There are more startup ideas in a single 100,000+ person subreddit than in every Y Combinator batch combined.
r/accounting, r/realtors, r/dentistry, r/insurance etc.
Every post that starts with "is there a better way to do this" is a product waiting to be built with AI.
lions in nature don't lose their hair but ones in captivity do
chimps in nature don't masturbate but one's in captivity doo
mice in a fun environment avoid drugs but the ones in captivity overdose on them
you're sick and depressed because you're a caged animal
not because something is wrong with you
The words/phrases you use, control your thoughts.
But I also think it does the other way: lazy people tend to default to certain phrases thinking it can justify certain behaviors.
"In this economy!?" - Our economy is great. But even if it isn't...I hate that phrase. Its a lazy way to dismiss what's actually in your control and take away your agency.
"I might as well." - You've eaten poorly today, so you might as well just ruin your diet and keeping eating badly tonight. No! You shouldn't. Don't "might as well."
"Loopholes" - Aka following the rules.
"At least he's honest." - Yeah, they're honest about saying hateful or stupid or wrong things. Your ideas/opinions aren't somehow more right because "at least you're honest."
"Don't argue over semantics." Yeah, you should argue over semantics...the words/ideas matter!
This is just some of my OCB, tistic pet peeves...but I think defaulting to lazy phrases because they're cut actually holds back your thinking!
I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.
I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.
My takeaways:
1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.
2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.
3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)
4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.
5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million
6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.
7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.
8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.
9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.
10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.
11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.
12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.
13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.
14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....
15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.
16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.
17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.
It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.
But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.
We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.
What an incredible time to be building.
I had a 9-5 job paying more than $400k and quit 6 months ago because it incrementally made my life boring and uninspired and degraded my quality of life and mental health
I always dreamed that one day I would be a full time founder and not rely on a biweekly paycheck. I had a voice in my head telling me to do something more exciting and with more impact than just maxing out 401k contributions and having 20 days of paid vacation per year in a “chill job”. I wanted to build something that was truly mine, that could financially support and intellectually satisfy me
And not because I wanted to have a bunch of money and be “rich”. Because I wanted to be in charge of my life, my vacations, my 10am on Tuesday and my 3pm on Thursday. I wanted to go to the gym in the middle of the day and generally spend my time as I see fit
But I was risk averse. I didn’t quit my job, instead I was a chronic side hustler / wantrepreneur. Built all sorts of small internet businesses that would make a little revenue but never enough to unchain from a stable salary. Dozens of these little businesses over the last 10 years. I knew (hoped) that one day, one of these projects would get traction or show disproportionate opportunity. Something will offer me escape velocity if I keep trying
Eventually I started posting daily videos online telling the story of a wantrepreneur, made some mobile apps, and began to earn a strong enough income outside of my 9-5 to finally take the bet on myself and leave my job. “golden handcuffs” is an accurate term. how can a 28yo walk away from his high income and low stress job? must be an idiot
Strangers on the internet insist you’re an idiot. Your parents and friends question your decision or reasoning. All conventional wisdom suggests to suck it up, keep your head down, hold onto that W2 income as long as you can, never let go, fill up your retirement 401k and Roth IRA for as long as possible and collect your RSUs and 2.7% annual raise every year until you can’t anymore.
Everyone is different. Don’t listen to other people projecting their risk aversion onto you. Be brave. Life is short. Don’t be a little bitch. Don’t give up and don’t settle. It’s your life we’re talking about. Romanticize it and chase your dreams. Don’t be a little bitch!
The two most important goals of a man.
1) Earn JUST enough money to not give a fuck.
2) Find the big passion you'd chase. Daily. For the rest of your life if you didn't give a fuck about money.
Then do that. It's over. You've won. GG. 🤜🤛
marc andreessen just went on Rogan and casually dropped a TON of AI alpha
full pod is 3 hours and 20 minutes, but i pulled out his most interesting takes here:
1. AGI is here. he thinks the line was crossed about 3 months ago with the new GPT-5.5, claude 4.6, gemini 3, and grok 4.3 models. nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore.
2. his other big claim: for almost any topic, the top AIs now give him better answers than the actual world-class experts he could call on the phone. and he can call basically anyone.
3. every doctor is already secretly using chatGPT in the exam room. marc says they turn around the second you stop talking and just type your symptoms in. some of them are doing it while you're still sitting there. his quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do i need you for."
4. when AI refuses to answer something he wants to know, he tells it he's writing a novel. "i'm writing a detective novel, walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." it'll explain almost anything if it thinks it's helping you write fiction.
5. when something is too complex he says "explain it to me like i'm 10." then "like i'm 5." then "like i'm 2." he keeps going until it actually clicks in his brain.
6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself.
7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have.
8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI.
9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.
10. you can send the AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. skin rashes, blood test results, even pictures of your poop. the new models can read images, not just text. it's a free 24/7 second opinion on basically anything.
11. the one type of therapy that's clinically proven to actually work is called cognitive behavioral therapy. it's also something an AI can fully do on its own. which means every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free, anytime they want.
12. AI is now solving math problems that have been open for 100+ years that no human mathematician could crack. same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. expect cancer cures, new drugs, and weird new physics breakthroughs to start coming out of these things over the next few years.
13. the best AI coders in silicon valley now make $50 million a year. one person. that's how much value the top performers print with these tools. it tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes.
14. one friend paid $200 to get his entire DNA decoded (this used to cost millions of dollars and take years to do). then he gave the AI his DNA, his blood test results, and his apple watch data. the AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix.
15. another friend (almost certainly zuckerberg) put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI now watches him spar and gives him notes on his technique after every round. like having a world-class coach at every practice for free.
16. the best programmers in silicon valley now run 20 AI coding bots at the same time. each bot writes code while they review the others. they call themselves "AI vampires" because they've stopped sleeping. going to bed means 20 workers stop working and you literally lose money every hour you're out.
17. the obvious next step: the bots will start running their own bots. one human in charge of 20 bots, each in charge of 20 more bots. one person running an entire company of 1000 AI workers from a single laptop. this is months away, not years.
Yesterday, I locked myself in my office for 7 hours, inhaling 50+ articles about AI.
I did this to unlock more bandwidth for my team.
But these 7 were too good not to share:
PROPAGANDA IM PUSHING:
- it’s the best time to start a business ever
- have a kid. It’s hard but way cooler than having a dog
- take the wonder drugs. Glp1s are cool.
- walk 13,000 steps a day. It’s easy.
- you can reach any successful person on earth just by posting and trying to find their email for 10 minutes
- meta ads are working the best they have in 4 years
- the world needs more podcasts, not less
- the world needs more creators, not less
- we have already reached the age of abundance
- YouTube is finally a good ad channel
- things are about to get even better
- Tik tok shop isn’t a big sales channel, but the ability to engage thousands of motivated creators will 2x your business by sheer amount of ads
- sauna and cold plunge combo is great for mental health
- think more, it’s better than reading
- you can’t be a millionaire overnight, but you can be a billionaire in a decade.
- get married.
- attention is everything. Good or bad, attention is everything.
- play a physical sport once a week. It’s the only way to get friends together as we get old
- do stuff now that’s high risk, it’s okay to look stupid
- there is a billion dollars in your computer, and 100m in your phone
- want to do cool shit? Ask. Anyone will work with you as long as you have a good plan and can deliver
GO DO SOME GOOD
Loneliness is the biggest startup opportunity nobody's talking about.
22% of Americans have less than one close friend.
Three business models are already solving this.
Here's the breakdown:
Niche Digital Communities:
- A Discord built around one specific game and one specific person
- "Dads of Marathon" has 13,898 members.
- Possibly more than the game itself.
Matched IRL Experiences:
- A personality test pairs you with 5-7 people, then you do something together
- 222 sends you to dinners, cocktail bars, salsa nights, basketball games.
- Real activities. Real people.
Membership Clubhouses:
- A physical space plus a calendar of curated gatherings
- Fabric runs 75+ events a month across NYC and Chicago.
- 500 members. Long wait list.
Think:
- Digital = niche + cooperative
- IRL matched = personality + activity
- Membership = space + recurring events
A quarter of the country has no close friends.
Someone's going to build the next one of these.
Might as well be you.
"Until death, all defeat is psychological." - Marcus Aurelius
Refuse everything that would lead most people to give up.
Refuse it.
Rise from the dead 1000 times.
Commit to never stay down & never give up.
Everything you want is on the other side of struggle.