AI is changing everything for startups - again. As a founder, mentor, and investor, I’ve seen technology reshape industries before. This time, the pace of change is breathtaking, and the abundance of AI tools is overwhelming. To help you figure out what to do next, I’ll share stories from founders using AI tools to move faster and do more with less - founders “10xing” themselves and their startups.
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Who this is for
Thousands of founders out there need to figure out how to use AI tools to make their startups 10x more productive. I’m one of them. Pretty soon, it won’t be an option - we’ll have to do it in order to stay competitive. But it’s hard to know exactly what AI tools can do for our startups, which tools to use, and how to put them to work for us - especially for those of us who weren’t CS majors.
By now, we’ve all heard what’s coming. Forward-thinking founders will use AI agents (I’ll call them “AI tools”) to move faster and get better results, with smaller teams and less capital. Those AI tools will automate repetitive and manual tasks, speed up data-driven decision-making, and boost creativity - helping startups find product-market fit and scale with attractive economics, and improving every function and process. Sam Altman is betting we’ll soon see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations.
Excited yet? I am! But so far, I’ve felt more overwhelmed than empowered. Keeping up with all the new technology and tools is like drinking from a firehose. As if building a successful startup wasn’t hard enough, now we have to learn a whole new way to do it. Here’s what founders in my network had to say:
AI tools will be game-changing - we’ll do more, faster, with fewer resources
We know we should be doing more with AI than we are so far
We don’t know what AI can do for us, which tools to use, or how to use them
That’s where this newsletter fits in. Every week, I’ll talk to founders who are successfully 10Xing parts of their startups by using AI tools. Then I’ll report back about:
What problems or opportunities they were looking to address with AI tools
Which tools they chose, and how they put them to use
How those tools impacted performance
I’ll also talk to the AI experts building tools for founders, to find out who loves their products and why.
Who I am
I’m not an AI expert, but I’ll use that as an advantage. I’m a non-technical founder going on this journey along with you. If I can figure this out, you can too. Here’s my background:
Co-founded Stash, an app for investing with 1.5 million paying subscribers. We used the inertia of the app economy to rocket to unicorn status.
Built Minded, a telehealth for psychiatric care that was acquired. We launched during Covid, when mental health hit rock-bottom, and remote care was critical.
Adviser to 1,000+ founders, as a mentor to TechStars, and EIR for Brown University and Harvard Business School
Angel investor in 40+ startups
LP in Everywhere Ventures - a pre-seed founder’s fund with investments in 250+ companies
Of course, that’s the highlight reel. I’ve also started a lot of companies that didn’t work out well, including a social network that started with Ivy League graduates 8 years too early (oops!). I’m a New Yorker, though I moved to the east end of Long Island during Covid with my wife, two sons and our sheepadoodle, so now I’m back and forth.
Let’s figure this out together. And if you’ve had success putting AI tools to work for your company, reply to this email, and let me know.
Subscribe now, and let’s build the future of startups - with AI.
As a technologist who has worked in both startups and F200 enterprises, I'm firmly convinced that startups are going to be the incubators of innovation in terms of the patterns of how to apply genAI. Far easier to build a new AI-enabled department from the ground up than to retrofit an existing 1000+ person org. Superpowers for individual founders and a short-term disruptor that lets new entrants compete on a lower cost basis with incumbents. This will equalize in a few years, when applying the winning patterns incubated in startups to larger enterprises will become easier and more interesting. Not wholly different from many other technology innovations but with its own fascinating twists: things that are non-deterministic are challenging to scale.