alex

[alex @alexfromvan]

Start with no funding
Start in your garage
Start on weekends
Start at midnight
Start messy
Start while working full-time
Start with one customer
Start with a bug
Start tomorrow
Start imperfect
Start

[alex @alexfromvan]

performative productivity

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I have 22 Claude max accounts, and the current promotion - an optional weekly reset that you can spend any time before Oct 22 -- is a lifesaver for fuel tuning. I know it makes it harder to predict their compute loads, but I'm super grateful for this reset form factor.

[dax @thdxr]

everything is fake

- posts on here, ghostwritten
- statistics, misleading
- benchmarks, bullshit
- reviews, paid for

nearly every company is doing this. the frenzy over ai is showing me so few founders have any backbone

[alex @alexfromvan]

Anthropic is firing on all cylinders

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family.

It’s a clear upgrade over Sonnet 5, runs more than 30% faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work.

[alex @alexfromvan]

it's crazy how fast notion went from beautifully crafted software to vibe coded bloatware

[Riley Brown @rileybrown]

5.5 is the first time i've felt confident enough to start ripping a ton of Saas tools out of my business and building them myself for my team.

Yes, I'm not going to vibe code an entire app (like Notion)

But I am going to vibe code one that's better for me and my small team.

Almost every app I pay for, I use maybe 10% of the features.

I'm currently using Opus 5.5 to build an internal tool that takes the few features I actually use from 5 different apps and puts them in one place.

- 5 logins... now 1
- I can add a features freely almost immediately
- It's built around how my company works, not how some other company thinks I should work

[diva @divaagurlxw]

I recently watched the famous lecture by the late MIT professor Patrick Winston, titled ‘How to Speak.’

He opens by saying: “Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order.”

Freaking brilliant.

[Gaurav Vohra @gauravvohra]

Oh, young, misguided founder, this is not the way

[alex @alexfromvan]

@chrislevan24

[Daniel Lockyer @DanielLockyer]

can I try and coin a new term:

Slop shop

Companies shipping code at breakneck speed but it's all worthless crap with bad UX

[benja @benjaminakar]

Dockset 0.2.0 is here 🐙

introducing custom docks for your Mac

widgets, apps, files, folders, music, timers, and more!

use it alongside your macOS Dock, or replace it entirely

 https://t.co/eyGHyBfI63

[Brian Cho @brianyoungilcho]

You don’t need a demo to sell.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of an a16z @speedrun-backed company, and we’ve grown from $0 to a $360K annualized run rate in the last three months - with zero product demos and a vibe-coded website (getting an update soon!).

All you need to sell is a deep understanding of your customers and the ability to pinpoint and solve their pain points.

As a third-time founder, I’ve learned different lessons from each company.

My first company taught me that market size matters (a lot more than you think). My second company taught me the importance of incentive alignment between the company and the customer. The business was structured in a way where the better we became at delivering results, the less we got paid. Without aligned incentives, you eventually become just another vendor that customers can churn at any moment.

So, for my third company, I decided to build a vendor-agnostic and channel-agnostic platform that shares the same incentive as our customers: making their consumer businesses successful in America. I also chose a rapidly growing market that I understand better than almost anyone.

Once you understand your customers’ pain points, ambitions, and what they desperately need (and can show proof that your team knows how to execute), it doesn’t matter that your company is four months old or that you don’t have a sophisticated product demo.

At the end of the day, B2B customers are buying you and your team’s ability to execute. The product you demo is simply one way to communicate that ability. It is not what they ultimately want to buy. They want the outcome from you, not another tool. Especially today.

The old rule of business still works because it is based on first principles: Sell first. Build later.

[kasey @kaseyklimes]

working to get this down to 1 month

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Overall, I’m very surprised at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack. It’s clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.

[alex @alexfromvan]

it's really hard to be a young engineer because your taste is better then your abilities

[alex @alexfromvan]

a generational startup opportunity is hidden in this tweet

[dax @thdxr]

if you want to rent a thousand GPUs:

1. find provider
2. sign 3 year commit
3. put $40M down
4. they go to bank and say look a real customer
5. bank lends them money 12% interest
6. nvidia gets it
7. GPUs deployed to you in 2-3 months

is the shortage GPUs or is it money

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Someone asked how founders can make their companies huge without being overconfident. It was meant to be rhetorical question, but it has an answer, and the answer is an important one. Incrementally.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

The thing that’s devastating about AI is that really smart - truly truly smart - people get fooled into thinking they’ve got a handle on it.

It’s like heroin or something.

I was chatting to a brilliant person the other day and they were telling me about how great their AI usage is and how efficient it makes them, and then they sent me a doc they created and it was an absolute slopshow.

People just can’t see it in their own work. They see it in everyone else’s work. But in their own habit, it’s under control.

[alex @alexfromvan]

@maxbosch @obvious @flatfile Obvious was lucky to have you. Excited for what’s next!

[sunil pai @threepointone]

“Look at my incredible new factory!”

Yo that’s cool, what do you make?

“It’s highly optimised, fully automated, zero tolerance for defects and with a continuous feedback cycle”

Cool cool, so what do you actually make?

“I can interact with it on my phone, laptop, messenger, completely async, and the shared context means it’s always learning how to get better”

Very impressive, but what do you make?

“Every agent has full context, can spawn other agents, review their work, fix defects, and ship continuously.”

yes yes. WHAT DOES IT MAKE?

“Software.”

Oh nice. What software?

“Well right now we’re mostly using it to improve the factory.”

Improve it to make what?

“Anything!”

Such as?

“…a better factory.”

[alex @alexfromvan]

@tokifyi well done brother. panorama ridge is the most difficult hike i've ever done.