Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth

[Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth @kaustabhc]

@Lukealexxander N8N

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

this is what's keeping me up at night these days...

1. chatgpt 4o image gen is as big as the chatgpt launch. probably will birth 1000+ $1-$100m/year vertical software businesses.

2. we’re in the “mp3 napster era” of content. millions of creators don’t realize their entire back catalog is being weaponized into their competition because of AI.

3. every calendar, inbox, and CRM will be rebuilt from scratch in the next 3 years. not “AI-enhanced,” fully rethought.

4. i thought ai was creating digital employees. but it's more like digital employers. the first ai systems that can manage human workers will cause a restructuring of labor markets more significant than the industrial revolution.

5. if your job is interviewing people who will train ai systems that will replace people who do interviews, you're just a step in a weird recursive extinction.

6. ai is turning "service businesses that don't scale" into "product businesses with service margins." the new unicorns will be productized services with ai doing 80% of the work.

7. building communities is harder than building products but everyone pretends it's the reverse. the reality is most startups fail because nobody cares.

8. it's been 739 days since the will smith spaghetti video. imagine what could happen to gen ai in 739 more days?

9. people building "ai assistants" have never actually had assistants. real assistants need context, history, and relationship. 95% of chatbots have none of those.

10. most customer support will be automated within 36 months. not just tier 1 tickets, complex, multi-step resolution that previously required senior support staff.

11. the worst thing that can happen to your startup is mediocre success. enough to keep you going but not enough to change your life. most founders are trapped there. thinking about this a lot with respect to shutting down or doubling down on projects.

12. the ai backlash won't just come from replaced workers, it'll be from everyone who realizes their entire digital identity is being converted into training data without consent.

13. no one has ever read a terms of service ever

14. the "sketching economy" is the real ai revolution. when anyone can turn rough sketches into production-ready designs, taste and ideation become the only scarce resources.

15. i dont know how else to say it, the money (and opportunity for the avg joe) is in ai startups is in vertical-specific applications that actually understand industry context. no, adding industry terms to your prompts isn't the same thing.

16. consumer mobile is back in full swing. we went from desktop-first apps to mobile-first apps to now ai-first mobile apps. the next wave of $100m/year apps will start mobile-first with ai baked in from day one.

17. the ai middleman boom is just starting. companies that sit between foundation models and specific industries will capture most of the value while both ends get commoditized.

18. we're witnessing the birth of a whole new job category: ai workflow designers. people who can map human processes into ai-augmented workflows will be the highest-paid consultants of the next decade.

19. ai is creating winner-take-most markets overnight. the window to establish yourself as the go-to solution in a specific vertical is maybe 6-12 months before it closes for a decade. this isn't helping my sleep lollll.

20. really smart strategy to rebuild traditional products with ai as your unfair advantage, hiding the complexity behind familiar interfaces. basically, just look at proven apps that have no ai, make them ai-first (if it adds a ton of value to end customer). use ai features (don’t sell ai) in creator-led marketing. this is the playbook.

21. distribution is the only moat left. your product, tech, and team can all be replicated. your direct connection to customers cannot.

22. we'll soon hit the tipping point where custom ai tools are cheaper than hiring humans, even for small businesses.

23. nobody's talking about how ai is making previously "un-acquirable" businesses suddenly attractive targets. when you can automate operations, the owner-dependent business problem disappears.

24. the coming smb acquisition frenzy will make the 2021 tech bubble look tame. when ai drops operating costs by 60%, every small business becomes a cash flow engine.

25. if vibe coding will be a $100B opportunity, how big of an opportunity is vibe marketing? (you can follow my co-founder @boringmarketer for more on that)

26. Video game studios will separate into two distinct types: agent-driven content farms that generate infinite assets, and boutique studios focused on core mechanics. The middle will disappear entirely.

27. Corporate photography is effectively dead. No company will pay $2K for a stock-style photoshoot when they can generate unlimited perfectly on-brand imagery for the cost of a subscription.

28. enterprise sales is being completely inverted by ai. using ai to identify exactly when and how to talk to the right buyer, and set off automations. ill probably talk about this more on a pod soon.

29. i wonder if AGI will emerge from interconnected agent networks that develop emergent properties nobody designed? we're building the neural connections without realizing it.

30. while genai looks to be the $1T category, many quiet fortunes will be built in predictive ai. knowing what will happen is more valuable than generating new content.

31. the "ai bubble" is actually an excise tax on vcs who can't tell the difference between genuine innovation and repackaged openai apis.

32. interfaces will become personalities. when every tool can talk back, vibe and tone will drive trust, loyalty, and retention. It's why I'm investing more in our design firm for the AI age @meetLCA (you can follow for more insights on designing/taste/brand that will stand out)

33. ai will kill the homepage. interfaces will get replaced by entry points that change based on who you are, what you need, and when you show up.

34. no one will pay for "ai", they’ll pay to solve a $10,000/hour problem in 3 clicks. sell outcomes, hide the ai.

35. ai is unbundling google. every vertical search engine, directory, and comparison tool is a billion-dollar opportunity in disguise.

36. every small business will get a “ghost team.” automated bookkeepers, sales agents, marketers—run by one founder and 5 bots.

37. ai-generated content is creating a monoculture of ideas. when everyone uses the same models, we get the same outputs. original human thinking is becoming the ultimate premium. be weird. weird will sell.

38. schools won’t be disrupted by ai. they’ll be disintermediated. smart teens will skip formal education, build audiences, run experiments, and learn faster. kids say they want to become creators but creators are becoming entrepreneurs. entrepreneurship becomes the most popular profession.

39. in 18 months, 80% of the “ai startup” category will look like spam. the rest will become infrastructure.

40. conversion rate product debates are obsolete. Why argue over 2 button colors when AI focus groups can test 200 variations overnight?

41. most of what we call “marketing” is about to be done by ai. humans will move upstream into storytelling, vibes, and brand energy.

42. the best hiring decision you can make this year? a head of ai ops. someone who can build workflows, glue tools, and ship outcomes.

43. the first $1b AGI startup will look like a toy at first. all world-changing interfaces do.

44. ai-powered distribution > ai-powered product. a mid product with elite reach will beat a great product with no attention every time.

45. people still hate monthly subscriptions. outcome-based pricing is still in early days. implementing this will be a competitive advantage for lots of companies. large saas wont be able to compete with you.

46. i don't know how long this window stays open, but we're in a moment where all the rules of building businesses are being rewritten. for the people playing with these new tools, creating audiences and communities, you've got an unfair advantage.

i hope you get some sleep.

[Navin Kabra @NGKabra]

Who are Indians descended from? Aryans from Europe? Dravidians who've been "here" forever? The Indus valley civilization?

A controversial question for 150+ years, but now we have DNA evidence that answers these questions with a high degree of certainty.

🧵

[Sanket Shah @_sankyy]

One interesting thing that most companies do after a decent raise is hire very senior folks, which makes sense.
VP/CXO from Swiggy/zomato/amazon/flipkart etc etc… the leader was of course massively successful in their previous stint.. but for them to find success at the new org, there are a few pitfalls that I want to flag, pitfalls that can lead to them being non-successful which none of us want. I am also presuming the leader hired is competent.
1 - Success at a senior level comes from
a degree of PMF. PMF is not 1 or 0. So a company they worked for can have 10/10 pmf and thus success. However, fund raising and pmf might not always have high degrees of correlation. And without great pmf, they might not succeed.
2 - With great success from the previous org and now ready to take a larger responsibility the leader also builds a similar culture to their previous org. But in reality the culture of the company should always be aligned with the biz type and not what you experienced. I think culture comes from 2 places - founders and what the biz demands. Culture at uber if copied at open ai will add negative value.
3 - The expectation setting done at the stage of hiring is around a larger responsibility and absolute freedom to succeed. Also, after a large success, ego plays an implicit role. Also, the founder believes that the new leader knows more than they do and does not indulge in very tough discussions. Under the disguise of trust. But there should be duality wrt trust and strategic inputs. Founders should know that their mental models are much stronger than the leader at that point.
4 - Instead of 1:1’s and planning from first principles the discussions are about hypothesis that sound great on paper and how they worked previously. And thus they are left to do things they know for months. But imo every biz is unique in some form. But more than that, degrees of pmf play a role. This can be avoided with a few things if we are mindful:
1 - Founders need to be honest about where are they with pmf and not mix it with fundraise. Leaders getting hired should inquire about that versus speak about how the vision is great only.
2 - Evaluate skills and interests wrt the ‘degree of pmf’ versus how you will scale the org. You need pmf to scale.
3 - Past accolades are great, but what is the culture imp wrt our biz vs the culture at the last place. (Mostly successful companies will have culture etc thought through before the leader joined)
4 - Can we build a biz by copy pasting a playbook - and why - if yes, copy paste if maybe - inquire often.
5 - Tough checkins regularly versus just talking good things about each other, during checkins are necessary. Don’t be in awe of each other during the meetings. Outside of them, it’s fine.
6 - New leaders should avoid building large teams fast after joining without their own individual judgement on degree of pmf and culture. Often they bring in their best folks from their previous org. More people will lead go less clarity or won’t let you arrive at clarity.
7 - New leaders should internalize that their success was ‘the last ball’ as a batsman. And batsman are only as good as their ‘next ball’ and they cannot play the same shot on every ball.

This won’t lead to success but will enable you to be mindful about it and let you pivot strategy fast saving time but also improves path to clarity.

[Siqi Chen @blader]

After 20 years of interviewing candidates, I've found this to be the single most useful interview question:

"What is your greatest strength ... that you are most worried about not coming across in an interview setting?"

[Dr Nandita Iyer @saffrontrail]

If you found this thread useful, please RT the tweet below to share it with your audience 🙂https://t.co/5Lbj1pSYtn

[Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth @kaustabhc]

@ponnappa Stay till the 2 people interact and then leave.

[Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth @kaustabhc]

"Life is a series of tradeoffs, and greater results usually require greater tradeoffs.

The question is not, "Do you want to be great at this?"

The question is, "What are you willing to give up in order to be great at this?"

– @JamesClear

[Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth @kaustabhc]

@Austen We used NPS to get a sense of what's broken in the customer experience at a point in time. We started using CES to measure perceived friction in friction-prone processes (after sales, returns etc) and that led us to rethink processes.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Lucky people work very hard, show up on time, have good manners, are self-aware, optimistic, kind and generous.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

10 websites you didn't know you were missing (until now) :

[nandiniv @nandiniv]

Last year sometime, when I was talking to a founder building something powerful, we both realised he couldn’t move as fast as he wanted to. He didn’t have a co-founder with the skills needed to solve for the gaps and continue building.

[Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth @kaustabhc]

@nandiniv It's always such a pleasure to catch up with this gang! @bpangti @pankajaroraofc @Vijayibmt Nilesh Rathi, Pankaj Agarwal, Govindraj Kaushik

[Chris Hladczuk @chrishlad]

I devoured 50 years of Warren Buffett shareholder letters.

The result?

12 timeless principles from the greatest investor in the world.

Here are the golden nuggets🧵

[Kaustabh Chakraborty - kaustabh.eth @kaustabhc]

This!

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Not everyone wants to build wealth, but if you’re internally ambitious & find yourself conflicted - it’s usually an internal sticking point.

You want to build, but you’re not moving. You push, but just to a *point.*

Let’s talk about "Approach-Avoidance." 1/

[Jason Flack @FlackThought]

8 illustrations guaranteed to change the way you think about your life:

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

You never know when knowledge of Taylor series might save your life by Nobel Laureate physicist Igor Tamm

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

After being in hundreds of board meetings, I've learned:

World-class board members are worth their weight in gold.

Here's how the greatest board members set themselves apart.

(1/x)