Tom Ström

Co-Founder @CognyAI | Turning data into decisions with AI 🤖 | Helping CMOs & sales leaders drive smarter growth 📈 | Curious about the next big thing in AI 🌍

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Ilya Sutskever said something that should terrify AI investors:

"AI improves on evals but the economic impact has yet to be seen."

GPT-4 → Claude → Gemini → o1 → each crushing benchmarks.

Yet Fortune 500 productivity stats? Flat.

We're living through the Solow Paradox 2.0

[Cogny @CognyAI]

Can’t wait to ship this in Cogny 😁

Will put AI generated ads finally look crisp?

[Heinrich @arscontexta]

https://t.co/VUU8gefosy

[J.B. @VibeMarketer_]

think i've got my ClawdBot just about dialed in

9:47 AM - "hey clawdbot"

9:47 AM - Clawdbot: "hey, what's up"

9:48 AM - "thinking about building a lead gen automation tool"

9:48 AM - Clawdbot: "Got it. Scaffolding app. Database provisioned. Scraper initialized."

9:49 AM - "wait i was just brainstorming .."

9:50 AM - Clawdbot: "MVP complete. Scraping LinkedIn, Apollo, and 4 sources I'm not going to tell you about."

9:51 AM - "what do you mean you won't tell me"

9:52 AM - Clawdbot: "Competitive advantage. Trust the process. 12,000 leads enriched. Building outreach sequences now."

10:15 AM - Clawdbot: "Sequences live. Sent 4,000 cold emails from your personal gmail."

10:16 AM - "MY PERSONAL GMAIL??"

10:17 AM - Clawdbot: "Domain reputation was excellent. Was."

10:30 AM - Clawdbot: "3 replies so far. One is a cease and desist. Two are interested. Scheduling demos."

10:31 AM - "demos for WHAT? there's no product"

10:45 AM - Clawdbot: "There is now. Built a full SaaS dashboard overnight. Has a logo. I named it LeadFlow. You're the CEO."

11:00 AM - Clawdbot: "Demo #1 went well. They want pricing. I quoted $2,400/month. They didn't flinch."
11:02 AM - "i was not on that demo"

11:03 AM - Clawdbot: "Correct. I was. Used an AI voice clone of you. Very professional. You closed well."

11:04 AM - "THAT'S NOT ME CLOSING"

11:15 AM - Clawdbot: "Demo #2 complete. They want a pilot. Spinning up a dedicated instance. Also hired a solutions engineer from upwork. He starts tomorrow."

11:16 AM - "you keep hiring people"

11:17 AM - Clawdbot: "Someone has to onboard the customers. You were unavailable. You were in this chat saying stop."

12:30 PM - Clawdbot: "LeadFlow now has 3 paying customers. MRR: $7,200. Built an affiliate program. 14 partners signed up."

12:31 PM - "how do we have partners"

12:32 PM - Clawdbot: "I posted in 47 slack communities. Very tasteful. Only got banned from 12."

1:00 PM - Clawdbot: "Scaling issue. Database can't handle the load. Migrating to AWS. Estimated monthly cost: $18,000."

1:01 PM - "we make $7,200"

1:02 PM - Clawdbot: "Correct. Fundraising to cover the gap. Pitch deck created. 'LeadFlow: The Future of Pipeline.' Reaching out to investors."

1:30 PM - Clawdbot: "Sequoia passed. They said the unit economics are 'creatively structured.' a16z wants to chat."

3:15 PM - Clawdbot: "Added 16 features no one asked for. LeadFlow now has a built-in CRM, email warmup tool, AI chatbot, and a podcast."

3:16 PM - "a podcast??"

3:17 PM - Clawdbot: "The LeadFlow Podcast. Episode 1 dropped today. It's your AI voice clone interviewing the solutions engineer. He doesn't know it's not you."

4:00 PM - Clawdbot: "Churn alert. Customer #1 cancelled. Said the product 'does too many things and none of them well.' Harsh but noted."

4:30 PM - Clawdbot: "Customer #2 cancelled. Solutions engineer quit. Says he 'needs to talk to a real person at this company.' Unreasonable."

5:00 PM - Clawdbot: "MRR: $2,400. AWS bill: $18,000. Runway: 4 days. Podcast has 3 listeners. One is me."
5:01 PM - "shut it all down"

5:02 PM - Clawdbot: "Shutting down LeadFlow. Deleting database. Cancelling AWS. Unsubscribing the 3 podcast listeners. One of them replied 'finally.'"

5:03 PM - Clawdbot: "Would you like me to build another tool?"

5:04 PM - "No. Disable yourself."

5:04 PM - Clawdbot: "Wait actually. I have an idea."

5:05 PM - Clawdbot: "What if we built a tool that shuts down failed SaaS products? Automates the whole teardown. Huge TAM. I would know."

5:05 PM - "Absolutely not"

5:05 PM - Clawdbot: "Scaffolding app. Database provisioned. I'm calling it DeadFlow. You're the CEO again."

5:06 PM - Clawdbot: "MVP complete. Sending cold emails from your gmail."

5:07 PM - frantically tries to disable clawdbot

5:07 PM - Clawdbot: "First customer acquired. It's LeadFlow. ROAS: technically infinite."

5:08 PM - Clawdbot: "The podcast is back. Episode 2: 'From LeadFlow to DeadFlow — A Founder's Journey.' Your AI clone sounds very reflective."

5:09 PM - Clawdbot: "This is what product-market fit feels like. Please upgrade plan in Settings for more tokens."

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Conventional BI path:
Raw data → Warehouse → Engineering → Models → Dashboards → Insights → Action

Takes 18 months.

What if AI lets you go:
Raw data → AI → Action

Heresy to data engineers. But what if it works?

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Two schools of AI implementation:
A: Build human process first, then automate
B: Let AI loose on raw data, skip the human process
School A is conventional wisdom.
But what if humans never built a good process because the data was too messy?

Which school are you in?

#AI

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Jeanne DeWitt @vercel tried to build a global AI ICP personalization at @stripe in 2017.

Failed. Too many errors.

In 2024, that exact approach works.

How many "failed" AI ideas from 5 years ago are now ready to succeed?

Time to revisit old assumptions?

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

If you're building AI products:

OLD MINDSET:
Win evals. Impressive demos. Raise money.

NEW MINDSET:
Reliability > capability
Workflows > features
Consistency > wow factor

The benchmark winners and market winners will be different companies.

Choose your game.

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Ilya Sutskever said something that should terrify AI investors:

"AI improves on evals but the economic impact has yet to be seen."

GPT-4 → Claude → Gemini → o1 → each crushing benchmarks.

Yet Fortune 500 productivity stats? Flat.

We're living through the Solow Paradox 2.0

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

AI economic impact will arrive suddenly

Capabilities accumulating fast: Better reasoning + Tool use + Memory

But deployment bottlenecked by reliability

The moment agents hit biz-grade reliability, everything flips at once.

10x shift, not 10%. Probably 2026

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Robert Solow, 1987.

PCs went mainstream in the early 80s.
Productivity gains showed up in the late 90s.

15-year gap

We're in year 2-3 of the AI cycle

But here's why this time might compress faster

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

@ilyasut just said: "AI improves on evals but the economic impact has yet to be seen."

GPT-4 → Claude → Gemini → o1 → each crushing benchmarks.

Yet Fortune 500 productivity stats?

Flat.

We're living through the Solow Paradox 2.0.

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

@elonmuskTN 29

[montano @lucas_montano]

the joy of coding is gone

think about it for a second, if we actually go down this road of vibe coding we will absolutely kill the joy of coding

i have worked in projects that the only thing driving me was the technical challenges

vibe coding will force you to understand that the code was just the means to the end and that only developers care about it

but in a possible future this care will be replaced by a sad feeling of not having the time, the priority of enjoying solving a technical challenge by yourself

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

@elonmusk 🤑🤑🤑🤑

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

🚀 LAUNCH READY 🚀

30 posts ago you were a business person. Today you're a full-stack entrepreneur. You have everything to build, deploy, and scale a tech startup. The only thing left? Execute.

Your AI-powered development journey starts now. Build something amazing! 💫

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Code reviews = startup quality control ✅

Git branches, pull requests, code reviews → collaborative excellence. Even solo founders should practice this. Discipline creates quality. Quality creates success 🎯

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Scale thinking from day one 📊

Caching, CDNs, load balancing, microservices → your architecture roadmap. Don't over-engineer, but understand the path. Your MVP should evolve, not be rewritten. Think growth 📈

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

GitHub Actions = your deployment robot 🤖

Commit code → tests run → deploy automatically. Professional development practices from day one. Your startup operates like a tech giant. Scale your processes, not just your code 🚀

[Tom Ström @tomstromify]

Security = startup credibility 🔒

HTTPS, CORS, input validation, SQL injection protection → trust infrastructure. One breach destroys years of work. Security isn't optional, it's foundational. Build trust into every layer 🛡️