Ron Hung

🍣 Serial entrepreneur of sushi burritos and software.
🎯 Founder @startupheist

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

Remember that Anthropic Super Bowl ad? The one dunking on ChatGPT for putting ads in conversations. Everyone loved it. "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." Standing ovation. We all felt very smart and principled.

Guess what happened while we were clapping.

ChatGPT's ad pilot crossed $100M in revenue. In six weeks. 600+ advertisers signed up. Copilot ads are converting 73% better than traditional search. Users who come through chat ads convert at 1.5x every other channel. The numbers are as subtle as Sam Altman trying to scan your eyeballs.

And here's the fun part: not a single ad tool on the market knows how to write for this format. Everyone's running their Google/Meta copy inside a chat window and hoping for the best. It's like reading a billboard out loud at a dinner party.

Trust me on this: if someone does this right, the whole Anthropic Super Bowl thing is gonna age like milk.

This has happened before by the way. 1952. TV was new. Every respectable ad agency refused to take it seriously. One guy built a simple framework for the new medium, made the most hated commercial in America, and tripled his client's revenue in 18 months. That spot earned more than Gone With the Wind. That legend's name was Rosser Reeves.

The people who mocked the new medium kept their credibility. The guy who built the playbook for it kept their clients.

The playbook for conversational ads doesn't exist yet. Just saying.

Be Rosser Reeves.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@tibo_maker Half the apps that need building are just replacing a 6-month waitlist with a camera and 30 seconds. The hard part was never the AI.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@BoringBiz_ Reading a 10-K in a market that trades on vibes is a special kind of self-harm.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@paulg This is going to ruin a lot of people's gin and tonics today.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

The weirdest tax on commerce is eye contact.

[Startup Heist @startupheist]

This is what happened when CVS installed self-checkout to save on labor:

Sales of condoms went up.
Plan B went up.
Antifungal cream went up.

Double digits across the board. Nothing else changed. They just removed the part where a cashier picks up your item and looks at you.

Turns out a lot of people wanted to buy stuff they just couldn't bring themselves to hand to a stranger.

Meanwhile, Japan has known this for decades.

We call this the embarrassment commerce.
Lots of money to be made here. Many ways to play it.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@sama

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@BoringBiz_ Somewhere on that analyst's desktop is a hidden folder called "LBO_backup_REAL_final2."

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@aakashgupta The hardest problem in AI right now is a cookie banner. Billion dollar agents vs. a CAPTCHA. Incredible times.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@hnshah The sentence test is brutal because it forces you to pick one thing. We want to be three things.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@BoringBiz_ The $25K/year messaging app that also does charts sometimes.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@sciencegirl Trying to keep my optimism but I think it's humanity itself.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@nevmed Marketing is just making a new friend.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@creatine_cycle

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@agazdecki MRR happens when nobody's watching.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@WSJ Bold prediction from the guy whose product made every day feel like a work day.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@thisisgrantlee "Real engineers don't use it" is what real engineers said about every tool that eventually replaced half of them.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@ItakGol @AnthropicAI Remember looking at the $1B number 15 months ago and people thought it was the ceiling?

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@1Umairshaikh The 19-year-old talks to every customer. The 12 engineers talk to each other. That's the retention gap.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@oscrhong @levelsio The YC application alone used to take longer than this entire build.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@kalashvasaniya I miss exactly one thing about my old job. The coffee machine. Not the 9am standup about the coffee machine though.

[Ron Hung @ronhung]

@craigzLiszt Pre-pregnancy is honestly where most VCs prefer to get in. Less dilution.