James Isilay

Founder and CEO of @Cognism

Also angel investing......

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

We selected @cursor_ai for our engineering team last week after running a pilot program.

We introduced this AI tool with three goals in mind:

Automate repetitive tasks
Accelerate development cycles
Empower our team to focus on innovation

The pilot achieved the following:

31% more issues resolved—less time on repetitive work, more time on creative problem-solving.

21% more pull requests (PRs) merged—quicker features, faster deliverability.

3% faster PR cycle time—a small win that we know can grow.

Overall so far an 18% productivity boost for our engineering team.

AI is not going to replace our human developers, but it is transforming how we approach the mundane development tasks.

I wish these tools were around when I was a developer....

Strong recommendation for: https://t.co/ZoiAV5wY25

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@krandiash SONIC

[Karan Goel @krandiash]

We're giving away an 11-page guide titled: “How to clone your voice and make an agent in <10 minutes” (Like we did for Elon and Karan).

It can call support to complain on your behalf, make reservations, prank your friends, etc. You also get $100 in free credits so you can play with your voice AI.

Retweet and comment "SONIC" below and we'll send you the step-by-step guide and $100 in credits.

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@StartupArchive_ Great advice, I made the mistake of weighting the interviews more than the references in the past. Founders need a good playbook for reference checking.

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@kimmonismus Highlights that it is not the content that matters but how it is curated and marketed.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies

“It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’”

The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love.

Next, Sam looks for intelligence:

“You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.”

#6 is communication skills:

“So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.”

#7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.”

#8 is the rate of improvement of the founder:

“If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.”

#9 is the right motivations:

“There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2018)

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@ChrisBoening @itsolelehmann And they will fine, there is no allowance for company stage or size.

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

As an EU AI startup you now need to read, understand and implement 144 pages of the EU AI Act, if you manage data another 88 pages of GDPR. There is no allowance for size of company. Before you can build a solution for your target customer you need to build to the regulations. European start-ups have a major disadvantage against international competition. Founders I have recently spoken to are planning to build outside of the EU having been regulated away.

At the minimum the EU should have a minimum company revenue threshold (>€100 million) to allow start-ups time to innovate. It is costing Europe jobs and pushing out the best talent.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

I'm from Berlin.

Afghanistan gets better tech than Europeans now.

It's not a joke. It's the result of 30 years of suffocating regulation.

And now, the EU's new AI Act is about to make it 10x worse.

Here's the tragic story of how the EU is killing our tech future 🧵:

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@elerianm Learning how to be present in the moment is such a beautiful gift. Also took me until 2024 to learn that mental discipline.

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@javilopen It screams opportunity

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@StartupArchive_ Take risk! Build the future.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Mark Zuckerberg on the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him

“Peter was the person who told me this really pithy quote that, ‘In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.’ And I really think that that is true.”

Mark continues:

“Whenever you get yourself into a position where you have to make some big shift in direction or do something, there are always people who are going to point to the downside risks of that decision — and locally they may be right. For any given decision you make, there’s upside and downside. But in aggregate, if you are stagnant and you don’t make those changes, then I think you’re guaranteed to fail and not catch up. So to some degree, I think it’s really right that, over time, the biggest risk you can take is to not take any risks.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2016)

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@weswinder Add please thanks

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

Happy New Year! Wishing everyone a successful 2025.

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@lexfridman Peace for Ukraine in 2025, thank you for your work for peace.

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

@PonderingMoore Family

[Brandon Moore @PonderingMoore]

Acknowledging failures begins with defining boundaries.

Establish your families expectations in writing.

Every wise man knows his family’s happiness is his business.

I'm giving away the exact same contract my family uses!

I’ll send it to you! For free!

Just Like+Comment "Family"

Must be following (so I can DM)

[James Isilay @JIsilay]

Deeply believe this is how leadership should work, unfortunately it is not the norm. Typically CEO support gets the label micromanaging - lets just solve the critical issues and move the business forward.

[Fernando Cao @thefernandocz]

4. The "Musk Method" is revolutionizing leadership

Andreessen has worked closely with Musk for years.

His operating method is unlike any modern CEO:
• Shows up weekly at each company
• Identifies their biggest problem
• Fixes it personally

While others plan meetings about meetings...

[Fernando Cao @thefernandocz]

4. The "Musk Method" is revolutionizing leadership

Andreessen has worked closely with Musk for years.

His operating method is unlike any modern CEO:
• Shows up weekly at each company
• Identifies their biggest problem
• Fixes it personally

While others plan meetings about meetings...

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: Founders have no work-life balance

“I actually think founders have no balance… If I ever hear a founder talking about how ‘this is how I have a balanced life’ and so forth, they’re not committed to winning… The really great founders are like: ‘I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years… But while I’m doing this, I am unbalanced at this thing.’ It’s not to say that you don’t take breaks or you don’t go on dates or whatever else. But you’re super focused on this because it’s really hard and there’s lots of ways to die.”

Elon Musk emphasizes this as well:

“If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks, and you’re putting in 80 hour work weeks, you will achieve in 6 months what takes them a year to achieve, which will greatly improve your odds of success”

Why make such extreme sacrifices?

Well, as Paul Graham puts it in his essay How To Make Wealth:

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.”

In the early years, you will have to make lots of sacrifices and shouldn’t really expect much work-life balance if you want your startup to be successful.

But you can view it as an opportunity to compress your whole working life into a few years.

And hopefully excitement about what you’re building and the extremely-talented team you’re building it with make those long hours way more fun and rewarding than a normal 9-to-5 job.

Video source: @ycombinator (2014)

[Sebastian Völkl @basti_vkl]

this post was inspired by me not being able to try out Veo 2