@evisdrenova@TrustVanta FWIW I went through this exact same thing in May of last year and the Vanta team replied in hours, helped us through everything, and had it turned off (and refunded) faster than almost any other vendor. Sorry you had a bad experience, but it’s not systemic … scaling is hard.
Yesterday Mark Cuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and told me to keep telling my story.
So here it is.
I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. 15 years pulling wire in Kentucky. Zero coding background. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to trade school.
Every week I'd show up to a home where someone just bought a Tesla or a Rivian. And every time, someone had already told them they needed a $3,000-$5,000 panel upgrade to install a charger.
70% of the time? They didn't need it.
The math is in the NEC — Section 220.82. Load calculations. But nobody was doing them for homeowners. Electricians upsell. Dealers don't know. And the homeowner just pays.
I got angry enough to build something about it.
I found @claudeai. No coding experience. I just started talking to it like I'd explain a job to an apprentice. "Here's how load calcs work. Here's the NEC code. Now help me build a tool that does this."
6 months later — @ChargeRight is live. Real software. Stripe payments. PDF reports. NEC 220.82 calculations automated. $12.99 instead of a $500 truck roll.
I'm still pulling wire. I still take service calls. I wake up at 5:05 AM for work.
But something shifted.
Yesterday @vivilinsv published my story as Claude Builder Spotlight #1. Mark Cuban saw it. The Claude community showed up. And for the first time, I felt like this thing I built in my kitchen might actually matter.
I'm not a tech founder. I'm a dad who wants to coach little league and be home for dinner. I just happened to build something that helps people.
If you're in the trades and thinking about using AI — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try.
https://t.co/cDVdY5mcLv
Use the saw, fear the saw
When I learned to use a table saw, my teacher impressed upon me that the machine wants to cut fingers. Fear the saw!
Powerful tools can do powerful things. If you want to make handmade wooden furniture you must cut wood. Your desire to have limbs and your desire to have furniture are not at odds if you learn to use tools safely.
There are table saws that will stop at the touch of a finger, but I don’t know of any chainsaw that won’t cut an arm. There is a limit to how safe a tool can be before its function is crippled.
We should not stop making powerful tools because they are dangerous. Rather, we should empower people to use powerful tools safely.
I use the saw, I fear the saw. I have handmade furniture, and I have all my limbs.
Dear @Chase my account was compromised this AM. When I called your security team they told me to change my username. When I asked how someone got past two-factor without a code being sent to my phone, they told me “because they are hackers they know how to bypass two factor” 🤦♂️
We have been building! Since coming out of stealth mode in Nov 2024 we have signed 25+ customers. Thanks @rebecca_szkutak and @TechCrunch for covering the momentum.
I’m joining @saranormous, @pranavreddy and the team at @conviction!
The past two years have been the best. I’ve enjoyed the freedom to travel with my family and (assistant) coach my son’s Little League teams, all while continuing to try to help some of the founders and companies I’ve worked with over the past decade.
These two years have confirmed that I love hanging out with my family … and it’s really fun to spend time with amazing, ambitious, impatient entrepreneurs.
We are living through the most exciting technological change of our lifetime (of anyone’s lifetime?). We are on the cusp of having an infinite supply of intelligence. We can literally just convert electricity into intelligence.
It’s hard to sit that one out.
I have known Sarah Guo for years. She’s one of the smartest, hardest-working, most connected and admired investors out there. Founders love her.
Over the past two years, she and the team at Conviction have built one of the most exciting new firms in years. In just two years they have partnered with @harvey_ai, @MistralAI, @SierraPlatform, @cognition_labs, @HeyGen_Official, @cartesia and more. That’s pretty good. In a short period, Sarah and Pranav have emerged as the partners of choice for AI-native companies.
Even more impressive than the track record is the ethos, ambition and culture of the firm (https://t.co/9EjoTo0V60).
At Conviction, we are building a small, hands-on team that deeply understands the technological revolution that is underway, that can serve as a connector between the builders at the center of it and that has the patience, independence and conviction to take an extremely long-term perspective.
And it’s fun to be back at a startup! There are cardboard boxes everywhere and a random humanoid robot hanging out in the kitchen. The most fun I’ve had in my working career was the early, fast-scaling days at Facebook – it’s fun to be back.
I have been fortunate to work with some amazing teams and founders over the past decade (thank you!). Luckily I’ll continue to work with a few – @getcaptionsapp, @clay_gtm, @NotionHQ, @Rippling, @Statsig – for the rest, please don’t be a stranger.
I am grateful to Sarah, Pranav, Christy, Niki and Vivian for welcoming me in and trusting me to be part of the team.
And lastly and most importantly, I am so grateful to my wife and my kids who have hung out with me for the past two years and have been supportive of this new journey.
My weird hobby of helping ppl debug chatbot behavior turned into a business.
No, but seriously: the future of how people find and engage businesses has LLMs at the heart. Assistants, agents, personalized reranking, more. Excited to begin.
@TestKitchen do you publish an errata for your cookbooks? Pretty sure the liquid in Everyday Bread's Three Ingredient Bread is off by about 2x (3/4cu on the left, 1.5cu on the right)
I’ve started a new company - Unblocked
We’re eliminating the countless hours developers spend in meetings, dealing with interruptions and searching for documents as they look for answers to questions about their codebase.
The details and motivation here: https://t.co/XZd07vhGCP
@PeterAttiaMD great to meet you this weekend, thanks for joining us. This is the Iceberg Lettuce "study" I mentioned, from p97 of @ProfEmilyOster's excellent book Family Firm. She didn't name the dataset she used but was making the same point re healthy user bias.
Toolchain is at PyCon US 2021! Find out about our talks and our selection for "Startup Row" and come visit us at our virtual booth!
https://t.co/T2lZuzjWHL