Joel Smith

I help founders lead product. SaaS product management, design, and growth. Founder @productforward / Expert Coach @saasacademy

[Jen Zhu @jenzhuscott]

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

powerful

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/BA5kVYqcji

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

highest compounding mindset for doing anything hard:

you’re either right and rewarded, or wrong and learned.

[Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee]

No, you didn't waste time. You learned.

[Emil Kowalski @emilkowalski]

This vocabulary is a side-effect of domain expertise. Having domain expertise makes you way better at getting what you actually want from AI relative to other people.

So learn how to code, learn design, all the fundamentals. It’s incredibly revelant, and it will stay relevant.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

interesting thread… it’s almost like just building more doesn’t mean more customers. 🤔

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

We keep hearing about 10x or 100x productivity gains in engineering and knowledge work.

But outside the model labs, I haven’t seen the corresponding 10-100x revenue growth across the market or increase in quality.

So where is the productivity going?

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

hah, love this… because I’m totally focused on the boring stuff first…

I want the high-cognition to happen in my head more than I want the bots to do it… so i can feed it straight back to ‘em, so they can help me manifest my thoughts, strategies, creativity into the world.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Everyone building AI agents is focusing on building the prefrontal cortex. Planning. Reasoning. Multi-step chains. There's value here. CEO-stuff.

But also, a reframe: there is value in building the cerebellum. It's offloading boring tasks into reflex so the complex thought can focus.

Your mortgage gets paid by a standing order, not a committee. The things that are not fun, not interesting, but have to be done? Done. Most agent frameworks will fail because they treat all cognition as high cognition.

The winners will nail the boring stuff first.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

maaan, that is a based line up 🤓

[Only In Boston @OnlyInBOS]

Nickelodeon’s 1999 lineup was unreal:

8 AM: Doug
8:30 AM: Rocko’s Modern Life
9 AM: Rugrats
9:30 AM: Rugrats
10 AM: SpongeBob
10:30 AM: Hey Arnold!
11 AM: The Wild Thornberrys
11:30 AM: Angry Beavers
12 PM: CatDog
12:30 PM: Aaahh!!! Real Monsters
1 PM: Looney Tunes

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

https://t.co/cIfFSrnv7Z

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Shipping faster is useful only if it makes you learn faster. Otherwise it creates a very convincing illusion. A fast-moving team can hide a slow-learning company for a surprisingly long time.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

the faster, more accurately you’re able to articulate things—concepts, ideas, etc—the more effective your problem solving becomes.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

interesting… so the claim is it’s like an LLM and RAG had a baby with near perfect memory?

[Alexander Whedon @alex_whedon]

Introducing SubQ - a major breakthrough in LLM intelligence.

It is the first model built on a fully sub-quadratic sparse-attention architecture (SSA),

And the first frontier model with a 12 million token context window which is:

- 52x faster than FlashAttention at 1MM tokens
- Less than 5% the cost of Opus

Transformer-based LLMs waste compute by processing every possible relationship between words (standard attention).

Only a small fraction actually matter.

@subquadratic finds and focuses only on the ones that do.

That's nearly 1,000x less compute and a new way for LLMs to scale.

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

The faster people can get to something 80% done and unstable, the more they are going to crave stuff that's already 100% done and reliable.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

thanks for saying this out loud… I’m shipping solid work, but my workflow looks nothing like my feed says it “supposed” to look like.

lost in the sauce 😅

[Jon Yongfook @yongfook]

The idea of "one shotting" an app using AI is a fugazi.

If you had to describe my app and all the edge cases I have solved over the years, it would be a prompt the size of a small book, and my app isn't even that complicated.

The people promoting creating a business overnight with AI are just selling a get rich quick pipedream. Those grifters are present in every cycle.

AI has completely transformed how I work, but you can't push a button and make money. Doesn't work like that.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

I still remember my ICQ number.

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

the next 5 years things are gonna look a whole lot different 😳

[Naval @naval]

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone.

No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum.

Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too.

Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund.

It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital.

And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee.
—

Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital.

Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring.

But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line.

This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in.

Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition.

But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital.

USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages.

It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere.

There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.

USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid.

Get access here:

https://t.co/pAj1sqUsG0

[Joel Smith @rhythmofself]

💯

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

The hardest (bootstrapped) revenue level is $1m to $3m in revenue. Main reason: assuming 25% margins, you have $250k to $750k in profit. Typically you need higher value teammates to scale. And they cost...$250k-$750k. So you have to bet everything on an unsure thing. 3 Alternatives: 1) Narrow avatar to more valuable customers, so you can make more money with same infra. 2) Make a better offer you can charge more money for 3) Raise prices. But no matter which path you choose, it takes more risk to get out of "the swamp' than it take to get into it (which is why most get in, and never break out).

[Paul Graham @paulg]

This is true of startups too. You launch to learn what you should have built.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

A good customer segmentation is worth a thousand strategy offsites.

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

My top 5 takeaways from Dylan (CEO @Figma):

1. Taste vs. craft are different skills. Taste is knowing what's good and articulating why. Craft is pushing past where others stop, at every level from macro down to the smallest detail. You need both.

2. Design is the new code. "You'll be designing in a visual first way, and you'll be able to do a pull request right to production." The canvas becomes the source of truth, not a mockup that gets handed off and lost in translation.

3. PMs and designers don't have to wait for eng anymore. "If you think your job is to make docs for upwards alignment, you're going to love this new world. You get to make things too." 60% of Figma designs are now made by non-designers.

4. Move fluidly between design and code. Spacing, color, and layout are faster to adjust visually than to describe in a prompt. Figma MCP makes it easy for you to round-trip between canvas and code.

5. AI gets you to average fast. Your job is to push past it. "The first thing AI gives you is generic by definition because it’s the average of everything it’s seen.” You need to apply your taste and iterate until it meets your craft standards.

📌 Watch the full episode here: https://t.co/PsIKNwBPdd

[Des Traynor @destraynor]

This is a great article about the new table-stakes of adapting to, and competing in, the AI era.