Conor Hillick

I host a podcast called Write Your Own Story. Click below to listen 👇 🔗 chillick.eth Enterprise Growth @stripe

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

British Swimming had c.€5.5m funding pa towards Tokyo. Irish Swimming had €630k performance funding for 2020. HP sport in Ireland received €8.5m funding in 2021 vs c. €102m pa in UK. I know they’ve a higher population but think we can support our athletes more #Olympics

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

EU: Some fantastic hotels, great service, very clean, quality food, spacious rooms and aircon works well. Might be generalising for experiences in Spain, Portugal & France and obviously you can probably find an example to support any argument

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

Had the opposite experience & stayed in highly rated hotels in both.

US: Fees for looking at the mini bar, for parking your car onsite, resort fees (always gets me) & taxes. Service is generally good but sometimes ott for tips.

Food has been mixed

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I'm back in America

My hotel room has:
- AC that goes down to 18°C/64°F but my sensor shows it's 16°C/61°F! Ice cold means perfect sleep
- $100 in free spending on anything + full minibar with beautiful products like Norwegian canned salmon with Sichuan peppers (!)
- free water and sparkling water bottles every day, fresh fruit bowl
- daily room cleaning without asking, finished before noon!
- bathroom full of amenities + extra amenities you could request during booking like Marvis toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash ear plugs, sleeping mask
- moderately fast wifi (to be honest)

The top European hotel in Netherlands we were in last few weeks for same price:
- AC did not go below 23°C/73°F, and to make it worse windows were locked (for eco reasons)
- empty minibar (for eco)
- no water bottles (the paper said use tap water like the locals for eco, guess what NL tap water is full of PFAS the gov just admitted)
- no daily cleaning, we had to ask for it every day, and when we came back 4pm it still wasn't cleaned, every day (for eco)
- strictly no amenities (for eco)
- unusably slow wifi

America is much more value now for your $ or € than most of Europe

(And ofc Asia too)

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

Tiger Woods 2019 Masters…

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Neuroscientists find that chewing gum can elevate focus and alleviate stress.

Randomly assigning people to chew gum increases blood flow to the brain, boosting attention and productivity—especially under stress.

Even small movements are enough to keep our minds active.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[TBPN @tbpn]

.@Collision is bullish on two types of people: high-agency individuals and double majors.

"There are two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now and I think will do incredibly well over the next 10-20 years. First, high-agency people. The people at Stripe who have been talking to customers and know exactly what we should do. It's the people who have that pep in their step and want to go make Stripe better. They are so much more empowered thanks to AI."

"The second is double majors. I think if you understand software and understand finance, or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company. Now, one person can do what would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems."

"Charlie Munger talked about the importance of being multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking. He thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books now or you can talk to your AI about it. I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well."

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

This is such a weird tweet. 2 men go under 2hrs, 3 under the previous WR and apparently there was a crazier marathon today 🤣

[CITIUS MAG @CitiusMag]

Was Sabastian Sawe’s world record not even the craziest marathon performance of the day?? 🤯

Vincent Mauri ran his first marathon the Glass City Marathon in Toledo, OH, this morning… and won in 2:05:54, becoming only the fourth American ever to break 2:06.

The 25-year-old @NDXCTF and @SunDevilTFXC alum won by 15 MINUTES running solo on a USATF-certified course. Mauri finished his collegiate career in 2025 with PBs of 3:59.05 (mile), 7:50.33 (3000m), and 13:34.03 (5000m).

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

In Ireland, & probaly most of the world medicine is still very reactive, rather than proactive.

For example if tests are in the “normal range” or just outside of it nothing is done.

A lot of it is because there are strains on the system, some of it is down to ways of thinking

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools.

With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments.

Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know.

I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars.

(One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.)

There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

A few years ago I asked @levelsio How to code and he challenged me to build.

My ability to code is still useless but AI has made building even more accessible!

This is the MVP and I hope this week it gets used for some fun!

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

Every year we play Fantasy Golf for the Majors. Usually on spreadsheets.

This year I built a site using @Lovable & @claudeai.

Pick 3 players with combined odds 100/1 plus, create private leagues and have fun!

Check out: https://t.co/DEDxxQskmi

Masters 2026 here we go!

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

A couple of years ago I asked @levelsio How to code. He made me build something instead.

It was crap.

My coding is still useless. AI has been a game changer!

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@Brady_H You get a midday nap? What age is your son btw, mine is coming up to 1 and the lack of sleep I’ve accumulated this year is beyond what I could have imagined 😂

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@THArrowOfApollo Code

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Chris Williamson's brutal wake-up call in 46 seconds:

“Adults don't exist.”

He runs down the list:

- Steve Jobs delayed pancreatic cancer treatment for carrot juice and acupuncture.

- Mozart drowned in debt, constantly begging friends for money.

- Nietzsche caught syphilis in a brothel and sold only 300 copies of his work in his lifetime.

- Martin Luther King had affairs with over 40 women and spent his last night with two of them.

- Isaac Newton wasted 30 years on alchemy pseudoscience his heirs hid out of embarrassment.

The point lands hard:
Don't put any adult on a pedestal.
Kill your gurus.
The adults aren't going to save you — they don't even exist.

Raw, unflinching, and impossible to unhear.

Which "hero" or guru did you once idolize… until you learned the messy truth behind them?

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@iamliamsheridan PROMPTS

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@Seannywilson SCRIPT

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

Interesting theory but define success. This obviously points towards monetary, although I think it’s true for any success, even sporting.

I’d argue though that elite financial success without health & family is not life success.

[Jason Ai. Williams @GoingParabolic]

The four burner theory is so real and most billionaires I have met in my life (more than 10 so far) have all either shown this to be true or explained to me what they lost or sacrificed along their road to elite success.

The theory states that to be successful you have to turn off one burner. To be elite successful you have to turn off two burners.

The burners represent
1. Family
2. Friends
3. Health
4. Work

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@mattytjmartin Been renewing fortnightly instead of 4 weekly!

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@RossMackay111 Sign up Lionel Sanders and get into the IM world 👀

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@RossMackay111 When will Cadence come to Ireland? 👀

[Conor Hillick @chillick1]

@KyleAsay_ Curious on what you see as the best ways to leverage AI? There are so many aspects throughout the sales cycle and I like finding out what best in class is