The AI scaling era is over! “Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research” it’s been obvious for everyone seriously developing on top of LLMs. The app layer will drive the further progress, until a new breakthrough in AI, that’s not guaranteed.

My open letter to the new Startup Founders: ( It's extremely negative. An unfiltered truth. Proceed at your own risk ) 1/ There is no easy, quick, risk-free & proven way to succeed. Everyone who gives this promise lies. 99% of makers fail on their 1st, 2nd, and Nth try. Don't be fooled by super rare success stories of an 18yo college dropout on TechCrunch. Those odds are lower than a lottery. 2/ Any successful person has spent way more time before their "overnight" success than it might seem. I may start a product today and reach $30k MRR in 6 months. Can I teach you this? NO! I can do that because I've spent 20 years building startups. 3/ There is no magic bullet to succeed at startups. U must be above average in ideas, design, UX, coding, sales, marketing, presentation, copywriting, content, customer support, etc. Think of a soccer player. Can u be a winner if they run like a snail? Or shoot like my grandma? 4/ The only way to learn all those skills is by DOING! No amount of reading, watching youtube, consuming the courses and bookmarking the tweets will help, if you don't actually apply this knowledge right away. That's why u must be in "action" all the time. Every hour of the day 5/ Stop wasting your time. Do you wanna succeed with your startup or express your valuable opinion about politics that nobody gives a sh*t about? Remove everything from your life to focus only on one thing. Just a gladiator. Forget hobbies, parties & fun. Focus, Focus. Focus. 6/ I monitor profiles of people here on X. People who seem to be eager to do stuff. But their feed is full of nothing. Nothing is being shipped. Nothing is being learned. They go around writing totally senseless comments nobody wanna read. 7/ Don't mix fun & education. It inevitably kills your bias for action. Suddenly you get dopamine when u consume, not when u act. ————————————- Enough being negative, here is what works: a) Pick one topic and make a bet on it. Don't spread to wide audiences. Pick a narrow niche. You should have some connection to the audience or be able to understand the audience and emulate their thought, pain, taste, and desires. b) Learn the topic really deep. Be in the top 1%. It's not easy. You will have to read/try/experiment for 1000s of hours to get there. But this won't be a waste of time. I've never yet seen any true "expert" being poor & unsuccessful. c) Educate the audience! Share things that save them time so that they don't have to spend 1000 hours learning it. This type of content is worth sharing following the author. You can also launch newsletters and info directories out of your expertise. d) If you have a crisis of ideas now, by the time you complete the steps above, you'll have a new problem: too many ideas! Start discussing these ideas with the audience and build little tools to demonstrate them. Often, they don't even make a tool, but instead, they are the tool. e) Spend months iterating with micro MVPs and doing things manually for your audience and inevitably, one of the tools/services will gain more attention, and you'll clearly see you need to put more time into it. f) Don't even hope that it'll take weeks/months. Enter the game as it's a marathon. Not prepared for a marathon? Go back to be employed or try dropshipping biz, I heard kids make millions there with no effort.

Most founders think VC-backed means rich, but bootstrapping means poor. Not true. I’ve done both: VC exits are rare: most are small, and only a tiny few are big. Founders are diluted to 10%, locked for years with an earnout. Bootstrapping to $3.7M/y at 80% margin equals $3M/y in profits, which is $30M/10y. But the VC path means hoping for a big exit after years. I raised pre-seed to Series A 10+ times and stayed poor, dreaming of billions that never came. I knew 1,000+ founders, but only a few achieved life-changing exits. My profits fund whatever I want here & now, not in some imaginary future. I'm my own boss, earning money now while spending time with my family and living life on my terms. Ofc, if you wanna make a billion-dollar exit, VC path is the way to go, but idk, that's a fking lottery to me.

I’ve been chasing VCs for 15 years, and it wasn’t easy, it felt like being 16yo dude in a club trying to make up with girls, 99% rejection rate. Nowadays, I receive funding offers weekly, but I don’t need it. If u wanna raise funding: stop chasing VCs, chase users & traction.

i logged off for a minute and all these things happened: > google is so back with a new gemini & Antigravity IDE (renamed windsurf) > Humanoid companies are going crazy, I'm on a waitlist for a teleoperated robo-wife > Cloudflare crashed 80% of the internet, users posted 1 trillion tweets and it brought X down too > Jeff Bezos is a startup founder again, with his new Prometheus > after those servers, the markets dropped down too, both the stock & crpt0 > Mega rounds: Cursor: $2.3B, Cohere: $450M, Ramp: $300M, Apptronik: $400M, d-Matrix: $275M, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines: $50B valuation > Warren Buffett declared the winner of the AI Race, and it's google > Yann LeCun is (almost) fired from Meta cuz he doesn't believe in LLMs > Jeff Bezos landed his rocket, too > Satya Nadella actually uses X and follows Pieter Levels > openAI, xAI & anthropic launched their new best models too > John Carmack thinks we're entering an era of Solo Makers leveraged by AI > Marc launched TrustMRR and killed buildInPublic fantasy mrr world > Indie hacker world has lost another soldier, after Dago, it's Alex Isora > Replit coding agent went from producing the ugliest UI to the prettiest(it's so good) > Manus launched their Chrome extension so that you could generate more ai slop on the internet > Apple is trying to sunset Tim Cook, who would be the new CEO? > EU softens the AI Act > France plans to tax citizens globally, like the US. > Most YC startups use Chinese LLMs (just like all hardware companies been doing for decades) > There is more funding into building datacenters than housing in the US > Big investors sold their NVidia stake, maybe because AMD and others are catching up > Saudi Arabia Invests $1 Trillion in the U.S > Alex Karp flexed his sword skills on an interview with Molly > GTA6 Release Delayed Yet Again > Nikita Bier plans to dox everyone's location on their public X profiles > Bill Ackman fixed low fertility rates by introducing "may I meet you" > Bonus: I'm about to "John Rush Bundle" - all my products (SEObot, Unicorn Platform, ListingBott, IndexRusher, SocialBott, TinyAdz & More).