Entrepreneurship

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

how to use perplexity computer to spin up digital employees that automate your work 24/7 1. connect your email. give it a list of prospects, what you sell, and your tone. it finds the right contact at each company the person who actually signs deals), researches their pain points, and drafts outreach that sounds like you 2. ask it "what am I not asking you that could make me more money?" it told me to monitor competitors weekly, build follow-up sequences on day 3 and day 7, and target companies whose budgets are already hot. one prompt changed the whole session. 3. set up daily competitor monitoring. pick 5 competitors. every morning it checks their pricing, features, content, and X mentions. changes get summarized. silence when nothing moves. delivered to your inbox at 8am. 4. need to fundraise? describe your startup once. it builds a 50-VC spreadsheet with fund size, thesis fit, the right partner, and their recent activity. 5. turn a podcast episode or loom video into a blog post, tweetable quotes, and a carousel. one upload. 6. reverse engineer any competitor's SEO strategy or pricing page. see exactly where you're leaving money on the table. 7. hiring? describe the role. it finds and ranks 50 candidates in minutes. 8. it orchestrates 19 models in parallel. one for reasoning, one for code, one for research, one for images. it picks the best model for each step automatically. 9. start thinking in recurring workflows that compound every day without you (this is relevant for perplexity computer or any tool you use) episode is live on @startupideaspod (full live walkthrough) send this to a friend who keeps saying they want to start using AI agents. watch

If you thought your company's edge was "how fast you ship", you're in for a rude awakening. Everyone can ship fast now. Obviously, not everyone can ship tastefully, with quality and restraint in mind. That's the new edge.

Am i the only dork who still loses money on this xD https://trustmrr.com/special-category/op… Then again can't complain in my new role as OpenAI troublemaker. 😅

Radiant CEO @DougBernauer on the lessons he learned working at SpaceX and The Boring Company, and reporting directly to Elon Musk: "I would just go and talk to whoever I needed. I'd cross every line possible. I didn't use the right channels of communication. I just pulled all the assets - I'm building a thing, and I'm ignoring everything else. That's still how I operate." "I loved it. It's why I stayed 12 years. It's the coolest mission - make life multi planetary. I left to make a reactor company to make power for that mission still." "I made the first Falcon 9 ground system. Then I made the first two rockets. I traveled around the country testing the first two Falcon 9's that flew. Then I did the first ever rocket with legs." "That was reporting directly to Elon with three other people. We'd go to his desk, and tell him what we were doing. We got so lucky - every time we came to him, we were pretty much like, 'The qual tank passed and it worked, and the schedule's good.' So, he loved it." "Then I was doing The Boring Company and Hyperloop - basically every Elon side project."

Sometimes when a startup wants to escape from a bad organization that has some claim on their IP, it's worth rewriting their software from scratch in a "clean room." AI-assisted programming will make this much easier.

.@ResslAI deploys AI employees at field ops businesses to automate their office work - responding to leads, booking jobs, sending estimates, etc. Their agents sit on existing software and increase operating margins. Congrats on the launch, @arushi_ressl and @AbhishekEswaran! https://ycombinator.com/launches/PXv-res…

This morning, my agents filed 192 million lawsuits against every company in the world. 0.1% of the companies settled for $1000. I was up $200 million. By the afternoon, their agents countersued and my agent settled for $2000 each. I am now bankrupt.

The only paths to a soft landing: 1. Government subsidized severance pay if you get laid off by AI 2. Govt subsidized APIs/Mac Mini’s for your business 3. AI increases govt efficiency to reduce debt/taxes All of which require America mogging the international markets first

I meet a lot of founders who are worried by the rapid rate of technological change. They shouldn't be. It may feel uncomfortable, but techno-turbulence is net good for startups. They're much more likely to adapt successfully to some big change than incumbents are.

Ben Horowitz on the infrastructure behind the AI economy: "Crypto is the natural money for AI because it’s internet-native money." "AI is global. Crypto is global." "There needs to be not just a ledger of money, but probably a ledger of truth for AI to really fulfill its potential." "I think people are probably underestimating how crypto and AI work together to form the AI economy." "Networks and computers tend to grow together, and I think that AI is obviously a new kind of computer and crypto is a new kind of network." @bhorowitz on Moonshots with @PeterDiamandis

"I can imagine the jobs eliminated. I'm not imaginative enough to think of all the jobs that will be newly created. I see a net decline in jobs." @HowardMarksBook says AI is innovating faster than society can adjust, and even if we could adapt, we'll see a significant period of job market dislocation. "There are people who say, 'I have great news, people aren't going to have to work.' To me that's terrible news. We get a great deal from our work other than a paycheck. How are those elements of life going to be replaced?"

I have AIDHD. The models are so good that I’m working on 5 different projects a day. At first it felt like distraction, but I’ve shipped more features and apps in the last 3 months than ever before. AI made building fun again. It’s a better programmer than me, so I can focus on creativity instead. I’m grateful to be alive at this moment. Decades from now, people will look back at this era as the best time to be a maker. Huge respect to the people building the models so idiots like me can just make stuff.

We're a few months away from a $500/month plan. maybe weeks.

My agent looked up every Amazon product I've bought in the last 10 years, called each manufacturer, said it broke and demanded a replacement. I now have 6 TVs, 12 printers, 2 microwaves, and 800 tubes of tooth paste.

how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding: 1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now 2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend 3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets 4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time 5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users 6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists 7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees. 8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing 9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A 10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start you don't

Omarchy 3.4 is out! Massive release with 61 contributors, three new themes, tailored Tmux, new screenshot flow, new agent features (claude by default + tmux swarm!), keyboard RGB theme syncing, and a million other things. https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/rele…

Today's chapter of Agentic Engineering Patterns is some good general career advice which happens to also help when working with coding agents: Hoard things you know how to do https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic…

Someone asked what's the most underappreciated quality in startup founders. I realized I could answer this by asking what's the most underappreciated aspect of startups. That's easy: how hard they are. So the most underappreciated quality in founders is sheer toughness.

"There’s at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity." Stripe CEO Patrick Collison: "There’s been a phase transition in 2025." "There are many more businesses getting started and the average, the median business is in fact performing better." "Looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe… end of ’25, beginning of ’26 is when I feel like we’re really starting to see it." @patrickc with @collision on @tbpn