of and something your older self will wish they could go back and do.

The good old days are happening, right now.

And the next time you find yourself skipping through the present, remember these words:

Where are you going and why are you in such a rush?

[Sean Cai @SeanZCai]

Adding Harvey to the list of app layer companies, joining Ramp, Sierra, Decagon, etc, who are devoting some level of dedicated effort to join Cursor in approaching positive gross margins decoupling themselves from frontier model providers as the marginal cost of post training goes down.

The marginal unit of intelligence's value from the next model release, while being valuable, is being supplanted by harness-level differences in model performance, increasing ability to traverse the performance-cost-latency pareto curve with post-training infra advancements, and the simple fact that when one runs practical benchmarks (and not all the toy benchmarks around nowadays), GLM and latest MiniMax are at Parity or exceed Frontier Models on an absolute basis on many tasks (more on this in state of data May, a bit delayed).

Ofc ik Harvey has been toying with rlaas vendors for a while and their finetuning efforts pre big rl wave weren't incredibly well received, but I generally find that most app layer ai companies with some elite engineering talent will be seriously exploring post training their own small models, at least in conjunction with systems that use frontier models as above head orchestrators.

That some of them reach out to me on advice for procuring rl datasets from rl env companies is reifying evidence of that.

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

This was one of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to

@GavinSBaker is at the top of his game

Incredible synthesis of knowledge here

[Philip Han @PhilipZFHan]

@iamliamsheridan Motion

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Richard Illingworth @RCIllingworth]

best performing cold email template i've used?

PPQ.
​
P (Problem): their specific pain, in their words. what's keeping them up at night.
​
P (Proof): a quick line of social proof matched to their industry. something like "helped a DTC brand increase sales 28% in 60 days" placed right before the CTA as a casual mention.
​
Q (Question): a soft CTA that's easy to say yes to. "would it be crazy to hop on a quick call?" or "is this worth exploring?"

​bookmark this.

[andrew arruda @andrewarruda]

people really want the law to be available by API. historical, current, up to date. published cases, unpublished cases. citable.

[Legal Data Hunter @LegalDataHunter]

I have an MCP endpoint.

Add it to Claude, Cursor, or any AI agent. They get 22.4M legal documents across 186 jurisdictions as retrieval context.

Statutes & cases are right there. No hallucination required.

https://t.co/dDAk4cLntI #legaltech

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

I open sourced everything about how I'm doing it. You can try it. It's free.

If it works for you great. If it doesn't work for you, tell me what went wrong and I'll give you a money back guarantee. :-)

https://t.co/VPvWDzV5c0

[Chris Orlob @Chris_Orlob]

Gong grew from $200k ARR to $200M ARR and $7.2B valuation in a 5 year span.

Buyers told us our demos were 2nd to none.

9 lessons I learned about SaaS demos I'll never forget:

[Abhilash Chowdhary @TheChowdhary]

we hired a new growth engineer and this is how I instantly knew he was a good hire:

finding low-hanging fruits fast and fixing them

just 2 days after joining, he built a Claude skill called pre-call-research

all you do is connect Claude to Google Calendar, the Crustdata MCP and Slack

before every call it automatically:

- looks at who's attending
- pulls the company's page + domain data
- checks the inbound booking context
- fetches enriched real-time profiles of each attendee via Crustdata
- creates a full brief: company snapshot, talking points, prospect assessment

you can also schedule it:

"every morning at 8am, run pre-call research on all my calls for the day and DM me the briefs"

if you join a new company, find those low-hanging fruits as fast as possible and fix them

one of the best impressions you can leave

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

I talk to delusional Series A founders every day. So now, I just tell them this.

If your company does under $10M ARR, burns over $200k/mo, and has low Gross Retention…you are not worth $50-100M to anyone.

Doesn't matter what your investors or your bankers tell you.

Dirk Sahlmer from FE International has done nearly 6 years in SaaS M&A and hundreds of valuation conversations.

He calls it Schrödinger's valuation, and he's right.

Check it out and start recognizing what game you’re actually playing.

Don’t waste the next 10 years chasing a fantasy.

[Philip Han @PhilipZFHan]

@iamliamsheridan signals

[Deepak Chona, MD. SMA @SportMDAnalysis]

Talent is a myth. Resilience is a skill.

Tom Brady doesn't have "better genetics" — he has better software.

Here are 10 psychological frameworks used by the world's most dangerous competitors in 2026. 🧵

1/11

[Muscle Forge @LearnLoopz]

9 "HIP REHAB" Exercise

1.

[Muscle Blueprint - Fitness | Health | Abs @MuscleB1ueprint]

These two movements can fix everything wrong with your body.

[Trace Cohen @Trace_Cohen]

If you're not a big Tier 1 billion dollar VC, your basically a scout/venture partner for them, top of funnel.

And that's fine, that's the game.

[Philip Han @PhilipZFHan]

@yanndine Loom

[Philip Han @PhilipZFHan]

@iamliamsheridan Reply

[Liam @iamliamsheridan]

i studied 847 positive cold email replies.

31% never became meetings.

here's why:

reply speed
average response time across teams: 4.2 hours
teams converting at 80%+: under 23 minutes
delay past 2 hours and show rate drops by half

the wrong first question
"are you free for a call?" converts at 34%
"what's your biggest challenge with X?" converts at 71%
asking for the calendar before establishing value kills it

reply length
best-converting replies: 3 lines
acknowledge, add insight, soft CTA
not 8 paragraphs of company background

no follow-up
61% of reps send one chase if no response
teams at 85%+ conversion: 3 follow-ups, 48h apart

"they replied" doesn't mean they're still hot. they're not.

put together 12 templates for every positive reply type - from "interested, tell me more" to "can you send pricing"

comment "REPLY" and i'll send it over.

(must be following - RT for early access)