now that summer is wrapped in vancouver, i’m shifting back towards the 4am start time. gm!
Notes from this week
- Interviewed 5 founders/business owners. Three were struggling with AI transformation. The major areas = shared context and workflows. Nothing was sticking, which sounds like a skills and adoption problem, not a tooling one.
- The other two were trying to scale GTM: one with zero paid customers, the other with early pilots but no PMF or clear ICP. Growth dollars exist after understanding customers, positioning, and dialing in product.
- Four of the five felt behind on AI adoption. They want to go deeper but have no idea how to budget for it. “What token formula per employee should we use?”
- Friends who code for a living aren’t writing code by hand anymore. They review, and change what needs changing.
- All my builder friends are diverging on the word “focus.” Some are doubling down on the AI spray and pray game. Going wide, building literally anything and everything. Others are killing every side quest to pour everything into one product. To be a missionary.
Hugging Face started as a companion app for teens. Wild, given yesterday’s news. TC screenshot:
My takeaways on Hugging Face acquisition
- Proof that you can hard pivot and just catch large waves and win bigly. Does that mean going deep on mission or ICPs and all that jazz is meaningless?
- Betaworks as business model.. Deep research I ran w/ Claude yesterday confirmed: the product studio model doesn’t work? What does work is deploying capital around a thesis.. what Betaworks calls “camps.” Their Hugging Face exit alone returned everything they’d put in over 19 years, and then some
^^ look at the rest of the portfolio in progress..