Drew

Founder at Fast + Light, loves bikes and breakfast burritos

[Drew @drewmabry]

Sell me something. I'll listen. Just don't dress it up as a friendly chat and hope I won't notice. State your intention. Stand by it. Pitch slappers, the door is over there.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Britney builds in Tulum, I build at my gym. She's a bodybuilder, I'm a marketer. Neither of us writes code. She vibe coded an app that logs her peso receipts in dollars. I fed photos of my gym to AI and it builds my workouts. Being a beginner and getting better never gets old.

[Drew @drewmabry]

AI's taking center stage. Still doesn't beat sitting across the table from great people. Had hangs with agency owners last night. No one's ready. We'll be fine. We're not in the AI business. We're in the business of helping businesses move forward. LFG.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Everyone's using the same tools to study the same ads. The output rounds toward the average. Then the average rounds toward itself. Too many Spider-Mans. The original thought is the moat.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Six of us in a room built for sixty. Beautiful LA day, the other RSVPs ghosted. The speakers pulled chairs up, got close, and went deep. With the avalanche of AI slop out there, this is the way forward. Humans helping humans connect with humans, using AI at scale.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Yesterday: lunch talking peptides, NAD, the newest health science we have. Dinner in Altadena over an open wood fire, the oldest tool we have, the block behind us still empty from the burn. Technology isn't the point. Both tables were good for the same reason. The people at them.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Every AI product I tested this month was great at one specific process. We don't follow that process. Either you adapt to the tool, or you have a useless tool. Operators are starting to build for themselves. Bespoke is back. It's just yours to build now.

[Drew @drewmabry]

A New York law went live yesterday. If your ad uses a synthetic AI actor, it has to say so. On screen. Labeled. The platforms keep selling. The brand running the campaign is the one holding the bag.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Things ad platforms green-light: Ketamine. Psilocybin. Ayahuasca. GLP-1s.

Things they flag as political: female empowerment t-shirts.

Pretty sure that's a typo.

It isn't.

Politics is a tough game these days. More productive to focus on living our best lives.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Found the entire sales playbook stenciled on a bench in San Diego. Respect the signals. Ask for consent. You shouldn't kiss people without asking. Don't pitch them like that either.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Nothing is normal. Nothing's going to be normal for quite a while. The people waiting for things to settle down may as well start filling out the UBI paperwork. There's going to be a lot of opportunity. Just not for everyone who waits.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Out in San Diego this week with good people. Business runs on uncertainty and change. People want the opposite. The world isn't going to calm down. Their businesses might. Not in a good way. Get close to good people. Keep moving.

[Drew @drewmabry]

TechCon SoCal opening night. Founders, operators, venture folks, and me as the marketing one. Things are moving fast. Nobody has the playbook. The honest ones just admit it and keep moving. At the show two more days. Hit me up if you're around.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Asked Doug how things were going. Said it seems awful but actually pretty good. He said yeah because you can eat a burrito and watch Netflix as the ship goes down. Easiest hard time we've ever had. At least we're moving. Even if we don't know where yet.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Told Doug on a call today I thought he was falling behind on AI. He didn't get defensive. He just said I'm an open book. Truth is nobody knows what they're doing right now. Some of us are just louder about pretending we do.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Tried to explain my entire AI setup over mariscos with Walt yesterday. Warp, Claude Code, Obsidian, Slack bots, all of it. He's from manufacturing. He just looked at me and said make money, save money, mitigate risk. That's it. He's not wrong.

[Drew @drewmabry]

Asante earned Diamond status at the coworking space Nina and I joke we run out of our guest room in Lake Arrowhead. No sign out front. No kombucha tap. Just people we trust, working near each other. Best thing I did for my work this month was pull up another chair.

[Drew @drewmabry]

A stranger booked a cold call on my calendar. No intro. No context. First thing I asked: tell me what I do. He couldn't answer. AI made it easy to pitch slap at scale. But when your whole strategy is volume, people can feel it.

[Drew @drewmabry]

We're writing more for robots than for people now.
But here's the twist from SoCal Tech Forum: what makes a site readable to AI is the same thing that makes it useful to humans.
The robots want what people always wanted. They just won't tolerate the noise.

[Drew @drewmabry]

The best AI conversations happen when AI isn't the point.
The faster you embrace it, the more relevant you stay. The more relevant you stay, the more you can actually help people.
Cross the threshold. We either meet this moment or we don't. Get after it.