Mike Black

Building — the first fully autonomous recruiting agency. Hire the best people, faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

In the long run - people will be running models that run locally for 95% of their usecases

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

This is what’s causing Anthropic to aggressively beg for govt protection (see below). Customers are finding cheaper alternatives. Keeping employees requires continuing ultra-rich secondaries ($$$) that are dependent on revenue growth. When you can’t win on the field go to DC.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

exactly this

[Ashwin Gopinath @ashwingop]

Claude Tag is a Trojan horse.  Not because Anthropic is doing anything evil. Because the incentives are obvious.

Day one, this looks like a great feature: tag Claude in Slack, let it follow the thread, remember context, connect to tools, break down tasks, chase work, and act like a teammate.

But that is exactly the problem. The moment your AI vendor becomes a shared coworker, it stops being just a model provider. It starts becoming the place where work is interpreted, remembered, routed, and eventually executed.

That is not model lock-in. That is context lock-in. You are now renting your company back from them.

Models can be swapped. Agents can be copied. But the memory of how your company actually works is much harder, maybe impossible, to move: the Slack scar tissue, the exception paths, the customer promises, the unfinished threads, the weird workflows, the implicit owners, the “we tried that in Q2 and it failed” knowledge.

Once that lives inside one vendor’s agent layer, you are not renting intelligence anymore. You are renting your company’s operating memory.

And the pricing model makes it even more dangerous. A human coworker has a salary. Claude has unbounded tokenized activity. The more work moves through it, the more the vendor captures not just IT spend, but labor spend.

This is the enterprise bargain people will regret: Convenience now, and rapid decent into dependency.

The right architecture is simple: rent the best intelligence from whoever is best this month. OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, open source, whatever. But own the context layer.

Your company memory should be inspectable, permissioned, portable, and model-neutral. It should not be buried inside the same vendor that sells you the intelligence and the workflow surface.

Claude Tag is useful. That is why it is dangerous. Rent the intelligence, but own the context. Or, regret later.

[Yasser @yasser_elsaid_]

Be bootstrapped
Grow to over $500 million in ARR
Refuse to build a website or app just because
Use money to fund extremely ambitious projects
Save lives

What an absolute chad of a company

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

Oliver tree was so creative, talented and hilarious, this is awful.

Just 32 years old 😢

[Dexerto @Dexerto]

Singer Oliver Tree has reportedly died in a helicopter crash in Rio de Janeiro

Two helicopters collided in mid-air before crashing into an electric vehicle yard, killing six people

via CNN Brasil

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

Are you based in SF and running a B2B company?

Thursday night i'm sitting down with @romanbuildsaas the founder of Gojiberry to talk about how Gojiberry (YC P26) went from $800K to $2.5M ARR in the last 2 months.

​Roman is one of the best in the world at cold outreach, signal-based selling, and modern GTM.

​We'll be going deep on actual tactical advice you can apply into your business on: the channels he's leaning into, how he thinks about intent signals, the experiments that have paid off, and the ones that haven't.

If you're in SF and want to join, here's the link: https://t.co/QyjaRmj84P

We have limited availability and are almost at full capacity.

Comment or shoot me a dm if you need the luma approved!

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

I would pay a lot more to have starlink on my flight. Airlines that don't get starlink (good wifi) are going to lose a lot more then 2% when everyone stops flying their airline. Pretty dumb.

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Michael O'Leary (Ryanair CEO) says installing Starlink would cost him $100M a year in fuel drag, and he's not paying that so passengers can scroll for free.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

@im_roy_lee 💯

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

This is cool

[Ian Macomber @iandmacomber]

Today, @AnthropicAI added @tryramp Data as a connector in Claude. You can now ask Claude what 50,000+ businesses are actually spending on and get an answer grounded in real spend data. Vendors, categories, growth, switching patterns, and more.

For decades, @Rich_Barton companies have focused on "turning the lights on." Homebuyers have @zillow, job seekers have @Glassdoor. But how companies actually spend, operate, and make decisions has stayed dark.

Today, that's changing. The people best served by transparent market data aren't the ones who can afford Bloomberg terminals. They're the founder sizing a first contract, the procurement lead negotiating a renewal, the researcher studying AI adoption, the agent booking software on a user's behalf. AI has made those users far more capable but only if the data they need is actually available.

Ramp Data is live in Claude today, and accessible via API, MCP, and CLI. Every market gets better with information transparency. B2B software is next.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

Blown away by how good GPT's new image model is. You no longer need a designer for decks or product. Been using it all day with claude design - pretty crazy stuff

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

The S&P500 is down this year, but up over 14% over the last year.

I've now seen multiple people copying each other's twitter posts saying how great of a buying opportunity right now is... Ok...

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

If you're under 40, this is one of the best buying opportunities you'll get this year.

Run the math on what happens when you buy at these levels historically.

The forward P/E just fell to 19.7x. That's below the 5-year average of 20.1x and the cheapest the index has traded since Liberation Day in April 2025. Citadel's Scott Rubner flagged it: every time the S&P forward P/E has dropped below 20x since 2020 (13 occurrences), forward returns have been positive.

Over the last 50 years, the S&P has had a negative Q1 18 times. Last year it dropped 4.6% in Q1 and finished up 16.4% for the year. In 2003 it fell 3.6% in Q1 and posted 26.4% for the full year. The pattern repeats: after 10% corrections, investors who bought the dip averaged 11% returns within a year and 37% within three years.

The panic math is even more telling. Miss just the 10 best trading days and your returns get cut roughly in half. Miss the top 50 and they shrink by nearly 5x. The best days almost always cluster inside the worst months. March 2026 has had 1%+ intraday swings on 14 of 18 trading days. The snapback days are hiding inside this exact volatility.

Everyone sharing this chart is seeing a 7.6% decline. The people who build wealth from these moments are seeing a forward P/E in the 6th percentile of its one-year range, Wall Street consensus calling for 10-20% upside, and 50 years of data confirming that selling here is almost always the wrong trade.

The worst time to look at your portfolio is the best time to add to it.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

@iamtyfrankel you suck

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

@WretchedJalopy @MakisMedicine You were given 5 months to live? Most people I know with stage 4 colon cancer are given much longer.

Why was yours only 5 months?

Unbelievable if this is actually true. I've talked to quite a lot of stage 4 colon cancer patients and have yet to see someone with 5 months

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

I spent 1 month in SF and generated close to $3m in deal pipline. I'm selling to tech companies.

I've lived in Austin since 2018.

It's not even close. SF is significantly better then Austin. Everyone you see online saying otherwise is lieing.

I love Austin - it's great. All the things Codie is saying is true.

But if you're building B2B and your ICP is tech companies you NEED to be in SF. Living anywhere else is a diservice to your company.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Why I’d live in Austin over SF any day:

- Cost of living: 30-50% lower than SF, NY, LA
- State income tax: 0%
- A household earning $200k keeps $15-20k more per year in Texas
- Oracle, Tesla, Apple, Google all moved or expanded here

SF still leads in AI.

But if you want to buy something, own something, and build wealth without giving it back to Uncle Sam… Austin is the most rational financial decision on the map right now. *Also fewer socialists so that’s a win.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

@THArrowOfApollo code

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

I love that when i'm in the office on a Sunday in SF i'm one of many.

In Austin, this is never the case.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

Been taking these for the last month. I’ve literally paid under $2 to grow across town in a robo taxi. Pretty crazy

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.

Congrats to the @Tesla_AI team!

If you’re interested in solving real-world AI, which is likely to lead to AGI imo, join Tesla AI. Solving real-world AI for Optimus will be 100X harder than cars.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

Crazy how much better Claude is then gpt for pretty much everything.

[Mike Black @mikeblack]

@NickFoles The 🐐

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

Chamath: Fraud at this scale will end the American Empire if nothing is done

“It is a crucible moment for American society.”

“If nothing happens and we deem this kind of theft acceptable, it is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.”

“It's just a level of disrespect and lack of care for this country.”

“I will be waiting and observing how important it is to root this out, that's number one.”

“The second, which is more tactical political calculus, this is an enormous opportunity for the Republican Party if they take this and run with this.”

“Is there waste, fraud and abuse in every state? Absolutely. I don't think this is endemically a Democratic problem, but the scale of it is so gargantuan in these Democratic states that if the Republicans don't take advantage of it, I think it is a huge political miscalculation.”

“So there is this tactical opportunity, which I think if you want to have a chance in the midterms and if you generally wanna have a chance to level-set the country, you must take this and run with it.”

“And then separately, if as Friedberg says, it does die on the vine, it is the beginning of the end of the American Empire, unfortunately.”

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

2025 Look back:

I was the only Republican in the House who never voted to fund fraudulent daycare centers or the $5 billion immigrant resettlement.