Andrew Overby

scribbled notes on travel and AI/tech.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

A peak life advice from James Clear:

“You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.”

[Leila Hormozi @LeilaHormozi]

The fastest way to spot a successful person: watch how quickly they make decisions, respond to messages, and turn ideas into action.

Speed is king.

[Auren Hoffman @auren]

there are no more moats anymore. moats are dead.
was talking to a friend of mine who's a CEO of a rapidly growing startup (~$1B revenue). we're small investors. He told me that he has only taken one one-week vacation in the last eight years of his startup.
I was like, "Hey this is crazy. You're gonna burn out. This is pretty serious."

he said, "Auren, I don't know what to do. We don't have no moat."

am like, "What are you talking about? The business is going great!"

he said, "We have incredible competitors. We sell AI products and so we're selling to the smartest people in the world. If we don't have the best product that week, they won't buy us. If we don't have the best product for two weeks, our customers will churn. We don't have a moat."

I started thinking about it: who does have a moat?
There are just no moats anymore. Nobody has a moat. Everyone will switch their software providers in a heartbeat for better product or for cheaper product or for faster product. Anyone will switch.

We looked at our 200 companies at Flex Capital and how they're buying software and AI services today. Almost all of their vendors are on month-to-month contracts or on usage-based contracts. That means they can switch immediately. The reason they have everyone on month-to-month is that they have no idea if they're going to be using those tools two months from now. They may not even be using those tools two weeks from now. Everything is changing so fast all the time.

The only moat you have in software is that you have the best product. There are just no other moats.

It used to be back in the day that you have a mediocre product and you'd be using it for years. we just dealt with all these of mediocre software systems, mediocre cloud providers, mediocre data providers, mediocre APIs. we dealt with it because the switching costs are really hard.

Nowadays it's really easy to change software. It's really easy to change APIs. it's really easy to change AI infrastructure. It's super easy. You can change it in a heartbeat and every other vendor will help you switch. Of course, your AI tools will help you switch as well. All these things that used to give very high customer lock-in just don't exist anymore and so they're just no more moats.

Moats are dead.  you just need to work insane hours all the time because the only thing you have is your product. goodbye moat, goodbye predictable revenues, goodbye 2010s era.

[signüll @signulll]

nvidia paying $12b for a startup is pretty much like you or me grabbing a diet coke at checkout.

[Andrew Overby @overbyonline]

@JoeySwagattoni @thejustinwelsh Wish someone had told me

[Justin Welsh @thejustinwelsh]

Advice I'd give anyone in their 20s:

1. Move to NYC, SF, ATX, etc.
2. Join a company with A+ players.
3. Immensely overdeliver on your work.
4. Do it for years and build a reputation.

Once you've built that, you can do whatever you want for the rest of your life.

[Andrew Overby @overbyonline]

What a sentence! Identity trumps simple habit tracking.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“Discipline is when your identity is so clear, you stop negotiating with your feelings.”

[Tim Denning @Tim_Denning]

Patterns I noticed in successful people in my life:

• People think they’re insane
• They’re relentless at follow up
• They reply to emails in one sentence
• They are so high agency it’ll rip peoples faces off
• They understand the enormous value of pattern recognition
• They don’t give a flying f*ck about people’s opinions
• They don’t network and let their work do the work
• They have confidence that comes from action
• They purposely cultivate high energy
• They have an aura about them
• They chase their obsession
• They see writing as thinking

[Andrew Overby @overbyonline]

Enjoyed hiking in Crete recently. 👌

[blue @bluewmist]

A mistake that cost me 5 years: Thinking preparation was progress. Reading every book. Taking every course. Planning every detail. Meanwhile, someone dumber than me started badly and figured it out. Preparation feels productive but it's often just fear dressed up as strategy. You learn to swim by getting in the water, not by studying water.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Market doesn't give notice before it revolts against the debt. But so far this month, as debt crossed $40 trillion, the 30-year bond yield hit a 19-year high, gold rose 13%, silver +18%, GSCI commodity index +5%, BTC +19% and the dollar weakened. Markets are saying something.
1/3

[Nikita Thakur @nikitathakur21]

A simple rule I use when something feels overwhelming

Don't ask How do I finish this?

Ask

What is the smallest useful version I can finish today?

A project becomes a page.
A business becomes one customer.
A habit becomes 10 minutes.
Momentum loves small beginnings.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated life advice: Increase your recovery speed. You can't avoid failures. You will get rejected. Make bad decisions. Lose money. Embarrass yourself. Whatever. Just learn to reset faster. Shrink the window between fall and recovery. Master the art of the fresh start.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

Slow down and remember this:

Most things make no difference.

Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant.

Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive.

Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

[Max Sturtevant @maxwellcopy]

Patterns I noticed in successful people in my life:

- They work a fuck ton
- When there’s something to do, it gets EOD and not EOW
- They never leave open loops
- They dress simple, same outfit damn near everyday
- They heavily re-invest in coaching, knowledge and education
- They read books
- They don’t gate keep their knowledge and experience
- You can tell they know they are an expert just off their aura
- They talk in specifics not general platitudes
- They use examples to illustrate their points as much as possible
- They don’t bother themselves with work that isn’t high leverage. Obsessed with only high leverage things
- They have an ego whether they admit it or not

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

True power:

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated career advice: Choose to work in a place with high talent density early in your career.

You tend to rise or fall to the level of the people around you. When you work with exceptional people, you absorb their standards, pace, frameworks, and instincts almost through osmosis.

High-talent environments compress learning cycles and force you to grow faster than you would on your own. They change your opportunity set and rewire your brain. The compounding effect of a few years in that environment can change the trajectory of your life.

Early in your career, there’s probably nothing more valuable than choosing the room with the highest talent per square foot.

[Cloudflare @Cloudflare]

We're opening the waitlist for our Monetization Gateway, which will allow you to charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. The charges will settle in stablecoins over the x402 open protocol. https://t.co/pvICtEIixj

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

The work you do in private is the work you are rewarded for in public.

Today’s news is 10 years in the making.

$400M raised.

Time to get back to work and work harder than ever.

https://t.co/yr9BeJfomQ

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

The Bullseye Framework comes from a fantastic book:

Traction, by Gabriel Weinberg.

One of the best books I’ve ever read on marketing for early-stage companies.