Chris Adams

Marketing & Tech Consulting | Startup Advisor & Investor | Managing Director @AdamsHamilton_ | Mentor @gchbec | EIR @theDMZ 🙌⛵️@reIGNITEConf_

[Chris Adams @chrishadams]

How Jeff Bezos’ Day One Mentality Keeps You Hungry, Focused, and Agile https://t.co/fZ9jzIx67e via @AdamsHamilton_

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

Good morning. Today is going to be a great day. Let’s get after it relentlessly.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

The thing nobody tells you about exponential change is that it feels like nothing is happening right up until the moment everything happens at once.

[Chris Adams @chrishadams]

It’s great to be at the @TOtechweek
Homecoming event this morning. The Era of the Entrepreneur talk with @tobi

@melltruong

[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.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Everyone needs to read this...

The Crab Mentality

(a visual thread)

[MATT GRAY @matt_gray_]

One of the biggest cheat codes in entrepreneurship is finding an expert that has done what you are trying to do and learning their tricks.

[Ryan Walker @rwalk_xyz]

Founder after discovering the enterprise agreement requires SOC 2 compliance, a 12-hour breach notice, unlimited indemnity, customer audit rights, and service credits for downtime caused by the customer.

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

Happy Friday to those who celebrate ❤️

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

The future doesn't belong to the fearful or the reckless, but to the informed optimists who see the risks clearly and build anyway.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Need more entrepreneurs

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Elon Musk on the most important lesson he learned at PayPal

“The initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. So you’d have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had a little feature for email payments. And whenever we’d show the system off to someone, we’d show the hard part — the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we’d show people email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested.”

Elon continues:

“I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible. And so we focused on email payments and really tried to make that work. And that’s what really got things to take off. But if we hadn’t responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions.”

[Paul Graham @paulg]

By default my first question to any startup is "What's your growth rate?" That's the patient's pulse. Which is why we push startups to launch. Till then you have no pulse; till then you have no idea if you're doing well or badly.

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

I love Tobi Lütke but lets be honest, we have all heard him on several podcasts.

This episode is @tobi like you have never seen before. Spicy, fun and leaning into controversy.

I mean wow, he did not shy away from hard topics:

- AI as a scapegoat for layoffs
- The dangers of irresponsible charitable giving
- Carney’s stance against a Trump administration being wrong
- Why Elon Musk deserves more credit

I condensed my notes from the discussion below for you:

1. The $160 Billion CEO Who Did Not Want to Be CEO
To run a truly product-driven company, you must be in control of the company itself because the needs of a product and a business often diverge. This requires passing the "marshmallow test" by prioritizing a three-year perspective over immediate gratification. Founders must be willing to endure "bad numbers" in the short term if they believe it is the only way to reach the right long-term destination.

2. The Best Engineers in Shopify Are Not Writing Code Anymore and the AI Does It for Them
AI now generates over 50% of the code at Shopify, and that number is steadily increasing. Many of the company’s best engineers have not written a single line of manual code since December 2023, as the release of advanced models like Opus changed the fundamental nature of the job. Engineering has shifted from manual execution to "steering" AI agents through high-level context engineering.

3. Why AI Is Being Used as a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs
The current wave of industry layoffs is largely a result of "over-hiring" during the COVID era rather than displacement by AI. AI has become the "perfect scapegoat" for slow companies because it cannot fight back against the narrative that it is destroying jobs. In reality, AI is an incredible tool that improves productivity across every department when implemented correctly.

4. Why We Are About to Enter a Golden Age of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the most "AI-safe" and "AI-benefiting" career path available today. AI acts as a "handy sidekick" or co-founder, allowing individuals to focus on their core ambitions while the technology handles various execution tasks. The barriers to entry are dissolving; you no longer need a family background in business to understand that business formation is something real humans can do.

5. Why We Need to Place More Not Less Scrutiny on Charitable Giving
Giving money is only virtuous if it yields results; prioritize what works over what sounds good. "Charity dollars" lack the "self-healing fitness function" provided by for-profit markets. Be skeptical of organizations that choose to opt out of market intelligence.

6. Why Will Governments Regulating the Technology We and Our Children Use Push Us Into the Hands of the Chinese?
Age limits won't stop kids from using AI; they will just drive them toward uncurated "donut" Chinese models. This risks exposing youth to a collectivist monoculture that censors historical truth. Such regulation trades individualistic enlightenment values for state control.

(links below)

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Most people don’t realize how much they’re leaving on the table.

When you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
Opportunities stay small. Doors stay closed.

But the moment you ask, you expand what’s possible.

Not every ask gets a yes.
But every ask gives you a chance.

And that’s where the magic lives.

[TBPN @tbpn]

“When you go from consumer to B2B, the number one mega-challenge that you must master is LTV:CAC.” - @travisk

"Yes, you can make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with 'I'm going to talk to customers, and I have to make LTV:CAC work' — versus 'My LTV:CAC is the App Store' — it's a whole different ballgame."

“LTV:CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go [after] small businesses, is life on hard mode. Anybody who’s crushed it on SMB, those guys are special individuals who've made that happen. Because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke."

From his appearance on the show in March.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

“It's shocking to me how few people actually give entrepreneurship a shot. The fate of the world over the next 1,500 years is riding on the people who actually want to give it a shot.”

— Marc Andreessen @pmarca

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

One of my favorite metaphors for building a business:

[Ontario Tech University @ontariotech_u]

Canada’s nuclear sector will need nearly 40,000 new workers starting in 2030. Ontario Tech @durhamcollege @HumberPoly @CentennialEDU and @georgiancollege launched the Canadian Clean Energy Workforce Consortium to help students prepare for energy careers. https://t.co/vGkmqULn2u

[ISED @ISED_CA]

Innovation deserves protection. 💡

Discover how Canada’s Intellectual Property Strategy helps Canadian researchers, entrepreneurs and businesses understand, protect and access #IP.

https://t.co/QwoCIUiR8h

#WorldIPDay

[Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) @OCInnovation]

Unrivaled access. Pure momentum. 📈🚀

Don’t miss IPON Alley at #DiscoveryX — where top talent, research, and industry will converge to move world-class IP from lab to market.

Explore the full lineup below.

@ip_ontario