Builder in Residence - Business Builder | Kenny Grant

small design tools

2026-09-09T21:10:00.000Z

built a browser studio for making my own brand assets.

somehow already on phase 4 with dither + a bunch of efx that absolutely didn’t need to exist

burning midnight token oil

2026-09-09T00:27:00.000Z

Junastar, my new baby that I’m purposely leaving unshaped as a lab, is trying to take some public shape. Working late nights, hoping to push the new HP later this week and find time this weekend to burn some late-night token oil and find out where this goes

romantic scent

2026-09-08T20:16:00.000Z

sage advice from steve, maybe more so now more than ever:

spent too much time last night experimenting with 3D renders, recreating the sparkly mj glove just for fun.. safe to say, we have a ways to go with 3D animation

pushing 3d and sound experiments

2026-09-08T02:06:00.000Z

dabbling with fable 5.1 today: cad renders, making sounds, cleaning up sounds, some heavier animation work. it’s incredibly easy to fall into “idea plussing” rabbit holes. and across this, which is outside my typical day to day, idea to 80% takes just minutes. a few hours in and it feels 85% done. that last 15% is days, maybe weeks. it’s the same curve every time with ai regardless of the medium.

having a ton of fun though!

agent auth

2026-09-05T21:02:00.000Z

Agent identity and authentication are top of mind. Cloudflare looks early here, and after reading these articles I’m looking to go much deeper:

saw this on my tl, will this dumb phone (that’s plastered all over nyc) turn into an agent only device?

the future of web

2026-09-04T17:12:00.000Z

I shared this screen capture with a few founders earlier this morning. It sums up what i’ve been seeing and feeling in regards to the future of websites and marketing. The middle is moving towards high craft, or sales/marketing.

The rest of the day includes building + sending a few proposals, then rebuilding a folio, and pushing new website designs

indo house

2026-09-03T17:20:00.000Z

Watch on YouTube

Checking out Armaan’s set from Dec. He was the lead designer at Properlot back when we were trying to make it a huge thing with Andy Josuweit. So far, loving the indo house sound.. go dj kahani !!

ghosting

2026-09-02T20:17:00.000Z

camerabuds

2026-09-02T17:16:00.000Z

enjoyed reading this article on lessons learned from not shipping camera air buds. https://x.com/minafahmi/status/2095158535298445699

only 8 months until may

2026-09-01T15:12:00.000Z

only 8 months until May

how the 6am fitness trainer starts the class

tysm 🫠

Squashing various website bugs today, re-enabled RB2B (sorta expensive for current traffic needs) and will continue writing themes for 2027. Going to circulate these (via deck?) with a few trusted builder friends for all the feedbacks, I hope to come up with an alternate term versus a group theses. Trends, digital outlook, digital forecasts, ai antenna cast, future cast, ai almanac? Need an anti ai slop name, send help ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

is this build or marketing week for you?
after today, it’s all sales and marketing

whatever is most hideous

2026-08-30T16:40:00.000Z

4 agents running updates on this website as i type. today i’ll continue through minor website edits.. mostly design focused, whatever is most hideous, and general polish. guessing we’ll reach a point over the next week where i’ll say forget this mess, clone the repo, and redesign the whole website from scratch. blah blah. portfolio websites are time consuming and it’s far easier to PMM something or someone else.

once those agents wrap, i’ll work through a new blog post draft on missionaries. it’s a collaborative piece, so fingers crossed the respondents (mostly founder friends) answer honestly instead of performative, it doesn’t trigger, and that founders actually give it some real thought.

update 2 - 9:51am

got lost in the ghostty sauce. heading over to a coffee shop to collect thoughts and v1 draft on missionaries.

how i watch videos on the internet in 2026

- see video (shared via X, dms, or another platform)
- immediately open yt, search for said video, watch 3 seconds
- click "ask" and "Summarise the video"
- click 2 timestamps, watch for 10-15 seconds
- close forever, and done pic.twitter.com/kG50RKNJpr
— Kenny (@allbombs) August 30, 2026

at a cafe and the dude beside me is on google hangouts call talking about gtm.. he just dropped

how can we be like a hot girl, but in an ai world

streaking

2026-08-29T23:01:00.000Z

things i’ve been doing daily, and hoping to continue through September:

gh streak, pushing daily design improvements to this website
daily deep dive research projects using different models (last few days = betaworks, product studios, social commerce startups, walt disney)
1 new connector per day
creation. tweets, daily log posts, mini decks, idea maxxing (5 new ideas outside of my day to day industries)
visiting a new font foundry
cold emailing an artist, creative, or someone that I find interesting

dayshifting

2026-08-28T11:34:00.000Z

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..

wheels down

2026-08-27T01:31:00.000Z

Flight was basically just smoke. Mostly brainstorming how companies or organizations can best manage shared context with permissions and versioning (staff, contractors, agencies, partnerships, etc)

peach city commits

2026-08-25T18:05:00.000Z

Penticton has a strong coffee shop game! Have a few terminals running refactoring this website, improving design, and a few small bugs. Wrapping up plans for September

the peach city

2026-08-25T04:09:00.000Z

checking the sights and sounds in the ticker

road tripping

2026-08-24T05:10:00.000Z

yesterday

2026-08-21T14:44:00.000Z

The founders day event was inspiring and overall vibe was there’s far more happening in our back yard than I knew. Outdoor events are tricky, with the stage and seating area being directly in the blaring sun. This worked in our favour, as 80% of the founders skirted to shade areas, which led to far more networking and candid conversations.

soundbytes from yesterday

What will the VC want to hear? I have my first pitch tomorrow morning with <retracted>

First time founder

I'm a solopreneur selling digital products to other solopreneurs and feeling isolated.

Digital nomad founder

Do we even need CTOs or technical co-founders anymore?

Founder from Alberta

Our first client fired us, and it was appalling. Embarrassing would be an understatement. Our Lovable MVP broke. We desperately tried to patch a hot fix, but I need to find or poach a tech leader to somehow rebuild this before end of quarter.

Martech founder

If we don't wrap a successful pilot, and secure the raise, then i'm retiring... which wouldn't be the end of the world.

Second time founder working in civic tech

Before the founders event, went full ham on trying to capture Strava PB and came up short. 5 seconds from kom record and 11 from season goal 🫠. Dew usually starts on the back side of Stanley Park in late Aug (like any day now), and foot traffic becomes too intense for daytime attempts… extended weather not looking too promising.. maybe 1 or 2 more shots on goal? Claude despite best cheerleading attempts states i’m losing 1-2% on my roller maxxing pace, as a minimum per year, and this might be the top. what a jerk!

founders day 2026, vancouver edition

2026-08-20T17:08:00.000Z

It’s back! Just wrapped a few meetings and in the back of an uber (tesla of course ha) on my way to Founders Day. Will try to push a few updates with photos and observations. Pretty stoked to run into some old friends i haven’t seen in a minute. Let’s gooo!

whoosh

2026-08-19T18:53:00.000Z

This whoosh! screen shine and keyboard cleaner has been the best purchase under 20 bucks everrrrr

Used to use the magic apple cloth but it greased out. Perfect addition to your laptop bag. A++++++

Built a meta tags checker tool, and manually creating some replacement og images in figma. Maybe next I’ll create a generative open graph image tool.. trying to showcase more wip.. screenshots below

aug 19

2026-08-19T15:59:00.000Z

I love bringing ideas to life

PSA

2026-08-18T22:36:00.000Z

Always start with the marketing brief. Even if the client, agency, or founder says you don’t need to.. just do it

Don’t outsource day0 inputs to ai agents.. The context doesn’t carry, and you’ll be forced to come back to the brief

Pen and paper first

2026-08-17T22:33:00.000Z

If you token max, don’t forget to allocate 20-25% of your time towards manual creative outputs. Otherwise, you’ll brain rot -> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S294988212500091X

Today I’m inventing v0 of a Junastar deck and prepping for Founders Day this Thursday. Which means practicing what I just preached.

My process: brief first, always. Then pen and paper for the first draft. That’s where the story, the emotion, the flow, and the “what the hell is this thing” anyways gets figured out . Only then do I bring in Claude design systems for a first version, and finish in Figma Slides.

Doing it this way forces me to deeply understand the topic and the nuances between pages and the audience. When I skip straight to whatever Claude or ChatGPT pumps out, it clouds my judgement, intuition, and my idea antenna. Same as teaching. You don’t really know a topic until you’ve had to write or present it yourself. Reps build the clarity, confidence, and user empathy. You know the thing cold, and the audience can feel it.

TLDR don’t skip creative writing days or that morning pages routine.

Sunday update

2026-08-17T00:05:00.000Z

Refactored a personal project. Wading through an old Figma file hits differently. The goal is to actually build the iOS MVP in September.
Refactored this website with a dozen design improvements. The experiment of working without Figma is over, or at least going hybrid. I still haven’t cracked how to make design passable without a design tool, at least to my own bar, and I know it’s something I need to work on. There’s a misconception that teams are shipping great work without Figma or Paper. Maybe for 80% quality. Anything that needs to be 90 to 100% isn’t happening freehand from command line.
Experimenting, and so far failing, with larger context management projects. Talked to a few other builders this week. Everyone is struggling with this.
The plan is to keep tightening this site without a huge overhaul. I suspect I’ll end up there anyway: waking up mid-Sept saying yuck, and starting over. In the meantime, focusing on different types of AI reps, processes, and agent trees to find what I like best.
While everyone is tokenmaxxing and trying to increase surface area, I’m reducing mine. Going deeper with a stronger foundation, higher quality. Red hot coals versus spray and pray fleeting flames.
Captured 2 KOMs this morning, attaching a video below

cleaning up site

2026-08-13T19:21:00.000Z

This website is driving me bonkers. Originally planned to carve out three or four days in September; however I need to just do something so that I can even visit my website. Most of my interactions with this website are from terminal. Let’s see how much damage I can do over the next 24 hours.

unrelated. my friends golden says hi

src

2026-08-11T16:48:00.000Z

PSA your company or product website is your source of truth. While you may have a brand new launch or product or thousands of pages sitting within Google Docs, Notion, Obsidian, etc What the world knows about you is what is available to the internet eye. It’s even more important in an agentic world That scrapes your website, misses nuance, and has 10 other parallel agents checking potential competitors. Ensure your website is up to date. And lean into what makes you a unique snowflake!

whats next

2026-08-10T18:25:00.000Z

wrapped a few major Health and fitness milestones with 3 PBs. chatting with a few different founders. August is shaping up to be token-heavy, which feels like a dangerous metric and rather meaningless. excited to share a slew of new ships and text on where I think we’re headed next.

ten weeks ago i said i was withholding a bunch of projects “for now.” still withholding.

biggest struggle atm is what or how much to share in public.

aug 2026

2026-08-05T02:21:00.000Z

perhaps the last daily log for now? starting a new repo for a quick n dirty new kenny.is website. messing around with some new models, and have this playing in the background

Watch on YouTube

sunset vancouver

2026-07-20T04:23:00.000Z

thinking different

2026-07-08T18:52:00.000Z

pushing this post as i’m restarting ai outputs after an extended break (sick).

one topic i’ve been exploring is how to think different… how models are predictable and those that are ai pilled have offloaded deep thinking to the models, to blindly march toward reinforcement completion.