The biggest opportunities right now: 1. build for solving loneliness (the more AI floods everything, the more people crave real human connection, IRL and small social) 2. build for agents that need to spend money (they're getting virtual cards and budgets, someone builds the spend controls, fraud protection, receipts) 3. build for people drowning in AI output (everyone generates infinite drafts now, the bottleneck moved to reviewing and choosing, build the judgment layer) 4. build for the burnout economy (everyone is expected to always be on and always optimizing, and the backlash toward rest, slowness, and enough is building) 5. build for verifying humans (deepfakes broke trust, every dating app, marketplace, and video call needs proof-of-human within 2 years) 6. build for the physical world (the trades, hardware, robots that AI is finally reaching) 7. build for the agent that answers the phone (every local business misses calls after 5pm, a voice agent that books the job is worth thousands a month) 8. build for the aging (70M+ boomers who want to stay healthy, sharp, and connected) 9. build for the LLM-search land grab (being the cited answer is the new SEO) 10. build for the newly automated (the paralegal, the analyst, the marketer whose job just changed and needs to reskill fast) 11. build for the seat-pricing collapse (software repricing from $50/seat to per-outcome, whoever nails outcome billing wins a category) 12. build for AI enablement (95% of businesses use nothing beyond ChatGPT, someone has to onboard the other 95%) 13. build for the agency everyone resents (businesses pay $1k/mo to agencies they hate, an agent that does 80% of it undercuts the model) 14. build for verticals on 2011 software (dentists, HOAs, contractors, all overdue for an AI-native rebuild) 15. build for reviving dead software (thousands of abandoned apps with real users, agents can maintain what a team couldn't, buy and revive) 16. build for markets too small to matter before (500 lobster fishermen was never worth a team, now it's a weekend and a real business) 17. build for agents hiring agents (a shadow economy is forming, it needs escrow, reputation, and dispute resolution for machines) 18. build for the anti-AI premium (as everything gets generated, human-made and analog become status symbols people pay up for) 19. build for distribution-first (anyone can build the product now, so the audience is the moat, media company first, product second) 20. build for the reinvention of college (what does an MBA even mean anymore) 21. build for a world with more free time than it knows what to do with (if AI takes the busywork, the question becomes what people do with the hours, and that's a civilization sized market) note: more trends/ideas @ideabrowser (free to sign up) 22. build for the return to the physical (screens fill with slop, people crave the real world, the hands-on, the local, the analog) 23. build for the caregiving wave. The population is aging fast, tens of millions are caring for parents, and the whole burden is landing on families with no support. 24. build for the longevity shift (people want to live to 100 healthy, and a whole industry is forming around actively managing your own biology) 25. build for the housing and rootlessness problem (people can't afford to settle down, and the whole idea of a stable home base is up for grabs) 26. build for spiritual hunger (as institutions hollow out, the need for meaning, ritual, and belonging is exploding into new forms) KEEP BUILDING

we are going to witness a golden age of hardware startups because the cost of intelligence is collapsing open source models commodity robotics global manufacturing ai design tools hardware is becoming software

Every year it's the same. Something is dead, the window closed, it's too late And every year, the people who ignore it and just build put themselves in a position to get "lucky" Maniacally focus on driving a huge amount of value for customers with real problems and keep going!

EVERYTHING you NEED to know about Jack Dorsey's AI agent "Slack killer" Buzz (set up, use-cases etc in 38 mins) What we get into: 1. What Buzz actually is and should founders switch from Slack? 2. How to swap the model under any agent and keep all your context? 3. How to talk to your agents live with audio huddles? 4. How to get agents to build and deploy real apps for you, like a full CRM from one ask? 5. How to set up the context loop that feeds your live app data back to your agents? 6. How to share compute so a few people split one machine running a local model? 7. Who it's actually for right now, and what's still rough? Full breakdown on the pod @startupideaspod. Thanks to @hot_town for jumping on and clearly explaining @jack and team's latest product. My TLDR take is Buzz is a glimpse into the future of work. Some of you will roll your eyes at that, and I get it, it's alpha software and it's slow in places. But the core idea, that your context is the foundation and agents build out from there, is right, and that's worth seeing early. Watch Curious what you think

People are often surprised to hear that my podcast (2M+ listens/month) is literally just me and one producer + freelance editors. You don't need a lot of people to make videos, you need a system, curiosity, desire, and reps. I've done 790 videos since 2021, so at this point it's second nature. The real trick is I'm not doing this full time. I'm running companies all day, and that's actually where the content comes from. I'm taking notes on what I'm learning as I go, and when something's interesting I tell myself to come back and make something out of it. Or I'm in a meeting with someone sharp and I go "you should come on the podcast." It's not a second job I bolt on, I just made it part of how I already live and work.

Marketing agents are the NEW coding agents. It's code in the cloud that makes decisions off your live business data on a loop. It researches, acts, reads the results, improves, and goes again. Picture an agent that runs your entire Facebook ad account by itself. It researches your customer's pain points, generates on-brand creative, publishes it, kills the losers, scales the winners, and makes more of whatever's working. We show you the EXACT stack. Perplexity to scrape Reddit for real pain points, Nano Banana for on-brand static creative, a vision model to check it against brand guidelines, HeyGen for AI UGC video, all wired into a loop that reads Facebook's data and reacts. Now point it at a business. What are some startup ideas you can point marketing agents to? WordPress runs 43% of the internet. Take the plugins people already pay for, like Yoast, WooCommerce, and WP Forms, and build the AI-first version of each. Examples: Yoast (~$15M ARR) shows you red and green dots and tells you to fix your SEO yourself. The AI version just does it. Proven demand, no AI-native competition, and thousands of site owner pay agenices $1,000 a month and many wish they'd pay less and got more. Coding agents changed who gets to build software. Marketing agents change who gets to grow a company. Full breakdown on @startupideaspod. Thanks to @codyschneider for the sauce. Will break down more marketing agents if people are interested? Just LMK. Watch. I'm rooting for you and happy growing. I think we've heard a lot about coding agents recently. And we're about to hear a lot more about marketing agents.

M&A is going nuts right now for AI startups. It's Monday at 10:58am and 2 people have already emailed me trying to buy my company, unsolicited. The X timeline is saying the "death of software" and RIP good times, I think there are TONS of buyers to scoop up AI native startups (with EBITDA). Some data: 1. Startups buying other startups jumped 18% in the first half of last year, driven almost entirely by a 30%+ surge in early-stage deals. 2. Private equity is sitting on over $2 trillion in dry powder and competing so hard they're paying about 3 turns of EBITDA more than strategic buyers just to win deals. 3. The market flipped to rewarding profit over growth: in 2021 growth mattered 2.5x more than profitability, and in 2026 a profitable business growing 25% beats one growing 50% while burning cash. This is one of the best times to build there has ever been. Cheap tools, hungry buyers, and insane opportunity to build the AI-native version of things. Anecdotally, based on a lot of people I know, there's a ton of M&A for startups that aren't reliant on Google SEO and built something truly AI-native in hardware, mobile apps, or vertical AI agents. Tune out the doom. Build something worth buying. Keep going.

There's panic right now that AI is eating indie software. I see it differently. For 10+ years you could spin up a few hundred auto-generated pages, rank them, and let Google send you signups for free. Now the answer people used to click your site for sits right inside ChatGPT and Google's AI overviews. If your whole business ran on that one faucet, the water's turning off, and it feels like the end of the world. And I've built a few of these projects, so I feel that darkness too. But let's look at the data. Has it really gotten dark/worse for software founders and indie devs?? Let's look a Stripe Data... New companies on Stripe Atlas are up 130% year over year. Companies are hitting $10M ARR within three months of launch at double last year's rate. One in five charges its first customer inside the first month, up from 8% in 2020. Fastest business formation anyone's ever recorded!! And the solopreneurs, the exact people saying they're getting crushed, are winning the most. 63% of new companies on Atlas are solo founded, and AI native solo startups pull 2.3x the revenue by month 24. This category was basically non existent at the scale we're seeing rn like 5 years ago. TLDR; So my thinking it's a channel shift wearing a collapse costume. The people hurting share one setup: they sell inexpensive tools to other indie hackers, and/or their traffic comes from SEO. That's the most exposed spot in the whole market, because your customers can rebuild your $20 SaaS in a weekend, and your traffic source is the exact thing the models replaced. Kinda feels like 2 cannons pointed at one little boat. Call me an optimist, but here's my take.... Building software is a bigger game than it's ever been. More companies, forming faster, making money sooner, run by fewer people, than any point in history.

I think the most interesting thing about Jack Dorsey's "Slack killer" is the idea around shared compute. I haven't seen people talk about it so here are my thoughts FWIW: Open models got good, close enough to the paid frontier stuff to run for real. But the strongest ones need expensive hardware most people probably won't buy alone, and it's kinda a pain to set up if you aren't technical. Shared compute solves exactly that. In Buzz, one person runs the machine, loads up an open model like Google Gemma, and everyone in the community plugs into that same model. Basically, a whole group has real AI they own and control together, running on their own hardware, learning from their own data. Once you see it, a bunch of things click into place. 1. A community can now run a top open model together, on a machine they own, instead of renting from a lab. 2. It learns from the group's private data and gets sharper over time, and all of that stays inside the community. 3. A narrow, private model can quietly get better than ChatGPT for the one world your group lives in. 4. It's impossible to copy, because the edge is the private data on your machine, not the model itself. 5. The moat stops being how smart your AI is and becomes whose data it learned from. 6. Compute becomes something you share like a building shares a gym. 10 people split one machine instead of 10 people each renting forever. 7. Idle compute becomes income!!! Your machine sits dead half the day, so it earns money renting that time to someone who needs it. 8. Communities become the unit of intelligence instead of companies. The group with the smartest shared brain wins, and being a member means owning a piece of it. 9. A shared brain becomes an asset you build equity in. You put in money and data, it appreciates, and your slice is worth something the day you leave. 10. The whole thing runs on open protocols, so the group keeps full control and nobody outside can throttle it or shut it off. You know me, obviously, my head went to what startup ideas come to mind here. Adding them to @ideabrowser soon. Well… 1. The vertical brain. Pick one profession, tax lawyers or real estate agents or indie game devs, and build the shared machine trained on everything that group knows between them. A year in it's the smartest AI in that field, impossible to copy, and you own the club it lives in. 2. The rental marketplace for collective brains. Once these private models exist, outsiders will pay to use them. You build the layer where a group lists its brain, an outsider pays per task, and the money flows back to the members while you take a cut. A marketplace for expertise, not compute. 3. The idle-compute exchange. Every shared machine sits unused half the day. You build the market that rents that dead time to whoever needs the power right then, so owners earn money off a machine that was just sitting there. Idk where Buzz goes, but it's cool to see Jack putting it out. Right now the way it works in AI is you rent your intelligence from a few giant labs that own the machine, set the price, and hold the off switch. Shared compute flips that, because a community can run the model together, feed it their own private data, and keep full control of the whole thing. It's one of those things that might look tiny today, but Jack does has a habit of being early.

If your whole workflow is one Claude Code instance on your MacBook, you're leaving 10x on the table. Here's why. On your laptop, running 2 agents at once means two copies of your code, and you're constantly fighting over which worktree you're on and whether everything's synced. It caps out fast. Cloud agents in VMs let you run as many as you want without worrying about any of that. Each one gets its own machine, so the work never collides. Spin up 10, let them all run, and nothing steps on anything else. Watch full ep below on @startupideaspod. Thanks to @ryancarson for sharing the sauce. Cloud agents are probably the future. So is doing half your work from your phone, which sounds insane until you try it once. Then you don't go back.

So let me get this straight.... 1. Agents are about to outnumber humans on the internet, so most of the traffic, transactions, and conversations online will soon be machines talking to other machines while we sleep. 2. Superintelligence exists now, and for $20/mo you pretty much get it all. 3. Cloud agents allow you to run a business 24/7 and from literally a phone while you're waiting to order a latte. 4. Voice AI is wide open. This industry has barely changed since the 90s. Infinite opportunities. Voice AI is finally getting good enough. 5. Mobile apps are interesting again for the first time in 10 years, because an AI-first app that thinks and acts on its own is a different species than the passive ones in the store today. There are kids doing $100k/MRR. 6. It's the golden age of open source. The models you download off Hugging Face for free and own forever are landing within months of the ones behind paywalls, so the smartest thing on earth can't be throttled, priced up, or shut off by a company having a bad quarter. 7. The keyboard is on its way out. We spent 40 years learning to type fast, and it's about to feel like handwriting, because soon you just talk and the computer goes and does it. 8. Every company is about to hire agents with their own logins, their own inboxes, their own track records, and a shadow economy is forming where agents pay, hire, and vouch for other agents. 9. Software stopped being something you buy and became something you rent by the hour. The whole industry is repricing from $50 a seat to thousands per outcome. Tons of opportunity. 10. Robots are about to have the moment software agents just had. The intelligence got solved. Now it's dropping into machines with arms and legs, and the people who can wire AI into hardware are about to be the most fought-over hires on earth. 11. The 10-person startup can now out-ship the 500-person company, and everyone can feel it happening. 12. Every white-collar task is getting a "do it for me" button, and most people haven't pressed it yet. 13. Data you've been sitting on for years is suddenly worth something, because now an agent can actually use it. 14. Language stopped being a barrier. Real-time translation that actually works means the next huge consumer app might get built for a market you can't even read, by someone you'll never meet. 15. Every SOP is turning into a product. The way a business does one thing, written down as a markdown file an agent can run, is now something you can sell. Knowledge that used to live in someone's head became downloadable. 16. The moat moved from what you know to how well your business is written down. The company an agent can actually run wins, so being legible beats being big. 17. Since agents will get scammed by other agents, a whole trust layer has to get built. The Yelp for agents. The escrow for machines. Wide open. 18. You keep the whole thing now. A business that needed 50 people to hit $10M needs 3 and some agents, so instead of splitting it 200 ways with investors, it's just yours. 19. Search engines minted a generation of millionaires and billionaires. LLM search is about to do it all over again. Billions of eyeballs are moving off Google and onto ChatGPT, so being the answer inside the models is the new front page. 20. The margins are stupid. You charge someone what they'd pay a human, and it costs you a few bucks in tokens. That gap used to go to payroll. Now it goes to you. Any one of these would DEFINE a decade on its own. We got ALL of them at once, stacked on top of each other in the same 18 months. It's a magical time to be building. You don't need to overthink it. Build.

Broke down AI Forward Deployed Engineering and why the biggest unlock for enterprises in the AI age. Give it a listen and let me know what you think. Will make more content like it if people find it helpful. Thank you Greg for having me on!

The thing I'm learning about business nowadays: to survive, you need to constantly reorient. You used to build a business, hit product-market fit, and then kind of coast. Now you hit PMF and the ground shifts 3 months later. New AI models, new algorithms, new tools that change what's possible. So you reorient, and reorient again, it's pretty constant. I'm noticing even companies doing $100M to $1B in revenue are sweating these days. They feel it too. But the cool part is if you reorient right, you get rewarded massively. That's kinda the trade. The stability is gone, but so is the ceiling. I've been reorienting my own companies more this year than in the last five combined. And weirdly, it's the most alive I've felt building. It's a good time to be a founder if you can move on a dime. For the experimenters out there, the people who actually like the constant change... I think this has gotta be the greatest time to be building there's ever been.

Every AI right now is a "yes man", and I'm soooo tired of it. Maybe you are too. I don't want an LLM that claps for everything I do. I want the one that tells me my writing is weak, my logic falls apart halfway through, and I've been lying to myself about the thing I keep dodging. You can engineer an AI with a spine. Here's the exact setup I use: 1. Write a "critic" skill. A markdown file whose only job is to attack the work. It hunts for the weakest claim, the dodged question, the thing you're avoiding. Every agent that loads it gets a spine by default. 2. Run two agents against each other. One builds, one tears it apart. The builder has to defend or fix. You get the truth from the friction instead of from a single agent trying to please you. 3. Score against evals. Give it a rubric with real criteria and have it rate the work 1-10 on each. A number tied to a standard forces honesty that "what do you think?" will always dance around. 4. Make it cite evidence for every criticism. Set a rule: no critique without a concrete example from the work and a reason it matters. It has to show its work, so it can flatter you or hand wave. 5. Give it a kill criterion. Tell it the exact condition where it has to recommend you stop entirely. "If X isn't true, tell me to shut this down." Most agents will optimize a doomed idea forever because you gave them permission to call it dead. I've learned that the default AI claps for you. That's cool for a bit but it gets old quick. If you actually want to build exceptional products, create top 1% work, and grow as a person, you need an AI that pushes you harder than it flatters you. We're in the age of agency. The people who win are the ones who go build the version that tells them the truth. Best time to build there's ever been. Go get 'em.