Category: Uncategorized

Tour Status: 2/15 Cities ✅

Chișinău was a blast. 40+ students asked question after question, dove deeper at every turn, and pushed back on ideas without hesitation.

No wonder so many top companies were founded by people from the CEE region.

Now imagine recruiting them early, cultivating that raw talent, and flying them to SF where the environment works in their favor.

Oh wait, we’re doing exactly that 🙂

They knew nothing about the exercise going in.

I gave them 40 minutes: 10 to think individually and write down their ideas, 30 to work in groups.

They asked a few questions upfront to understand the rules, and then they got to work.

With no hesitation, they adapted to the scenario, the ideas, and the situation as we went on.

Here are the traits I look for:

The key to building the right solution is being genuinely interested in the problem you’re solving and the people experiencing it.

One group was working on a problem involving athletes and didn’t think to ask if anyone in the room was actually an athlete. I pointed that out and walked away. Under three minutes later, I heard one of the girls from that same group ask: “Has anyone here personally experienced this problem?”

She didn’t wait to be taught twice.

It shows up as the ability to think deeply and connect the dots between everything happening around you.

There was a guy in the room and every time he spoke, people turned to listen. He didn’t just share a conclusion, but walked everyone through the entire thinking process that got him there.

That tells me I can spend two weeks with you and by the end of it, you’ve learned everything you need to start building.

Thinking for yourself, learning things nobody told you to learn, and always finding a way forward.

One girl disagreed with something I said and wanted to approach the problem differently. Perfect 🙂

Another wanted to go from being introverted to extroverted. I told her to take acting classes. That shows willingness to get over your fears for the greater good:)

Then there was a team building a democracy tracker, built on blockchain. They want to make voting transparent and easy to verify.

Who can say young people are not interested in politics now?;)

Another team was building AI video detection for journalists to cross-verify news before publishing. They already had 3,000 users.

That’s high agency. You don’t wait for permission to take action.

I personally came to SF one year ago with no brand, no network, just my experience and the figure-it-out gene.

Now I get to travel to 15 countries, recruit the top 1% talent, fund them, and fly them to SF to build global companies from day one.

📍Next stop? Already in Sofia, Bulgaria

( but you can track me live here )

The Debrief after each event lands right here, so might as well subscribe.

Subscribe now

If you’re a builder ready to take the next step, a partner who wants to plug in, or an LP looking for early access to ReaktorX, DM me on LinkedIn.

P.S. Huge thanks to Artcor Creative Center for hosting us!

TRIP STATUS 1/15 Cities ✅

(Track live where I am: reaktorx.com/cee-friends)

We’re throwing Brainstorming Parties across 15 CEE countries to recruit next batch for ReaktorX, the only SF-based fund betting exclusively on builders U25 who show real promise and have the drive to build something global.

There are three things I’m watching:

1. How you think when you’re faced with a problem you don’t have an answer to.

2. Whether you can engage with complexity instead of avoiding it.

3. If you naturally step up and lead when the room needs direction.

📍First stop: Builders House, Bucharest.

30+ builders showed up with curiosity, and in under two hours, they went from asking themselves if they were good enough to apply, to getting into problems they’d never touched before.

The spotlight of the evening:

THE PLUMBATHON

One participant decided to answer the question:

How might we help young people get into the trades industry?

The solution he came up with:

Competitions for young tradespeople, structured like hackathons, where they show up, demonstrate their skills and rank against their peers, to show they’re ready to have independent projects.

How he got here:

• The specific problem: To gain trust and prove their expertise, young tradespeople spend months, sometimes years, working under a senior before landing independent projects. The process of gaining legitimacy is too slow.

• Market opportunity: demand in the trades industry is rising, so the actual problem is getting more people prepared to meet that demand, faster.

• The reasoning: if the tech industry has hackathons to compress the time in which young people can prove their worth, create visibility and build trust, why not create something similar for the trades industry?

Now, let me tell you how an investor who bets on young people sees this way of thinking:

The tech industry and the trades industry couldn’t be further apart.

This participant took a concept native to one world and adapted it to fit into a completely opposite industry.

That showed me they have cross-industry thinking, which plays a great deal in building a global company.

But when it comes to other solutions found that evening, there’s only one thing to say:

THE RISKIEST THING YOU CAN DO IS PLAY IT SAFE

The biggest mistake I saw that evening was people playing not to lose.

They went for familiar problems, the kind they knew they could handle, thinking that was going to secure them a spot.

The goal is the opposite. I put hard questions on that table not for you to come back with a fully formed concept, but to see how you think.

So you need to shift from:

“I’m going to get into problems I know I can solve” →

“This problem requires deep expertise, I can’t fully assess it right now, but here’s where I would start, here’s what I’d validate, and here’s how long it would actually take.”

In short: the move that feels the safest can actually cost you the big win.

INSIDE THE PROGRAM: WHAT THE WEBSITE DOESN’T TELL YOU

Here’s exactly what’s going to happen between now and San Francisco.

The Call

At the end of May, we’re selecting 40 people from all applications for a 15-minute call, when we’ll ask why you should be selected, what makes you different, what your plan looks like when you land in the US.

The Follow up

From those 40, between 15 and 20 people may join a second call, longer, with me and the investment partners I work with.

The Selection

By June 20, the 15 teams joining the program will be announced.

Two Weeks in Europe

Mid July, the whole batch spends two weeks in Europe, where you find or adapt your idea and go from concept to traction through intensive workshops.

The Goal is to leave for San Francisco with a working prototype and client meetings already booked.

San Francisco

On August 1st, you fly in.

What’s actually going to happen when you land there?

That’s for the next newsletter.

Whether you’re a founder who wants to apply, an LP who wants early access or a potential partner

DM me here

This week covers: how to not kill a great pitch in one sentence, a juror who did not understand the assignment and gave unsuitable advice with full confidence, a business model worth stealing, and…

Well, you can keep reading and find out:)

Let’s get into it!

A Mistake That Can Kill a Good Pitch – and The Fix:

There was a founder who delivered a great pitch at an event: well-structured, clear, designed to win clients from the room.

All well and good, until someone from the audience asked: “What about users and revenue?”

The answer: “We’re not gonna disclose that.”

Big mistake.

That answer signals one of two things:

a) you’re not in a good place

b) you have something to hide

Neither was true in his case. He had thousands of users and revenue at an early stage.

That’s not just something you disclose, it’s something you pride yourself in.

The fix: Don’t just say the number. Package it.

“Out of our xK users, about x% are paying – so roughly x paying customers.

We’re charging $x/month, which puts us at around $xK MRR. The pricing is intentionally low right now while we focus on acquisition and retention.

Our challenge – and where we’d love your input – is: how do we monetize this audience better? Do we raise prices? Add tiers? We’d love the room’s take.”

Now you’ve done three things:

1. You showed traction (people are paying)

2. You framed the low revenue as a strategy problem, not a failure

3. You invited the room in — and suddenly everyone wants to help you

The number didn’t change. The story did.

Advice That Bothered Me and Why:

After the pitch, one of the jurors said:

“Your pitch wasn’t targeted enough toward investors. You should have positioned it from an investor’s perspective.”

The misleading assumption here: that you should always pitch to investors, regardless of who’s actually in the room.

You don’t.

You pitch to your audience.

Here’s our context: 120 people in the room, 5 investors (the jury), and 115 builders and founders who are potential customers.

• If you’re at a demo day specifically designed for fundraising, pitch to investors.

• If the majority of the room can become customers, you do a customer pitch.

• If you’re at a community event with a mixed room, decide which audience you’re targeting and craft your pitch accordingly.

Investors sometimes forget that it’s not the founder’s job to hand-feed everything to them during a public pitch. It’s the investor’s job to do due diligence, ask follow-up questions, and set up a call.

A Business Model Worth Stealing:

The company: Fly.io

The standard model of a cloud infrastructure platform for developers gives you two options:

a) rent a server by the month and pay a flat fee whether you use it or not

b) go serverless: throw compute tasks at a provider, they handle everything, but pick the cheapest possible resources for you.

Fly.io does something in between, and it’s clever.

You spin up a server with exactly the specs you need – say, 6 CPUs and 4GB RAM – run it for as long as you need (could be two minutes), then shut it down.

The golden nugget: The best business models give people the feeling of control while doing the optimization work invisibly in the background.

Users get agency. You get efficiency. Everyone wins.

This model would benefit any business where the current model forces people to either:

a) overpay for fixed packages

b) surrender control to an opaque system

Let’s take a co-working space as an example:

• Members book the workspace using credits;

• Before they show up, they configure the room: projector on or off, catering preferences, seating setup, internet specs etc;

• They walk in and everything is ready;

• They leave and only pay for what they actually used.

The Spotlight Section:

I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and spent some time talking with George Roth, someone who, by all accounts, has every reason to walk into a room with an “I’ve made it” attitude.

Instead, he was completely grounded.

What impressed me was his network thinking.

Every time someone said something, you could almost see him running through a mental Rolodex:

Who do I know in that space? Who said something similar last month? Who should these two people be talking to?

Then he’d proceed to connect everyone with everything:

“You need to talk to X.” “You should connect with Y.” “Have you met Z? I’m making that intro right now.”

The instinct itself – to think first in terms of network – is a skill worth developing.

If you don’t already follow him, you should: George Roth on LinkedIn

P.S. He entrusted us with restarting the Romanian-American Business Network Silicon Valley meetup, happening on March 5th at the European Startup Embassy.

See you there:)

The Shiny Numbers Syndrome

OpenAI raised $110 billion at a valuation of around $800 billion.

The investors:

1. Amazon (which OpenAI already pays for servers)

2. Nvidia (which OpenAI already pays for GPUs)

3. SoftBank — who are the only ones putting in genuinely new money, reportedly around $20 billion of the total.

Make of that what you will, but the real problem is what this does to the broader ecosystem.

A founder with a solid, healthy $1M ARR business walks into a VC meeting, and the investor’s internal monologue goes something like:

“OpenAI raised at an 800x ARR multiple. You’re doing $1M ARR and want to raise at a $7M valuation? You’re not growing fast enough. We want OpenAI-level growth.”

So, as Peter James Walker said:

“Don’t get distracted by shiny numbers, founder friends.”

That’s a wrap for this week.

If something resonated, or if you think I got something wrong – hit reply.

Always happy to be challenged 😉

See you next week 🧭

– Luca

Founders Compass is a weekly field report for early-stage founders and builders. Subscribe to stay up to date with the latest insights:)

Subscribe now

A quick word from the author:

Ahoj děti,

Back with a hot-take: everyone who says you should focus on one thing to be successful is lying to you.

I love this quote by Robert A. Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

In my industry (startups), you usually hear VC’s saying that the founders “aren’t focused”, especially if they’re involved in multiple ventures.

Yet nobody says that about the VC when they invest in 10 different industries with barely and connection to one another.

Taking a step back, even our schools are trying to help us specialize in a field, inventing narrower and narrower sub-niches of expertise. “Data-analyst for micro-services on the blockchain” is not the future.

If you visit any great personality of history’s wikipedia page, you’ll see multiple titles, divergent interests.

Let’s take for example Thomas Jefferson. U.S. president, lawyer, architect, writer, inventor, farmer.

Hedy Lamarr: Hollywood actress and inventor (helped pioneer spread-spectrum technology)

Or someone closer to our times: Bridgit Mendler, ex-Disney Channel star turned Musician turned CEO for a space startup company Northwood.

Point is, if you’re truly passionate about multiple topics, don’t stop yourself from pursuing everything that makes you alive just cause some random ass investor/financier told you they wouldn’t invest in you. F*ck them and follow your passion without looking back.

The truly exceptional people recognize each other, so stop pursuing money and investments and start pursuing the best version of yourself, even if it might look like a bowl of Borscht to everyone else. Money will follow.

Inspiration just for you (very personal, yes):

• Hype is a Business Tool

“m constantly trying out various LLM tools and find they often perform far poorer than promised. When I try to discuss this online the boosters come out in great force, often with a dismissive response about “you’re prompting it wrong”. For a UX designer, blaming the user is as close as you can get to a cardinal sin. But this boosterly vibe seems to have escaped social media and is infecting the C-Suite of many companies. Cory Doctorow said it well: “we’re nowhere near the point that AI can do your job, but we’re past the point where an AI salesman can convince your boss it can.” For such a young and still unproven technology, it’s shocking how quickly it’s being forced upon teams.”

• Mini products are everywhere—here’s why

“Miniature products aren’t exactly new in marketing, as sample sizes have long existed to give customers a taste of a bite-sized snack or a quick spritz of perfume. The difference now is that at a time of price-consciousness, many consumers are interested in buying smaller, more affordable items before committing to more expensive, full-sized purchases. According to data from market research company Circana, unit sales of mini beauty products grew 15% in the first half of 2025—almost four times the rate of other sizes.”

• Pull vs Push Marketing

“The buying dynamic is different depending on the customers’ state. They can be searching for a solution (pull) or in a passive state (push). When they’re in a “pull state”, they actively look for solution, experience internal buying triggers, and grow an intent to buy.”

• The founder’s guide to hiring designers in 2025

“So we hosted a virtual session to tackle the nuts and bolts of design hiring in 2025. Nearly 1,000 people signed up, which should tell you something about how high the demand is for design talent right now.

The takeaway: the problem isn’t necessarily a lack of talented designers. It’s that market dynamics have shifted. AI has raised the baseline for product quality, big companies and startups are competing for increasingly similar profiles, and the hiring playbooks that worked even two years ago need updating.”

• The art of prototyping

“In 1997, Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill wrote a paper called, What do Prototypes Prototype? Their framework remains one of the clearest ways to think about the practice. A common mistake in making prototypes is having an unclear intention of what questions the prototype is meant to answer. As a result, several prototypes are solution-oriented with a nice-looking demo but no clear learning objective.”

Startup Idea of the Week: Midjourney for fonts

What’s more divisive than politics at a family dinner?

Fonts.

Case in point: Apple’s big iPhone launch. Forget the specs—what really lit up X and design blogs was the font. A chunky new typeface on the Pro lineup. Some people loved it. Others said it looked like WordArt from 2003.

And that makes sense: typography isn’t decoration. It’s design. The right typeface makes something iconic. The wrong one ruins it instantly (and yes, Comic Sans should be illegal under international law).

But here’s the thing: finding and using fonts is a pain. You’re hunting through sketchy websites, fighting license agreements, downloading zip files, installing, testing, uninstalling. Designers waste hours just to end up with something that still isn’t quite right.

What if, instead of searching, you could just make the exact font you need in seconds?

How It Works

💬 Prompt a Typeface
Type “A bold, futuristic font for a tech startup” or “An elegant serif inspired by 1920s Art Deco posters.”

🎨 Get Options Instantly
The AI generates multiple variations. Refine, iterate, tweak until it’s perfect.

📝 Complete Character Sets
Not just pretty mockups—full alphabets, numbers, punctuation, and special characters ready to download.

💾 No Legal Headaches
Every generated font comes with full commercial usage rights.

Why This Works

Fonts are identity. They shape how we perceive brands, products, and even entire cultures.

But the industry is broken:

• Licensing is confusing.

• Choices are overwhelming.

• Custom fonts cost thousands to commission.

FontJourney.ai flips the model:

Instant creativity → Unlimited variety → Zero licensing drama.

Designers go from “settling” for whatever font’s available to creating the perfect one.

Go-to-Market

🎯 Freelance designers and agencies—sell direct with a freemium + credits model.

🤝 Partner with platforms like Canva, Figma, and Webflow.

📦 Monthly subscription for unlimited font generations.

Business Model

Freemium SaaS.

• Free tier: limited generations.

• Paid: subscriptions + credit packs for high-volume users.

Long-term play: acquisition by Adobe, Canva, or Figma at a 12–18× revenue multiple.

What’s going on for us (thanks for asking):

• Level-1.dev: We’re hiring!

Actively looking for a software architect with experience using Langchain. Join us, get equity and work on something truly amazing: making Lovable for Video Games.

Ah, we also dropped a slew of new features and added a free tier, so now’s the time to test level-1.dev if you want to test it.

• European Startup Embassy: Launching in a couple of days.

Look out for our HowToWeb launch this week.

• ReaktorX: Raising a $2M Fund

ReaktorX is turning from an accelerator into a VC fund, backing the most talented Under-25 first-time founders, flying them to San Francisco and letting them loose to destroy their competition.

Very tired and almost out of gas,

The author

A quick word from the author:

Hey there,

Let’s do something different today. Here’s an excerpt from a potential new book.

Chapter 3, “Into the belly of the…”

Day 21, First Day of the Summer Cycle:

Ever since I was brought to their HQ, my hands haven’t stopped shaking. They all want to see me, see if I was real, grasp at me as if I was a rockstar on the way to the stage right before their final show.

I feel like I can’t breathe anymore, like the walls are closing in. Every minute I spend in their underground bunker is another opportunity for them to discover the truth.

But they mustn't, not ever. No one must know. How do I keep hiding this when they want me to do a demonstration tomorrow? I don’t even understand what they expect of me…

I’ll fake it, like I did before. They won’t be able to tell the difference anyway. If my examiner wasn’t able to, they surely won’t.

But Davey seems like he’s onto me. He tried to check under my jacket for hidden equipment when I first Delivered during the examination. The fact they were able to infiltrate the school for so long.. Just goes to show they’re the real deal. I’ve got to Deliver for real this time..

If only Dad was here…”

End of Entry (EoE)

Julius put away his journal, making sure to re-encrypt his dMem with a new key and protocol. Nothing has been the same since he left home, since the exam…

Being exiled is not what he expected. June was always telling stories about the famous exiles that ended up being reintegrated and how they’ve changed the last 250 years Post-Distrum. What June often failed to mention was only 9 exiles were ever reintegrated, out of thousands. And 2 of them committed suicide 1 year later.

Writing down an entry used to calm Julius, but the shaking hasn’t disappeared. It even got worse. “How am I supposed to fake an entire Visual Delivery for tomorrow? I’ve barely got time to think about what I should make…”

Julius put down his tablet, stretched across the improvised bed and hugged his backpack tight.

“If only Dad was here… he’d know.. He certainly would know. Right?”

Sometimes, in this newsletter, instead of some pop-culture inspired article, you’ll receive an excerpt from this new SF book.

Set in 250 PD (Post-Distrum), the story follows Julius, a 14-year old who, after an unexpected outcome during his Majora Exam, ends up in the base of The Rebels, where he’s worshipped as if he’s the new Banksy. Julius however hides a deep, dark secret from everyone, even from his family: It’s all fake.

This week’s kinda news I guess:

• How Instagram hacks perception

“Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom came up with a crafty hack to make the app’s photo-sharing flow feel snappy and instant for the user on any network/device.

He applied a lesson from his time at Google’s Gmail team: don’t just optimise the speed of the technology, optimise the user’s perception of speed.”

• Build Places, Not Products

“From an engineering perspective, it made no sense. You don’t use a massive image for a background when you can’t predict page height, because if everyone is getting a different view of the image, you can’t guarantee a coherent experience. Our approach violated other “best practices” of product design, too: You don’t add texture when flat colors load instantly. You don’t choose paintings over flat backdrops when you’re building software that needs to work on every connection speed.”

• Claude Memory: A Different Philosophy

“When Claude detects memory invocation through phrases like “what did we discuss about,” “continue where we left off,” or “remember when we talked about,” it deploys two retrieval tools that work like web search or code execution—you see them activate in real-time and wait while Claude searches through your history. Once the search completes, Claude synthesizes the retrieved conversations to answer your question or continue the discussion.”

• My (speculative) master plan for immortality

“Where should this personal computing system live? Ideally, it should be built into glasses. I’m already annoyed at how often I have to pull my phone out of my pocket to talk to AI chatbots. It’s doubly annoying when I have to open the camera app, take a picture, send it to the chatbot, and then keep the phone out while I wait for a response. Glasses solve all of this by a) sitting right next to your human i/o interfaces (eyes, ears, and mouth) for easy communication, and b) seeing and hearing everything you see and hear. This gives glasses context that a handheld device lacks when it’s not out and actively recording.”

• Why the best products tell most people to f*** off

“When you finally beat a boss after 50 straight deaths, something magical happens. The frustration of those 49 failures doesn’t just disappear – it transforms into one of the most powerful feelings in gaming: earned mastery. That moment of triumph feels so good precisely because you paid for it in blood.

This is the trade-off at the heart of great product design.”

Startup Idea of the Week: AI Patient Simulators

You know what’s more nerve-wracking than your first day on the job?

Your first day with a real patient.

That moment when a stranger sits across from you, listing symptoms you’ve only read about in textbooks? Terrifying.

The stakes? A person’s health, their trust, their future.

And here’s the kicker: in their first two years, medical students only get about 15 minutes per week of actual patient interaction. Fifteen. Minutes.

Meanwhile, they’re expected to log hundreds of hours practicing bedside manner, diagnostics, and treatment decisions before they even hit clinical rotations.

Real patients are unpredictable. Standardized patients cost $200 an hour. And mannequins? They’re glorified CPR dolls.

No wonder 68% of med students say they feel unprepared walking into real-life patient care.

What if they could practice—anytime, anywhere—with patients who feel real?

How It Works

👩‍⚕️ Meet Virtual Patients

AI-powered simulations with full medical histories, personalities, and evolving symptoms.

🩺 Diagnose & Treat

Ask questions, order tests, and propose treatments. The “patient” responds dynamically—just like real life.

📊 Instant Feedback

Get scored on communication, diagnostic accuracy, and treatment planning. Detailed breakdowns show what you nailed and what needs work.

🌍 Thousands of Cases

From everyday flu to rare diseases across every specialty. New cases roll in regularly, sourced from real medical data.

Why This Works

Right now, med students are learning to swim by reading about water.

AI Patient Simulators flip that:

Practice builds confidence → Confidence builds competence → Competence saves lives.

Students walk into clinicals having already “treated” hundreds of patients—without risking a real one.

Go-to-Market

🎯 Sell directly to medical schools as a bundled learning tool.

🤝 Partner with med ed platforms and residency prep programs.

📦 Subscription pricing: $50/student/month for unlimited access.

Business Model

B2B SaaS.

Schools pay per student, predictable recurring revenue.

Expansion into residency prep, nursing programs, and continuing medical education.

AI Patient Simulators becomes the “flight simulator” of medicine.

Long-term: acquisition by a medical education giant like Kaplan or Pearson at an 8–12× revenue multiple.

It’s med school practice—without the $200/hr actors or the creepy mannequins.

What’s going on for us (thanks for asking):

• Level-1.dev: We’ve redone the entire UI and right now implementing tutorials so you guys actually understand how to use it…

Also added asset preview and replacement 🙂

• European Startup Embassy: We’ve signed the lease, insurance is being drafted as we speak, and the furniture is being picked from facebook marketplace (we’re on a budget, ok?)

Sneak peek at the layout, just for the ground floor:

Can’t wait to have just 2 weeks to furnish the space and start organizing the first events. Any suggestions of what kind of events you’d like to see in the new space? (except orgies of course, we already added those to the list).

May your coffee be strong today,

The author

A quick word from the author:

Buna copii,

I’m baaack. I know, last week you didn’t receive the wonderful gift that is my writing, but here I am to grace you with my thoughts yet again.

Today, a bit of popcorn culture + metaphoric stereotyping. Just the way I like it 🙂

I’ve realized I haven’t told you a lot about my American Experience (moved to SF 5 months ago). Let’s start doing that with today’s topic:

Eastern European founders vs American founders (through the lens of Wednesday, my new show obsession)

If you’re not familiar, here’s the fastest rundown possible:

On the left, Enid, a werewolf that likes pink and is generally positive and upbeat and loves hanging out with people.

On the right, Wednesday, a loner, serial-killer obsessed with death, really talented and poetic.

It’s very similar to how founders operate in these 2 regions of the world: on one hand you have the Americans, being ultra mega positive and hyping themselves up to the moon, with an incredible network of connections that just make it possible (their pack).

On the other hand, you’ve got the Eastern European: one guy in a basement somewhere in Bulgaria that build that one piece of open-source software 80% of the internet relies on (I’m looking at you ffmpeg).

These two, polar opposites. Couldn’t be more different. Put them in the same room together, and there’s a 1125% chance sparks will fly.

And here’s where my obsession with the show Wednesday is even more apparent: in season 2, an entire Freak Friday episode happens (typical for these kind of coming-of-age shows). Masterfully executed might I add, the actresses freaking killed it.

Basically, you had the Eastern European founder trying to cosplay the American one and viceversa.

My favorite part of that episode is when Enid (in Wednesday’s body) gets a typical American rainbow milkshake that triggers Wednesday’s ALLERGY TO COLOR (if lack of color isn’t typical Eastern European, idk what is).

There’s a lot of twist and turns in the episode itself (not gonna spoil more here), but at the end, they both learn how it feels to be in each other’s shoes and what each other’s superpowers actually are.

So here’s my thoughts: I think we need each other. Eastern European founders need more positivity and generally a more positive outlook on their life and work. American founders need more grounding to stop overselling and under-delivering. The ideal team setup in my mind is an Eastern European CTO with an American CEO, the roles just fit.

TL;DR: Just go watch the show, it’s pretty freaking cool.

This week’s news slop:

• Video Game Blurs (and how the best one works)

Graphics programming is uniquely challenging in the beginning, because of how many rules and limitations the hardware, graphics APIs and the rendering pipeline impose. But it also unlocks incredible potential, as other limitations dissolve. Let’s find out how graphics programmers have leveraged that potential.

INCREDIBLE READ FOR NERDS, IGNORE IF YOU’RE NOT A NERD.

• Claude Code Framework Wars

The big idea: Claude can automate the coding, while you step into higher-value roles as project manager, designer, and software architect. The trick is to stop treating Claude as a chatbox and start treating it as a framework—a set of rules, roles, and workflows that make its output predictable and valuable.

Even more fascinating – claude code doesn’t require code to become a framework – just structured prompts. And right now, the developer community is experimenting wildly—what you could call the Claude Code Framework Wars. Dozens of open-source projects are testing different recipes for how to work with AI productively.

• The destination for AI interfaces is Do What I Mean

The best prompts now are quite simple, leaving AI to handle how to answer a question. Meanwhile AI chat suffers from the same problem from command lines to Alexa – how can i remember what to ask? Only this time the problem is exacerbated by the fact that AI is capable of practically anything making the task less one of remembering commands but a creative one of coming up with great questions or delivering an interface to discover them and then wrapping the resulting prompts as buttons.

• Stuff costs money

If you want to build a big software business, there are two ways to do it:

1. Build a new product, and charge people to use it.

2. Build a new product. But start small, in a narrow niche. Make some helpful utility, for a very specific set of people with a very specific problem. Downplay your ambitions; talk about how you’re solving a problem for yourself; how you’re building the thing you always wanted. Acknowledge your product’s rough edges; its odd opinions. Put it on Github; say it’s free, open source, forever. Go viral on Hacker News; talk to people on Twitter, on Reddit, never on LinkedIn. Create an online space for your users; call it your community. Open issues; debate them; ask for contributions. Build in public—for the people; of the people; by the people.

• Go faster

f you want to win, go faster. If in doubt and uncertain, go faster. If you want to make $1B dollars, go faster. If you want to change the world, go faster.

Startup Idea of the Week: ⛈️ Weather-based Calendar

(don’t build this in California)

You know what’s worse than canceling plans last minute?

Letting the weather cancel them for you.

That time you set up a picnic, only for the clouds to open up? Painful.

When you finally psych yourself up for a big work sprint—only to realize it’s the sunniest day of the month? Brutal.

And don’t even get us started on scheduling a long run the day it snows.

It’s not that we can’t plan. It’s that we don’t plan with the weather in mind.

Because who knows more about your week than your calendar? And who knows more about your mood than the forecast?

But right now, the two don’t talk to each other.

What if they did?

What if your calendar flexed around the sun, clouds, and rain?

How It Works

📲 Connect & Sync: Link Google or Outlook calendars, give weather access, set your city and preferences.

☀️ Play on Sun, Grind on Gray: The app rearranges your flexible tasks—moving deep work to rainy days, freeing up sunny slots for fun.

🧠 AI-First Planning: Non-negotiables stay fixed. Everything else shifts intelligently based on the 7-day forecast and your productivity style.

🔔 Always Adaptive: Forecasts change. So does your calendar. Real-time nudges help you adjust without the chaos.

Why This Works

Weather already dictates how we feel and what we do—whether we admit it or not.

Right now, planning ignores that reality. But Cloudcal flips it:

Sun comes out → You get more leisure time → Work still gets done on cloudy days → Your week feels balanced.

It’s productivity disguised as play.

Go-to-Market Plan

🎯 Start with remote workers, freelancers, and digital nomads who crave flexibility.

🤝 Partner with wellness coaches, co-working apps, and productivity influencers.

📦 Launch as a freemium SaaS (Cloudcal.ai) with an optional “Pro” tier.

🌍 Expand into team calendars and integrations (Slack, Notion, Jira) so companies can coordinate around weather-sensitive workflows.

Business Model

Freemium SaaS.

💻 Free: Single-user app with core weather-aware scheduling.
🚀 Pro: $10–15/month for smart integrations (Slack, Notion, multi-location weather), team use, and advanced customization.

Long-term play: Position for acquisition by a productivity platform like Notion, Atlassian, or Google Calendar—valued at a 5–7× multiple for its unique behavioral data and IP.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Launch absurd mini-products to make your brand cool

To make your brand stand out and feel cool, launch an unrelated product in a category far and different from your core one (e.g. cookies from a marketing agency specialized in promoting books) and pick one main brand feature to use in the extension (e.g. make the cookies in the shape of books).

Launching an unrelated product in a totally different category (e.g. clothing from a snacks brand) makes people perceive the brand as cooler.

• Across 4 experiments with 1,454 people and an analysis of over 5,000 social media comments, researchers found that:

  • When real brands launched extremely unrelated products (e.g. KFC’s fried chicken-scented nail polish, White Rabbit’s candy-scented body lotion, KFC Crocs), people felt surprise, joy and saw the brand as cooler

  • When a hot pot brand launched a spicy flavored toothpaste, people rated the brand as 20% cooler

  • When a snack brand launched an unrelated product of home furniture that had the shape of their signature cookie (vs one with no visual connection), people rated it as 11.5% cooler

• The effect is:

  • Stronger when the brand is popular or well-known. When people saw herbal coffee marketed by a popular brand (vs a lesser known brand), they rated the brand as cooler

  • Stronger when the extension is co-branded. For example, people rated McDonald’s 9.7% cooler when they launched a sauce-themed sneaker with Adidas

  • Weaker when the new product is in a category near the core brand’s one (e.g. Instant noodle extension for a hot pot brand)

What’s going on for us (thanks for asking):

• Level-1.dev: We have our first paid user. Pushing new features every single day.

• European Startup Embassy: We officially have a house for Eastern European founders here in San Francisco. Full announcement at How To Web.

• ReaktorX: We’re raising a $4M fund to invest in high-schoolers and students across CEE, fly them to SF and let them devour all of the script kiddies playing around with AI here.

One last meme for good measure.

Lots of hugs and some occasional punches from the author,

A quick word from the author:

Hej barn,

Long one today.

There’s this already famous tweet/post/internet truth circling social media (at least the tech bro area):

Easiest ways to make money:

- Men's lust.

- Women's desire for beauty.

- Elderly's health.

- Children's education.

- Rich people's fear of loss.

- Poor people's desire to quickly get rich.

I don’t like it. There’s some truth to it, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s a piss-poor attempt of superiority and positioning “business makers” as some sort of psycho-analysts that trigger just the right impulses of the “feedstock” to make bank.

The POV of this is basically deluded founders trying to justify to themselves and everyone around them replicating Onlyfans or abusing the eldery in care homes.

Ok, enough complaining, let’s rewrite it:

Easiest ways to make money:

- Men's desire to be appreciated and loved.

- Women's desire to be admired.

- Family's desire to take care of their elderly.

- Parents desire for their kids to be better.

- Rich people's desire to keep their wealth safe.

- Poor people's desire to overcome their situation.

Let me walk you through each one and what the changes imply:

Men's lust.

Carnal desire, illogical, based on urges. Yes, you can make money from this, but it’s temporary or limited, because ultimately men are (somewhat) logical creatures.

- Men's desire to be appreciated and loved.

“Only women and pets are loved unconditionally” Chris Rock. Give a man unconditional love and appreciation, and he’ll never leave. The root of almost all failed marriages (Men most often times cite the reason for cheating as “I felt unappreciated for me efforts”). There’s a reason most $$ made by Onlyfans model is not thanks to the pictures, but the chats their team maintains with the subscribers.

Women's desire for beauty.

This is where you can clearly tell the initial post was written by a guy. Women don’t crave to spend 5 hours in the bathroom getting ready for a 2 hour event. Women don’t inherently desire beauty, beauty is the means.

- Women's desire to be admired.

Reality is women desire to be admired (and not just by men). Men desire to be admired too. Unfortunately, society has entrenched the belief of “being valuable = being admired for physical looks” in women a lot more than men. That’s why you see badly dressed men everywhere. You can make a woman feel good, feel admired, without serving her beauty secrets and recipes for clean skin. This actually opens up the realm of possibility of what you can build.

- Elderly's health.

Right, so as long as you hawk a miracle pill on TV that’s basically just sugar (I’m looking at you Oscillococcinum) and promise the elderly they’ll feel better, that’s good business. Ok, let’s assume good intentions, you’re still focusing on the wrong target. I’ve met the elderly, most of them try to ignore their health issues cause they’re too scared to get checked out. Another miss.

- Family's desire to take care of their elderly.

Now this is truth. The ones trying to keep the elderly safe are their family, but they’ve got to deal with their own life at the same time. Now you’re selling them something to help them track/support/communicate with their elderly? Sign them tf up.

- Children's education.

Close, but no cigar. Go sit outside a school and stop and ask kids if they like being in school (on second thought, don’t do that, it’s creepy af). 8 out of 10 will say no. Children don’t particularly like education in the traditional sense, they like to play. And if they get to learn at the same time, what a great opportunity that is.

- Parents desire for their kids to be better.

The real way to interpret this is again through the lens of the parent: who ultimately decides what activities the kid gets to enjoy? Who is ultimately paying for that?

- Rich people's fear of loss.

Ok, this one is quite spot-on, but it’s again a negative lens that doesn’t really help with brainstorming.

- Rich people's desire to keep their wealth safe.

Suddenly, there’s 1242940434 ideas of how to help rich people achieve that. A really large Safe with a hole leading to the author’s pocket is one of them.

- Poor people's desire to quickly get rich.

Now this is just nasty (and not in the good, kinky way). Generalizing that all poor people desire to get rich quickly. Not everyone dreams of being Jeff Bezos you bozos.

- Poor people's desire to overcome their situation.

Everyone who’s struggling financially is, however, trying to overcome their situation. They see it as temporary. Suddenly, there’s plenty more ways to help them. Just don’t try to sell them a $999 course of how to build a B2B SaaS. That’s old tech, now it’s about Agentic AI systems.

By reframing these, we actually get to build healthy, positive business, not just the next grift/pump-and-dump scheme. Now, how do we airdrop this into the brain of every tech bro in Silicon Valley?

Inbox finds that weren’t shit:

• How I approach motion in product design

“Start with three timings

Quick, default, and long. This creates a simple framework that can be used in most use-cases, then you can refine when custom timings are needed.

Embrace springs

I hear a common misconception of people not using spring animations because they don’t want things to feel “bouncy””

• What Do You Mean?

You’ve probably experienced situations where this lack of understanding has caused problems. Take this simple series of events:

> We are working on a project together.
> I need something from you. I ask for it.
> You say you will “try” to get it to me by the end of the day.
> I operate under the assumption that I will have it by the end of the day.
> You do not send it. The project derails slightly. Now our timing is off.
> You say you did not commit to sending me the item.
> We get into a big argument about what “try” means.

• The Red Queen Effect – Mental Model: Work Smarter, Not Faster

Technology, frameworks, and tools change fast. Running forward without a clear plan just to keep up is a daunting experience. The key is to run with the right focus.

It’s up to leaders to make sure that our teams are running in the right direction and at the right pace:

• Are you learning fast enough?

• What is your benchmark for growth? Are you looking at teams within the company, or outside of it?

• What’s a good conversion rate? (Based on 41,000 landing pages)

Not all conversions are created equal—and neither are conversion rates.

The number that counts as “good” isn’t one-size-fits-all. It depends on your industry, your audience, and how people find your page in the first place.

• Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems: What Actually Works in Production

I’m using mixed decomposition for feedback processing:

Phase 1 (Parallel): Categorize feedback, extract sentiment, identify users

Phase 2 (Sequential): Group by theme → Prioritize by impact → Generate report

Works every time.

Startup Idea of the Week: Bear-lingual 🧸

You know what’s worse than kids forgetting their homework?

Watching them forget their heritage language.

That time your kid calls grandma and can only say “hi”? Painful.

When they mix Spanish with English and end up inventing “Spanglish 2.0”? Brutal.

And don’t even get us started on trying to explain cultural traditions in one language only.

It’s not that kids don’t want to learn. They just aren’t being taught in ways that feel natural—or fun.

Because who knows more about bedtime stories than a stuffed bear? Who knows more about playtime than the toy they carry everywhere?

But right now, toys don’t help kids stay connected to their roots.

What if they did?

What if learning a language wasn’t another lesson—but a cuddle?

How It Works

🧸 Plush + AI: Kids get a soft, huggable bear that talks back in two languages—blending playtime with learning.

🎤 Talk, Listen, Repeat: The bear responds to voice prompts, tells bilingual stories, sings songs, and plays call-and-response language games.

📱 App + Parent Controls: Parents pick the target language (Spanish, Mandarin, French, etc.), track simple progress, and unlock new content packs.

⭐ Positive Reinforcement: Kids get gentle praise (“¡Muy bien!”) for repeating words, building confidence instead of pressure.

🔄 Always Fresh: Weekly content drops—seasonal songs, cultural stories, playful mini-games—keep the bear from becoming “that one toy in the corner.”

Why This Works

Kids don’t learn languages from worksheets. They learn by hearing, repeating, and—most importantly—playing.

Right now, bilingual parents are stuck: they want their kids to stay connected to their roots, but they can’t always teach consistently.

Bear-lingual creates a neat loop:

Kids play with the bear →

They pick up words naturally →

Parents see real progress (and guilt disappears) →

The bear updates with fresh stories →

Kids keep playing.

It’s cultural connection disguised as cuddles.

Go-to-Market Plan

🎯 Start with bilingual households in the U.S. (22% of families speak another language at home).

🤝 Partner with preschools, daycares, and bilingual education programs.

📦 D2C launch via Shopify + Amazon, bundled with the app subscription.

🌍 Expand with licensed characters (Disney, Sesame Street) to make bilingual learning feel like mainstream play.

What Could Go Wrong?

❌ Kids might lose interest if the bear repeats too much.

❌ Parents may worry about screen time.

❌ Not all language translations feel natural in plush-toy voice.

That’s why:

– Content refreshes weekly to keep things engaging.

– The bear focuses on audio + plush interaction, with optional app visuals (not mandatory).

– Native speaker linguists curate translations so it’s always culturally correct.

Business Model

Hybrid.

🛒 One-time plush purchase.

📲 Subscription for ongoing content packs, new languages, and premium features (seasonal story drops, cultural mini-games).

Long-term play: Position for acquisition by a major toy company (Hasbro, Mattel) or ed-tech leader (LeapFrog), targeting a 5–8× revenue exit.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Gladwell’s Law

Word-of-mouth isn’t random – it’s driven by three specific types of people: Connectors (people with huge networks), Mavens (love sharing knowledge), and Salespeople (natural persuaders).

How to use it

Go through your customer list right now. Find people with 5,000+ LinkedIn connections (Connectors), customers who send detailed feature requests (Mavens), and anyone who’s referred others without incentives (Salespeople). Give these people exclusive access, early previews, and special recognition.

1 connector sharing your content > 100 regular customers.

Excerpt from The 13 viral marketing laws 🏛️

T-t-t-t-that’s all folks, see you next week.

A quick word from the author:

Bongiorno,

While hanging out with my house-mates around the fire yesterday, we started talking about the reality that surrounds us and current social, political and economic context.

We all had different takes, some of us mentioned this is the best humanity has ever been and we’re lucky to be alive today, some of us (myself included) thought that this is just the beginning of the end and we’re doomed to experience techno-feudalism.

There is an objective reality and a way to interpret that reality (our own subjective views).

The objective reality is that inequality is getting worse every single minute, government is powerless (or actively trying to make it worse) and we’ll soon all be at the mercy of the few and the powerful.

Now, taking into account this objective reality, what’s our own individual take? There’s a lot of options, for example, we could:

A. Decide the bad guy in this current setup are the corporations, the elites and the 0.1% and fight them through any means necessary (backing political adversaries, boycotting the companies owned by these elites, speaking out and protesting against them etc.)

B. “If you can’t beat them, join them”. Start building products and services for the elite, try to join their ranks by making things they want to see in the world. Praise them on social media for their skill and know-how and support their actions.

C. Build your own, parallel system. Disconnect from the current architecture of society and find alternative ways to live and grow (this is the hardest to put into practice since our world is so inter-connected). This is reflected in what the crypto community initially tried to achieve.

D. Live ignorant to all these struggles and just focus on your own well-being and your immediate family. Get a job (any job at this point), go on vacations, enjoy life to the fullest and navigate the uncertainty one turn at a time.

E. Actively pursue your own narrow-goals, not focused on the bigger picture. Build that restaurant/club/app you’ve always wanted to make. Very similar to option D, but with more intent on personal goals.

F. (My Take) Understand what’s under my control, what’s not, and make an active, genuine effort to move things in what I consider to be the “right direction”. Problem with this approach is that what I consider “right” will be considered “wrong” by others.

Day-to-day, I do a lot of reading of technical, professional and, let’s call it “philosophical” reading. For example, this great read from Dan Koe about the 12 rules to change your life.

The principles are incredible and will definitely help you engage with your life better than before. But I can’t escape the feeling they’ve been written from the myopic lens of a person who owes a lot of their achievements to luck, timing and positioning.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about success:

Once you’re at the top and start giving advice, you’re already wrong. Because the path behind you has already changed dramatically and things aren’t like they used to be, the same path to success, the same principles, beliefs and systems that made someone successful no longer apply to the new reality.

What I want you to take away from this rambling of mine is to be very aware of the lens you’re adding on top of the objective reality we’re all living through. The way to do the most damage to yourself and everyone around you is to stay ignorant to your own beliefs and values.

The bad and the good of last week:

• I’m Worried It Might Get Really Bad

“Hundreds or thousands of companies, and billions of dollars, are being spent on replacing human workers.

Some don’t think this is possible, but they think we need to invent some super smart model that’s better than anything we’ve ever seen.

We don’t need that. What we need is scaffolding and piping that connects the dots and brings the right context together in the right way to solve problem x or y.”

• The Ad Industry Is Dumping Younger Workers

“In recent years, the unemployment rate among college graduates aged 22-27 has inched higher than jobless levels for all workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This is a new development: Young degree holders have consistently experienced lower unemployment than the general public going back to at least 1990, the earliest year the data is available.”

• Designing With AI, Not Around It: Practical Advanced Techniques For Product Design Use Cases

“Jumping straight into execution feels fast, but it’s risky. We might end up solving the wrong thing, or solving it the wrong way. That’s where GPT can help: not just by generating ideas, but by helping us think more clearly about the structure of the problem itself.

There are many ways to break down a task. One of the most useful in product work is the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework. Let’s see how we can use advanced prompting to apply JTBD decomposition to any task.”

• Eleven Music is Here

“Today, we launched Eleven Music – the next step on our mission to build the most comprehensive AI audio platform in the world. With Eleven Music, businesses, creators, artists, and every single one of our users can generate studio-grade music from natural language prompts, with:

– Complete control over genre, style, and structure

– Vocals or just instrumental

– Multi-lingual, including English, Spanish, German, Japanese and more

– Edit the sound and lyrics of individual sections or the whole song”

• Why LLMs Can’t Really Build Software

To be fair, LLMs are quite good at writing code. They’re also reasonably good at updating code when you identify the problem to fix. They can also do all the things that real software engineers do: read the code, write and run tests, add logging, and (presumably) use a debugger.

But what they cannot do is maintain clear mental models.

LLMs get endlessly confused: they assume the code they wrote actually works; when test fail, they are left guessing as to whether to fix the code or the tests; and when it gets frustrating, they just delete the whole lot and start over.

Startup Idea of the Week: Collective LLM Teaching

You know what’s worse than AI models making mistakes?

Watching them make the same mistakes—over and over again.

That time an LLM explained how to boil water at “450°F”? Painful.
The one that confused Kafka the author with Kafka the database? Brutal.
And don’t even get us started on tax advice…

It’s not that the models aren’t smart. They just aren’t being taught by the right people.

Because who knows more about tax law than a tax lawyer? Who knows more about mechanical engineering than an actual engineer?

But right now, specialists don’t get a direct way to feed their knowledge back into the system.

What if they did?

What if training an LLM was less about abstract datasets and more about a collective tutoring session—where experts teach the AI in exchange for better access?

How It Works

🧑‍🏫 Experts Answer, Models Learn: Specialists in fields like law, medicine, design, or software development respond to real user questions. Their answers aren’t just helpful—they become high-quality training data.

💸 Teach-to-Earn: In return, contributors earn free or discounted access to the model. Think of it like tutoring your future AI assistant.

🔍 Quality Control Loop: Answers are peer-reviewed, scored, and reinforced before being ingested. Experts earn reputation points alongside their credits.

📚 Domain Pods: Communities of practice form around specific areas—e.g. “LLM for Radiology,” “LLM for Contract Law,” or “LLM for Game Dev.”

⚡ Continuous Improvement: Instead of waiting for big updates, the model gets smarter incrementally, with domain experts steering it.

Why This Works

LLMs are only as good as the data they’ve seen. Right now, that’s mostly internet text. Great for memes, not so great for medical nuance.

Specialists want smarter AI in their field—but they don’t want to give away their expertise for free.

This creates a neat loop:

• Experts supply targeted, vetted knowledge.

• The model improves in real-world domains.

• Experts get privileged access to a sharper tool that helps them do their jobs faster.

It’s a collective upgrade cycle.

Go-to-Market Plan

🎓 Start with professions where precision matters (law, healthcare, finance).
🤝 Partner with professional associations who want AI aligned with their standards.
💡 Target indie consultants and freelancers: people who’d love free AI horsepower but can’t pay enterprise rates.
📱 Build a gamified platform where “teaching the AI” feels like contributing to Stack Overflow—but with direct rewards.

What Could Go Wrong?

❌ Experts might game the system by giving low-effort answers.
❌ Conflicting expert opinions could confuse training.
❌ The platform risks becoming just another Q&A forum.

That’s why:
– Peer review and reputation scores gate what counts as training data.
– Multiple perspectives are tagged and labeled, not discarded.
– The incentive structure is tied to model improvements, not just volume of answers.

Business Model

Freemium.

🆓 Anyone can ask and browse questions.
💎 Verified specialists can:
– Earn credits for discounted access.
– Build reputation in their domain pod.
– Access pro-tier tools (custom fine-tuning, private deployments, priority inference).

Ok, hear me out, you should try: a Trustworthy Smile

Trust isn’t just built. It’s triggered.

Research suggests we evaluate trustworthiness based on facial cues that resemble happy expressions, like an upturned mouth and slightly raised eyebrows.

They signal to us that a person is likely approachable and has good intentions, so our guard drops.

But it runs deeper than just feeling comfortable.

One study found people invested up to 42% more money in strangers who had “trustworthy” features. 🤯

Because, as research shows, feelings of trust quiet our risk radar.

When someone looks trustworthy, we’re less likely to imagine getting scammed or disappointed.

So instead of spiraling through all the scary “what ifs” on the checkout page, we click “Buy now” with confidence.

That’s why trust isn’t just a vibe—it’s the currency of business.

In just milliseconds, potential customers will judge your profile picture and decide if you’re trustworthy or not.

So if you wanna trigger trust and earn more sales?

Smile genuinely, choose a profile picture that screams “I’m trustworthy,” and use that same pic across every platform.

What’s going on for us:

Our platform is live:

Is it working perfectly? Nope.

Do we know how to improve it? Not yet.

Is this gonna be the coolest f*cking thing once it works properly? 100%.

More news coming soon, for new we keep it cryptic to increase FOMO.

Have a wonderful time these last few weeks of summer,

The guy who didn’t know how to code 8 months ago.

A quick word from the author:

Cześć dzieciaki,

What if laziness is the habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff?

What if you could reverse laziness by simply developing a habit of thinking more about the delicious food you’re about to enjoy than the effort to get up and go get it?

Can we think more about the good outcome and less about the work?

Can we go back to daydreaming, being hopeful? Would that make a difference in how we carry ourselves every day?

Focus on the outcomes, not on the effort. And you will, without a doubt and probably against your will, reach your goal.

Also, remember to be kind and loving. You never know when it’s the last time you get to meet and talk to someone. Stay strong brother.

The NeWs (if you can call it that):

• How to write a good design document

“Novice document writers make the exact same mistake, but with prose instead of code. They get a soup of sentences and paragraphs and expect the reader’s brain to do what they want.

If the reader is smart enough, you might actually get away with this. Just like an expert programmer can mentally untangle spaghetti code.

But a perfect doc is written such that the reader is never surprised. The reader should find that every sentence flows obviously from the previous ones. They should finish your doc and think “well this was entirely straightforward, why did we even need to have this meeting?”

• What is the N+1 Query Problem and How to Solve it?

“If you have 100 posts, that’s 1 query for the posts and 100 more for the comments: N+1 queries in total.

That’s the problem.

It starts small. Feels innocent. But once your data grows, this turns into a flood of unnecessary database traffic and your app crawls.:

• Where to find ideas

“Here’s what it actually takes to find a startup idea. This also will help if you’re working at a startup considering building a new product, or even just a new feature. I am writing this so that you, a serious person trying to build something real, don’t feel like an idiot when you see people peddling nonsense about how easy it is.

This post digs into three fundamental questions:

1. What are we looking for?

2. Where do we find it?

3. How do we know we’re right?”

• tokens are getting more expensive

“imagine you start a company knowing that consumers won’t pay more than $20/month. fine, you think, classic vc playbook – charge at cost, sacrifice margins for growth. you’ve done the math on cac, ltv, all that. but here’s where it gets interesting: you’ve seen the a16z chart showing llm costs dropping 10x every year.”

• The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion

“The Rationalist movement is a lifestyle as much as a set of ideas. The adherents have mixed their focus on A.I. with advice for how to live your life and manage your career. The community embraces unconventional ideas, including polyamory and the genetics of intelligence as well as Effective Altruism, which is also a lifestyle. And for aspirational A.I. developers, Rationalist events have become essential networking opportunities.

Gatherings like the Machine Learning Alignment and Theory Scholars program, or MATS, hosted at Lighthaven each summer, are a more important way of getting into the field of A.I. safety than academia, said Sonia Joseph, an A.I. researcher at McGill University in Montreal and the tech giant Meta.”

Tool of the Week: Orchids.app

Lovable, but the websites actually look good?

Sign me tf up. Right here:

https://www.orchids.app/

Startup Idea of the Week: Cards Against You

You know what’s more fun than telling a great story?
Convincing everyone it’s true.

The internet is currently obsessed with lore—not the fantasy kind, but the “tell me a weird fact about yourself” kind. One viral tweet asking for personal lore got 1.2 billion views. That’s billion with a “B.” Now there’s a constant flood of people oversharing their quirks, drama, and bad decisions.

And we thought: why should Twitter have all the fun?

What if this became a living room blood sport?

The Game:
Like Cards Against Humanity—but instead of picking the filthiest punchline, you’re spinning the wildest backstory.

Here’s how it plays:

👑 Lore Lord: Each round, a rotating “Lore Lord” draws a prompt card. Example: Share a piece of dating lore about yourself.
🎭 True or False?: Every player answers the prompt—either truthfully, or with one of 6–8 bluff cards in hand that suggest believable lies.
😂 Pick the Best: The Lore Lord chooses their favorite. 1 point if it’s a lie, 2 if it’s the truth (gotta reward the real-life chaos).

Why This Works:

• Humans love swapping stories—especially the kind that toe the line between “that happened” and “no way.”

• Viral social trends are great testing grounds for IRL fun.

• The format is easy to explain, fast to play, and endlessly expandable.

Go-to-Market:
📦 Launch as a $25–$30 physical card game.
🃏 Drop themed $5–$10 expansion packs (“Family Lore,” “Office Lore,” “Holiday Lore”).
📱 Optional app with extra prompts, bluff generators, and story-recording features.
🎯 Sell direct-to-consumer, then court party game publishers like Hasbro, Exploding Kittens, or What Do You Meme.

What Could Go Wrong?
Somebody shares lore that ruins Thanksgiving.
Everyone’s too shy in the first round.
Half the group is too good at lying.

That’s why:
– Prompts are designed to be fun, not therapy.
– Bluff cards keep even shy players in the game.
– The scoring rewards both truth and lies, so you can play to your strengths.

Business Model:
One-time purchase + optional expansions and digital upsells.
Target an exit to a party game giant at a 4–6x revenue multiple.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Make your premium plan free during weird hours.

• $0 on weekends

• $0 after 9pm

• $0 during lunch breaks (12pm-2pm)

It’s unusual enough that some people will probably share your pricing page. Could create some buzz.

Someone who sets an alarm for 2am to try your product is already emotionally invested before they even start using it.

For B2B products, this is genius: You’re making employees try work-related software during their personal (or weekend) time. When someone voluntarily tests your project management tool on Saturday morning instead of relaxing → they’re solving real work problems on their own time. Truly obsessed. Perfect users.

Now, some people will cheat with VPNs or time zone tricks. Let them. If someone goes through the effort to hack your free hours, there’s sunk cost.

👉 Put a “Remind me when free access starts” form on your pricing page.

People will happily give you their email to get notified about your weird-hour windows. These are much better than random leads – they’re people who specifically want to try your premium features for free. They convert like crazy.

What’s going on for us:

I’ll just leave you with this demo:

And one last meme for good measure:

I kiss you,

The author at 1 AM from the comfort of his bed.

A quick word from the author:

Pryvit dity,

It’s not that hard.

But really, it’s not that hard. Whatever you want to achieve in this life, as crazy as it may sound, it’s not that hard.

Most of us are not that inspired honestly to dream about impossible dreams: riding unicorns, flying outside the solar system etc. 98% of us dream about human things: owning the best sports car, having the ideal body, travelling the entire globe etc.

And most of us are stuck in the realm of “If only…”. “If only I had more time, more money, more energy, more courage, more friends, more knowledge”. “If only..” is the killer of “what if?”. And everyone would rather engage with a dreamer than an obstacle detector.

Trust me, I felt it first-hand during my first month in the US. The hater in me (thanks Eastern Europe!) was hard to smother.

But getting rid of “If only..” is not so easy. It’s literally your brain trying to keep you away from what it deems as risky.

The only trick here is to start with one. One push-up, one design, one email sent, one feature built, one plane ticket bought. Start with one, do it 100% and then no.2 will feel like a breeze.

(in my Grant Cardone era ngl)

Stuff to spark your rough:

• Elements of System Design

“One of the rewards of working in computer systems is the field’s sheer diversity, spanning operating systems, databases, computer architecture, distributed systems, programming languages, networking, and more, each with a rich history. For newcomers, it can be challenging to spot connections across different domains due to the diversity of traditions and vocabularies: the same design principle may appear in different guises across domains.”

• Virality Prompts

“The key appeal is shareability: users can export outputs to social media, nurture their communities around AI art challenges or collaborative storytelling.

Social Gaming:

AI generated dynamic characters, narratives, and worlds, enhancing multiplayer interactions.”

• How to Get Quoted in the Press

“Smart marketers already know earned media isn’t just “good PR.” It’s strategic. One way to move this needle is to focus on getting mentioned by journalists. A quote in an article might now have more downstream reach than a blog post or press release.

Fortunately, you can do this low-lift, high-leverage PR tactic yourself. You don’t need a PR firm on a monthly retainer or a product launch to score earned media.”

• AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates

“Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, said he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.

Balderaz has urged his own kids to focus on jobs that require people skills and can’t easily be automated. One is becoming a police officer.

Having a good job “guaranteed” after college, he said, “I don’t think that’s an absolute truth today any more.””

• On the Edge of Competence

“I’ve also started treating myself like a system. After every project, I log my assumptions, key decisions, and outcomes. Did the latency drop I expected actually happen? If not, why? Over time, patterns emerge—such as my tendency to underestimate complexity in certain areas. Tracking that stuff compounds into better judgment.”

Tool of the Week: OpenRouter

Planning to build an AI tool (like 99% of tech bros) and not sure which AI model is the best for your case?

Try OpenRouter: just switch the ID of the LLM in your IDE, no need to remap, reroute, re-order if you want to swtich the model.

Startup Idea of the Week: Builder Parties

You know what’s worse than unfinished ideas?

Having too many of them. That Arduino-powered herb garden? Still a sketch. The horror short film? Just vibes. That modular furniture set? Somewhere between your Pinterest board and your garage.

You’re not lazy—you’re just solo.

And solo is where good ideas go to die.

But what if creative projects didn’t feel like work?

What if they felt like… going out?

A weekend-based “project party” app where you join live builds, jams, and collabs with other makers.

Because your ideas are more likely to come to life if someone’s waiting for you Friday night with a soldering iron, a mic, or a Figma file.

How It Works:

Every Friday, the app drops a fresh lineup of open projects.
Join one. Host one. Build something weird and wonderful together.

🎉 Drop-In Projects: Creators post what they’re building this weekend—music tracks, tiny robots, short films, zines, browser games. Each one has a time window and roles they need.
👾 Join Instantly: Find a project that needs your skills—or just your vibes.
📅 48-Hour Jams: Most collabs are weekend-limited, with a clear start and end time. Think “hackathon,” but chill.
🧠 Prompt Generator: Stuck? The app can pitch random creative constraints or challenges.
📎 Built-In Tools: Shared workspace for to-do’s, file sharing, voice chat, and streaming progress.
🏆 Wrap-Up Monday: Showcase what got built. Celebrate shipping. Then move on.

Why This Works:

• People are overwhelmed by long-term commitments.

• But short-term, social, low-pressure creative jams? That’s fun.

• Creativity thrives on constraints, deadlines, and good company.

This isn’t about finding a lifelong collaborator. It’s about showing up, doing the thing, and shipping it. Then disappearing like a project ghost.

It’s a maker jam, not a marriage.

Go-to-Market Plan:

🎓 Partner with design schools, film schools, and college makerspaces.
🎧 Drop sponsored collabs with creators on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.
🎨 Highlight themed weekends: “Synthwave Sunday,” “Low-Poly Jam,” “Spooky Arduino Night.”
🏙️ Host IRL project parties in cities with high creative density. (Berlin, SF, Brooklyn, Tokyo)

Make it feel like a cultural event. Less GitHub, more Burning Man.

What Could Go Wrong?

• Someone ghosts mid-project and now you’re stuck finishing the banana piano alone.

• Too many “idea guys,” not enough doers.

• It turns into a glorified Discord server.

That’s why:
– Projects are opt-in, short-term, and scored on completion.
– Team ratios and contributor types are balanced automatically.
– You earn XP for shipping. Not for talking.

Business Model:

Freemium.

🆓 Join and participate in public jams.
💎 Pro users can:
– Host private project parties
– Save full project archives and media
– Get VIP invites to curated jam weekends
– Use premium prompts and build kits
– Integrate with tools like Notion, GitHub, or Ableton.

Is this just a rebranding of hackathons? Maybe. Does it sound better? Yes.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Discounting properly

If you are discounting a product that is priced more than $100, use an amount off discount (i.e. $X off).

If you are discounting a product that is priced less than $100, use a percentage off discount (i.e. X% off).

Keep “100” as the cutoff for other currencies too (e.g. for an item priced 180 pesos use 36 pesos off, not 20% off).

• For higher-priced products, people perceive better value and are more likely to buy when a discount is an amount off (e.g. $25) rather than a percentage off (e.g. 10%).

• For lower-priced products, the opposite happens. People perceive better value and are more likely to buy when a discount is a percentage off.

• A cutoff of “100” (e.g. $100, €100, 100 pesos) determines what is high priced (more than 100) and what is low priced (less than 100).

• For example, in experiments:

  • When a jacket priced 480 pesos was discounted as 120 pesos off (vs 25% off), people

    • Perceived the offer as 12.4% better value

    • Said they were 16.3% more likely to buy

  • When balloons priced 48 pesos were discounted as 25% off (vs 12 pesos off), people

    • Perceived the offer as 7.8%* better value

    • Said they were 11.1%* more likely to buy

Why this works

• Part of how we perceive the value of an offer is based on the absolute number of that discount (e.g. 10, 50).

• That’s because we don’t always put in the mental effort to calculate a percentage discount to the equivalent amount.

• For example, a 10% discount means we think of the number 10. If a price is higher than $100 (the equivalent amount would be more than $10 off), we perceive it as a smaller discount than what it actually is.

• When we see $20 off instead of $10 off for a $200 item, we think of the number 20, which is higher, so better.

• Mathematically, amount offs will look bigger than percentage offs when the price is higher than 100.

• When we perceive a promotion as better value, we’re more likely to buy it.

What’s going on for us:

That’s all you’re getting this week 🙂 Sneak peeks into the potential new HQ’s in the heart of San Francisco.

What I can tell you is I’ll give you a single chance: When I post about the launch of the House, it will already have been too late.

If you want a space for yourself (or your startups) in the middle of SF, you’ll have the chance to book it right here, on this newsletter, 1 week before everyone else.

As a legendary orc once said in the corner pictogram of Warcraft 3:

“Work work”. Ceau!