I’ve had an agency growing start-ups and scale-ups from zero to millions in fundraising and revenue for ten years, and I was a freelancer for the 15 before that. I’ve worked in and around start-ups for my entire career.

The scariest shift I’ve seen in the start-up landscape? The business in which everyone uses AI to do all the thinking and talking for them.

How can you tell if you’re in this kind of business right now? Easy. All the emails around you just keep getting longer and longer, with no end in sight, as one AI talks to another. What

“That’s a sharp observation, Tina. Here are 14 in-depth ways your email misses the mark.”

I increasingly believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to use AI. The right way is coding and automating mundane, non-human processes.

The wrong way is claiming that you wrote something that AI wrote for you. How many LinkedIn newsletters haven’t written a word in months? How many conferences have devolved into a series of AI-made presentations that all look the same?

A business today in which every employee is just one ChatGPT talking to another ChatGPT may feel productive, because all the conversations look so serious.

But GPT-speak is just papering over real problems much like a shiny new tattoo won’t cover up my beer gut. Sorry bud, you’re here to stay.

You can’t serious-speak your way to a successful company. You have to build something of real value.

And marketing a real business is about more than just shoving a bunch of semi-technical jargon onto an AI-made template. It’s about communicating an idea effectively and here’s what people tend to forget: communicating it simply.

Sadly, we’re all going to have to send our BS detectors into overdrive over the next several years, as more and more people around us get suckered into the dark side of AI.

I’m just glad I’m not a VC right now.

The one and only Conan O’Brien.

And I got to have a conversation with him about how the man who can so effortlessly give a poignant Harvard commencement address can also do a fake Bollywood song in India called “Namaste In Your Lane” or prance around as Van Gogh in my old home of Amsterdam.

I’m a Simpsons kid. My dad was probably a bad parent, because he let a 5-year-old watch every episode.

So I knew Conan as a TV writer before he even had his talk show.

I’ve admired how he packages intelligence into comedy for my whole life.

But here’s what we talked about:

Intelligent people spot patterns. They have strong opinions. And other comedians that I respect, like John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver, have turned their opinions into the show. They are experts at comedy, but they wield their comedy like a weapon.

Conan wields his comedy like a rubber chicken.

I’ll admit that it’s hard for me not to be polarizing about some of the things I see in our world. When I start typing, God only knows what’s gonna come out!

But what Conan does that so, so, so few people on planet earth have managed to do is: He walks a comedic tightrope between intelligent and absurd that never leans on politics or the desire to make a point. The joke is the point.

He’s stayed married to one person. He hasn’t self-destructed with drugs or alcohol. He’s taken care of his entire team (even during Covid), who are also lovely people by the way.

There are people out there who have achieved some of what he has, but when you add it all up, no one I can think of has done it all, for so long.

And talking to him? I can tell you it is no accident. He’s just somebody who’s smart enough to realize he can have everything he wants if he stays focused on what truly matters.

There’s a powerful lesson in that.

It takes thoughtful work and conscious effort to build a life and career on that frequency—on that vibration.

All I can say is, I’m buzzing, that’s for sure.

#Lifegoals right here.

Growing a single SoundCloud channel from a few thousand followers to a network of nearly a million.

To build that platform, I had to listen to thousands of submissions every week and make hard decisions. In addition to making a weekly DJ mix show, I posted at least 5 songs per day, 7 days a week for years. No days off. I even missed National Donut Day, TWICE. What the hell was I thinking!?

But dealing with so many mp3s, I had to develop systems. In fact, I got a repetitive stress injury from using my computer basically around the clock with no breaks. While others were content to do everything by hand, I was always building scripts to auto-name, add artwork, and tag the files to make my job easier. Automation was essential to produce the kind of volume needed to keep the engine running.

That was 2012.

Now I do the same thing with AI, just much faster, and across a much larger set of small tools.

The money for most of us today isn’t in creating a software subscription that’s going to change the world or make us a quick million. Instead, it’s in making small improvements to the thousands of inefficiencies each of us witness and deal with daily.

We can probably each sustain around three major software projects at any given time that we can go deeper on, that require multiple months or even years to build. And in between that, I estimate that we can each craft dozens to hundreds of little tools that make our lives, and probably no one else’s, smarter and better.

This is the kind of efficiency waiting for all of us with AI coding. No more, no less.

Does everyone need these tools? No. But if you are in an industry or endeavor where volume and speed are important, this is the main benefit you should be thinking about.

In fact, the name of my Github repo for the project is “Simple-Social-Project”.

Because I suck at names and my intention was to spend a weekend fixing ONE annoying problem about getting client approvals for social media content.

And listen, I’m not a full stack engineer. But I did code Z80, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript when I was in middle school, building websites for relatives for free and fixing computers on the side while solving Rubik’s cubes competitively. Yikes. But then I got a dual-degree in English Literature and Film, because I decided to become unemployable instead of studying Computer Science with a minor in World Domination at Stanford.

So yes, I’m what you might call a highly intelligent moron.

But what I can tell you is this: Over the last 18 months building with AI, I was able to get much farther than I ever thought possible in building software. A year ago, I never dreamed that I could build an app as complicated and awesome as the one running my business.

I never dreamed my whole company would prefer an app I built to the ones built with commercial teams and billions of dollars and tons of VC money behind them, sharpened over many years.

But it happened.

And I think if you asked my employees, they would genuinely prefer the software I built for them over any purchasable software on the market today. Me. One non-expert building. Because it was built in conjunction with the people actually using it.

This last year, I kept waiting for a sign that I needed to stop. Feeling in over my head constantly as I set up my own server. My own Slack bot army. My own self-improving coding agent team.

And yes, I’m aware that there are a lot of genuine concerns out there about non-experts coding. Which is why yes, I brought in help when it mattered. And the truth is, I don’t know how far a guy like me is “supposed” to go with AI.

But I keep pushing, and I keep getting met with success.

And I suspect there are a lot of people out there just like me.

So my advice? The stupid, gimmicky “simple-social-project” app you build today just might become something massively important for you next year. So why not try?

But keep your wits about you. And when a senior dev critiques your code or approach, listen. They're usually right.

But only do it if you like this sort of thing. If you prefer gardening or re-selling Pokemon cards, definitely do that instead.

As a child who grew up loving Blade Runner and The Matrix and all things dystopian sci-fi, I can’t believe that this video is actually real, and that it’s happening, right now.

This video from Anthropic’s Chloe Lubinski should be required watching for all of humanity right now.

I’m going to break down two key concepts of this video that will make you smarter in your next discussion about AI.

I strongly suggest watching everything that comes from official people at Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. vs. trusting what the news tells us about these subjects. When we study the language of people actually inside these companies, the nuance of their words matters.

So here are two key concepts from the video:

1. Intelligence can be bought. Compute costs money. And more money=more intelligence=more potential power. So those with more money will get more power from AI. Hardly surprising. The reason our digital products are all getting more expensive this year is because of a global memory shortage, because AI has hoovered up all the chips. In fact, former Apple CEO Tim Cook called this shortage a “100 year flood" saying “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The rich getting richer is not a new concept. The most powerful people, nations, and companies will have a vastly larger, ever-growing share of compute. Access, assuming we are able to contain/control this “super intelligence”, will be disproportionately wielded by a few.

2. Recursive Self-Improvement is possibly close at hand. We all know that AI is exponential. But it only becomes truly crazy when AI builds its own successors. As Chloe says: When Claude 9 builds Claude 10 all by itself, for example, everything changes. This is a likely scenario. And then, AI development will accelerate at a pace we truly cannot comprehend. If you’ve been using these tools daily like me, consider how far things have come in just the last year. How much more is possible now than last April, and you start to get a sense of how fast this could go.

These two points are terrifying by themselves. But the implications of both of them combined are central to a fear of AI that is grounded in reality and not just doom-scrolling.

The pay-to-play, winner-take-all nature of this technology means there’s a strong economic feedback loop with geopolitical incentives that are practically impossible to slow down. Which means that self-recursive development will happen with little or no coordinated oversight.

And these incentives (greed, power) are so fundamental to human nature and involve such powerful global players, our individual actions can’t and won’t stop what’s to come. This is different than Coca-Cola, which if we all stopped drinking it, might go out of business. AI isn’t going out of business regardless of if we stop making AI cat memes.

Now look: There are many problems on planet Earth that could theoretically be solved if we all worked together, like clean drinking water for all. I know I know, that’s just crazy I’ll shut up. But agreeing on anything, is apparently one thing that humans categorically refuse to do.

So should you be more excited or more afraid of AI? Yes!

As a builder with these tools and a digital native of almost 30 years, I truly believe the rational response to this moment is to be both. If we are purely pessimistic, we could end up creating the very reality we are so afraid of. If we’re purely optimistic, we probably don’t understand the very real threat.

To quote Chloe from the end of her talk: “The stories we tell don’t just describe the future. They literally could help create it.”

So if you go around talking about Skynet all day… Well…