👋 Howdy to the 4,225 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 454,990-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

👾 Treating Candidates Well, Post-Training & AI Recruitment. An interview with Sofia Faiman, Recruitment Manager at Athyna.
🍂 The Startup That Launched Itself. An interview with Andrew Busse, VP of AI Operations at Hyperagent (by Airtable).
⚓ The Intelligent Layer In Enterprise Data. An interview with Ethan Ding, Co-Founder & CEO at TextQL.

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Set your profile once. Less hunting, more building.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

New brand for the newsletter is coming along nicely. Well, it’s been a battle, actually. One of our early investors at Athyna runs a great product and design agency, and did a ripping job on the Athyna brand refresh recently. Absolutely nailed it. Building out the new Open Source CEO brand was more difficult. The designs were awesome, but they just weren’t the core of what this newsletter is about. It was too polished.

So, I scrapped the entire new brand and am building a brand kit myself around the core identity of this newsletter. Something since day one I’ve been calling ‘Dirtbag Chic.’ New website, and a few more bells and whistles rolling out soon. Couldn’t be happier with the decision.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Let’s Talk About Benefits, Baby

There are countless ways to improve a company's culture. One of the least sexy ways is to improve your benefits. No one is writing best-selling books on benefits. Twitter threaboiis banging away their keyboards telling people all the ways co-working passes work. But while they may sit behind total comp, and the overall way you treat people, benefits are important.

Feels I get when I use the B word.

That’s why today we are diving face-first into the topic. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say the benefits package we offer at Athyna goes a long way towards our 90% engagement score averages. For context: that’s world-class. So let’s do it. Open Source CEO, the Benefits Edition.

“Mummy, where do benefits come from?”

Benefits are not a new phenomenon. Benefits, in the earliest sense, began in ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Workers, and especially skilled laborers or soldiers, often received housing, food, or land in exchange for their services.

It was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, though, that the benefits of today started to take shape. First, really just in the form of safety. Physical safety, and also wage protections. Railroad and mining companies were among the first to offer benefits in the 1800s, primarily by providing company doctors, as workplace injuries were common.

Then came more progressive practices: Henry Ford, of Ford Motor Company fame, began offering higher wages and reduced work hours—hello, eight-hour workday—to attract and retain workers. But it was the 1940s-1950s that benefits really took off. During wartime, wage controls were in place, so companies competed for talent by offering perks like health insurance, pensions, and paid vacations.

Fast forward more decades, and unions led to retirement plans, tech leads to ping pong tables, who knows, maybe in the 2040s we’ll have robot masseuses in every office around the world.

Benefits are bidirectional

When you think about benefits though, the mind usually goes to the employee. What does the employee get from the company, or what does the employer give to the worker? But that’s a little bit shortsighted. There are huge benefits that go both ways with a great benefits structure. Benefits aren’t a cost; rather, they are an investment.

Another example of bidirectional benefits.

Think about it; better benefits usually mean less burnout, lower turnover, higher productivity, a better culture, and easier hiring. The list goes on. Here are a few stats around some of these factors.

_{*Note: I pulled these from various sources but skipped the citations. I’ll do better next time, I swear.}

Next, we are going to look at a few key pillars of Athyna’s compensation and benefits programs that have worked really well in keeping our team engaged over the years.

#1: Parental leave (paternity + maternity)

The first benefit I want to highlight is parental leave. The most exciting, but also most stressful, time in a young family’s life is having the child. When building out the company, we wanted to make sure we were taking care of both birth parents, enabling the family to be able to enjoy the time with their newborn kiddo.

_{*Note: the data in the chart below is from 2019, but similar policies apply today.}

Our policy gives 24 weeks of full-rate paid leave for the birth mother and 20 weeks of full leave to the non-birth parent. It’s a really strong policy, much better than my home country of Australia, although Australia has made improvements lately, and much better than the US, which, interestingly, is one of the only OECD countries in the world—one of two, I believe—that does not pay parental leave.

Interestingly, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and many other European countries have incredible policies, including up to 86 weeks of full-rate leave. On paper, it’s great to look after people, especially taking care of both parents, but in practice it’s even better. See this lovely message from Mailen, one of our recruitment leaders, after coming home from leave to have her second child.

What’s even better is that her husband happened to be our head of finance at Athyna, so he took the time off too. We’ve been through a lot together, he and I, with the last few years being incredibly stressful for long periods, so to see him step away and take some time to enjoy the experience of becoming a father for a second time is very rewarding for me.

#2: Equity from intern to executive

The second incredibly powerful benefit we boast is a world-class equity incentive plan. And let me first start by saying how disappointing most equity plans are. They are bullshit in most cases, if you ask me. They are often nothing more than a bait-and-switch.

Companies will often boast, ‘Come and join us, we have great equity,’ but then you find out that: a) the stock is options, so you need to pay, and b) you have a short exercise period after vesting, or they go back to the company’s equity pool. Not to mention early-stage company stock is incredibly valuable, but fraught with danger, as most companies fail. I truly believe that the way to create lasting impact for your team is to build a large, valuable company, and share in the upside.

Source.

At Athyna, on day one, we carved out 20% of the company in an RSU (Restricted Stock Units) pool for the team. Most companies allocate 10-15 percent to their equity pool, and most, again, use options. What is the difference between options and RSUs? Well, RSUs are a gift. They don’t need you to pay. We give you a piece of the company.

_{*And—this is kinda nerdy, deep-in-the-weeds technical stuff—we have a double trigger clause in our RSUs to cover any potential tax liability one might have, with the first trigger being vesting, and the second trigger being a liquidity event.}

I actually can’t believe people issue options. It drives me nuts. If you come join my company and work your butt off for a number of years, you will be rewarded. This statement rings true from intern to executive.

Source: Cake Equity.

This initiative gives our team true ownership and a vested interest in making things work. And getting the company to wonderful financial results in the future. I want the earliest members of our team to be able to go and buy houses with their Athyna stock. And I think we are well on our way to making that happen.

#3: Investment program

This third opportunity is something that I stole from one of my favorite digital uncles, Scott Galloway. Scott mentioned on his Prof G Show podcast recently that his employer, Vox Media, doesn’t actually pay him regularly; instead, he uses their salary sacrifice program to invest his pre-tax income.

When I heard this, I realized how well this would work as a bidirectional benefit for Athyna to boost working capital, while paying roughly double (when adjusted for pre vs post-tax investing) what investing in the stock market would historically pay per annum. In the vast majority of cases worldwide, people invest their post-tax earnings. So ~30% less than their pre-tax amount. At Athyna, we have an employee investment scheme in which our team can invest a lump sum or divert a small % of their wages to receive a 10% pre-tax return.

Here is a super simple explanation of the math behind the two investment opportunities, using round figures for ease of conversation.

_{*Note: working off historical stock market returns of 7% per annum.}

As you can see, the Athyna investment scenario offers more than twice the return in the same amount of time. The illustration below shows what the impact of that would look like if it played out over time.

As you can see, this works wonderfully as an investment vehicle for the team, and the craziest thing is, there is next to no risk. For Athyna, or any other company, it works great too; to borrow money elsewhere, you would typically pay 13-18%.

💡 If you are interested in learning more about how we structure any of these benefits, hit me up with a reply and I am happy to share more.

Summary / Future

It’s very easy to sit here today and talk about all the things that are wrong in the world. And how hard we have it at work. But in the grand scheme of things, we are in a better place than probably any time in history. Hell, most of our ancestors were peasants bound to work on land owned by nobles or lords.

Serf’s up.

Considering this, I think we should be excited about the future. Work, will likely be more and more flexible, with better and better benefits, and if our policy makers—and big tech overlords—do their jobs well enough, it might even be less and less hours as well.

Fun facts

• Coffee for all: Coffee breaks became standard in American workplaces thanks to a Pan-American Coffee Bureau ad campaign in the 1950s that convinced employers that coffee breaks would boost productivity.

• Love me tender: In Japan, some companies offer "heartbreak leave" - paid time off to recover from a bad breakup.

• Mahalo to the weekend: The casual Friday from Hawaii's ‘Aloha Fridays’ in the 1960s, where workers were encouraged to wear Hawaiian shirts to promote the local garment industry.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• The Perfect Onboarding In 7 Simple Steps - May, 2024

• How (This & Other) Newsletters Make Money - November, 2024

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,210 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 450,765-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🍂 The Startup That Launched Itself. An interview with Andrew Busse, VP of AI Operations at Hyperagent (by Airtable).
⚓ The Intelligent Layer In Enterprise Data. An interview with Ethan Ding, Co-Founder & CEO at TextQL.
🎳 Brand Expansion = Loading. We've reached a point where we can take a breath and think about what should come next.

PARTNERS 💫

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Confidence in the room starts with what you prepared before you walked in.

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Trusted by companies like Miro, Bilt, and Perplexity.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

For those of you who love sport, I salute you. Today, NBA fans around the world witnessed what might have been the second- or third-best basketball game of my lifetime. The championship-starved New York Knicks came back from an NBA Finals record deficit of 29 points on this tip you see below by O.G. Anunoby with 1.2 seconds left.

Sport is wonderful because it doesn’t matter if you are black or white, a man or a woman, tall or short, dumb, deaf, or blind; if you support a team together, you are together. Everything else falls by the wayside. Why we started playing sport is strange, but it is truly one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Oh, and by the way, today’s piece is an interview with one of my team members at Athyna. For the sake of the piece, I don’t make any real allusion to that. But thought it good to clear it up here. It’s a great one, with one of the most talented people I know. Enjoy!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Sof Faiman, Recruitment Manager at Athyna

Sofia Faiman is the Recruitment Manager at Athyna, the AI-powered global talent platform that connects companies with world-class remote professionals across engineering, product, design, GTM, and finance, while also just launching a post-training arm, Athyna Intelligence. Based in Buenos Aires, Sofia leads a fully remote team across multiple regions, overseeing strategy, tooling, candidate experience, and the team's transition to Athyna's proprietary AI-powered matching platform. She has been building the recruitment function at Athyna since early in the company's growth.

Sof manages recruitment the way she thinks it should be done: with empathy at the center, and AI as the accelerant rather than the replacement. She came up through an industry that often treats candidates as interchangeable, and she's spent her career building against that. At Athyna, she's been responsible for moving the team from spreadsheets to an AI-driven ATS, improving match quality and time-to-place, all while keeping a remote team performing at a high level across time zones.

What problem is Athyna trying to solve today?

At its core, Athyna is solving a very specific talent access problem. We have always served the market with top-quality developers, product folks, and GTM, and we continue to do that well, but the big opportunity and problem to solve for us today is in AI. As AI models get more complex, the companies building them need highly specialized researchers fast, and traditional hiring markets just can't keep up with that demand.

Cool brand.

For example, Latin America produces over 25,000 PhDs a year across math, physics, computer science, engineering, and adjacent fields. That's a huge and largely untapped pool. So we built Athyna Intelligence specifically to connect that pipeline with AI companies that need expert-level talent to support their models, whether that's model training, data generation, or evaluation.

All with vetted PhD and Master 's-level researchers, in US-aligned time zones, and at significantly lower cost than US or European equivalents. On top of that, we also built an AI-powered job board so candidates can find roles faster and more directly. It's another way we're making access to this talent pool easier and more seamless for the companies that need it most. In summary, we are building the talent infrastructure that AI development actually needs right now.

What does it look like to recruit PhDs and Masters compared to developers and engineers?

Most people assume recruiting is recruiting, but these two profiles couldn't be more different. With engineers, the playbook is pretty structured. Well-known platforms for sourcing, solid tools for technical screens and take-homes that make the evaluation process consistent and scalable, and clear benchmarks.

Where they hide.

With research profiles, the whole dynamic shifts. Top research profiles are often not actively looking, and the pool is specialized by nature. The right fit depends heavily on the specific domain you're hiring for, so the search is more niche, more investigative. You're reading into someone's academic background, their publications, their area of focus, and your outreach has to reflect that depth because a generic message just won't land. But the AI side makes this really exciting. PhDs and Masters with quantitative or research backgrounds are genuinely drawn to these opportunities. They get to contribute to innovative AI projects, apply their expertise in a real-world context, and do it flexibly alongside their existing work or research. That combination of intellectual challenge, flexibility, and AI relevance is honestly a strong sell. You just have to know how to find them and speak their language.

What does your team look like? And what about a typical day?

I have two direct reports who are Team Leads, and they each have their own teams. That's six recruiters who I'm not directly managing day-to-day, but who are part of my team and whose performance I'm responsible for. Eight in total.

As for my day, it varies a lot. I find this question pretty hard to answer, honestly. It changes depending on which projects we're in and which stage of the period we're at. If we're in OKR planning or making strategic decisions, that gets a lot of my focus. Still, most of the time it's one-on-ones with the team to stay close to them, handling communications across different departments, improving processes, and talking to some key clients. I work really closely with product because they help us develop new features for our internal platform. I'm also in regular communication with our different vendors to make sure everything is running smoothly, and I take in feedback from the team and make sure we can actually act on it. Those are the core things. Everything else changes week to week.

How has your role changed from Lead TA Manager to running the whole recruitment team?

The scope expanded significantly. I became responsible for the department's results, metrics, strategy, and team well-being and morale. That meant I was much more closely involved in strategy, identifying pain points, solving cross-functional issues, finding solutions that help other departments work better in association with us, evaluating new tools—we're in a real exploration era with AI—and supporting the team in general. Something that became a big part of my role was the cross-functional side. Recruitment at Athyna doesn't operate in isolation.

Source.

Sales, recruitment, and CS all work together as part of the same commercial lifecycle, so improving how those teams collaborate and making sure that cycle runs smoothly became something I was directly responsible for.

And then there's the AI shift, which honestly was one of the biggest things I had to navigate. The rules of recruitment were changing in real time. New tools, new client needs, entirely new ways of working. That created a lot of uncertainty for the team, and my job was to make sure nobody felt left behind. We started running AI literacy sessions and workshops so everyone felt equipped and confident, not threatened. And out of that process we actually built something new, Athyna Intelligence, a whole business unit connecting AI companies with PhD and Masters-level researchers from Latin America. So AI didn't just change how we work; it opened up an entirely new direction for the business.

How do you set goals at Athyna? And how do you build a high-performing remote team?

We run on six-month OKR cycles. At the start of each cycle, senior leadership comes together to evaluate the previous cycle's results, discuss priorities and upcoming projects, and exchange perspectives. From that session, we define company-level goals, which then flow down into departmental goals.

What I love about how we run the departmental phase is that it's not top-down. Each department then runs the same structured process internally. The whole team gets together, we share the company goals, and collectively figure out how our specific department can best contribute to them. From that conversation, we build out our own objectives and key results.

Team Argentina & Brazil.

That process creates real ownership. When people have a voice in shaping the goals, they're far more engaged in actually pursuing them. And OKRs as a framework really support all of that. They make objectives clear, specific, and time-bound. They demand owners, so there's always someone accountable for execution. And they're easily trackable, so at any point you know exactly where you stand. It's a system that keeps everyone aligned and moving in the same direction. Performance-wise, I really, really believe it starts with culture. Our senior management has done a great job there: a lot of time was invested early on in building an open and trustworthy culture.

That's a big part of it, but it's not enough on its own. What I try to do is make sure the team has the tools they need to do their work properly, and I give them the autonomy and trust to do their jobs independently. They're accountable for their work, and I have their backs all the time. I think those things are what drives performance, because they create a good experience for all the people working at Athyna.

What is broken about recruitment today?

There's definitely this tendency to treat people as interchangeable in hiring processes, which I think is what breaks candidate experience. Treating people like resources rather than actual people. Behind every application, there's someone making a real-life decision, one that affects their income, their future, maybe their family's future. When a hiring process lacks empathy or even basic communication, the candidate ends up feeling disposable and, ultimately, that damages the brand too.

To make sure that doesn't happen, I do my best to always be transparent and consistent in my communication, even when things aren't moving as expected or are slower than planned. Staying close to talent, setting expectations clearly, making sure people know they're being treated as people and that their needs are being considered. That's my go-to strategy, and honestly, what everyone should be doing.

Hire now.

What has changed moving from pre-AI recruitment to how recruitment functions today?

Our team was so scared when we made that switch to leveraging AI, but over time it made us so much sharper and faster. We improved our time-to-match a lot as well as the quality of the matches themselves. AI is helping us identify better talent, apply better filters, and that accuracy in matching means we're more successful when placing people, which directly impacts our client satisfaction. It brought a lot of positive changes. We used to write every job description manually, take interview notes by hand, write every briefing, every communication piece, and run language assessments as a separate process on top of everything else. That was our reality not too long ago. It worked, but it was slow, and every decision, every assessment, every output lived or died on the knowledge and instinct of the person behind it.

Athyna swipes right.

Today that looks completely different. We started integrating external tools, automating processes, and eventually building our own AI solutions with the support of a global product team. We built Athyna AI, which first brought AI-powered talent matching based on client briefs. This alone changed our speed dramatically, improving endorsement times by 50%. It also brought AI note-taking, evaluations, and language scoring. But the piece I'm most proud of is our AI-led interview. The system generates questions directly based on the role requirements; it's fully self-served, takes candidates around 8 minutes to complete, and gives us a full assessment of their spoken ability, relevant skills, strengths, risks, and language proficiency. No human intervention needed at that stage.

At the end of the day, AI didn't replace the recruiter. It made the good ones much better. It freed us up to focus on what actually matters: the relationships, the strategy, the decisions that genuinely need a human behind them. And most importantly, delivering the best possible experience to our clients and candidates, which is something we've always been known for.

💡 Note: If you're looking for the best post-training talent to train your models, check out Athyna Intelligence.

Where is AI taking the recruiter's job in the coming years?

There's this dramatic view that AI could potentially replace recruitment entirely. I don't think that's going to happen, because there's always a human element involved, even if AI is running interviews or whatever comes next. What AI will do is make processes much, much faster: sourcing, searching, matching, all of it. Less manual work across the board. But it will not replace a recruiter when it comes to building relationships, reading people, or managing the emotional side of a career change. A lot goes into reading a person that you can't put on a CV. I think the recruitment role will probably shift a little, but it will remain just as important as it is now.

What's your philosophy around leadership?

I guide myself on three core concepts. The first is empowerment. That word is really close to how I work: making sure the team can do their best work, tailoring the way I work with each person based on their skills and what they need, empowering people to do what they're best at. Because everyone has different strengths.

The second is trust and communication. I've mentioned both a lot on this call, but I really do believe they're the key. The third is just making sure the team has everything they need—the knowledge, the tools, the context—and that I'm there to back them up if needed, but that they can do a great job themselves. I genuinely care about everyone's growth and becoming a better professional. Building career paths is something I believe in. Making sure everyone has a next step they're excited about and is motivated to be their best.

And the last thing I always remind myself: it's not about me, it's about them. Not my ego, nothing like that. Just the team, and doing the best work we can together.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I always try to learn new things. That keeps me going. I've made it a personal mission to learn something new every year, whether it's work-related or not. This year I studied oratory, and I also did a postgraduate two years ago. Last year was my year of learning something for myself, so I studied architecture and interior design, which was totally different. But those things keep me really connected on a personal level.

I also have pretty high standards for myself, which keeps me grounded professionally. And I believe in leading by example, which means I need to stay sharp so I can actually demonstrate that. Remote work has really helped me build a work-life balance that works for me, making sure my social life and hobbies are covered. This year I'm enrolled in calisthenics, which is really challenging and exciting. I try to stay active and keep exploring. I love exploring new things.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• We Raised $2.5M To Build Athyna AI - May, 2024

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 20925

And that’s it! You can follow Sof on LinkedIn or check out Athyna to keep up with what we’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Granola*—an AI-powered notepad that takes, summarizes, and organizes meeting notes without using intrusive recording bots.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,003 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 446,555-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎳 Brand Expansion = Loading. We've reached a point to take a breath and think of what should come next.
🧬 Enhancement, AI Doctors & The Future Of Health. An interview with Max Marchione, Founder at Superpower.
🔥 How To (Attempt To) Send 1M Outbound Emails A Day. Our wild plan to send world record levels of outbound.

PARTNERS 💫

Framer helps teams design, build, and launch their marketing sites lightning fast. With the ability to publish hundreds of CMS pages in a single click, operate at a global scale with seamless localization, and even host unified content across multiple domains, teams have never been able to ship faster.

Trusted by companies like Miro, Bilt, and Perplexity.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

If you haven’t noticed, there are some pretty interesting plays on the agent harness today. They are very interesting to me because being trapped in one ecosystem (Anthropic, OpenAI, others) while other models accelerate around you is stressful. The team at Hyperagent have built a platform where you use whichever model is best for the job. Claude, ChatPT, Gemini.

Try it out.

They also gave me $1,000 free credits for my community to try it out. Hyperagent is a new startup inside of Airtable, the $11B behemoth. So quality is all over the tool. Anyway, let’s dive into how they built it and the strategy around it.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Andrew Busse, VP of AI Operations at Airtable

Andrew Busse is the VP of AI Operations at Airtable, where he leads operations and go-to-market for Hyperagent, the company's standalone platform for building and deploying autonomous AI agents. A mechanical engineering and business management graduate of MIT, Andrew traded equities at Goldman Sachs and founded a consumer supplements brand, Revivo Energy Chews, before joining Airtable in 2018 and moving through growth, special projects, and chief of staff roles. He is also a Scout at Andreessen Horowitz. Airtable, founded in 2012 and valued at $11.7 billion, is used by more than 500,000 organizations. Hyperagent launched publicly in February 2026 with a mission to help companies go agent-first; recently, they gave away $10M to founders who are building agentic businesses. They call it the Founding 500.

The bet underneath Hyperagent is a familiar one for Airtable. A decade ago, the company took building software and made it something anyone could do. Andrew thinks the same opportunity exists with AI agents, a proven technology still locked behind technical setup and security risk, waiting for someone to make it usable by an entire team rather than a handful of power users. His argument is that the model itself is becoming a commodity, and the durable product is the layer around it—the skills, the memory, and the verification loop that improves with every run. The clearest proof so far might be their recent launch: the Founding 500 campaign that introduced Hyperagent, from founder and influencer outreach to the landing page to lead qualification, was run almost entirely by Hyperagent's own agents.

Why does Airtable need an agentic product right now?

The form factor behind Hyperagent is the autonomous agent. Give a model a real computer, real tools, and let it do the work. That got validated over the last year by OpenClaw and others. It clearly works and resonates in the market, but it's still reserved for power users. You have to be pretty technical, run it on your own machine, and accept the security risk that comes with it. The opportunity is taking that proven form factor and making it something anyone can actually run a business on. That's our bet.

Taking a step back, this is kind of Airtable's move. A decade ago, we took building software, a pretty technical thing, and made it something anyone could do. We called it ‘democratizing software creation‘. Agents are the new, powerful, and technical thing, and Hyperagent's goal is to democratize them. Same frontier capabilities as OpenClaw, but put in front of all users, made accessible, made safe, and made manageable for a whole team.

Source.

Why build Hyperagent adjacent to the core product?

In terms of how we operate, it has to move at frontier speed. The market is barely formed and moving far faster than traditional software, so it needs to be unconstrained. It doesn't fit within the existing paradigm. From a development standpoint, we needed to be in an unconstrained world, but conceptually it's also a bit different. Airtable is just one of many enterprise products that Hyperagent can connect to in order to get work done. Similar to being model-agnostic, Hyperagent integrates with many enterprise tools, which means we're not going to be overly narrow in our focus on Airtable-specific use cases, though we are seeing many early users using Airtable as the data layer for their agents.

On brand, people have very limited shelf space for what they associate with a brand. The moment Airtable becomes three or four different things, it becomes nothing. Having a clear sandbox to play in and a clear definition of what this product is (so there's name recall and a strong first impression) really matters when you have a whole new form factor, as opposed to just a feature within an existing product.

What was the founding insight?

In a nutshell, AI intelligence is the prerequisite, but not the product. The real product is becoming the harness around the agent. Once models got good enough, especially around the end of last year with Claude Opus 4.6, something shifted. The bottleneck moved from just having a smart model to what you actually apply that model to.

The harness, in action. Source: Hyperagent.

Concretely, that's three things. Skills, where the agent learns how you actually get work done. Memories and retrieval, so it retains your context across sessions. And evals, meaning verification, where every run gets scored, and the whole thing gets better with every single run. The harness around models that are always growing and improving is the durable part. That was the founding inspiration.

How important is model agnosticism to what you're building?

Similar to how Airtable took a model-agnostic approach for its own AI features, what we see is that users have very different applications for their jobs to be done, and real preferences around models based on performance versus cost. There's an ability to truly tailor workflows and agents to specific models.

You can imagine having a supervisor agent that needs heavy reasoning ability, then switching down to a lower-cost model for more rote tasks. Having that dynamic approach matters. From a competitive standpoint, we're also no longer tied to any one model family. We can always give our users the best model for what the specific task requires. That opens up a lot of opportunity without being constrained to any single model roadmap.

You don't have to pick just one.

What's most exciting about AI agents for early-stage builders?

The scaling IC Founder is taking on a new life in this world. What Hyperagent really allows you to do is create an augmented fleet of agents across a lot of these workflows, such as early outreach, understanding funding rounds, competitive intel, and aggregating feedback from early customers. All those nice-to-haves that founders typically let fall through the cracks when they're focused on product development.

But the more important shift is moving from thinking of AI agents as a time-saver for all the stuff you don't want to do, to actually injecting them directly into the core of your business. That could be actual product development, integrating with your repo, creating a dynamic ship log, taking support feedback, and directly informing what you're building on your roadmap. The people having the most impact from our early customers are those taking end-to-end workflows and reimagining each step with an AI agent. Maybe you take in new clients in a totally agentic way: something new comes in, it gets assessed and qualified, a contract write-up gets generated, and ships back to the client, and the agent is actively waiting for the email reply. That's their entire business supply chain, built agentically.

Two things have surprised us most. First, the breadth of use cases. Similar to what surprised us in the early days of Airtable circa 2018 when I joined, the self-serve customer base has adoption across every industry. We're seeing that again with Hyperagent, cattle ranchers, and VCs funding breakthrough companies. The spectrum of who can use it is incredible. And second, the depth of usage from those users, where it's completely augmenting core workflows.

Source.

How do you picture the org chart in an agentic world?

One way I like to think about it is that those closest to the problem are probably best equipped to solve it. In the old world, you'd have to file an IT ticket or go find software that might solve whatever specific thing you were experiencing. We're trying to reduce the barrier to entry. Anyone with the will, the skill, and the understanding of the business processes should be able to build, develop, and use agents.

But, as with Airtable, what we end up seeing is power concentrated among the technically capable individuals who build it into a proper org structure. A lot of what we're investing in is things like a command center, where a single person—say, your ops lead—thinks holistically about skills across the company and whether the data infrastructure is actually connected in the right way for agents to use. So yes, there will always be a low floor for people to interact with agents intuitively. But the actual configuration is probably more concentrated in these power users who lead the charge on what agents mean in a business setting.

 Who's the dream user of Hyperagent?

There are kind of two groups at this stage. The first is the wave of founders thinking in an agent-first way; a new breed asking how they can scale themselves, how to build the first one-person billion-dollar company. All that hype that exists right now. They're making a lot of sacrifices with the tools they're currently using. With OpenClaw, it's essentially YOLO mode across all your software. The question is how to do this reliably and scale, especially as the team grows. That's very much the founder looking to outmaneuver competitors. A lot of people we're seeing are, like, local tax attorneys in the San Antonio region, where, in their market, going agent-first means completely outperforming their competition because it scales them by orders of magnitude beyond traditional businesses.

Trusted by thousands of leading teams.

The second group is existing operators at mid-market to slightly larger companies going through that same transformation, but from a very different starting point. They're coming at it from an enterprise readiness angle. That's a really interesting piece for us, especially as we build out more team functionality and governance. The founders are leading the way, and that's the core ICP, but the existing organizations looking to find leverage and efficiency are also a key part of where we're headed.

What was the biggest trade-off when shipping version 1?

Being feature maximalist. We intentionally started with a very broad set of capabilities out of the box. Memories, evals, multiple invocation types. It's powerful, but it's a lot of product surface area with implications for both UX, where there isn't always a clear golden path, and execution focus for the team.

Source: Hyperagent.

Source: Hyperagent.

The tension is ‘if it's too narrow, it's just a toy. If it's too broad, it's overwhelming.’ Where we landed is giving power users escape hatches. The simple paths stay simple, but the depth and control are there when you want them. That's the low-floor, high-ceiling bet. The hard part was holding both of those things true at the same time.

What does your day-to-day look like?

I've had every ambiguous title that's ever existed: growth, special projects, chief of staff, AI ops. You have to get comfortable with ambiguity. My focus now is on this new product area. Being the operational glue, so clarity on what we're building, why, and by whom, plus all the systems that enable that. But it's also owning the go-to-market side.

Source: Hyperagent.

Source: Hyperagent.

The team is small but mighty. There's a heavy focus on agentically leveraged developers. On the go-to-market side, it's about being as scrappy as possible and rethinking go-to-market the way a startup would. Our asymmetric advantage is Airtable's balance sheet, but a lot of what I'm managing is figuring out which growth bets to make and how to bring this vision to life with its own brand identity. A lot of my week is either building and perfecting agents, working on go-to-market and the campaigns we're driving, or closing the loop with the development teams: ‘What are we hearing from the market, are we still focused on the right big rocks, and where does that take the vision?’

Where does the Hyperagent team sit in Airtable's org chart?

On the go-to-market side, I'm running daily standups, working with the marketing team, managing ops. On the dev side, Howie is driving the roadmap and making sure we're executing against the right vision. Howie is one of the best examples of the IC CEO in practice, pushing more code and burning more tokens than probably anyone else on the team. It's a very invested-in bet. The failure mode in a big company is treating it like a pet project, having it buried in a team within a team within a team. Fin would have died if that's how Intercom had handled it. It has to be elevated in a way that gets the energy and attention required to get it over the zero-to-one hump.

As a team, we try to dedicate as much time as possible to avoid context switching; what I'd call a strategy tax. In my role, keeping the operating rhythm going, forming a clear vision, getting the right people on the right things; it's a full-time job focused on Hyperagent.

What does the near-term roadmap look like?

If I think of the pyramid of product needs, the foundation is the agent harness, the skills, memories, and memory retrieval. Then you get into the more differentiated features on top. One big near-term focus is team features. Today you can build an agent, deploy it to Slack, and invoke it, but we want to get to a world where the product truly meets the demands of teams. Collaborating on agents together, which comes with permissions, cost, and billing implications. The core near-term goal is making Hyperagent the place teams go to deploy agents safely, reliably, and performantly, with full governance and visibility into their organizations. Beyond that, more model agnosticism, getting more models into the platform so we can meet users where they are.

On the growth side, marketplaces. You could imagine someone packaging up a specific skill—how to run a really good interview process, or how to write great interview prep documents—and making it available for other users to pull into their own agents. There are endless possibilities there. But on the core functionality side, it always comes back to the same question, ‘how do we make this as reliable and good as possible for teams?’

Source: Hypergent.

Why isn't collaboration a built-in feature of the existing model providers?

It comes with a lot of considerations you have to be really thoughtful about. The way most agents work today is by authenticating into systems on someone's behalf. So there are major permissions questions. If I connect to my Databricks instance, or I'm on the HR team and connect to Workday, all of a sudden my agent has access to compensation data that someone else working on that agent shouldn't have.

When the scope is agent-to-user, permissioning and governance are more manageable. When you get into multiplayer, there are harder questions. If an agent is authenticating into someone else's account, can that person change the system prompt? Can they deploy it somewhere else?

What Airtable has done well historically, and why we have confidence in the people building this product, is taking these complex software decisions around permission architecture and team sharing and turning them into simple, tasteful UX. You could probably hack that together right now with an OpenClaw instance, but it'll be ugly and have holes. Building something a team can actually adopt and understand. That's where the magic is, and that's what we're building toward.

💡Reminder: Hyperagent is giving away $1,000 in credits to the first 1,000 OpenSource CEO subscribers. Claim yours now.

What's your favorite agentic workflow day-to-day?

I have two at the moment, and I'll admit the first is a simpler one. The workflow that has saved me the most time is our data analyst agent. I used to spend a lot of time writing SQL. I know it sounds like something you could just use a chatbot for, but the way we've structured this (with skills, a repo of cascading skill retrieval, and specific definitions for things like how we calculate MRR), we've built a really robust data analyst that produces better analysis than I ever did manually. We had our board meeting today, and I was able to get full analyst-level questions answered on the fly in a way that a model alone couldn't do. The skills, the memories, the ability to share it with the data team. That's a real unlock.

The second is the Founding 500 campaign. We gave $10 million in inference credits to 500 founders, and almost the entire end-to-end campaign was run agentically—all the outreach to founders and influencers, building the landing page we went to market with, all the early qualification before a human did final review. A campaign like that, I would have needed multiple people to pull together. Instead it was me building one agent, and now it's reusable for any campaign we want to run in the future.

Source.

How do you get the best out of yourself, personally and professionally?

On the work side, being maniacally focused on the highest-leverage thing at any given point, and treating delegation as a feature, not a failure mode. That second part was the harder thing to learn. My instinct, like probably a lot of founders, is to just take on everything myself. Getting the best out of me is really about fighting that instinct and applying myself like a laser rather than a floodlight.

Andrew’s Hyperagent hiking through beautiful scenery.

On the personal side, reset moments. Staying active, going to the gym, hiking, getting off the screen. I spend so much of my life staring at a screen. Cycling is the big one. Last year I was aiming to ride 100 miles every single week, which is hard to pull off with a new kid. We just went to Yosemite this past weekend, and coming back from that is exactly where I find I can really reset and clear the noise.

Extra reading

• Building Athyna Intelligence - January, 2026

• AGI is here. Now harness it. - February, 2026

• The World’s Hottest Industry: Post-Training - March, 2026

And that’s it! You can follow Andrew on LinkedIn or check out Hyperagent on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Lightfield*—an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings.

beehiiv: We use beehiiv to send all of our newsletters. Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails. Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 6,778 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 449,330-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎳 Brand Expansion = Loading. We've reached a point where we can take a breath and think about what should come next.
 🧬 Enhancement, AI Doctors & The Future Of Health. An interview with Max Marchione, Founder at Superpower.
🔥 How To (Attempt To) Send One Million Outbound Emails Per Day. Our wild plan to send world record levels of outbound.

PARTNERS 💫

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"Show me every deal where the champion's gone quiet and draft a re-engagement email for each one."

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Bolt.new removes the second list. Describe what you need, and it builds a working app—no engineers, no sprint planning, no waiting.

Founders are shipping client portals, admin dashboards, and internal trackers in an afternoon.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

BIG NEWS: We launched an AI jobs board at Athyna. If you are looking for jobs in AI, whether that’s typical tech jobs inside of the leading AI firm, or AI/ML, and post-training roles, we have you covered. Find roles at Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, ElevenLabs, Perplexity, Midjourney, Google's AI teams, Harvey, and a long tail of AI-first startups.

Source.

Not only that, Athyna’s AI watches all of them for you. We match their openings to your profile and ping you when a strong fit shows up. Wherever the frontier moves next, you'll hear about it first. Sounds pretty great, right? Anyway, let’s jump into today’s interview.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Ethan Ding, Co-Founder & CEO at TextQL

Ethan Ding is the Co-Founder & CEO of TextQL, a New York-based AI data platform he started in 2022 with Co-Founder & CTO Mark Hay. TextQL builds AI agents that let enterprises query their data across every existing system, without migrating anything. The AI agent, called ‘Ana’, connects directly to a company's BI tools, warehouses, and documentation, and lets anyone ask plain-language questions and get answers in seconds rather than days. Customers include Amazon, Dropbox, Scale AI, and Blackstone. In April 2026, TextQL raised $17M in strategic investment led by Blackstone’s early-stage investment arm, bringing total disclosed funding to $21.1M. Before TextQL, Ethan held data and research roles at Bessemer Venture Partners and Contrary VC. He writes a newsletter on AI cost curves and enterprise infrastructure that has been cited by Ben Thompson, Reid Hoffman, and TBPN.

Ethan.

Ethan describes his entire career as one long, barely-controlled frustration with the status quo. The first two years of TextQL were, by his own account, a disaster: wrong product, churned customers, models that didn't work, a full rebuild. What kept them going wasn't a plan so much as an inability to accept that the problem wasn't solvable. The company that came out the other side has a blunt thesis: every enterprise has messy data, nobody has fixed it in 20 years, and the agents that can finally navigate that mess without demanding a migration first are going to eat the incumbents. Ethan has opinions about that, and he is not shy about sharing them.

What’s the problem you are trying to solve, and why?

The problem we're trying to solve is that it takes people a long time to get access to their data. They hear: our data is not ready, it's garbage in, garbage out, we haven't cleaned it up or moved it into one system. Every single system in the ecosystem wants you to migrate into their own system (whether it's a BI tool, whether it's a data warehouse). We want to be very clear with our messaging that we are agnostic to all the other systems. Our goal is to make it so that you can query from all those places without having to migrate, without having to do anything, as is.

Source: TextQL.

What was the most difficult when going from zero to one?

For the first two years, the product just didn't work. The language models weren't there, the infrastructure wasn't there. We churned almost all our customers and had to constantly rebuild the product. It was a pretty extensive period of ‘are we going to make it? Is this product going to work? Is this space going to work out at all?’ There were a lot of losses to take along the way.

Source.

Source.

I don't know if there was a specific day, but I remember one where we sat down in the office and it was just ‘everything is terrible’. We'd just churned a customer and then tore down the entire product from scratch and started whiteboarding. There were six of us. We all grabbed beers and went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. We were just like: we're going to remember this as the worst time. And yeah, it's gone pretty well since then.

What is your main day-to-day job as CEO?

Right now it's a lot of modeling the best behavior for the team. We have a lot of new salespeople and new forward-deployed engineers who don't yet have a strong intuition for how to pitch the product or position against others. This space is relatively immature (we're still growing it) and we're trying to figure out the right messaging.

I can talk to any CIO and basically produce opportunity out of thin air, because I have 20 or 30 different soft points and a deep understanding of how their world works and how they're getting screwed over. But that knowledge is very hard to impart. Distilling it is the priority right now: figuring out how to scale the best people and get the product to a place where it's sustainable.

Mark and Ethan.

The team is roughly split in three between sales, forward-deployed engineering, and regular engineering. Everyone on the non-engineering side rolls up to me, while everyone on the engineering side rolls up to my Co-Founder, Mark.

What’s your ideal ICP and how you identify them?

Our ideal ICP is anyone with messy data, which is basically every large enterprise. The messier the data, the bigger the difference we can make. It was actually fairly recent that we landed on this messaging. If you tell someone you can build AI that accurately handles their stuff, they'll ask: how do you deal with things that make accuracy harder? And it's like: why don't we just go one level up? We built AI for people with extremely hard-to-make-sense-of data.

That framing just lands better. It feels like a more believable thing in the structural messaging of what you say. We have customers across six continents—five, actually, Antarctica doesn't really count—but by far the majority of our volume is in the United States.

How are you infusing AI operationally day-to-day?

Almost everyone on the team uses Claude. Every single person uses our internal agent for analytics too. It's kind of a requirement of the job. Our agent handles our CRM updates, scheduling, emailing, mailing list management, and all of our data integration work. All of our dashboards and all of our assets are built from the existing product. We basically eat our own cooking entirely.

Mic dropping. 🎤

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

Growing up, I've always been extremely easily frustrated by the status quo; by things around me. It's basically dissatisfaction and rage boiling up inside. In terms of channeling it responsibly.

Showing how you do it.

I'm extremely self-deprecating. I make a lot of jokes about how bad I am at my job and all the mistakes I make. I do my best to create a culture where people can tell me I'm wrong. I try to model the fact that I'm wrong all the time, and on the back of that, that shapes the kind of feedback I get, which I can actually work with.

Extra reading

• TextQL Raises $17M to Help Bring Intelligence to Enterprise Data - April, 2026

• The startup Blackstone just backed to turn any exec’s data question into instant answers - April, 2026

• Building AI for Petabyte-Scale Enterprise Data - October 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Ethan on LinkedIn, his newsletter, or check out TextQL on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Thesys*—a Generative UI company that helps anyone build AI apps and agents that respond with interactive UI like charts, forms, cards, tables, and more, instead of walls of text.

beehiiv: We use beehiiv to send all of our newsletters. Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails. Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 8,673 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 442,552-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🧬 Enhancement, AI Doctors & The Future Of Health. An interview with Max Marchione, Founder at Superpower.
🔥 How To (Attempt To) Send One Million Outbound Emails Per Day. Our wild plan to send world record levels of outbound.
🕹️ Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo. A story of a video game behemoth that began all the way back in the 1800s and still thrives today.

PARTNERS 💫

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Although I speak about my team at Athyna a lot in this newsletter, I probably don’t speak about them enough. The message below was posted on social media without any prompting by a talent who went through a process with us recently. Incredible stuff.

Source.

We might not be the most impressive company in the world, but we are growing fast and profitably, building cool stuff, with a great brand. It is all underpinned by one thing, though: culture. Everything is so much easier when you have 92% engagement scores on average. Culture eats strategy for breakfast; all day, every day.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Brand Expansion = Loading

It’s now been a full three years since we shipped our first edition of Open Source CEO. The crazy thing is that it feels like just yesterday I was fanboying my favorite writers, the Packy McCormicks and Lenny Rachitskys, wondering if the world would like what I wanted to create.

Well, it’s safe to say, the Jury is in. The people have voted with their computer mice (yes, that’s the plural), a whole lot of technology, and meme-addicted weirdos like me love our product. And to you, dear reader, I send you my deepest gratitude.

My goal for today is to share some ideas and updates on expanding the Open Source CEO brand and to gauge your feedback on each. This newsletter is my side hustle alongside my main hustle at Athyna, but as we are growing up—we have a team of four dedicated to the brand today—I think it would be doing us a disservice to play it safe. Let’s dive in.

1/ Travel experiences

One of my first ideas with Open Source was to create bespoke travel experiences: for example, five days touring San Francisco, visiting Anthropic, Google, hardware startups, and deep tech builders. This idea is an amalgamation of my previous startup, AdventureFit, where we took people all around the world on adventure holidays.

Holidays built by founders, for founders; that type of thing. Not only would it be a great experience, but it would also be an awesome way to learn, network, and get inspired. No breakout sessions, no whiteboards, just a pure techno-optimist holiday.

2/ YouTube

One of the two ideas closest to launch would be to take what we do with words and do it with video. It could be any number of formats, Vox-style video essays, man-on-the-street pieces, polished documentaries, a video podcast, or shorts from our interviews.

My man-on-the-street test last year.

Two of the channels I’m leaning towards stylistically are Good Work and Mr. Beat. Good Work is great, as it’s part interview, part presentation, while Mr. Beat is usually a 20-30-minute talk on one interesting topic. What’s important is that both of these lean heavily into what I’d call ‘shit editing.’ Editing that’s deliberately rough, but really works as a pattern interrupt.

Another content type I really like is the polished documentary-style videos. Two channels that are doing this well today are S3 and Sachin and Adam. I really like this content, and it’s something that would be commercially valuable from both a networking and revenue perspective (if we were to sell it, as we do our writing).

The easiest for us to convert into video is either turning our interviews into a podcast or, at the very least, a firehose of shorts, ala TBPN. Although podcasting stresses me out, the shorts idea is quite likely in the very near term.

3/ SWAG

This one is easy. We want people wearing our kit in the world. The thing is how to do it. I don’t think a newsletter like Open Source CEO needs a store. That would be dumb. What I am interested in, though, is custom swag sends, maybe as part of a giveaway. Or a swag subscription that sends one per quarter.

Hear me out on the subscription: No one needs a swag subscription. But what if we had super fun, unique swag that only gets made once, and we ship it to our closest supporters? I support my favorite creators in that way. See me wearing my tie-dyed Channel 5 tracksuit pants below.

4/ Daily news + insights

The other thing closest to release would be a daily tech news version of the newsletter. I’ve sat on this idea for a very long time, but am yet to pull the trigger. I honestly think over time, the likes of the NY Times, WSJ, and Washington Post will continue to struggle. And I think more and more people will want their news delivered with two things: data and memes.

You can think of it like the Bay Area Times, mixed with your friendly neighborhood meme dealer. If we were ever to do this, we’d include a daily poll to gauge the audience's feelings on whatever is top of mind at the time.

If that sounds quite specific, it’s because it is: I find the weekly wrap-up email from Tangle News incredibly addictive. Every day, they poll their audience, and at the end of the week, they send a summary of the week’s poll. Tangle has an audience of 500k readers across the political aisle, so it’s a great way to get a true pulse check on what’s going on in the world, and how people really think about it.

5/ Online + IRL community

Two ideas here. My buddy Michael Batko recently built and sold a running community called Startup Striders, and it gave me some great inspiration. I have the idea to build a set of WhatsApp communities titled ‘Founders who…’

As an example, 22-year-old French basketball phenom Victor Wembenyama just led his San Antonio Spurs into the NBA Finals today, and I’d love to have more people to chat with about it. I have my friends, sure, but I’d also love to join my ‘Founders who love NBA’ WhatsApp group to shoot the breeze about the news. In my experience, founders don’t always have founder mates. Maybe we could do our part to change that. Picture the groups: Founders movie club, Founders who like fantasy, Founders who hike, and so on. We’d be making sweet, sweet founder-friendship love.

As the world goes more and more online, the latter half of the 2020s will see a big push back to IRL events. I can feel it myself; I love remote work and believe it’s great for the world, but I am also craving being around people. With this in mind, I love the idea of tech trivia nights. Getting 50 people together at a bar/pub and having some fun.

Another idea is to get people together for sporting events. My partner loves padel, so we went and played with a group from our gym, and it was a riot. Super fun, over in two hours, and a great way to get some like-minded people together, for some light-hearted fun. Hiring a few fractional or part-time events folks to manage these events in key readers' hubs like San Fran, London, Melbourne, and Buenos Aires would be all it takes.

6/ Accountability streaming

I’ve been banking a set of pixelated tech scenes over the last few months. My plan is to put on an eight-hour loop with some tunes from Suno, to turn into great deep work playlists (kinda like this). Not only that, I want to stream while I work, allowing the Open Source community to join me.

Bezos 1RM.

Elon space hurtling.

I imagine this would turn into cowork sessions with other founders we work with in this newsletter: James Hawkins from Posthog, Christina from Vanta, etc. I’ve not seen anyone do anything like this. Regarding accountability, I really value the Focusmate accountability sessions I join, so I like this as an idea.

Looking ahead

Building a brand is like building a house. You need a solid foundation, then you lay each brick on the ones that came before. Three years in, the foundation is poured. The frame is up. Now I'm staring at a pile of bricks (six of them, give or take) and trying to figure out which wall to build next.

Coming soon?

Lucky for me, I've had some great mentors over time who have helped me read the blueprints more times than I can count. But the honest answer is that half the time I still don't know what goes where, which is why I'm asking you today. Vote above, hit reply with what I missed, and tell me what to build first. The brand expansion is loading. You get to pick the next room.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• We Raised $2.5M To Build Athyna AI - May, 2024

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 2025

• Building Athyna Intelligence - January, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Lightfield*—an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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LATEST POSTS 📚

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🔥 How To (Attempt To) Send One Million Outbound Emails Per Day. Our wild plan to send world record levels of outbound.
🕹️ Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo. A story of a video game behemoth beginning all the way back in the 1800s, and still thriving today.
🦇 Exiting Weapons, Betting On Gotham & The Anti-Portfolio. An interview with Bruce Wayne, Chairman of Wayne Enterprises.

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Most people don’t struggle with tools—they struggle with knowing what to do next. (Or where to start!)

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Ready to experience the same momentum for yourself? Join the next session of the 5 Day Challenge.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I’m excited to ship this piece out for you today. It’s another product I use personally: Superpower. It’s a one-stop AI concierge. It’s such a powerful idea to actually track your health and wellness. It’s crazy to me that this wasn’t a thing much earlier. I, for example, found out through using Superpower that I have high cholesterol. It’s likely genetic, but luckily, they’ve recommended all the steps I need to take to get it under control.

Yes, this is my body.

My next scan is in a month or so, and I actually can’t wait for it. Another reason I love supporting this particular startup is that it’s an Aussie-founded startup taking on the world. A handful of my mates work there now, in fact. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview with Max here. Ciao for now!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Max Marchione, Founder & CEO at Superpower

Max Marchione is the Founder & CEO of Superpower, a San Francisco-based preventive health platform built around an annual membership that includes a 100+ biomarker blood panel, ongoing tracking, and an AI-driven action plan, all for $199 a year. The Australian founder built the company alongside co-founder Jacob Peters after the two were introduced at a London founder event by a mutual friend who told them they were ‘the two most health-obsessed people I know.’ Since then, Superpower has raised a Series A backed by firms including Forerunner Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures and assembled a celebrity-investor list that includes Giannis Antetokounmpo, Shaan Puri, and Arielle Zuckerberg, among others.

SuperMax.

The story behind the company is personal. Superpower is the company he built, so nobody else has to repeat that experience, and the bet underneath it is bigger than blood tests: that within a decade, most people will outsource the running of their health to a software membership, and that enhancement will be the biggest theme in the next era of medicine. Max made that case publicly in a viral TBPN debate with Martin Shkreli, defending AI's role in primary care against one of the industry's loudest contrarians.

Why are you building Superpower?

I went through a long period of having health problems. From ages 12 to 18, it would take me three hours to fall asleep every night. Chronic migraines, chronic sinusitis, I slept through a third of my high school classes, had surgery, was told to medicate for life, saw probably 10 to 20 doctors, and no one knew what was wrong with me. When that happens, you become frustrated with the health system the way it is. Ever since then, I've been really obsessed with this idea: what would it look like if no one else had to go through that because we have a better health system?

Source: Superpower.

Source: Superpower.

It's deeply, personally meaningful to me. I think health really matters to the world. The current system does a good job when you're sick. It does a very bad job of preventing you from getting sick. It does a good job at surgery. It does a very bad job at actually making people better and enhancing people. And for as long as a system like the one we want to build at Superpower doesn't exist, someone or some company has to come along and create it.

How did the founding story come together?

I was in London hosting a little founder event, and someone I met there said, "You have to meet my friend." He put me in touch with one of my co-founders. He said, "You're the two most health-obsessed people I know."

So we met, we got on, we saw eye to eye. We'd both had similarly challenging health experiences, and we both wanted to build a new system. So we teamed up that way, and here we are several years later. I manage most of the functional teams. Jake, my co-founder, does a lot of business development, opportunity creation, and door-opening style stuff.

Some super-healthy guys.

What was the most difficult part of going from zero to one?

Zero to one is paradoxical because you need to do two things at the same time. One is that you need to pitch the biggest, craziest vision of the future you can, because the primary thing an investor cares about is: can this be big? The second thing is you need to operate and execute on the smallest thing you can, because anything big is impossible to do at the start, and trying to do the big thing probably won't work. So you need to start with the small thing that does work. It's paradoxical in that way.

I think the hallmark of whether founders get through the zero-to-one stages is whether they can do both. Another way of thinking about it is this: there's the long term, which is opinionated. It's not market-aware. It's opinionated and contrarian. And there's the short-term, which is reactive. It's market-aware. It's doing what works. It's doing what's proven in the market. It's not trying to do something completely new, because the probability of that working at the start is quite low. Then, over time, you earn the right to do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, over and over, until you reach that long-term vision where you can actually do everything.

How did you land on the product as it is? And what iterations did you go through?

Honestly, for me, even pre-Superpower, it started with a year in explore mode, where I tested dozens of things: dozens of small companies, dozens of small apps, and many ideas. Met lots of people, tried things, spoke with customers. That was important. It felt like I did nothing that year, and from an output perspective, I did nothing obvious. But what I did do was learn what works and what doesn't, get reps’ understanding of marketing and customers, and start learning the machinery for building zero-to-one motions in companies.

When starting Superpower, the initial premise was: let's create high-end concierge medicine for a fraction of the price. The thesis was similar to the Tesla thesis. Start at a higher price for a select few, then bring that price down every few months until we make it accessible to many.

The empowering factor was technology. That's what allowed the democratization to happen. So we started by doing that: high-end concierge medicine, $1,000 to $10,000 a year, quite doctor-led, very bespoke. And then we started productizing more and more things.

The seminal moment when we landed on the first thing we were going to really work on was actually more recent: August 2025. Ironically, it was post our Series A. We hadn't even launched at the Series A stage, which was a mistake, but we live, and we learn. In August last year, we launched our $199-a-year membership, which was fully productized, with very few humans in the loop, and very accessible. A great entry point. The belief was that if we wanted to create a membership that every American could own, we needed to set an accessible membership price. Rather than doing the Tesla strategy of doing everything and then working our way down, let's do the opposite, the Amazon strategy of starting with ‘books for us,’ which was blood testing, and then working our way up. I think it's a far more robust approach. Because if you start high and don't create the forcing function to know what it's like to deal with minimal resources, low prices, little margin, and challenging customer acquisition motions, you never build the muscle. Let's create that forcing function as soon as possible, so we don't just throw doctors at every problem we have. Instead, we have to solve it with technology.

In retrospect, I would have been more narrow at the start. We tried to do too much too early. I would have paid more attention to the market. I would have obsessed a little bit more about what works today, and would have been fine doing something lowly ambitious in the short term, with the belief that that's the right stepping stone to get to where we want to be in the long term.

Have your strategic angel investors played any specific role in the company?

Sometimes. We’ve been able to get certain celebrity partnerships we'll go live with soon that would have been hard without having them as investors. One thing I underrate, and this is a classic Aussie mistake, is to underrate the power of the big name. The big brand, you co-sign with the big celebrity, the big doctor. I've always kind of turned a blind eye to that, or almost found it distasteful because it's too showy. The Aussie distaste for showiness and pretension.

But such signaling, or ‘pretension’ as the Aussies call it, is actually part of how human psychology works, and it's very important. The reality is it's very hard to partner with a big-name doctor or celebrity, and the fact that you can partner with them is a useful, dense signal of legitimacy when communicating to the market. I think that's something we did well. It put us on the map to start. And once we're on the map, we can attract capital, team, and talent more easily, and achieve greater efficiency across all of our marketing. It's one of those foundational things that is time-consuming in the early days, but I do think it sets the company up for better talent, better capital, and better marketing.

What is your North Star metric? And anything you’ve found difficult to move?

How much are we shipping, product velocity, LTV/CAC; we think of that more as just ARPU right now. ARPU is a good proxy. Our CAC stays reasonably flat, so if we want to increase LTV, we have to increase ARPU or retention. LTV/CAC is a bit of a catch-all, and then customer love; when customers love us, everything else falls into place. Those are probably the three main.

As for difficulty, our action plan attachment rate, meaning the rate at which members actually buy the protocol through the platform, has been the hardest. If you speak to one of our members, they all say, ‘After I do my blood test, I want you to tell me what to do, and I want you to make it easy for me to do it.’ So we built an action plan, and we've iterated on it multiple times. It was so hard to get the attach rate above 10%, which is measly.

The number is higher now, but it's taken a while to optimize. People come back to us, they engage, and they get retested with us. But getting someone to actually buy supplements or pharmaceuticals from the action plan was way harder than we thought. Engagement actually works better than we thought. General life-cycle stuff, general engagement, making Superpower front of mind, that works quite well to get someone randomly coming back throughout the year. In theory, the actual action plan moment should be a real economics driver, a customer-love driver, and an engagement driver, but we really struggled with that.

Part of it was actually changing the infrastructure around so we could experiment far faster. We were in a world where it was hard for us to experiment, and it was very hard to optimize when you couldn't quickly change things. Now that we've done that, over the next month, we're running a lot of experiments. Another part was reducing the number of clicks and buttons. Part of it is showing the relationship between the recommendation and someone's data more clearly. Vitamin D, for example, is very easy to sell, because it's clear that taking vitamin D increases your vitamin D biomarker. So when there's a clear relationship, people are more likely to purchase. We need to make that relationship clearer, alongside the other recommendations we make.

When should AI replace a doctor? And what impact will that have?

Most people should chat with an AI to get a second opinion. I know many people who have had the AI catch something their doctor missed. Now, the regulators aren't going to want to hear that, but the reality is, doctors miss a lot of things. They make a lot of mistakes. And if the AI gives someone autonomy and empowerment to be more interested in their health, that's a positive thing.

At the level of ‘Do you trust the AI with the supplement or pharmaceutical it recommends?’ that's a matter of individual choice. I personally trust it more than I trust a doctor. Some people might want to validate its output against a doctor. An AI can't make medical recommendations, provide medical advice, or make a diagnosis. So a knowing customer knows those things, and, given that the AI is providing general information, has to decide whether to treat it as medical advice. That's up to the patient.

I think in 10, 15, and 20 years from now, none of us is going to think much about health. We're just going to have a system and AI that runs it all for us. We'll all likely have a membership to an AI software platform that's connected to everything you need: tests, data, therapeutic supplements, and pharmaceuticals. The AI is just going to run our health for us. We input our preferences, goals, and data, and the system does the rest. That's kind of where I think we're going.

In terms of impact, we'll be able to predict disease far earlier. We'll use health as a tool to help people enhance themselves. We'll think less about ‘let's cure sickness’ and more about how health can allow someone to be superhuman.

I do think enhancement will be the biggest theme in health. Can we live longer? Can we have more energy? Can we lose weight? Can we be taller? Can we put on more muscle? Can we sleep better? Can our skin look better? That will all be the domain of health, and it'll be most of what we call health. And then there's the obvious: can we prevent disease? But I think that actually becomes more table stakes once we have massive amounts of data, advanced therapeutics, and really intelligent systems.

💡 Note: I am actually a Superpower user and a huge fan. If you want to get better at being healthy, join me here.

How are you using AI operationally? And how are you fostering an AI mindset?

If you walk by anyone's desk at Superpower, you'll see a Claude Code window on one monitor and their normal work on another. Everyone is using Claude Code. I don't know a single person on the team who doesn't. That can look like building mini widgets and dashboards. It can look like helping with writing. It can look like writing code. It can look like automating things. That's just common for us. We increasingly build internal tools rather than use external tools. We want to get to the point where the AI is autonomous. I don't think we've done that yet. What I mean is: rather than the AI writing an SEO article, how do we have the AI running the SEO function? We're not quite there, but that's what we're working on.

On the mindset piece, the first thing is to hire young, cracked people; they tend to be very AI-forward. The second thing is, we have a guy who runs AI across the team. He champions AI, gets people set up, helps them automate tasks, and shows them how to use Claude Code. The third thing is to try to entrench it within the culture. We did ‘AI Hero of the Week’ for a couple of months, where at all-hands we'd have whoever the AI hero was get up and share what they built. And then probably the final thing is: let Ajay just cook cool AI stuff, and other people see Ajay cooking cool AI stuff and decide to copy.

Source.

How do you actually think about learning?

I'm always consuming information. Always listening to things: podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks. Typically listening, because I can do that at the gym, when commuting, etc. I spend a lot of time consuming. I listen quite quickly to information. I try to consume content relevant to what I'm working on. You can learn more if you can consume at the same time as you do, so I'll do that pretty intentionally. I read a lot as well, and then I chat with people. Whenever I meet someone, I'm curious, and I tend to ask lots of questions. I try to learn; what is this person one of the best in the world at, and what can I take away from what they've done and learned? Chatting with people is really valuable. Even when I'm interviewing, I treat it as an opportunity. So many people treat interviewing as a chore; I treat it as an opportunity to learn. Finding more moments to learn and practice, I find, is powerful.

And then just being very obsessed with how do you learn; How do humans learn? What's the machinery? I remember after high school, I took what I called a learning gap year. I wanted to learn many things in that year, and the first thing I learned was: let's learn how to learn. Let's learn how the brain processes and responds to information. Let's learn the foundational concepts. Some people call them mental models, or basic principles of human nature. Learn those things. Learn a little bit about a lot. I want to know a little bit about most things. I don't care to go very deep into much. I'll go deep into the select few things that matter, but I want to know a little bit about most things. I think that helps with overall reasoning.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

Health is important. Make sure my foundations are in check, because when they are, I have more energy, better cognition, and I'm happy and in a better mood. The second thing is being obsessed with learning. I'm always very obsessed with learning and improving. The third thing is giving everything, and giving up most things. Company building is an enormous undertaking. It requires an enormous level of commitment, and I will commit just about everything to it.

The next thing is being open to feedback, very truth-seeking. Whenever someone challenges me, I'll sit there for a moment and try to think, ‘Okay, assuming this was true, what would it mean?’ Then I'll think, ‘Okay, is this true in the past? Is this person classically right about this type of decision?’ I'll try to reason, ‘What's the truth here?’

For example, let's say Adam on our team makes a call around talent. He's very good at talent. Even if I disagree, I'll think I'm probably wrong, because Adam's normally right about this, so let me see why my reasoning might have been wrong. But let's say Adam made a call around brand. I'd think about it differently. In the past, Adam has been wrong with calls around brand that I've been right about. Therefore, I'm probably right. It's a real obsession with truth. The last thing is probably obsessing over the key constraint. Just really obsessing over right now, for the business, what are the select few things that really, really, really matter, and always trying to come back to that.

Extra reading

• Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger - March, 2026

• This 25-Year-Old Wants To Replace Your Doctor With AI - February, 2026

• Superpower's Roadmap (Made Public) - December, 2025

• Max Marchione is 25. He plans to stay that way - October, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Max on LinkedIn or check out Superpower on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting BILL—Your AI-powered financial operations platform.

beehiiv: We use beehiiv to send all of our newsletters. Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails. Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,522 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 425,311-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🕹️ Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo. A story of a video game behemoth beginning all the way back in the 1800s, and still thriving today.
🦇 Exiting Weapons, Betting On Gotham & The Anti-Portfolio. An interview with Bruce Wayne, Chairman of Wayne Enterprises.
🥗 Open Sourcing My Content Diet. You are what you eat, and it works the same for your brain. Feel it healthy goodness.

PARTNERS 💫

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Although I speak about my team at Athyna a lot in this newsletter, I probably don’t speak about them enough. The message below was posted on social media without any prompting by a talent who went through a process with us recently. Incredible stuff.

Source.

We might not be the most impressive company in the world, but we are growing fast and profitably, building cool stuff, with a great brand. It is all underpinned by one thing, though: culture. Everything is so much easier when you have 92% engagement scores on average. Culture eats strategy for breakfast; all day, every day.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Life, Liberty & The Pursuit Of Pipeline

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," said the author Mark Twain. The same line could be said about outbound email. Sure, it might be dying, and for many, it is already dead, but if you can put the right message in front of the right person at the right time, you are always in with a puncher's chance.

Nail all three, and you have a customer. Two out of three, and you have a lead. Only tick one, or God forbid, zero out of three, and you are nothing more than a dreaded little four-letter word: SPAM.

IRL spam filter.

Today, we won't be addressing the differences between great outbound and SPAM, but rather a strategy we employed at Athyna (and still do to a certain extent) that had us aiming to be the best in the world at cold outbound email. This is the story of our 1-million-emails-a-day strategy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of pipeline.

The Undefeated, Salesforce & Predictable Revenue

Before going too deep into our story, we need to take a short walk down memory lane to the company that wrote the book on outbound: the $247B giant, Salesforce. The company, known for coining the term SaaS and for building the CRM category, was also known for one thing: outbound.

The 'Predictable Revenue' model, pioneered by Aaron Ross at Salesforce, was built around systematic outbound prospecting. The model used dedicated SDRs focusing solely on outbound lead generation.

Aaron Ross.

Predictable Revenue.

Aaron Ross, the Godfather of Predictable Revenue, later introduced ‘Cold Calling 2.0,’ a framework to efficiently generate leads without traditional cold calling. An offer the sales world, it turned out, could not refuse.

Instead of direct sales pitches, the focus was on setting up meetings via personalized, targeted outbound emails. Smart. So smart that Salesforce's strategies have been widely studied and emulated by other B2B companies, from California to New Caledonia.

I will admit, although I do not kiss the ring of Don Ross daily, I did read his books when they were released, and his volume-first approach to outbound shaped how I think about outbound still to this day.

The rise of ZoomInfo, Outreach, Apollo

Outbound sales tooling has undergone a boom in recent years. ZoomInfo, long known for their comprehensive but grossly overpriced datasets, were the gold standard for sales intelligence. As tech boomed, the demand for efficient outbound strategies grew, and platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, Mailshake, and more rose to meet it, all earning their keep by helping sales teams scale faster. The era of quality and quantity had begun.

This period saw a surge in outbound across the tech sector. It was a gold rush, with companies of all sizes embracing aggressive growth strategies to keep up.

Source: Commsor.

Amid this frothy environment, Apollo broke the price floor. By making their system data accessible to smaller companies and early-stage startups, Apollo democratized (yes, I know it's the most overused word in tech) access to high-quality sales intelligence and outreach tools. Your mom-and-pop business could finally target customers with the precision of an enterprise sales org.

The timing mattered. It coincided with the rising importance of SDRs and the growing reliance on outbound email as a primary sales channel. Apollo lowered the barrier to entry for companies running sophisticated outbound at scale, previously the domain of the mega-funded-gig-chads of the enterprise world.

Athyna’s journey with outbound

The journey of Athyna began as most startup outbound stories go: scraping our own data, burning multiple domains, and getting all-around shitty results. But let's go back a step, to the decision to build a strong outbound arm at Athyna. This decision was made somewhere around day -90, three full months before we launched the business.

Picture me, my then-co-founder (whose name is forever stricken from the records), a laughably large whiteboard, and a bunch of growth channels scribbled across it. This would decide where we spent our limited time and energy in the early stages of the business. Meta, or Facebook at the time, was a no, no real budget there. That canceled out Google as well. Network, yes, we could lean heavily on our network, and outbound. Good old-fashioned outbound, we could do.

Not the actual whiteboard.

The actual whiteboard.

It was economical enough for us to invest time into, and strategically, all the best companies in the world also had a thriving outbound function. Pick a random name out of the Fortune 500 hat, and they would have dominated outbound.

So on day one, week one of the company, we started training our outbound muscle. We were off and running, starting with a humble 50 emails per week.

Our diabolical million emails per day plan

After some trials and tribulations of getting our outbound engine humming, we started to get really good at it, fast. It didn't take long for us to start getting high-quality leads consistently for less than $20. And not too long after that, we had it dialed in so well that we were acquiring a lead within our ICP for between $8-12 on average. Let me remind you, this was 2022.

By this stage, we had scaled our outbound to around 100k emails per week. To do this, in terms of scale and security, we had a number of sub-domains we were running. Think AthynaHQ.com, HeyAthyna.com, WeAreAthyna.com, and more. This was relatively commonplace. Back then, you were safe to send somewhere between 500 and 800 emails per account per day. These were still the glory days of outbound.

The limit here is your brand. If you have a reasonably tight ICP, you can't just keep hitting people over and over again. You'll get marked as spam, and you will slowly begin to do real lasting damage to your brand.

Luckily for us, we were struck by some terrible luck. Our outbound machine, the one channel attributing 85% of our pipeline at the time, broke. And when I say broke, I mean we broke it. Pipeline was as dry as the desert of Arrakis on a summer's day.

Looking for pipeline.

During the ensuing panic, we began to plan for building our system back better, stronger, and more redundant so this could never happen again. We decided to build separate siloed accounts for everything from the domain to the Google account to the IP addresses. The silos created security in the system. If something broke, only one tenth would go down instead of the whole house of cards.

The stroke of genius was the decision to go beyond sub-domains, into entirely new sub-brands. The first of which was called Ziggy's Tech Talent, named after my dog, Ziggy.

💡 Note: We actually have brands named after my brother Jack, Tino (our GM), Cucu (our Creative Director), and more.

The beauty of the sub-brand strategy was two-fold: scale and cut-through. To scale an outbound machine past 200,000 emails per week with one brand, no matter how many sub-domains you have, is hard, maybe impossible. Especially if you are trying to tell yourself that you are still talking to your ideal buyer.

Through sub-brands and custom-built, uniquely branded domains, you don't need to worry about crossing the same prospect twice. Second, and maybe more important, is the cut-through piece. Athyna, you see, services all forms of remote talent. For our clients, startups, and enterprises in tech, we find the best sales, marketing, finance, ops, product, design, and engineering talent. Quite the mouthful, right? And when you land on our site, that's what you see. Same in the inbox.

Picture that you are a VP of engineering at a Fortune 500 and you need 10 Salesforce engineers, and you really needed them a week ago. Two emails land in your inbox. One from Athyna saying, "Hey there, we hire great remote talent," and another from WeHireSalesforceDevs.com with the message, "Hey there, we hire great remote Salesforce engineers." Which of those emails is getting a reply?

Armed with the new strategy, I was hit with a sudden sense of dread. I knew what we had was a ticket to the glory land. Not that one channel can drive an exit, but one channel can lead the charge. The thing was, I knew these things didn't always last forever.

"It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end," said the great Isaac Asimov. Every great strategy is on borrowed time. And since it's the job of a founder to inject risk into a business, I took it upon myself to up the ante by reverse-engineering a plan to send one million outbound emails per day until our systems broke.

So that's what we did. We set out on a project to understand what it would take to send 1 million outbound emails a day. In the research phase, we realized it would take around 10 sub-brands to handle the volume.

The plan was actually working wonderfully well until March 2024, when Google lowered sending limits meaningfully again under their new sender requirements, making outbound at scale prohibitively difficult. It was already under that umbrella before we undertook this ambitious project, but we were better than most.

In the short time from the project's launch to Google pulling the handbrake on us, we scaled our volume from 200,000 emails per week to 1.3 million. And the annoying thing is that we had the infrastructure in place to reach 5 million by the end of 2024. A full one million outbound emails per day.

It's a real shame, because this was one of those once-in-a-decade strategies that we were executing to perfection. If we'd started the strategy only a few years earlier, there would have been no stopping us. Brett Adcock, founder of Figure.ai, said on an episode of My First Million that his first exit, Vettery, which sold for $100M, was powered solely by teams of VAs in the Philippines who scraped large volumes of emails.

Brett and Figure.ai.

Unfortunately, the strategy simply doesn’t work today. Data is too expensive, and sending limits are too low. Which is a good thing for the world, really. A more pleasant inbox is what we all want after all.

Outbound today

Two years on, the answer to ‘Is outbound dead?’ is still no. The shape of it, though, has changed completely. The 1M-a-day strategy that almost worked for us in 2024 simply cannot work in 2026. Volume is over. A lot of the playbook from 2022 now reads like ancient scripture. Three shifts redrew the map.

First, AI SDRs had their moment, and the verdict is in. Tools like 11x and Artisan promised to replace human SDRs entirely. What they actually proved is that outbound without judgment is just spam at scale.

Second, signal-based outbound has eaten everything. Clay went from upstart to category-defining infrastructure. The smartest go-to-market teams I know now run something like: signal in (job change, funding event, product usage, hiring spike), enrichment in Clay, 1:1 outreach drafted with AI and sent by a human. Not a million emails. Maybe a hundred a week, with reply rates 5-10x what we were seeing at scale.

Clay.

Third, LinkedIn is quietly the channel now. The same Fortune 500 VP of engineering who used to open cold emails no longer does. But they will read a thoughtful LinkedIn message from someone whose content they recognize.

The takeaway: the 2024 sub-brand strategy is dead; so is volume. What's alive is a much smaller, much sharper version of the same idea. Right message, right person, right time. The economics just moved. Data used to be expensive; attention was cheap. Now data is everywhere, and attention is the only thing that matters.

Fun outbound facts

• The origins of SPAM: The term ‘SPAM’ comes from a Monty Python sketch where the word is repeatedly sung, drowning out other conversation, much like how spam emails overwhelm inboxes.

• Google’s spam filtering history: Gmail, introduced in 2004, revolutionized email with its then-unheard-of 1 GB storage and advanced spam filtering, which has continually evolved to challenge even the most sophisticated outbound strategies.

• Email volume trivia: The world's first spam email was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation. He sent it to 393 people via the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet.

Extra reading

• Outbound Sales Strategies, Outreach - June, 2023

• The History of Email Marketing, Knak - February, 2024

• The World’s Hottest Industry: Post-Training - March, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Lightfield*—an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,153 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 420,789-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🦇 Exiting Weapons, Betting On Gotham & The Anti-Portfolio. An interview with Bruce Wayne, Chairman of Wayne Enterprises.
🥗 Open Sourcing My Content Diet. You are what you eat, and it works the same for your brain. Feel it healthy goodness.
🎆 Building Smarter Models with Cheaper Tokens. An interview with Benny Chen, Co-Founder at Fireworks AI.

PARTNERS 💫

Real businesses are running on fleets of AI agents. A DTC pet food brand: 14 agents in Slack handling bonus calcs and partner emails—one person built it. An insurance brokerage: 11 agents shipping risk assessments and compliance certificates daily.

They're on Hyperagent, the OS for AI agents. Coworkers that ship, not chatbots. First 1,000 readers get 1,000 free credits.

Trying to figure everything out alone is exhausting.

One of the best parts of the 5 Day Challenge is learning with other people and getting to see how they’re thinking, building, and progressing.

You don’t need to have it all figured out to join. You just need to show up. See you at the next one?

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Last week, I was feeling a bit creative, so I shipped a piece titled "Exiting Weapons, Betting On Gotham & The Anti-Portfolio"; it was a fictional interview with Bruce Wayne, otherwise known as The Dark Knight, The Caped Crusader, or simply The Bat-Man.

Gotham's Guardian.

It was fun for me. I was literally laughing out loud in parts. It had been a while since I did a fictional piece. The last time was my deep dive on Ted Lasso, I think. But while it’s good that I am having fun, I want to know if you like strange pieces like these.

If we do decide to do more pieces like this, I’d love to do a deep dive on the economics of The North, from Game of Thrones next. If you think they sucked, though, they’ll likely be shelved. Anyway, thanks for your vote, and enjoy today’s piece!

DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo

Mario, Pokémon, Zelda, Donkey Kong. If you're alive today, you've either played these games or your kids have. And if I had to guess, I'd say it was you. I bet you romped through the Mushroom Kingdom with the brothers Mario by day, and chased Pikachu and swapped rare Pokémon by night. I know I did. But how did we get here? How did a Yakuza-adjacent trading card company end up inside every family's living room for the last half-century?

Look under the hood of the Japanese gaming giant, and you run into the same thing over and over: creativity. Think of Nintendo as Pixar, if Pixar had reinvented itself every few years across platforms.

Mariocybin.

I've been waiting to write this one. As I started, a thought hit me: this company may have added more joy to children across the world than any other in the last fifty years. Sit with that for a second. On paper, Nintendo is a big, old, fat, smelly corporate monolith. Boards, investors, backstabbings, PR nightmares, links to the underworld. And yet somehow, for decades, it has pumped pure joy into the world. Kinda gives you the warm fuzzies.

So today we're going back in time. All the way to 1889, to a side alley near the banks of the Kamo River, in Japan's former imperial capital, Kyoto. That's where the story of Nintendo begins.

Playing cards, tobacco, ‘love’ hotels & the Yakuza

If I were to tell you Nintendo had an ‘interesting’ past, I’d probably be underselling things. Their original business, launched 23 September 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, originated in playing cards, which had long been looked down upon during the Edo Period of Japan due to their connection to gambling and, by extension, to Japanese organized crime, the Yakuza.

The cards Nintendo were developing were known as ‘Hanafuda Cards.’ They were beautifully decorated and hand-made, 'flower cards,' divided into twelve suits, one for each month of the year. The cards themselves were hand-painted on mulberry wood pulp, and sold well all across Japan. Before long, though, hanafuda cards became associated with the criminal underworld, and manufacturers stopped making them to protect their image.

Unlike its rivals, though, Nintendo saw this as an opportunity, and before long, they were the most prominent hanafuda card manufacturer in all of Japan, with the Yakuza as its biggest customers. Rumor has it that members of the Yakuza even have tattoos that are inspired by the illustrations on the Nintendo cards. This was not the only partnership early Nintendo would share with the underworld.

In what is a strange precursor to Pokémon, the next sordid stage of Nintendo’s growth was their 1900s partnership with Yoshihiro ‘Tobacco King’ Murai. Each pack of Murai’s cigarettes would hold one single card from the hanafuda deck, leaving early Nintendo fans collecting tobacco wrappers in effect trying to ‘catch them all,’ Pokémon style.

_{*Warning: Speculation and rumor incoming.}

Where things get even dicier again in our story is where Nintendo (may have) went next with their product development: love hotels. And by ‘love’ I am sure you know that I mean love in the proverbial sense. The type of love that is fleeting, in and out in under an hour. Yes, that type of love. The story goes that Nintendo's venture into love hotels was part of their business diversification in the 1960s through their real estate development branch. This happened during a period when Nintendo was searching for new business opportunities beyond their traditional playing card market.

Love hotels were (and still are) a legitimate and regulated part of Japanese urban infrastructure. They emerged as a practical solution in post-war Japan, where multiple generations often lived together in small homes, leaving couples with little privacy. These establishments offer short-term stays and maintain a high degree of discretion for their customers.

Allegedly.

Come the mid-1900s, Yamauchi’s grandson, 22-year-old Hiroshi Yamauchi, took over the company. One of his first strategies was to secure the right to place Disney characters on the company’s playing cards, creating a license to print money for the brand. While Nintendo continued to produce hanafuda until they fell out of favor in the 1960s, the great-grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi began crafting his own master plan, starting with diversification into new ventures, including toys and amusement arcades.

The rise of the (arcade) machines

It’s the 1970s; disco is taking off, and Star Wars, Jaws, and Saturday Night Fever have been dominating the box office, and one fast-emerging technology is about to catapult Nintendo onto the global stage. That technology is video games. To contextualize this un poco, the video game industry, at $455 billion annually, is larger than television, music, and film combined.

But in the decade that brought us funny things and funny things, the industry looked a lot like the following: Little Johnny asks his mother for a few quarters to head down the local arcade to play a few rounds of Pong and Space Invaders.

Pre-scrolling dopamine jacking.

In the late 70s, the team at Nintendo began building their first video game systems, starting with the Laser Clay Shooting System, also sometimes called the Beam Gun Series, which marked Nintendo's first venture into electronic gaming. Installed in converted bowling alleys across Japan, these setups used projectors and light-sensing technology to simulate clay pigeon shooting. Players used rifle controllers to shoot at on-screen targets, with sophisticated detection systems tracking their accuracy.

Though the 1973 oil crisis forced many installations to close, the project provided important experience in electronic gaming. This led Nintendo to develop the Beam Gun series of toys and their first home gaming product, the Color TV-Game series, in 1977. These early experiments laid the foundation for Nintendo's transformation from a playing card company to a video game pioneer.

Laser Clay Shooting.

Color TV-Game.

Towards the close of the decade, in 1978, they produced Computer Othello, their first microprocessor-based arcade game. But in 1981, Nintendo would find its true breakthrough with a game featuring a villainous giant gorilla and a hero in a red cap and overalls.

Konnichiwa, Shigeru Miyamoto

By the early 80s, Nintendo was throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. Playing cards, love hotels, clay-pigeon light guns—it was a cocktail of weird ideas fueled by sheer survival instinct. But the gamble that changed everything wasn’t a corporate boardroom play. It came from a young developer with a sketchpad, a wild imagination, and a knack for creating magic. Enter Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto wasn’t a conventional hire. A freshly minted industrial designer, he walked into Nintendo with dreams of creating toys. What he ended up doing instead was creating a legacy with his first major project. What was that project? Donkey Kong. 

The whole thing was part necessity, part accident, with Nintendo needing a hit to salvage their failing arcade game Radar Scope. Miyamoto’s task was to rework the machines into something profitable. Instead of playing it safe, he concocted an idea that not only saved the company but cemented its future.

In Donkey Kong, Miyamoto turned a simple chase into a story. A barrel-tossing gorilla kidnapped a damsel in distress, and players guided a hero carpenter—yes, that’s right, carpenter—then called Jumpman, through a maze of platforms to save her. It was the first time a video game felt like more than a game; it was a world, it was a narrative, and most importantly, it was fun.

As the game took off, Jumpman got a makeover. The original character would trade his hammer for a plunger and go on to be renamed Mario, after Nintendo of America's short-tempered landlord, Mario Segale. Who would have ever guessed that this friendly little Italiano would become Nintendo's most famous face and gaming's most recognizable pizza-loving hero?

Mario Segale.

Jumpman.

The genius of Miyamoto was that he didn't just create games; he created entire universes. After Donkey Kong came The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and a parade of hits that would cement Nintendo's place in entertainment history. But perhaps more importantly, he showed that video games could be more than just high scores and flashing lights; they could tell stories, create worlds, and capture imaginations.

The world meets the Famicom + NES + Game Boy

The latter half of the 1980s is where Nintendo really started to cook. On July 15, 1983, the world (well, actually Japan) was gifted the Famicom, a smooshed-together version of the ‘family-computer.’ This platform is what the larger world, starting with the United States, would know as the NES, or the Nintendo Entertainment System, from 1985 onwards.

_{*Note: The same year the Famicom was released, Nintendo would be listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange}

Nintendo had really struck something here. In a few short years, it was obvious that Nintendo had some budding IP, and with the success of the 1977 launch of the Atari 2600, felt it was the right time for them to join the home console revolution.

When released, the games Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye were available on the platform, and Mario and the debut of his leaner, meaner, and greener would come shortly after with the first official edition of Mario Bros. As they prepared for their eventual U.S. launch, the Nintendo team decided that the quickest and safest way to get their system into consumers' hands was through a partnership with their competitor, Atari.

In what seemed like a wild stroke of bad fortune, come good, Atari nixed the deal after they noticed a bootlegged copy of Donkey Kong being played on a rival system at the 1984 CES festival. They wrongly assumed Nintendo had been negotiating behind their backs, and, in turn, forced Nintendo's hand to do so themselves, which they did, launching the Nintendo Entertainment System at CES in Las Vegas on January 5th the following year.

The thing that would really propel Nintendo into the stratosphere, though, is a new game that Shigeru Miyamoto and his team were working hard on in 1985, Super Mario Bros. The original Mario Bros. game you see was just based around the favorite Italian brothers cleaning the sewers of New York City. This new incarnation raised the stakes.

Instead of our heroes sloshing around in the sewers of New York, they were transported to the mythical land of the Mushroom Kingdom, tasked with saving the wonderful Princess Peach from the clutches of the evil Bowser character. Bowser, or King Koopa, was a large fire-breathing reptilian beast, the King of the Koopas, and a worthy foe for our plunger-wielding heroes. This story would catapult Mario and Nintendo, and would go on to sell 40 million copies worldwide. Super Mario Bros. remains one of the most replayable games in the world today.

Nintendo maintained their momentum through the latter half of the eighties, releasing several major titles you may remember, such as Metroid, Mega Man, and, most notably, The Legend of Zelda, a franchise that is as popular today as it was in decades past.

And finally, with the last gigantic move of the 1980s, Nintendo finally released a product they had been working diligently on for many years, their handheld version of their system, the Nintendo Game Boy. By this stage, it was beginning to look like the video game world was Nintendo’s; we were just living in it.

Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat: The Console Wars

I could have led this section with a title along the lines of Mario versus Sonic the Hedgehog, but for me, the Console Wars of the early nineties were really this dispute: were you a Ryu guy, or did you prefer Sub-Zero, or maybe even his evil arch nemesis from the Shirai Ryu clan, the "GET OVER HERE!" wielding Scorpion. *_{Back, Back + High Punch}

Anywho, by the 1990s, Nintendo wasn’t just running a gaming empire; it was fending off invaders. Sega, the brash upstart, had thrown down the gauntlet with the Genesis, a sleek machine that wasn’t afraid to call Nintendo ‘kid stuff.’ The Genesis came roaring onto the scene with an aggressive marketing campaign and the attitude-packed Sonic the Hedgehog, promising speed, edge, and just enough rebellion to hook older kids who’d outgrown the Mushroom Kingdom. It was effectively a pre vs post-puberty throwdown.

And the fight was real. By 1994, Sega’s Genesis, or Mega Drive, if you were outside the U.S., had sold over 29 million units worldwide. Not bad, but still dwarfed by the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which would ultimately move more than 49 million units globally. Sega’s moves, including a direct call-out to Nintendo in their ‘Genesis does what Nintendo can’t’ ads, forced the gaming giant, Nintendo, to step up its game. The SNES countered with classics like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country, and the Super Mario series, reminding everyone why Nintendo was still a force to be reckoned with.

But as the Sega-Nintendo showdown heated up, two new players entered the arena: Sony and Microsoft. Sony’s PlayStation, launched in 1994, wasn’t just another console; it was a revolution. With sleek AF design, CD-based games, and a killer library, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, and Crash Bandicoot to say the least, the PlayStation became an instant hit. It sold over 102 million units, leaving both Sega and Nintendo scrambling. Sega tried to keep pace with the Saturn, but it fizzled at just 9.2 million units sold.

Meanwhile, Nintendo doubled down with the Nintendo 64, which introduced iconic titles like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Yet, it only managed to sell 32 million units, a solid performance but far behind Sony’s juggernaut.

Then came the wild card: Microsoft’s Xbox in 2001. The Xbox, with its online play via Xbox Live and hits like Halo: Combat Evolved, changed the gaming landscape forever. It wasn’t an instant blockbuster, selling 24 million units compared to the PlayStation 2’s staggering 155 million, but it signaled a shift. Gaming wasn’t just about nostalgia or cute mascots anymore; it was becoming a serious entertainment medium.

For Nintendo, this was a wake-up call. Their GameCube, though beloved by fans, sold just 21 million units, falling behind even Microsoft. The Console Wars weren’t just about Sega vs. Nintendo anymore. Now, it was a battle royale, and Nintendo needed to find a way to stay relevant in a field that was suddenly more crowded and competitive than ever.

And in the years that followed, that’s exactly what they did. But before the comeback, Nintendo would endure some lean times.

The lean years

The late 1990s and early 2000s were brutal for Nintendo. Sony's PlayStation owned the maturing market with cinematic titles and cutting-edge graphics. Microsoft's Xbox arrived with powerful hardware and proper online play. Nintendo got squeezed in the middle. The N64, beloved for Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye 007, sold 32 million units, a sharp drop from the SNES's 49 million.

The next swing, the 2001 GameCube, did worse. Even with hits like Super Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker, it stopped at 21.74 million units. Sony's PlayStation 2 sold 55 million in the same window. Microsoft's first Xbox cleared 24 million. Nintendo was getting outsold in its own category.

“It’sa me guys … guys?”

The bright spot was handhelds. The Game Boy Advance sold 81 million. The DS topped that and then some, hitting 154 million units and becoming one of the best-selling gaming systems ever made. Whatever Nintendo was losing in the living room, it was winning back in pockets and backpacks.

The home console rebound came in 2006 with the Wii. Motion controls, family-friendly software, and a $250 price tag turned it into a phenomenon. It sold more than 100 million units and pulled Nintendo back into the conversation. Then 2012 happened. The Wii U launched, confused everyone with its tablet controller, and sold 13 million units over its lifetime, one of Nintendo's biggest flops.

Source: Visual Capitalist.

So why did this happen? One theory: Nintendo lost its army of third-party developers. And when you lose the developers, you lose the games.

The first self-inflicted wound was the hardware. Nintendo stuck with cartridges on the N64 while competitors moved to CD-ROM. Even the GameCube, which finally adopted optical discs, used a proprietary 1.5GB mini-DVD against Sony's standard 4.7GB DVD. Developers had to compress or cut content to ship on Nintendo.

It wasn't just content getting cut. Between the hardware ceiling and the cost of production (pressing a DVD is far cheaper than manufacturing a Nintendo disc), studios started skipping Nintendo altogether and building for PlayStation and Xbox, which shared a clean port path. Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy all became PlayStation exclusives by default.

On top of that, developers fed up with Nintendo's demanding licensing terms and censorship policies defected to Sony's more developer-friendly PlayStation. The business equivalent of biting the hand that feeds you.

‘We might be screwed.’

By 2016, many people were openly questioning Nintendo's future in the home console market. The company needed something that could bridge the gap between its winning handhelds and its struggling living-room hardware. As it happened, that exact thing was already being built.

Failure Innovation

For every Wii and Switch, Nintendo has shipped a clunker. The misses are part of how they get to the hits. Virtual Boy. R.O.B. (the Robotic Operating Buddy). The clunky Power Glove. The short-lived Game Boy Micro. The Wii U. The Pokéwalker (yes, really). Even the ill-fated partnership with Sony gave birth to their biggest rival, the PlayStation. Nintendo has failed publicly, expensively, and often.

Virtual Boy.

R.O.B.

Companies like Nintendo need to fail at scale to build something worthwhile. As Jeff Bezos puts it, "failure and invention are inseparable twins." The trick is walking the knife's edge. One step too far and you have a major loser on your hands. Two or three in a row and you have a bad decade. A bad decade drains the company's creative horsepower, and then you're not really Nintendo anymore.

Nintendo knows this. They've stayed on top for decades by threading the innovation needle often enough that the wins more than pay for the misses. Most companies can't, and don't.

The Switch: Nintendo's 3-1 comeback

On June 19th 2016, LeBron James won a championship for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the National Basketball Association, the NBA. Who cares, right?! And more importantly, what the heck does this have to do with our story? A lot, it seems.

It was not the fact that LeBron and the Cavs had won it; it was how they had won it. In the days leading up to the 19th, the Cleveland Cavaliers, who LeBron had returned home to play for, had found themselves down 3-1 in a best-of-7 series against MVP Steph Curry’s near-insurmountable Golden State Warriors. A Golden State Warriors team that not only were the reigning champions, but had just set the regular season record of 73 wins and only nine losses. Teams that have been down in the NBA Finals by a 3-1 deficit on 32 occasions, and exactly 0 of them have managed to come back. It was a bridge too far.

Source.

But just as LeBron and the Cavs orchestrated one of sports' greatest comebacks, Nintendo was about to launch their own revolutionary response: the Switch. Released in March 2017, this hybrid console would go on to sell over 132 million units (as of late 2023), becoming Nintendo's best-selling home console ever.

The Switch succeeded by combining home console and portable gaming, offering both Nintendo's beloved franchises and strong third-party support, while its flexibility appealed to casual and hardcore gamers alike. The masterstroke that was the Switch single-handedly rocketed the company back to the place they had spent much of the last decades, the very top of the cultural video game zeitgeist. Marrrriiooo … this is for youu.

Nintendo’s intellectual property push

Now that Nintendo has its swagger back, their next likely foray is into other art forms. Case in point, the incredibly successful launch of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt as Mario, Jack Black as Bowser, and Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong. Expect more of this.

Even though Disney totally screwed it up by turning the Marvel brand into a pile of stinking, slimy, gutter trash by putting profits ahead of the people, companies saw what Disney achieved with the first half of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and are licking their lips. It really started with Marvel and Star Wars, but now franchises like Lord of the Rings, Dune, Game of Thrones, the Batman universe, and more are spreading their IP across more movies and TV (streaming) than ever before.

Only recently did Nintendo announce its plans for an upcoming feature film based on The Legend of Zelda. Take a look at this treasure trove of IP Nintendo can and will likely call on in the not-too-distant future to exploit/extend their brand.

If the massive success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie is anything to go by, Nintendo has only scratched the surface. Expect expansions into streaming series, theme parks, and maybe even more unexpected collaborations; I’d see Donkey Kong on Broadway, wouldn’t you? The sky’s the limit when your characters have already been etched into the cultural consciousness for generations.

Playbook / How you can apply this

Most deep dives serve up an easy playbook. SaaS tool does X. Consumer app does Y. Nintendo is harder. It's 130 years old, sells video games, and has reinvented itself a half-dozen times over. But a few patterns come through.

• Master storytelling. Nintendo is a master storyteller, and that skill compounds as the world gets more crowded with content.

• Make things fun. Nintendo prioritizes fun over hardware specs. That's how you end up with a player base that spans kids, casual players, and hardcore gamers.

• Double down on winners: When something works, push it across every channel and platform you can. When something doesn't, cut it fast.

  Reinvent on a clock: Users, trends, and tech all move. Nintendo ships a brand-new approach to the market roughly every decade and resets the conversation.

  Don't die: Business is the act of outlasting the competition. Nintendo had been around for nearly 100 years before it broke through on the global stage.

Closing

For me, Nintendo is a story of continuous reinvention, decade after decade, and one that I personally hope to see play out for many decades more. Sure, they may have done dealings with the Yakuza, but hey, we’re all young once.

The main thing Nintendo should be remembered for is the joy it has brought to kids around the world. And the exciting part is to think of how much more of this beautiful elixir it still has to serve up. Long live Mario, long live Luigi, hell even long live Bowser the cantankerous old sot.

Fun facts

• Mario before Mario: French general Napoleon was the face of Nintendo for many years and was featured on their ‘Presidential’ line of cards (even though he was technically an emperor). You can still find the Napoleon cards for sale at toy shops today.

• Mario makes cement: Nintendo’s little-known first game hit was the Game & Watch title ‘Mario’s Cement Factory.’ An oft-rumored, but ill-proven homage to the Yamauchi family’s cement factory business.

• Looking into the histories: On October 2, the first official Nintendo Museum was opened in Kyoto, Japan, inviting fans to dive into decades of gaming history.

Extra reading / learning

• Nintendo Wiki - Undated

• Nintendo's Origins, The Acquired Podcast - March, 2023

• Nintendo: The Console Wars, The Acquired Podcast - April, 2023

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Vanta*—the security and compliance platform companies rely on to stay audit-ready without losing their sanity.

beehiiv: We use beehiiv to send all of our newsletters. Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails. Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,038 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 416,636 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🥗 Open Sourcing My Content Diet. You are what you eat, and it works the same for your brain. Feel it healthy goodness.
🎆 Building Smarter Models with Cheaper Tokens. An interview with Benny Chen, Co-Founder at Fireworks AI.
🍰 What’s the story with Perplexity Computer? It's now possible to have your AI cake and eat it too.

PARTNERS 💫

Ever had a meeting where a random bot joins the call and, suddenly, everyone’s distracted? Granola works differently—there are no meeting bots.

Granola transcribes directly from your device’s audio (on your computer or your phone). It works with any meeting tool: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft team… and even for in-person conversations.

You stay focused and jot down notes like you normally would. It quietly transcribes and enhances the important bits in the background. Try Granola on your next meeting and see how much easier it is to stay present.

Most people don’t struggle with tools—they struggle with knowing what to do next. (Or where to start!)

With seemingly endless possibilities within HighLevel, I found myself in that last category. What finally changed for me was discovering the 5 Day Challenge. Five days of learning the system and how to achieve some quick wins in my business gave me all the momentum I needed.

Ready to experience the same momentum for yourself? Join the next session of the 5 Day Challenge.

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I’ve been doing a pretty sweet course lately from the team at Ultraspeaking. I stumbled upon them when one of their founders was a guest on Lenny’s Podcast. At the time, I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds cool.’ But the whole thing is actually a little bit more than that. The tagline, as you can see below, reads, “End speaking anxiety once & for all,” and I really feel like they live up to that.

Check ‘em out.

Not just for speaking; for life in general. Knowing that you are confident in front of a group of 100 or an audience of one is equally important, and I’ve been absolutely loving it. I plan to write more about it soon, but in the meantime, you can check the interview I did with the founders, Tristan and Michael. Anyway, onto today’s interview, it’s a real cracker.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Bruce Wayne, Chairman of Wayne Enterprises

Bruce Wayne is the Chairman of Wayne Enterprises, a diversified conglomerate spanning defense, applied sciences, biotech, clean energy, and real estate. Founded by his family over a century ago, Wayne Enterprises is the largest private employer in Gotham City. Bruce took control of the company in his late twenties after spending years abroad, ousting the incumbent CEO who had been steering the company toward an IPO. He immediately restructured the business, exited weapons manufacturing, and elevated Lucius Fox to run day-to-day operations.

Broooooce.

Outside Wayne Enterprises, Bruce runs the Wayne Foundation, one of the largest private philanthropic organizations on the East Coast, focused on urban renewal, criminal rehabilitation, and education across Gotham. He also manages a family office alongside longtime advisor Alfred Pennyworth, investing in early-stage technology. He is known for being intensely private, rarely making public appearances, and maintaining an unusually small inner circle for someone of his profile.

What does Wayne Enterprises do? Why is it important?

Wayne Enterprises is a diversified conglomerate. We operate across defense and aerospace, applied sciences, biotech, infrastructure, and real estate development. The company was founded by my family over a century ago, originally in railroads and shipping, and it grew into one of the largest private employers on the East Coast. Today, we're the largest private employer in Gotham, specifically. That part matters to me.

The important question is interesting because it depends on who you ask. If you ask the market, we're important because we hold significant government defense contracts and we're pushing hard into clean energy and next-generation infrastructure. If you ask me, the company matters because Gotham matters. This city has been through decades of institutional failure, corruption, poverty, and the kind of compounding decline that most people write off as permanent. Wayne Enterprises is one of the few institutions with the resources and the local commitment to do something about that. We're not a fund that flies in, extracts value, and leaves. We're here. That's the difference.

Why exit the weapons business?

It stopped aligning with who we are and what we're trying to build. My father started the company with a vision to fundamentally improve the city and people's lives. Somewhere along the way, the board drifted toward pure defense contracting because the margins were there. When I came back and took over, I looked at what we were manufacturing, and I couldn't square it with the mission. We were making things designed to hurt people at scale. I didn't want the Wayne name attached to that.

Source: NY Times.

Now, I want to be clear. I'm not naive about defense. I closely follow what Alex is doing with AIP at Palantir, turning an enterprise AI platform into what's basically a defense operating system.

I think there's a version of defense technology that's genuinely about protection, about intelligence, about keeping people safe. I respect those founders. The question for us was whether Wayne Enterprises was the right vehicle for that work, given our history and given the specific risks of our technology ending up in the wrong hands. We decided it wasn't. We still do government work, but it's oriented around infrastructure, communications, and applied research. Not weapons systems.

What were the early days like taking over?

Chaotic, really. I was young, I'd been out of the country for years, and the board didn't take me seriously. Honestly, they shouldn't have. I had no operating experience. I hadn't built anything. I was the founder's kid, showing up after a long absence to say, ‘I'd like to run things now.’ That's not exactly a compelling pitch.

The board at the time, under William Earle, had been moving to take the company public. That would have effectively ended family control and turned Wayne Enterprises into just another publicly traded defense contractor optimizing for quarterly earnings. My first real fight was stopping that from happening. It wasn't pretty. I had to learn very quickly that having your name on the building doesn't mean you have power.

You have to earn the room's respect, and you do it by making good decisions. I got a few wrong early. But the big ones, like bringing in Lucius Fox and restructuring Applied Sciences—a division particularly close to my heart—validated the direction pretty quickly.

Bruce at 25, upon returning.

What's your relationship with Lucius? And what does reporting look like?

Lucius is the best operator I've ever worked with. Full stop. He was buried in the company when I found him, running a division that the previous leadership had essentially mothballed because they didn't know what to do with it. I immediately saw that he was the smartest person in the building and the most underutilized. So I gave him room to run.

Today, Lucius is CEO in all but title. He runs day-to-day operations, manages the leadership team, and owns our relationships with government clients. I'm Chairman. I set long-term strategy, I handle the Foundation, and I stay close to Applied Sciences because that's where our most important R&D lives.

Leadership, Wayne Enterprise.

In terms of cadence, Lucius and I meet twice a week. Monday is a strategic alignment meeting: what's moving, what's stuck, what needs my attention. Thursday is more operational, focused on whatever the biggest open issue is that week. We run quarterly planning cycles for the company overall, with monthly check-ins at the division level. Goals are set top-down in terms of direction and bottom-up in terms of targets. Lucius is big on letting division heads own their own numbers rather than having me impose them. I've learned to trust that process. The company runs better when I set the destination and let the operators figure out the route.

What happened with the clean energy project?

We built a fusion reactor. Genuinely functional, genuinely revolutionary. It would have provided clean energy for the entire city. I was personally very invested in it, both financially and emotionally. It was supposed to be the thing that changed Gotham permanently, the kind of project that justifies the existence of a company like ours.

Then our research team identified a way to convert the core into a weapon. Not theoretically. Practically. With relatively accessible modifications. I decided to mothball the entire project. Shut it down, ate the cost, didn't ship it.

Wayne science.

More Wayne science.

That decision nearly bankrupted the company. The board was furious, investors were furious, and the press called me reckless. And I understand that reaction. We spent hundreds of millions developing something that worked, and I chose not to release it. But I keep coming back to the same question: if you build something that can power a city but can also destroy it, and you can't guarantee the second thing won't happen, do you ship it? I decided you don't.

What does your week actually look like?

I train every morning at six. Weightlifting, plyometrics, and combat conditioning. Non-negotiable. I'm done by seven-thirty, and that's when the day starts. Eight to ten is my morning block. Alfred briefs me on anything that came in overnight, then I clear comms and set priorities for the day. I protect that window. No meetings before ten unless something's on fire.

Ten onwards is meetings. I see Lucius twice a week—Monday for strategy and Thursday for operations—and do a quick wrap-up with him on Fridays. Division heads get thirty-minute windows throughout the week: Chen on financials, Okonkwo on defense and aerospace, Vasquez on Applied Sciences, Whitfield on infrastructure, and Naidu on legal. I also sit down with the Commissioner's office most weeks and stay close to the Gotham PD liaison. The Foundation has its own rhythm: board lunches, donor calls, grant approvals, site visits. Tuesday or Wednesday usually has a culture interview for a senior hire.

Hectic.

Lunch is always a working lunch. I can't remember the last time I ate without a briefing document in front of me. The afternoons are the grind. Contract reviews, board prep, real estate portfolio, press approvals (mostly declines). By five or six, most people are wrapping up. That's when my second day starts. I block four hours most evenings for deep work. Some nights, that's long-range strategy at the house. Some nights I'm in the Applied Sciences lab. Thursday evenings, I'm usually doing equipment calibration and testing with the R&D team, which can run late.

Saturdays, I train again, then foundation gala planning or reading. Sundays are lighter. I try to keep those for myself. I'm rarely in bed before three or four in the morning. I do my best thinking at night, always have.

How does the company run when you're not around?

Well, and I say that without any false modesty. The company runs well when I'm not around because I hired people who are better than me at operations. Lucius doesn't need me in the room to make good decisions. The division heads don't need me to approve things. I spent years building a leadership team that I trust completely, and then I got out of their way.

Source: Wayne Enterprises.

I think a lot of founders struggle with this. There's an identity attachment to being essential, to being the person the company can't function without. I had to let go of that early because my life required it. I travel; I have obligations with the Foundation that take me out of the office; and, frankly, there are stretches when I'm just not available. If the company fell apart every time I left, that would be a failure of leadership, not a sign of my importance. The best thing I ever did was make myself optional for day-to-day operations.

What's the hiring philosophy?

Small teams, exceptional people. We are very selective. For senior roles especially, I care less about credentials and more about what someone has actually been through. I want people who've faced real adversity, made hard calls under pressure, and come out the other side with their integrity intact. A resume full of prestigious names doesn't tell me much. I want to know what you did when everything went wrong.

I still do the final culture interview for every key hire. Lucius and the division heads handle technical fit and experience. That's their call, and I trust it. But before anyone joins the inner circle, they sit down with me. It's not a skills conversation. I'm reading the person. I want to know what drives them, what they're afraid of, what they'd do if nobody was watching. You can learn more about someone in a quiet room for thirty minutes than you can from ten rounds of structured interviews. Some people think it's a bottleneck. I think it's the most important thing I do.

We also hire for alignment with the mission. If someone's at Wayne Enterprises for the paycheck, they won't last. The work is demanding, the problems are complex, and there are easier places to make money. The people who thrive here are the ones who genuinely care about what we're building and are willing to sacrifice comfort for it. That's a hard thing to screen for in an interview, which is why we take our time.

See more roles here.

Why all-in on Gotham?

Because it's home. That's the honest answer. My family built this city. My parents gave their lives to it, in every sense. Walking away from Gotham would be walking away from everything they believed in and everything I believe in. There's also a strategic argument. Everyone in business right now is obsessed with scale, with going global immediately, with being everywhere at once. I think there's a contrarian case for going deep instead of wide. Gotham is a city of millions with massive infrastructure problems, a complex economy, and real demand for every service we provide.

If Wayne Enterprises can help fix Gotham, if we can prove that a private institution can meaningfully improve a city that everyone else gave up on, that's a model that replicates. But you have to prove it works in one place first. I'd rather be the company that saved one city than the company that had a presence in fifty and changed none of them.

What does Applied Sciences actually work on?

I can't get into specifics on most of it. A lot of our work touches government contracts with confidentiality requirements. What I can say is that the division operates as our internal R&D lab, focused on technology that's five to ten years ahead of what's commercially viable. Advanced materials, communications systems, defense-adjacent infrastructure, and autonomous systems. Lucius runs it with a small team of people who are genuinely brilliant.

Applied Sciences.

The unusual thing about Applied Sciences is that not everything it builds is designed to become a product. Some of it is pure research. Some of it feeds into our other divisions indirectly. And some of it stays internal because the applications are too sensitive to commercialize. I know that's a hard thing to justify to a board, and I've had that argument many times. My position is that a company with our resources has an obligation to push boundaries even when the commercial return isn't obvious. The moment you only fund research with a clear revenue path, you stop making breakthroughs.

Where do you draw the line with surveillance technology?

We built something once. A system that could monitor an entire city in real time. Audio, visual, full coverage. It worked. It was technically extraordinary. And after using it exactly once, I ordered it destroyed.

The capability existed because we had the infrastructure and the engineering talent to make it happen. But capability isn't justification. The question isn't, ‘Can we build it?’ The question is, ‘What happens when this exists in the world?’ And the honest answer was that no single person, including me, should have that much visibility into other people's lives. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are. The tool itself is the problem. Once it exists, someone will misuse it. If not you, then whoever comes after you.

Source: Wayne Enterprises.

I think about this a lot in the context of what's happening in AI right now. The companies building the most powerful systems are facing some version of this exact question. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And ‘we'll be responsible with it’ is not a sufficient safeguard, because you can't guarantee that the next person in your chair will be.

Tell us about the family office? Any recent investments you've been excited by?

The family office operates separately from Wayne Enterprises. It's lean; Alfred Pennyworth, who's been with my family for decades, manages it alongside me. He handles the administrative side, estate, trusts, and personal allocations. I handle investment direction. We don't have a large team, and we don't want one. Alfred's judgment is something I trust more than any investment committee I've ever sat in front of.

Regarding what we invest in, I keep that private. Part of it is personal preference, and part of it is practical. When the Wayne name is attached to something, it moves markets in ways that aren't always helpful to the company we're backing. What I will share is the anti-portfolio, because I think it's more interesting anyway.

_{*Bruce actually opened sourced his ten best investments to us, but without showing the name of the firm. Apparently, the family office has made 50+ investments this century.}

We looked seriously at Anthropic early and passed. We evaluated Cursor before it took off and couldn't get comfortable with the market size. I've been a personal fan of what Figure is doing in robotics for a long time, but I've never pulled the trigger. Every investor has a list like this. Mine keeps me humble. The misses teach you more than the wins, and I've had some spectacular misses.

You spent your twenties abroad. What did that period shape?

Everything. I left Gotham after my parents died, and I didn't come back for years. I wasn't on vacation. I was looking for something, though I couldn't have articulated what it was at the time. I studied with people across the world. Martial arts, psychology, forensic science, engineering, meditation. I put myself in situations that were physically and mentally extreme because I wanted to find out what I was made of.

Bruce’s travels #1.

Bruce’s travels #2.

What it taught me, more than any specific skill, was discipline. Real discipline, not the ‘wake up at five in the morning' and post about it’ kind. The kind where you commit to something that will take years, and you don't quit when it stops being interesting. I also learned that fear is a tool. Most people experience fear as a stop sign. I trained myself to experience it as information. It tells you where the risk is, and risk is where the important work lives. That reframing changed everything about how I operate, in business and in life.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

Routine. I'm obsessive about it. I train physically every day, without exception. Not because I enjoy it, but because I don't function well without it. My mind is sharper, my decisions are better, and my temperament is more stable when my body is taxed. I eat clean, I don't drink, and I sleep less than most people would recommend, but the sleep I get is structured.

Bruce’s morning routine.

Beyond the physical, I spend time alone every day. Thinking, reviewing, planning. Not meditating in any formal sense, just sitting with the problems I'm working on without distractions. Most of my best decisions have come from those quiet hours, usually late at night, when there's nobody to perform for and nothing to react to. The hardest part of being in a public-facing role is that everyone wants a piece of your attention. Protecting time for yourself isn't selfish. It's the only way to make sure the version of you that shows up tomorrow is worth anything.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• We Raised $2.5M To Build Athyna AI - May, 2024

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 20925

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,010 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 412,598 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎆 Building Smarter Models with Cheaper Tokens. An interview with Benny Chen, Co-Founder at Fireworks AI.
🍰 What’s the story with Perplexity Computer? It's now possible to have your AI cake and eat it too.
🪐 What Changes After Your Exit (Nothing?). An interview with Ronan Berder, exited-Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft.

PARTNERS 💫

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_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

You’re not going to believe this, but WE’RE HAVING ANOTHER GIVEAWAY!! This time it’s to W Mexico City. Bold, playful, and unapologetically extra (so the press release tells me), W Mexico City mixes neon-lit energy with sleek rooms, buzzy lobby cocktails, and a spa to recover from it all. Expect late nights, loud playlists, and just enough luxury to keep things spicy. Sounds good, right?

This is the second giveaway we’ve partnered on this year, and if all goes well, my plan is to start crafting tech-centered travel opportunities. So it goes without saying, SIGN UP! And enjoy today’s piece.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Open Sourcing My Own Content Diet

The recommended American diet, as outlined by the USDA, emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and low-fat dairy. And to limit sugars, sodium, and unhealthy fats. Focus on nutrient-dense foods like nuts and avocados, while drinking plenty of water. Moderation and variety are key.

The same thing can be said for your own content diet. Podcasts, articles, newsletters, and other thought-provoking, valuable information are good. Social media, YouTube rabbit-holes, and mindless scrolling are bad.

When sitting in on the final interview of candidates wanting to join my company, Athyna, one of the first questions I ask is: “Tell me about your content diet?” It tells me a lot about the person. If they can’t elaborate on their diet at all, that’s bad. If they mentioned that they enjoy Logan Paul videos, that’s worse.

Your own content diet should be taken seriously; you are looking to improve by learning from high-quality sources, all whilst taking in a nice mix of viewpoints so you don’t end up drinking your own bathwater.

When the learning started (again) for me

From childhood to my teenage years, I was an avid learner. Ancient Egypt was my thing. When I had a project on engineering, I chose the pyramids. Presentation on religion, I’m talking about the Sun God, Ra. But something happened around the age of 15. Learning all of a sudden became uncool. And at the age of just discovering the opposite sex, I was certainly not in the business of being uncool at this juncture.

_{*Note: Shout out to all the late 80’s kids who were lucky enough to be able to see Stargate in 1994 between the ages of five and ten years old.}

This carried on until ~27 years of age. I wasn’t yet a founder, and all I really cared about was, paradoxically, nightlife and training. Oh, and real estate. That all changed thanks to a strange interaction with a gentleman named Fred, who was staying with me on my Airbnb in 2015.

The Fred.

“An absolute pressure.”

I’d just finished watching Interstellar on a Friday night, and as the credits were rolling, Fred walked in. “Holy shit, what a movie, Fred,” I said with my jaw on the floor. “Yes, incredible how grounded in reality it is too,” he replied.

Haha, whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

“Excuse me, Fred, but what part of that fucking movie I just saw are you saying was grounded in reality?” Lucky for me, Fred had some serious cerebral horsepower and was able to detail, step by step, general relativity, time dilation, and even the mind-bending fact that Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev actually holds the world record for time travel.

The world was alive with possibility again. Everything became fascinating, and learning became my favorite thing to do. Beneath you will find my (podcasting) content diet from the past through to today.

Never miss them

• Prof G Show: I’m pretty sure Scott Galloway is my spirit animal. Great for big tech, startups, investing, media & comms, and some politics. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Equity Mates Investing: Two young Australian guys diving into their investing journey together. This is an easy listen with good guests that really lives up to the idea of the listener feeling like a fly on the wall in a great conversation between friends. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• My First Million: Take everything I said in the last, and apply it to this show. The only difference is that My First Milly is tech- and startups-focused, and both hosts have had decent exits themselves. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• The Rest Is Politics: A geopolitical show hosted two British ex-politicians, one from the left and one from the right. Brilliant listening. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• The All-In Podcast: Some of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to startups and technology. I don’t love the characters; in fact, I despise them at times, but I enjoy the content. Importantly, they all seem to be genuinely great friends. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Mostly don’t miss them

• Today, Explained: By the team that brought you Explained on Netflix, Today, Explained is a daily breakdown of what’s happening in the world today. Incredibly well produced and always interesting. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Unexplained: From the same team as above, but instead of daily news, this show takes you on a more offbeat path. How space works, do dogs feel love, that kinda stuff. An absolute cracker of a show. Apple | Spotify

• How I Write: David Perell is a master podcast host, and the guests that he brings along are always incredible. I feel like I walk out of the experience a better writer each and every time. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Making Sense by Sam Harris: I love Sam Harris. I feel like, in a world that is inherently less truthful and trustworthy, I can always rely on Sam. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I value him and his way of thinking. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• The Bill Simmons Podcast: My weekly NBA catch-up. Sports, with incredible yet random cultural references spliced in. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• The Ezra Klein Show: Very similar to Sam Harris, I love how Ezra thinks and find his conversations interesting every time I listen. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Interesting Times: Ross Douthat is the yin to Ezra Klein’s yang. A conservative voice over at the New York Times, and a great interviewer. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Love them, but every so often

• Hardcore History: Simply the best history podcast ever created. The Painfortainment and Human Resources episodes are some of the most engaging things I’ve ever laid my ears on. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Planet Money: Money stuff made fun. A daily take on how economics works on a macro and/or micro scale. Apple | Spotify 

• Dwarkesh Podcast: This podcast is actually too intelligent for me at times. Maybe all the times. But it’s also cool when someone on the train sees you listening to it and thinks you are smart as well. Tech, business, geopolitics, philosophy. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• VC20: I listen to Harry here and there. I find him a bit irritating, and I think a lot of his takes are garbage, but his guests are pretty high-level. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Gone Medieval: History stuff, made fun. It is what it sounds like, medieval history, which was quite an interesting period to say the least. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• How To Take Over The World: A great breakdown of some of history's greats, and how they did whatever it was that they did. Apple | Spotify 

• Huberman Lab: Only listen to it because Huberman looks like a 50-year-old version of me. Other than that, Huberman is your go-to guy for health, psychology, and more. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Lenny’s Podcast: Really, really, really great product, strategy, startup, and tech conversations. I tend to jump into the more unique interviews like this one with Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Stuff You Should Know: Amazing podcast that has stood the test of time about interesting topics, told deeply and told well. I have seen this show live. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• The Intelligence: Money stuff again by Planet Money. Daily insights about interesting parts of the financial system. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Lex Fridman Podcast: One of the great interviewers. I listen to a few, at least, with Lex. Science, AI, technology, politics, humanity. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Fin Vs History: This might be the funniest show I listen to on a semi-regular basis. A history podcast by two British comedians who know very little about history. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Acquired: Some of the best long-form deep dives into the greats of business. Very easy listening. I think the Nintendo episodes might be my faves. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

A note on philosophical + political diversity

Some years ago, feels like a lifetime, I interviewed the famous futurist and founder of WIRED Magazine, Kevin Kelly, for the upcoming release of his 2016 book, The Inevitable. The Inevitable is a 2016 nonfiction book that forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years. One of his forces was ‘filtering’ and was in large part in reference to being able to filter good information from bad.

Not only that, but he also believed the world would become one big echo chamber thanks to the rise of algorithms. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, heck, even your newsletter feed will, from now until God knows when, be feeding you more of what you already believe. This leads not only to an echo chamber where you and all your pals sniff each other, but also to a nice, big, juicy slice of confirmation bias when quality, neutral information does come your way.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why the US is more politically divided than it has been in decades. With divisions bordering on those experienced during the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War era, and even the US Civil War.

Source: Pew Research Center.

For that reason, I work actively to make sure I don’t just surround myself with crazy people on the liberal side of things, which is where I lean heavily politically. A great example of the pull between where I get my media is the clash between the right-leaning All-In guys and the likes of Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, who are firmly left-coded.

Left.

Right.

Content I loved but have since sunset

• The Joe Rogan Experience: It breaks my heart to say this, but I get quite put off by Rogan these days. I know he used to identify as a bleeding heart liberal, but his guests just frustrate me these days. Rogan has provided me with some of the deepest thinking and greatest learnings I have had as an adult, so it’s strange to not still be a loyal fan. But it is what it is. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• StarTalk Radio: Great science show that I used to love until Neil DeGrasse-Tyson was kinda rude to me when I went to see him once. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Dr. Karl Podcast: I interviewed Karl a number of years ago, and he was the rudest guy I’ve ever met. The first interview was supposed to be on my birthday. We flew up to Sydney especially for it, and he no-showed on us, with no contact whatsoever, then, a day or two later, he followed up by offering to send me a signed copy of his book. The second, and eventual, recording was even worse. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Worst.

• The Infinite Monkey Cage: Another great science show, but I just don’t have time for it in my rotation anymore. Business has eaten up all my science listening time, which is kinda lame. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Pivot: The aforementioned Professor Scott Galloway, and renowned media journalist, Kara Swisher, take on media, big tech, and more. Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• How I Built This: Great show by Guy Raz about how businesses got off the ground, but fell out of the rotation a while back. Apple | Spotify 

In a league of its own

• The Ricky Gervais Show: Ahh, where do I even begin with The Ricky Gervais Show? I would honestly say, from the bottom of my heart, that this has been my favorite show in my life. I don’t listen to the shows anymore, and you actually can’t find them for long stretches, but for the last 15 years, for around 50% of the time, I have listened to this show in my ears as I drift off to sleep. I can genuinely recite entire episodes as if they’re my favorite childhood music track. Love. Spotify

So big they made a cartoon.

My favorite conversation in history

My favorite conversation ever was between Sam Harris and William MacAskill on episode 44 of Making Sense. Reading from Sam’s website, “William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in effective altruism and the co-founder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles: Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Center for Effective Altruism.”

In sum, Sam and Oxford philosopher William discussed effective altruism, moral illusions, existential risk, and other topics that are bigger than the big picture.

William MacAskill.

The most evocative idea was borrowed from Peter Singer, who wrote Famine, Affluence and Morality. “He argues that, because people in extreme poverty are so poor and we can do so much to help them, we have a moral duty to give as much as we can in order to prevent their early death and suffering, just as, if we saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, you’d happily run in to save that child; even if it meant ruining your very nice suit,” William would go on to say. It’s these questions that really shine a lot on morality that made this episode such a good listen for me.

Summary

"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” is a quote often attributed to the motivational speaker and author Jim Rohn. This is how I think about my brain. If I do my job well and feed my brain with good, nourishing information, I will thrive. And if I don’t, I might one day turn into a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy pusher. Choose your content wisely, my friends, your future self will thank you.

Bonus: Extra reading

In today’s extra reading section, I am going to give you links to the five newsletters I love the most, just for a little look at the written side of my content diet.

• Not Boring by Pack McCormick

• Strategy Breakdowns by Tom Alder

• Bay Area Times

• Uncharted Territories by Tomas Pueyo

• Marketing Ideas by Tom Orbach

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting BILL—Your AI-powered financial operations platform.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,003 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 408,588 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🍰 What’s the story with Perplexity Computer? It's now possible to have your AI cake and eat it too.
🪐 What Changes After Your Exit (Nothing?). An interview with Ronan Berder, exited-Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft.
💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.

PARTNERS 💫

This is the app that might actually make you love meetings.

With Granola, the AI Notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, you can avoid context switching, the cognitive load of remembering what you promised, and the stress of knowing something important slipped through.

Take notes the way you always have. Granola works in the background, turning conversations into clear summaries, action items, and next steps. Before, during, or after a meeting, you can chat with your notes.

Most people don’t struggle with tools—they struggle with knowing what to do next. (Or where to start!)

With seemingly endless possibilities within HighLevel, I found myself in that last category. What finally changed for me was discovering the 5 Day Challenge. Five days of learning the system and how to achieve some quick wins in my business gave me all the momentum I needed.

Ready to experience the same momentum for yourself? Join the next session of the 5 Day Challenge.

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

If you are a 90s kid (grew up, not born), Scottie Pippen is pretty familiar to you, to say the least. Riding shotgun to MJ through the Bulls’ championships with his lockdown defense and all-around play. Today, Scottie is more of an internet meme, dissing his partnership with His Airness, and even going as far as to claim he had spoken directly with Satoshi Nakamoto. But when I saw this tweet, it really hit me.

Source.

“Winners lose more than losers ever will.” It’s a beautiful statement, and not just relating to business. When making our way through this crazy life, we need to be able to make bets, take chances, and force open doors, knowing that when we do, we may fail. Nothing more for today. Enjoy the piece!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Benny Chen, Co-Founder at Fireworks AI

Benny Chen is Co-Founder at Fireworks AI, the infrastructure platform quietly becoming one of the most interesting bets in the AI space. A New Zealand-born, UCLA-educated engineer, Benny spent nearly a decade at Meta as Ads Infrastructure Lead before walking away to build something of his own—back in 2022, before ChatGPT was a thing, before your dad knew what a large language model was, and before anyone was talking about gigawatts of compute.

Benny.

The company he helped build alongside CEO Lin Qiao and a crew of fellow Meta and PyTorch alumni has since raised over $300M from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Index, and is now valued at $4B. Their clients include Uber, DoorDash, Notion, and Quora. Not bad for a team that, at one point, had no front-end engineer and a website Benny himself describes as ‘very ugly.’ In this interview, Benny gets into the nuts and bolts of model customization, what most companies are still getting wrong with AI, and what it actually takes to compete with the giants.

What’s the problem you're trying to solve, and why?

We want to help people bring down their total cost of ownership for their tokens. We care about this because we believe the demand for tokens is going to go through the roof, and it is very cost-prohibitive to scale those on frontier models from big labs.

Source: Fireworks AI.

When you ask your voice assistant to help you book a restaurant or check the weather, it doesn't need AGI-level intelligence to do that. We also work with a lot of startups that care deeply about scaling their businesses to their customers, and most companies operate within specific verticals. They don't work in settings like Gemini or ChatGPT, where the model has to know everything. Whether the agent knows which comedian told a specific joke in some obscure 1980s setup doesn't help you book a table on OpenTable. So we help people reduce their total cost of ownership for their tokens, primarily through model customization.

How is Fireworks providing this in a different way than competitors?

A lot of our work involves making sure that we have a great inference engine that is high quality, a great training engine that matches the quality of our inference engine, and that what we call ‘numerics’—the way that the GPU operates on these models—ends up producing consistent results. On top of that, we provide an easy on-ramp for people to customize their models.

One thing we do a lot is support reinforcement learning, which allows people to simply author an evaluator and start customizing models from there. That is very powerful, because when we were looking at model customization two years ago, it was primarily done through what we call supervised fine-tuning. Every time a conversation began, it would go something like: ‘We'd love to help you customize your model, but to do that, you need to assemble a small team of machine learning engineers who know how to define what 'good' looks like. Then we help you connect with data labelers, guide those labelers to produce a high-quality dataset, and after two months of back and forth, you can finally customize a model.’ That process is extremely time-consuming.

What we've realized, quite painfully, is that everyone working in the large language model space is stretched for time. What's really powerful about the reinforcement learning world today is that you can use a coding agent to help you write an evaluator for your application. As long as you can articulate to your coding agent what good and bad looks like, and the coding agent can produce an evaluator, you're off to the races. You can already customize a model for your specific use case.

What are the biggest problems today when customizing AI models?

There are two parts to this: what's most difficult, and what people are doing wrong. On the difficulty side, a lot of it comes down to the quality of evaluations. It is often very, very hard to clearly articulate what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ look like. One example I've seen is someone whose job is to generate beautiful HTML for a customer. Part of the evaluation might be whether the code is correct, but correctness doesn't necessarily mean good taste. So how do you articulate what good taste is? That is genuinely very difficult. People who come from a design background, or who have a strong product sense and clearly understand what good and bad looks like, have a much easier time defining that. But without that clarity of intent, it's also very hard for a coding agent to guess what you're going for.

The second difficulty is ensuring the training stack is high quality. Because we control both the training and inference stacks, it's easy for us to ensure they align consistently. But when you introduce discrepancies between the two, the model gets confused. It's like a human learning from their environment; when you trip, it hurts, and you remember that. But if you're impaired and your brain is processing things with a 500-millisecond delay, you might not learn the right lesson. That kind of delay is terrible for models.

Source.

GOATs.

On the side of what people are doing wrong, many treat training as a completely separate, disjointed problem from their production environment. They're not doing reinforcement learning on the exact same setup they actually use. It's like training people in VR and then immediately throwing them into the real world. Training in VR is always different from the real thing. What we often encourage instead is using our open-source library, EDA Oracle, to trace directly from the production environment and perform reinforcement learning there. That way, you're not asking people to learn their job inside a VR headset in some simulated environment—they're learning on the job. It is indeed very difficult because you need to ensure your production environment doesn't have anomalies and isolate it correctly so the model doesn't, say, delete a database while it's learning. But we strongly encourage consistency and minimize discrepancies.

How do you articulate taste to a model?

The success I've seen comes from people who are strong engineers and also have really good product sense. These people can translate customer feedback into rubrics that agents can understand. That's one piece of it.

The other is making sure you give the judging model, or your reward model, the right harness to actually do its job. For example, even if you show a human a piece of HTML and ask whether it looks nice, most people can't answer that question properly because they're expecting to see a rendered image. And even when you do render it, sometimes the visible part looks fine, but when you scroll down, it's completely broken. So, figuring out how to give the model the correct setup to evaluate effectively is also very difficult.

The last thing I'd add is that certain models are better at judging certain things than others. Actually experimenting with different frontier models and seeing which one performs best as a judge for your specific scenario is a very useful exercise.

What makes a great AI product today?

On building great AI products, I think the key is to push as far as you can on product-model fit. Everyone knows OpenAI's voice assistant, for example, and there were so many people who built similar things six months or a year before it took off, but they didn't stick because the model wasn't good enough yet. Your product has to arrive at just the right time, when the model is barely good enough to do its job. When that alignment happens, it takes off.

Riding that wave is very difficult, though. You have to predict, at least roughly, what the model will look like in three months, and you have to stay very focused because you're making a contrarian bet rather than just copying another product. And I do think that simply copying another product is very, very hard to pull off, because go-to-market capability is so important these days. But if you build something new that you believe will be just barely good enough in a month or two, I think you'll get a lot of traction. We've seen a lot of people on our platform build pretty remarkable things, and it feels to me like they're betting that the model will be good enough in a few months.

Source: Fireworks AI.

On training success, for the people who have successfully trained models on our platform, I do think it requires patience from company leadership, which often doesn't come easily. A lot of our customers are very AI-forward; either their primary product is built entirely on language models, or their leadership has already bought in and is committed to training models and building a competitive edge. That level of conviction is actually very, very hard to cultivate because it costs money and time, and, as I mentioned before, everyone is running around like their hair is on fire. So it does require strong leadership and deep conviction to see it through. But we've seen many success cases where teams go all the way. They build the right team, work with us to train a model, and ultimately achieve a sustained competitive advantage.

What has been the most difficult thing going from zero to one?

At the start, we were building a PyTorch training platform because there was no ChatGPT then. We left Meta because we knew that AI infrastructure would take off. To be transparent, I did not expect it to take off at this rate. I never expected my parents to understand what I do. I used to tell them I push ads onto Instagram, and they'd say, "Sure, I see some ads on Instagram, I don't know how you do it." But now my mom is using all these AI applications to do her job. It's amazing. I don't think I ever expected this level of penetration, this level of takeoff. I just knew that infrastructure was going to take off because I could see the demand coming in for general NLP, computer vision, recommendation systems, and so on.

Source: Fireworks AI.

So when ChatGPT came out, it was important for us to decide whether to lean into generative AI, and how much. In retrospect, that pivot looks pretty straightforward. Of course, we should have just leaned into generative AI, but I do want to remind people that the open source models three years ago were Falcon and Llama 1, and you could barely hold a two-turn conversation with them. So it was a bet, and I'm glad it paid off. Going forward, I think helping people customize models more easily will be very, very important. Customizing models involves many details and many points where things can go wrong, so making that process as easy as possible, especially with coding agents today, is something we're very focused on. Though honestly, I think the jury is still out on exactly how we get there.

What are the strengths of each fund, and what makes them great?

To be transparent, our CEO, Lin, managed most of the investor relationships, so I don't have full visibility into everything. But one thing I do want to highlight is that Eric from Benchmark put in a lot of time and trust early on. When we raised in 2022, it was before ChatGPT, and none of us knew exactly how AI infrastructure would take off. We just had a strong conviction that it would. Putting that level of trust into us at that stage required a lot of soul-searching on Eric's part, I'm sure. I really appreciated that initial vote of confidence.

Source: Fireworks AI.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I've had to give up a lot of things to stay efficient, and I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing. I have a young kid who is about 20 months old, so my schedule right now is pretty much work, take care of the baby, sleep, and repeat.

I used to play a lot of video games and ball games, and there were a lot of things I'd normally do to kill time that have fallen away. So I don't know if I have specific rituals, but what I've found very useful is being conscious about making enough time just for my own headspace, on top of everything else. Just being bored. Sitting somewhere quiet without having to worry about anything for 15 or 30 minutes, or going for a walk outside on my own. That is very, very useful for me.

I think of it as a language model with the temperature turned up, exploring and seeing what you come up with. It's not really a ritual, but just taking a walk outside alone, thinking through the decisions I've made and whether they still make sense, is something I find incredibly valuable.

Extra reading / learning

• Building a $4 Billion AI Infra Company - February, 2026

• Inference is the New Runtime: Our Investment in Fireworks - October, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Benny on LinkedIn or check out Fireworks AI on their website to keep up with what they’re building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Lightfield*—an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 5,963 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 404,585 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🪐 What Changes After Your Exit (Nothing?). An interview with Ronan Berder, exited-Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft.
💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.
🔥 The CFO Who Killed The Spreadsheet. An interview with John Glasgow, CEO & CFO at Campfire.

PARTNERS 💫

Most AI agents think. Perplexity Computer finishes.

A cloud-based computer that orchestrates 19 frontier models, spawns its own subagents, and ships finished work; analyses, dashboards, websites, reports. Not a chat. A coworker.

No prompts to babysit, no infra to wire up. Just delegate the project and walk away.

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I don’t know what it is about Attio’s marketing; they just seem to get it right, all the time. Today, they released their GTM Atlas, a free resource built with some of the best operators in the industry, covering the full customer journey from lead capture to expansion. It’s valuable, but also just very slick and well put together.

Check it here.

For those who don’t know, Attio is the CRM I use for this newsletter. And it cracks. They are well ahead of legacy players when it comes to the AI-led GTM of the future. Anyway, enjoy today’s piece!

DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

What Is Perplexity Computer?

When assessing which AI to use in your personal and professional life, things can be daunting. Do I use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude? If Claude, should I use Chat, Cowork, Code? At the end of the day, what we all really want is to do more, better, and faster. The good news is there is one solution out there where you can, in fact, have your cake and eat it too: Perplexity Computer unifies every current AI capability into one single system.

In layman’s terms, you give Computer a job, and it pulls in its most talented friends to suit at every stage of the execution. This way, you don’t need to worry that ChatGPT sucks at coding, or that Claude doesn’t design super well (until recently), because you are using them all at once. It’s kinda like calling on the Avengers of AI.

Luckily for you, the team at Perplexity has asked me to act as your guinea pig, trialing Computer, to see what we can create with it. But not before we give an overview of the AI and LLM landscape at large, accompanied by a handful of memes, and a smattering of ill-fitted cultural references and analogies. Let’s do this!

The backstory on Perplexity

I don’t know about you, but Perplexity seems to me like it’s been around for longer than three and a half years. Well, it hasn’t. It was founded by four founders with one bet in August of 2022. Aravind Srinivas (ex-OpenAI, ex-DeepMind), Denis Yarats (ex-Facebook AI), Andy Konwinski (ex-Databricks co-founder), and Johnny Ho (ex-Quora), launched the original product: a conversational search engine that cited its sources, to a reaction from the Internet that read: ‘Is this a Google killer?’

If you think back, though, Perplexity were well ahead of their time; they were an AI browser before there were AI browsers. Something else they baked in early was that they were the anti-ChatGPT when it came to hallucinations.

Johnny Ho, Aravind Srinivas, and Denis Yarats (WSJ).

If the brainchild of OpenAI were out there making up case law, Perplexity would cite references. It gave you confidence in the answer. It cited truth.

_{*Note: I am well aware that the above quote was totally out of context; I just like it a lot.}

Because of their success, investors across the ecosystem were clamoring to get a piece of the Silicon Valley upstarts. Bezos and NVIDIA were in early. IVP, NEA, Daniel Gross, Karpathy, and Naval, all on the cap table at various points. Take a look at how they’ve progressed over time.

Total raised: ~$1.72B across 11 rounds, backed by the who’s who as they’ve moved from web app to mobile to Mac to Comet (their browser) to enterprise tier to Computer. Each release widened the surface area, all the way to today, and their release of Computer, the natural endpoint of every product decision Perplexity has made.

AI’s fragmentation tax

Most companies today are scrambling between 15-20 shiny new AI tools to stay apace with their competitors. They are using ChatGPT Plus, Claude, Cursor, Midjourney, or Nano Banana; a Veo or Sora subscription; Notion AI; a niche research tool; plus whatever vertical thing they pay for in their industry. Hundreds or/of thousands of dollars per month, ten tabs open, and a context-paste reflex that feels like 2009 muscle memory. This is called a fragmentation tax. And it’s a tax we are all paying daily.

In the world of AI, every tool is looking to be your home base, but none of them are. Claude Code, and their more recent release of Cowork, are the closest thing in my life to a home base, and I can’t rely on it today because no matter how much I try, I burn through my tokens like Joey Chestnut burns through hot dogs.

There are two strategic camps today: 1) First, is the model camp, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic believing the path is owning the smartest model and pulling everything into it, and 2) second, is the orchestration camp, Perplexity (and a few others that for the sake of today’s post, shall remain nameless) choosing the path of being model-agnostic and routing every job to whichever model is best at it. I wrote in The World’s Hottest Industry: Post-Training that models are converging, with the alpha being in how well you can train your model to differentiate.

Which is why Perplexity's bet here is, in my opinion, very smart. The model camp has to win every round of an arms race that grows harder with every quarter. The orchestration camp wins by not playing the game at all, and actually gets stronger every time a new frontier model ships. More models converging just means more great options on the bench.

Computer

The image below tells you most of what you need to know; Computer is the conductor standing in the middle of the orchestra, baton in hand, deciding which section to bring in for which moment. I don’t actually like The Avengers, but if you prefer to keep our running metaphor alive, it's the seat Nick Fury sits in with the call sheet, deciding which Avenger gets paged for which mission. Same idea, different uniforms.

In practice, Computer is Perplexity’s agent platform: you describe the outcome once, and it plans the steps, chooses models and tools, and runs the whole workflow for you in the background.

Source: Perplexity.

There are four moves Computer makes that, when you stack them together, are quietly revolutionary.

• It plans the job for you: You write one prompt, like ‘Build me a competitor pricing dashboard for the top 10 AI companies’ (yes, I see the irony). Computer reads that and works out the steps before it lifts a finger. It decides: research first, run the numbers, design the dashboard, ship it as a working web app. Most users will never see this part. And that's deliberate.

• It picks the right model for each piece: Coding goes to whatever's best at coding right now. Deep research goes to whatever's best in research. Images go to Nano Banana. Wide search goes wherever wide search is sharpest. Nineteen frontier models on the roster.

=

Source: OpenAI.

• It's on no one's team: This is the bet I want to underline. Most AI companies are racing to be the strongest hero. Perplexity is racing to be the one holding the clipboard. If Claude 5 leapfrogs everyone on reasoning next month, Computer routes more reasoning jobs to Claude 5. If Gemini 3 ships a video model that cooks, Computer sends the video work there. You, the user, are never on the wrong side of the leaderboard, because Computer doesn't have a side. This is very important.

Source: Perplexity.

• It works while you don't: Computer runs in the cloud, not your laptop (yeah, suck it Cowork). You write the prompt, close the lid, go for a walk, take a meeting, do whatever it is you do. When you come back, the work is built and waiting: Code, research reports, Monte Carlo simulations, slide decks, PDFs, backed-up dates on your dating apps (joke, sorry). All of it baked in the background.

Stack those four together, and you don't really have a tool anymore. You have something closer to a junior team that doesn't sleep, doesn't bill hours, doesn't argue, and gets better every time a new frontier model ships. Which all sounds great in theory. Now let me show you what came out the other end.

A quick note

This ‘one model to rule them all’ versus the Harlem Globetrotters of AI tools is a pain I feel on a daily basis. My company, Athyna, has tried to lead from the front with our AI strategy. Late last year, we hired our first AI lead, built out an AI council with one member from each department, and began running weekly watch parties and learning sessions for the team.

One of the most important decisions was which LLM to bet on for our enterprise account, which, for us, was OpenAI. The biggest name, the hottest narrative—until later last year—and a user interface + experience that we felt was more user-friendly for the team. Augusto, AI lead, would build with n8n and other tools for the team at large; it would be OpenAI.

I was happy, okay with the decision, up until Dario and Anthropic went on an ungodly run of feature-mogging Sam and OpenAI so hard they needed to buy a podcast. The recent release of Claude Cowork was the point that I simply couldn’t take it anymore, the writing was on the wall, we should be chips in with Anthropic. After some back-and-forth, we decided to shift the entire organization to Claude. It made sense, the team was excited, and we even had the blessing of my favorite AI educator, Ruben Hassid.

And then the last two weeks happened: Claude’s consistent token-jestering to the point you cannot work for 12 minutes without being limited, OpenAI’s release of Image 2.0, and then finally the ChatGPT-5.5 release, rocketing OpenAI back atop of the Most Powerful Model in the World Power Rankings.

From our Slack.

All these movements had me thinking, ‘Maybe Mythos can come and save us?’ It goes without saying that this is extremely annoying as a founder. And makes you wish there were a simple way to harness what you need when you need it. Enter: Computer.

What I built

The fun thing about playing around with the Computer for this piece was that the team gave me the direction to “go out and build something,” rather than just play around with the tool, so that’s what I did. I thought to myself: What is a web app that is fun, useful, or interesting that I could build? A lot of ideas ran through my head.

Build #1

The first that came to mind was a Michael Jordan versus LeBron James career-comparison app. I wanted an app that showed the key moments and claims in the careers of both, along with straw-man + steel-man arguments for each. The next idea was a website that pulled the most popular fan fiction stories from A Song of Ice & Fire (Game of Thrones) lore and presented them to me in chronological order. The final idea was something I actually needed: a guide to Blackbird Sunrise, the event I attended in Sydney this week.

Source: Perplexity.

The event was hosted by Blackbird, Australia’s premier venture fund (of which I am a proud investor), and while it was only one day, there were close to 30 separate events throughout the week, all held at different times across the city. There were also four main event stages with different speakers running all day, so I decided to build my own, custom-built event site to navigate. After a few back-and-forth questions, Computer went to work.

_{*Note: I found it super cute that Perplexity was giving Blackbird’s design a massive pat on the back while it was researching.}

What came out was a beautiful website that matched the energy of the event. Along with the list of the 28 activations—nine on-site sponsor lounges and brand bars (Stripe, Anthropic, AWS, Airwallex, Deel, HSBC, Vercel × OpenAI) plus all verified off-site community side events, a live Sydney five-day forecast leading into the main day, a time-stamped programs section, a must-see list, and my personal favorite, and maybe most interesting feature, a custom Sydney map with a save-to-itinerary function.

It was actually all one man could ever dream of for a micro-event site. But after looking hard at the design, I knew it needed one more tweak to make it really sing: It needed to be weirder. So, after a few back-and-forth prompts, I made what I called the Sunrise 2026: Side Events & Brand Activation Guide, AI Slop Edition. It now does the exact same thing but in the AI-sloppiest fashion.

See site.

In the time it takes you to order a coffee, Perplexity Computer built me the ultimate, event-focused microsite. Something that I actually used to navigate the event and its surroundings.

Build #2

The second thing I set out to build was a live Dream 100 Command Center for our Athyna Intelligence product. Intelligence, a new post-training focused arm of the business, was launched a few months ago, and in doing so, we also launched our Dream 100, the 100 (or so) accounts we are looking to land, along with a handful of contacts from each.

Because we are throwing a million strategies at the wall to see what sticks, GTM and tracking are somewhat all over the place. Athyna’s CRM is HubSpot, Open Source, Attio. We are communicating on multiple channels, with a handful of us all attacking it. It’s a bit frantic, but for now, that’s okay. What I wanted, though, was a home base to keep us on track.

See finished.

And with a few prompts back and forth to Computer, and a little bit of context, that is exactly what I got. The Dream 100 Command Center, or Athyna Intelligence relationship OS. The dashboard I built ranks the accounts we need to prioritize, provides the full list of POCs for each, and suggests which actions to take next.

See static (dummy) site.

Using Computer’s ‘connectors,’ I was able to pull data from multiple CRMs, Google Sheets, Notion pages, and Slack channels into a single unified dashboard. My next step, which I am admittedly still working on, is to operationalize the dashboard. This would effectively be me building recurring tasks in Computer to run our outbound efforts to book meetings, and/or set up guest interviews for Open Source CEO, our secret backdoor into these relationships.

This would look something like: Monday morning, we log into the Computer and see our outreach has gone out, CRM/s have been updated, along with the dashboard. If manual tasks are due, Computer will notify us via a reminder in Slack; then, finally, to close each day Computer will scan our emails, calendar, and Slack notes to review the status of each account and have things updated and ready for the following day.

See finished.

This is all possible and much more. Computer, in this case, acts a little like the all-seeing, ever-present Three Eyed Raven from Game of Thrones, or if we want to stick with the Marvel analogies from earlier, J.A.R.V.I.S., right hand of another famous Stark, Tony Stark, of Iron Man fame. Really quite a beautiful thing.

What you could build + do

Although building out my Sunrise and Intelligence sites was cool, the cooler thing is what you could do with Perplexity Computer with a little more time. The real value is in moving a load of your agentic workflows across from a standalone tool: ChatGPT or Claude, to Perplexity. This would singlehandedly dismantle the ‘Oh no, the new model that we are no longer paying for’ problem discussed earlier.

The next real stage for me would be to integrate every tool I use with Computer (already did most, as they are one-click integrations), and then start working through my scheduled tasks inside of Claude, giving each one of them to the gods of orchestration.

Source: Perplexity.

Source: My Claude (duh).

Source: Perplexity.

The two problems Perplexity Computer solves for—model agnosticism and working in the cloud—are for real. Model agnostic sounds like a marketing phrase, but structurally, it might be the whole game. Build your workflow around any one model, and you inherit their roadmap, their pricing, their downtime, and their bad days. Computer inherits none of those. When a new frontier model lands tomorrow that beats the field at reasoning, Computer routes to it the moment it ships. No migration. No rebuild. No meeting about whether to switch. The whole industry doing what it does becomes a free upgrade you didn't ask for.

The cloud-based, user-side reality is the bit that matters. While Computer is working, you don't have to be. You kick off three jobs in parallel, close your laptop, take a meeting, and come back to find them all waiting for you. The first time it happens, you laugh. By the third time, it's the new normal, and you start wondering what else you've been doing synchronously that didn't need to be.

Oooh.

Both lines compound. Every quarter, more models join the field. Every quarter, more work shifts from synchronous to async. Computer gets more useful as both lines move, which is the kind of design choice you only appreciate in hindsight.

Future

A couple of years ago, the AI deliverable was a paragraph of text or an image generation of an ayahuasca-induced dystopian fever dream. Today it’s anything from a working web app, financial model, or Word doc with redlines, to a 50-slide deck, research report with cited sources, or dashboard of your most ICP-fitting LinkedIn replies.

OG Midjourney fever dream.

The future, as always, remains uncertain. The foundation models will continue to build behemoth-like capabilities under their ever-growing umbrellas, while Perplexity and others will lead the ‘orchestra class’ of companies, picking the right horse for the right course. There is one thing I do know: We are in for an exciting agentic future.

Fun facts

• They made an unsolicited bid for Chrome: In August 2025, Perplexity offered Google $34.5 billion for the Chrome browser, which was nearly double Perplexity's own valuation at the time. Chutzpah, apparently, is a renewable resource.

• The name is a literal AI joke: ‘Perplexity’ is the metric machine learning engineers use to measure how well a model predicts the next token. Lower number, smarter model. Aravind named the company after the scoreboard.

Source: Dictionary.com.

• They also tried to buy TikTok: In January 2025, Perplexity submitted a merger proposal for TikTok USA, later revised to give the US government a 50% stake at a $300 billion implied IPO value. When Aravind says "we move fast," he means it across business development too.

• Annualized revenue grew 6x in 18 months: ARR went from roughly $80 million in late 2024 to a $500 million run rate by April 2026. Very few companies in any era have hit that curve.

Extra reading

• What is Vibe Marketing? The Complete Guide - October, 2025

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 2025

• The World’s Hottest Industry: Post-Training - March, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Perplexity Computer.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Granola*—an AI-powered notepad that takes, summarizes, and organizes meeting notes without using intrusive recording bots.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 5,834 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 410,419 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

❤️‍🩹 Automating Clinical Trials With AI. An interview with Scott Chetham, Co-Founder & CEO at Faro Health.
🪐 What Changes After Your Exit (Nothing?). An interview with Ronan Berder, exited-Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft.
💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

beehiiv reached out a few weeks ago to document some of the things we have done here with Open Source CEO. We covered a bunch of stuff: growth strategies, monetization, negative CAC, and growth for my company, Athyna, and my general thoughts on what makes the newsletter unique.

It was super fun to go through it all and reflect. I think by any metric we are doing well, and being able to share some of that makes me happy. If you’re interested in checking it out, great. I might actually turn it into a similar piece inside the newsletter itself soon. Thanks!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Wardah Inam, Founder & CEO at Overjet

Wardah Inam is the Co-Founder & CEO of Overjet, the industry leader in dental AI. Born in Pakistan, she earned her PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and launched Overjet in 2018. Before that, she completed a postdoc at MIT CSAIL and served as Lead Product Manager at Q Bio, where she focused on simulation and quantification of human physiology. The idea for Overjet came from a deeply personal place, as a dental patient who kept receiving different diagnoses from different dentists, she saw an opportunity to bring precision, consistency, and clarity to an industry that had long relied on gut instinct over data.

Wardah.

Today, Overjet's AI platform, trained on millions of dental X-rays, is used by thousands of dentists across North America, with FDA-cleared tools that can detect, outline, and quantify oral diseases. Dentists using Overjet's technology identify 32% more cavities, and the company's reach collectively spans 100 million people in the United States. Wardah led Overjet's $53.2 million Series C funding round, one of the largest investments in dental AI, bringing the company's valuation to $550 million. Her work has earned her recognition as EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2025, a spot on the Boston Globe's Tech Power Players 50, and a feature in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2026.

What problem are you trying to solve at Overjet, and why?

The problem I started Overjet to solve was the fact that a lot of dental data was being collected, but it was unstructured, meaning computers couldn't really analyze it. That led to many things being handled manually and subjectively. By using AI, we could structure the data so that computers can process it, allowing us to automate and augment workflows, make better decisions, and reduce inefficiencies across the system. As for why dentistry, it impacts almost every person in the world, so even a small change can have a huge impact. Being impact-driven really resonated with me.

Source: Overjet.

I also experienced the problem myself: I had gone to two different dentists and received different treatment recommendations, which I tried to understand on my own. Those two reasons, the personal experience and the potential for broad impact, are why I ended up starting Overjet.

In terms of why now, we actually started seven years ago, so it's been a while. At the time, it was the early days of AI, and it wasn't yet known whether it could actually be valuable or do what we needed it to do. We had to build a lot of capabilities just to prove that it was possible, that AI could look at data the way a dentist could, provide recommendations the way another dentist could, and encode a dentist's understanding of disease and treatments into these models. It was an interesting moment to start.

Can you explain what the processes are that you do, as if I had no idea about AI and dentistry?

If you remember the last time you went to the dentist, they probably took X-rays, charted your teeth, and noted down numbers while probing you. All of that data is then stored in their systems, and they write down what the treatment plan would be, what needs to happen. Before you even walked into the practice, they likely checked whether you had insurance or not, and confirmed it again while you were there. That's essentially the workflow.

We help with all of these pieces. We automate the insurance checks, whether you're covered and how much you're covered, so that the practice can bill you correctly. We also help dentists provide a much more comprehensive diagnosis and communicate with patients more effectively. If you've ever sat in a dentist's chair and been shown gray, white, and black X-rays, you probably had no idea what they were talking about. By adding annotations, visualizations, and quantifications, patients can now understand things like ‘my bone loss has increased’ or ’his cavity has grown and needs to be treated’, and why the recommended treatments are being implemented. We also help dentists document more effectively through ambient AI, which listens to what is being said during the appointment, transcribes it, and captures the notes in real time.

What was the hardest part of going from zero to one?

Early on, the hardest part was building models capable of matching dentist-level accuracy. This was pre-ChatGPT, so you couldn't just call an API and get answers; you had to build all the infrastructure yourself. We were connecting systems, building out models from scratch, and learning how to train them. There were a lot of firsts.

The second major challenge was FDA clearance. Our products are software-as-medical-devices, which means they need to be FDA-cleared. At the time, there weren't many cleared products like ours, so there weren't established guidelines we could simply follow. Drafts were circulating, but they were still being worked out. That uncertainty significantly increased the time it took us to get to market, both because of the regulatory process itself and because we had to build the product to a high enough standard to meet those requirements. During that same period, the device classification also changed. Our products were previously classified as Class III devices and were reclassified as Class II, which made it somewhat easier to clear regulatory barriers going forward.

What surprised you the most about stepping into the CEO role?

I would say two things surprised me the most. The first was how important engineering a company's culture and values is in shaping how it behaves day to day. The second was learning how to align very senior leaders—people who are fully capable of executing within their own functions—toward one shared goal, whether that's every week, month, or quarter, and keeping them focused on fewer, higher-impact priorities rather than all the noise that comes with running a business.

What does your main day-to-day job as CEO look like?

It varies significantly week over week and month over month, but I'm usually focused on whatever the major bottleneck is, or the one thing that will really make a difference that week. Everything else kind of revolves around that, while other things continue happening in the background. For example, this week I'm very focused on customer activations across our multiple products. We've gone from being a single-product company to a multi-product company, so the question right now is: how do you activate customers across multiple products, and what does that look like? This morning, I was working through dashboards with the team, figuring out how to bring all the information together in a way that isn't overwhelming and what that needs to look like. That was the focus today, but it could be something completely different tomorrow.

Source: Overjet.

We serve dental practices, dental groups, insurance companies, and schools. So there isn't really one single ICP—we have multiple customer segments that we sell to. Our North Star comes down to the AI being utilized and providing real value, specifically the number of patients whose care is being meaningfully impacted by our AI.

How do you build culture?

I think the first and most important thing is having a meaningful mission and a clear articulation of that mission, so that you're hiring people who are aligned with it from the start; people who are inherently motivated to solve the problems the company is facing. The second piece is how you keep reinforcing that mission over time. How do you ensure it stays top of mind for everyone, whether through all-hands meetings, regular team meetings, or other touchpoints?

It also needs to be embedded in performance review cycles, scoring people on the values and behaviors that matter, so that the company's values and expectations are continuously reiterated. It really becomes a cycle: hire the right people, make sure those values and behaviors show up in their day-to-day work, provide feedback and scoring on those behaviors, and then use that to reinforce the right culture going forward.

How do you hire the best people? Do you have any internal processes?

Recruiters are very important to us because they're the ones sourcing candidates. If your pipeline isn't strong, you're probably not going to hire the right people. There's a lot of art to it, not just science, because finding the right fit isn't always about making a generic hire for a given role.

How are you infusing AI operationally into your day-to-day?

This is something that continues to evolve as tools improve over time. We are a very R&D-heavy company, so our tech teams are using AI not only in writing code but also across the entire development process, from design and product requirements documents all the way through to building the features. The technology on the R&D side has gotten really good, especially in the last six months or so, and it makes a significant difference.

But it's not just the technical teams. Our marketing team, for example, has also started using the same tools—things like Claude, Make, and others—to unblock themselves, better understand our customers, and bring more standardization to what they build. Internally, we try to be AI-first and use tools that are going to make us better. And sometimes it's not just about saving costs; it's more about increasing productivity.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I think keeping your energy high is very important, and managing it consistently, day after day. It really comes back to the most basic things; the things your parents always told you, and it turns out they were right: eat healthy, exercise, and sleep well, being the most important.

For me, if I'm doing those three things, everything else tends to fall into place. It probably starts with sleep. Not sleeping well leads to not working out, which leads to not eating well, and before you know it, you're in a negative cycle. So the question becomes: how do I get back on the right cycle when I notice myself drifting from it? That's something I actively pay attention to and try to course-correct whenever I see it happening.

Extra reading / learning

• The Wisdom (Tooth) of AI - April, 2025

• Redesigning Healthcare: Abundance, Trust, and Outcomes Through AI - May, 2025

• Building The Most Advanced AI Platform for Dentistry - January, 2026

And that’s it! You can follow Wardah on LinkedIn or check out Overjet on their website to keep up with what they’re building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Vanta*—the security and compliance platform companies rely on to stay audit-ready without losing their sanity.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 5,963 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 404,585 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🪐 What Changes After Your Exit (Nothing?). An interview with Ronan Berder, exited-Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft.
💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.
🔥 The CFO Who Killed The Spreadsheet. An interview with John Glasgow, CEO & CFO at Campfire.

PARTNERS 💫

Ever had a meeting where a random bot joins the call and, suddenly, everyone’s distracted? Granola works differently—there are no meeting bots.

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The report breaks down:

• Salary benchmarks for Engineers, AI/ML specialists, Data Scientists, Designers, and more.

• Where the biggest savings are by role and function.

• How companies are hiring top global talent and reinvesting savings back into growth.

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Are you an NBA fan? Do you just love warm weather? If yes, then you should join our Miami Beach holiday. The package includes: a 2-night stay at The Elser Hotel & Residences for two + 2 tickets to see the Miami Heat light up the court + $350 gift card courtesy of it luggage. It does not include flights—which sucks—but I am trying to see if these giveaways work, and if so, I want to create some really unique experiences with them. So sign up!

The package includes a couple of free nights' accommodation and some great tickets to watch the Miami Heat. Enter here. And apologies to non-U.S. readers; again, this is a test for some bigger giveaways hopefully coming soon. Let’s go!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Scott Chetham, Co-Founder & CEO at Faro Health

Scott Chetham is the Co-Founder and CEO of Faro Health. A clinical scientist at heart and a surfer by nature, he spent over two decades inside the drug development system, most notably as Head of Clinical Research Operations at Verily Life Sciences. It was during that time that a nagging question refused to let him go: why were the same costly, time-consuming mistakes showing up across hundreds of clinical trials? Clinical protocols had always lived in static, unstructured files, locking away their data and making automation nearly impossible. The idea that would become Faro Health came to him on a surfing trip to Costa Rica, and he hasn't stopped paddling since.

Scott.

Founded in 2019 and based in San Diego, Faro Health is bringing clinical trials into the digital age, helping teams manage the complexity of modern trial designs through a cloud-native platform that replaces static documents with intelligent, collaborative workflows. The mission is as urgent as it is ambitious: drug development currently takes 10 to 12 years and nearly $2 billion per drug, with a success rate of less than 10%. Scott believes that compressing those timelines with AI and automation is one of the most meaningful levers we have to make healthcare more affordable. We sat down with him to talk about building from zero to one, what service-based leadership actually looks like in practice, and why repeating your goals every two weeks might be the most underrated management habit there is.

What’s the problem you are trying to solve with Faro Health?

At the highest level, the problem is that drugs cost too much money, and for a legitimate reason. One of the leading expenses is what we call clinical development: the process of proving a drug is both safe and effective. That takes between 10 to 12 years and nearly $2 billion. On top of that, the success rate is less than 10%—closer to 6%—which means that for every successful drug, you also have to pay for all the failures.

Source: Faro Health.

So we really have to bend that curve. If we want more affordable drugs and more affordable healthcare, the most impactful thing we can do is directly reduce the time it takes to get a drug to market. To be clear, I don't mean lowering the bar in any way; I mean accelerating the process. Compressing that timeline is key because the timeline is what's driving that $2 billion cost. A lot of that is within our control. Faro Health sets out to automate and bring data to people so they can make more effective decisions, faster. And frankly, there are a lot of very specialized, very expensive people doing very repetitive work. Automating that is how we can really compress the timelines.

What was the most difficult thing when going from zero to one?

For me, it was finding a technical co-founder. My specialty is clinical trials, specifically the science of proving a drug is safe and effective, which is a field in itself called clinical sciences. Because of that, I needed a software co-founder, and finding that first person was the hardest thing. Everything else builds from there; once you have that person, you can start assembling a technical team.

Thankfully, I had prior experience at Google and Google X, where I worked on the clinical side to support their efforts. So while I wasn't a software engineer, I was familiar with that world. But still, for me, picking that first technical hire was the single hardest part of going from zero to one.

What's your main day-to-day job as CEO?

We're at a growth stage, right in the middle of that inflection curve. I have a great mentor who has scaled software companies multiple times, from teams of 10 up to much larger organizations. She once told me, “When your hair feels like it's on fire every day and you're constantly putting out fires, you're probably doing something right.” That's very much the reality right now.

A big part of my day-to-day is living through scale. I put out a lot of fires, and I help teams think through questions like: how do we build for the future? Where do we spend our time and resources to grow effectively? And when do you have to make active decisions between solving for right now versus building for scale? I'm sure it'll change again in another year, and that's the one constant truth about the CEO role, from founding through growth: it's never the same from year to year.

What does your team look like right now?

Honestly, I have way too many direct reports right now, and reducing that number over the next six to twelve months is my number one goal. It's not a reflection of anything other than the fact that we're growing fast, and we now need people who have scaled companies effectively before.

We have great foundational leaders, but we need a few more, particularly across customer-facing functions. We have excellent people in those roles, but they now need leadership from someone who has scaled that function before. So, it's about letting go of certain things and bringing in people who are, frankly, better than me at those jobs. That's my role right now: to replace myself.

Do you have any special recruitment strategies?

There are certain things I look for. One of them is how effectively someone works on a team. Going from individual contributor to team leader doesn't come naturally to most people, so I look for specific characteristics around that transition. I also tend to ask a lot of questions about whether someone has learned from previous mistakes. It's not about picking on anyone; everyone makes mistakes. What I'm really trying to gauge is how quickly and effectively they can learn from them, because I think that's one of the most valuable traits you can have in a scaling company. The ability to learn fast, move quickly, react, and make decisions under pressure is critical.

Source: Faro Health.

Beyond that, we are a very customer-focused culture, so I make sure that any candidate aligns with that. On the positive side, because of that culture, we do have people reaching out to us looking for jobs, which is great. But we still make sure that every hire genuinely fits those customer-centric values.

Could you explain your philosophy around leadership?

We could talk for hours on this, so I'll start at the abstract level and get into specifics. The first thing I always tell my leadership team is: you have to find your own style. Everyone is a little different.

For me, I come from a service-based leadership style. I went to a military high school, and one of its mottos was: ‘He who wants to be first of all must place himself last of all and servant to all.’ In many ways, I think that's especially true in a startup. You can't ask anyone to do something you wouldn't do yourself.

Nailed it.

So my approach is really about supporting my team to grow and empowering them. One of the questions I come back to often is: what's the one thing I could do to help you? I think that's how you get your team to scale. It's easier said than done at times, but that's my style. It's not for everyone, but it's how I'm most effective.

How do you set goals?

Conceptually, we do it by quarter. We have yearly goals that then break down into quarterly ones. As CEO, I set the strategic goals—the things we need to achieve. They have to be measurable, and everyone should know exactly what they are. There should never be any ambiguity around them, so everything is quantified upfront. From there, I ask my leadership team to define what is required of their respective teams to hit those goals, along with a few of their own. We try to keep it to three or four goals per team, because at our stage, that's about the right level of focus.

Source: Faro Health.

Source: Faro Health.

One of the most important things I've learned is that I almost have to repeat the goals every couple of weeks. It's amazing how quickly drift happens, both within teams and at the individual contributor level. People need to be constantly reminded of how their work fits within the broader goals, and that we're not shifting priorities. You have to keep repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it.

How have you been adding AI operationally in the day-to-day?

It really depends on the team. As an AI company, we're all in on AI, but even internally, we're all over the spectrum. Some teams have been building their own tooling to automate their work, and what they've achieved has been pretty remarkable. Other teams, like our finance team, are not quite as far along.

Source: Faro Health.

Personally, I switch between different tools depending on the task. I've built a virtual version of myself for email responses, which works really well—that one lives in ChatGPT. For other things, I use Anthropic, and for some financial tasks, I've actually found that Gemini works better. I tend to be fairly agnostic and use whatever tool performs best for a given job. The email assistant has been a particular game-changer. It runs as a private instance, so it's secure, and it has a full history of my writing style. I can now feed it a few bullet points and some background context, and with a quick refinement pass, I can produce a polished email in a fraction of the time it would take me to write it from scratch. It's not thinking for me; I'm putting my thoughts down as bullet points and building a narrative around them. That has been a huge time multiplier.

I'm constantly pushing my teams to automate more, and we're on that journey, but as I said, we're at different stages depending on the function.

How do you build culture?

It's hard work, and if you don't actively invest in it, you might not like what you get. Someone put it to me very simply recently: you'd better do something about culture, because otherwise it will form on its own.

Being a hybrid company makes it even harder. We do all the usual things (company retreats and company events, for example), and those matter, but what actually makes the biggest difference is consistency. It's people showing up, responding, and modeling the right behaviors day in and day out. If something happens, how do you react? Are you being customer-focused? Are you being transparent?

Source: Faro Health.

That all starts with senior leadership being very intentional and responsive, and modeling the behavior you want to see from your team. If leadership isn't embodying a customer-centric focus—being extremely transparent on timelines, limitations, and challenges—that culture of high transparency will never percolate through the rest of the organization. And that ties back to recruiting key talent. You have to hire leaders who share your values. It's a bit like getting married: my wife and I are very different people, but we value the same things, and that's why it works. Leadership is the same. They don't have to be like you, but they have to share your values. That's a big part of how we hire.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

For me, it all comes down to discipline and structure. To be effective, I need to have a very consistent routine, and I'm quite intentional about it. I work out and surf regularly, and I keep records of my performance to track whether I'm getting better or worse. I know that drives my wife a little crazy, but I like to measure things, and that carries over into my personal life just as much as my professional one.

My days are very structured. I get up at the same time every day, get the kids up, have breakfast, and read my emails. I then commit to tackling the most uncomfortable tasks of the day before 8 a.m., so I don't spend the rest of the day dreading them. Then I carve out an hour to work out or do something for myself; that break allows me to reset and recharge for what I think of as the second shift. As a CEO, you're going to work again in the evening; for me, that happens after the kids go to bed. I know that level of structure sounds like a nightmare to some people, but for me, it's the only thing that works. If I lose that structure, I lose my effectiveness.

Extra reading / learning

• Fixing the Flaws in Clinical Research - August, 2025

• How Faro Health is Reinventing Clinical Trials with AI - November, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Scott on LinkedIn or check out Faro Health on their website to keep up with what they’re building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting BILL—Your AI-powered financial operations platform.

beehiiv: We use beehiiv to send all of our newsletters. Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails. Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 5,331 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 398,622 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.
🔥 The CFO Who Killed The Spreadsheet. An interview with John Glasgow, CEO & CFO at Campfire.
🧊 Get Down On Your Knees And Pray For Shackleton. The greatest Antarctic adventurer and how to lead through difficult times.

PARTNERS 💫

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Honestly, the 41-year-old LeBron James, in year 23 of his career, is just filling me with so much joy right now. In this previous game, he and his son—yes, that’s right, LeBron James Jr.—scored 10 straight points for the Lakers, including an insane father-to-son, alley-oop pass. What world are we living in right now? It’s literally bonkers.

Source.

Not only that, but the Lakers are going to win this series against the Rockets, meaning they progress to the big boss of the OKC Thunder in the next round, where they will likely get smashed, but I don’t care. I am just so happy that after I watched LeBron’s first game at 17 years of age in the bedroom of my family home (downloaded the game from The Pirate Bay), I am still watching him at 40. Amazing.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Ronan Berder, Exited Founder & CEO at Wiredcraft

Ronan Berder is the founder and longtime chief executive of Wiredcraft, a Shanghai-born digital product consultancy known for building large-scale apps and WeChat experiences for global brands like Nike, Dior, Burberry, Hilton, and more. He grew the team to well over 100 specialists across design, data, and engineering, positioning Wiredcraft as a go-to partner for Western brands competing in China’s fast-moving digital ecosystem.

Ronan Berder.

In 2022, Ronan led the sale of Wiredcraft to Publicis Groupe and later stepped away from day-to-day operations. Since the exit, he’s been writing, contributing to open source, and advising founders while splitting time between Singapore and the U.S., as well as working on his new project /dev/push.

Give us the quick Wiredcraft elevator pitch?

Wiredcraft was a consulting firm doing two main things: digital transformation and digital products. Concretely, we worked mostly with Fortune 500s—primarily in China, with some work in Japan, Australia, and the U.S.—on consumer-facing digital touchpoints.

We covered everything from strategy and design down to infrastructure, scaling, and security. We worked with leadership teams on how to enter and grow the Chinese market digitally and make it successful from a business standpoint. Clients included LVMH, Adidas, Nike, Burberry, Dior, GM, and Hilton, among others. We got serious about consulting around 2015 and grew from eight people to over 100 by the time we sold. At peak, we were roughly 160.

What pushed you toward selling the company?

I've always hated consulting. I'm a product guy at heart; I like building, launching, and growing digital products. When we focused on consulting in 2015, I was clear that it had a shelf life for me.

For a long time, I assumed I'd step down and let the company grow without me. But as we got more third-party interest, I realized selling might be the right path.

Source.

We had a deal on the table in early 2020 that died because of COVID. We went back to market after strong growth—20%+ top-line in 2020 and ~70% in 2021—which led to the sale.

Who acquired you, and how did the process unfold?

We sold to Publicis, one of the largest agency holdings in the world. They own brands like Sapient, Digitas, and Saatchi & Saatchi. We were initially approached by about half a dozen firms, plus a few strategics. We hired SI Partners as our M&A advisor to run the process. We probably had ~12 interested, narrowed to 8, then 6, then 4. In the end, we had two serious offers and multiple LOIs.

Wiredcraft at Publicis Communications Planning Summit.

We optimized for a mix of partner take-home, brand fit for staff, and how our team would be treated post-deal. Deal structures varied, so it was a balancing act: more upfront vs. more earn-out, retention targets vs. financial targets. Another bidder was a well-known consultancy that would’ve looked great on résumés, but Publicis had the more attractive terms overall.

How did you think about valuation and negotiation?

I’m not particularly sophisticated in finance. My approach was to anchor to the highest credible price and let advisors help parse the terms. The process was stressful: periods of intense decision-making, then long due diligence with constant small issues. We focused on the totality of terms: what partners take home, the brand impact, treatment of the team, and the structure of upfront vs. tail.

What did the first 24 hours after closing feel like?

Honestly, nothing. Mostly relief. I was in my bedroom on a cheap IKEA folding chair with my laptop on a stack of books because we had no furniture. We got on the call, confirmed signatures, and it was done in minutes.

Source.

Leading up to it, I had a knot in my stomach for weeks. Shanghai was going through brutal lockdowns, and after our 2020 deal died because of COVID, I worried it might happen again. Once it closed, it was back to work immediately. There was an earn-out and targets. It was pretty anti-climactic.

Did your mindset towards wealth change? How do you manage your money now?

Not really. The biggest shift was simply feeling that my family is safe, no matter what happens; that was always the goal. I’ve always been very frugal. I don’t chase attention, I don’t care about fancy things, and the most expensive thing I buy is a laptop. I’d pick a barbecue with my wife over a fancy restaurant or meeting some actor any day. Before the deal, I’d never even owned a credit card, taken a loan, or bought stocks. I lived off my debit card, so there was a learning curve just to understand how to manage money after the exit.

Others close to me benefited as well. I had a few minority partners, and they did really well. They don’t need to take jobs unless they want to. They can rest for a few years, and some may not need to work again. At first, the money sat in an HSBC account earning no interest for two or three months; that was dumb in absolute terms, but I had no idea where to put large amounts. We took time to get intros to private banks, choose who to work with, and set everything up.

There’s pressure to use them as your wealth manager, and others also pitch you. I was skeptical. It’s hard to delegate what you don’t understand. I didn’t understand the products or mechanisms, and I don’t think banks always have your best interests at heart. So now I mostly manage it myself. About 40% is in equities and ~60% in fixed income. I’m still learning and may eventually bring in help, but only once I deeply understand the risks and products.

How is the portfolio allocated today, and what do you expect from private credit?

High level: 40% equities, 60% fixed income. Within equities, it’s fairly concentrated in a few names, heavy on tech. There’s one ETF in the mix. We may add broader ETFs as we move toward a 60/40 equity/fixed split. We’re taking calculated risks with names like Tesla and Nvidia, aiming for strong performance over 3–5 years.

Fixed income is a blend: some cash in deposits (rates are still okay), some bonds and products like PIMCO, and a third going into private credit with firms like Apollo and others. So roughly a third cash, a bit more than a third bonds/PIMCO-style products, and a third private credit. Depending on the vehicle, roughly 8–12%. In my view, it’s lower risk than equities and historically on par with—or better than—the S&P 500. It’s more ‘fixed income-like,’ with coupon payments on a quarterly or monthly basis and much less volatility.

How has your personal spending changed post-exit?

It hasn’t. My two luxuries pre-exit remain: business class for flights longer than eight hours, and not worrying about the price of food. I cook most meals and eat high-protein, so I buy what I want there.

What’s your household burn, and does it touch principal?

Roughly $30k a month, mostly family and kids. Almost a third goes to the apartment—real estate in Singapore is expensive. The rest is schools, Chinese and French lessons, and general comfort for the kids.

We’re comfortably inside what interest and income can cover. I could 5× that burn and still be within a reasonable formula, but it’s unlikely to change much. If anything, maybe a larger home and a better view. Car-wise, if ever, probably a Tesla for safety and autonomy.

Source.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

I don’t think I’m exceptionally bright or sophisticated. A lot of success was timing and sheer consistency, putting in the work and creating your own luck. I don’t give much advice because context rarely transfers. Most people need to get burned to adopt lessons anyway. What I can say: hard work isn’t sufficient, but it’s mandatory. People underestimate what that really means: years of high stakes, fear of failing, and grinding. For years, I was broke; only in the last three years did it look like it would work.

Source.

Discipline is my edge. I don’t drink alcohol. Paleo/carnivore diet; no pasta, bread, sugar, or processed food. No coffee or tea. I work out five times a week, even if I’m sick. Reasonable sleep. It’s boring and vanilla, but consistency wins over occasional brilliance. I’ve seen incredibly talented people fall behind because they weren’t consistent. The steady ones compound from consistently good to very good to great. Do that long enough, and timing eventually tilts in your favor.

Extra reading / learning

• 15 Years Doing What I Hated… 8-Figure Exit. Worth It? - July, 2025

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Ronan on LinkedIn to keep up with him or check out /dev/push to see what he’s been working on right now!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

beehiiv: We use beehiiv to send all of our newsletters. Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails. Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀 

That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

👋 Howdy to the 4,324 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 393,591 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🔥 The CFO Who Killed The Spreadsheet. An interview with John Glasgow, CEO & CFO at Campfire.
🧊 Get Down On Your Knees And Pray For Shackleton. The greatest Antarctic adventurer and how to lead through difficult times.
⚡️ Data Is King & AI Is Queen. An interview with Bryan McCann, Co-Founder at You.com.

PARTNERS 💫

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The biggest win from the 5 Day Challenge isn’t finishing everything.

It’s leaving with clarity: knowing how HighLevel fits your goals and where to take it next.

Missed this session? Join the next one!

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Considering today’s piece is around mental health, I thought it would be cool to use this news as the anchor for my housekeeping section this week. It fills me with positivity and hope for the future when I see leadership like this. Phones are like cigarettes.

Source.

We all know this to be true, so the sooner we can eradicate them from our lives, the better. I predicted a few years ago that, in a decade, phones would exist but be a low-status toy. We can only hope!

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack

Being a founder is tough. Being a founder and maintaining your personal wellness is tougher. And being a long-term founder without taking an above-average amount of knocks to the self-esteem, happiness, and mental health zones inside of your head, well, that’s near impossible.

But the good news is, there are things you can do. With the right amount of support, effort, and empathy, any founder can live a happy and healthy life.

If you are a founder, or anyone for that matter, who is currently going through a rough period, today’s piece is not the answer to your problems. What it is, though, is an unfiltered, no-holds-barred look into the life of one founder, me, and what I have done successfully and not-so-successfully in the past.

If nothing else, I aim for this post to be fun, encouraging, and most of all, a love letter to all the crazy ones out there, just to tell you one thing—that you are not alone. 

A quick foray into the data

We know anecdotally that founders go through periods of hell, but what does the data tell us about this? One 2015 study by Michael Freeman titled ‘Are entrepreneurs touched by fire?’ attempts to answer the question.

In this study, 242 entrepreneurs and 93 demographically matched comparison participants completed an anonymous, online, self-reported survey to assess their engagement in entrepreneurship and their individual and family mental health histories. The findings were pretty stark.

_{*Note: All data was sourced from Michael Freeman’s study.}

Not only did the studies show a much higher risk of ADHD, anxiety, and depression, but there was a correlation between entrepreneurship and the ultimate sadness, suicidality. As someone who has lost a close family member to suicide, I have always had a very strong pull towards trying to understand mental health and how to cope successfully as a founder.

My backstory

I grew up in a very small town with a relatively happy family. School was amazing. I was the class clown and the best footballer in the area, so growing up, I felt somewhat as if I were the center of the universe and could do no wrong.

That did change briefly when I had a health scare in my twenty-third year, but even that spurred a positive change in me, opening my eyes to how quickly life can change and leading me to take off across the world with a backpack on my back.

Me on the left.

Also, I'm on the left.

Bolivia.

Iguazu.

Zimbabwe.

This long, unbroken streak of life-is-good-ness lasted until around 2014. I was 28, had come back from my travels, and had just taken the step of moving to the city and starting my first startup, AdventureFit. The brand was beautiful, the experience was second to none, but we really never made any money. Around three years into AdventureFit, with the writing on the wall that the company wasn’t going to work, a mentor told me that I was “the most driven founder he’d ever seen in 25 years of business coaching.”

He followed this up by telling me that, in this particular case, that was not a good thing. “You need to know when to quit,” he told me. This was a skill I was yet to learn, and I suffered for it.

Personal debt, insane stress, sleeping on my own couch to rent out my bed for long periods at a time. It came to a head at my best friend’s wedding when my anxiety and stress had peaked so aggressively that instead of enjoying the final day of the destination wedding, I decided I needed to lock myself in a hotel room for the entire day.

Wedding night.

People couldn’t understand it. I was gregarious, confident, outgoing, and just the night before, I had done a cracking job as best man at the wedding. But I was mentally broken from stress. It wasn’t until I had a text exchange with another friend that it really clicked what was going on. I had been telling him how stressed I was, how I felt a little bit sad all day for no reason, and that I had this really weird sort of heartbreak feeling.

As someone who had had his own mental health battles, he replied with a simple line that I’ll never forget reading: “Yep, that’s called depression, mate.” 

Things I’ve tried in the past

After I realized I had depression, the task was to get rid of it, or at the very least, learn to manage it. Which I have done successfully and unsuccessfully over time. Here is a snapshot of some of the things I have done and how I found them.

• Daily meditation: Thanks to the rise of wellness, the discussions and destigmatization around mental health, and my general openness to new things, I dove heavily into meditation. Sam Harris became my guru, and I devoured anything and everything about meditation.
  
  The good news is, I think meditation is great. I feel more relaxed when I meditate, and I did it 4-5 times per week for years. However, I do not meditate right now, and I didn’t find much efficacy in countering my depression. Having said that, I didn’t have a control group of me’s that were not meditating during the same period, so it’s somewhat hard to really know.

• Cold showers, ice baths, Wim Hof breathwork: Next up, I found the trend of cold showering, ice baths, and breathwork, partly thanks to the rise of Wim Hof, and gave that a shot for a long while as well.
  
  I never went deep into the breathwork side, although I dabbled, but I did have a cold shower every morning for a long time. It’s something that I’d love to pick up again, to be honest. Not really for mental health, but just because it gives you a very invigorating feeling and is great for overall health, mood, circulation, etc.
  
  _{*Below is an interview I did with Wim Hof nearly 10 years ago.}

• Journaling, gratitude, and general: Next was journaling. We have all heard the studies about how much gratitude journaling increases overall wellness. And it makes sense. The best way I had it explained to me was that ‘Happiness is momentum, the more pleasant, empathetic, and positive thoughts you can have, the deeper the neural pathways become, the easier it is to keep skiing down those wellnessy slopes.’
  
  I have no idea who told me that, and I know they didn’t phrase it in exactly that way, but you get my drift. I no longer have a gratitudinal (actual word) practice today.

Psychedelic and clinical experiences

• Psychology and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: While I was in Australia and for most of the last decade, I have had a consistent, albeit somewhat stop-and-start, relationship with my psychologist. I’ve learned a lot over the journey and do value having someone to talk to. Mainly to understand the brain in general, rather than my brain per se.

• Ketamine assisted therapy: In early 2022, when I was really struggling and had just left Australia, I heard the founder of Field Trip Health interviewed by Professor Scott Galloway about the benefits of ketamine-assisted therapy in reducing the effects of otherwise treatment-resistant depression.
  
  Although psilocybin had not been approved by the FDA in the U.S., the treatment was available, and I was about to land in the U.S. With only a few days before heading further south, I was able to secure a six-session course of treatment over a month at their San Diego clinic.
  
  The treatment itself cost me close to $10k, plus the additional time spent staying in an Airbnb in San Diego, but it was worth a roll of the dice. The experience itself was quite wonderful. You are given a doctor and a psychologist. The doctor will be the one who recommends how much ketamine to pump into your system every session—50mg to start, and up to 120mg to finish for me—and the psychologist is the one who will walk you through the journey.
  
  I could not speak more highly of my time at Field Trip, and although the experiences were challenging, it was definitely worthwhile. Months later, my partner said she had seen a huge improvement in my overall mental health, and she was probably right.

• Psilocybin (magic mushrooms): Out of respect for the sponsors of today’s post, I will leave this section out for now, as experiences I may or may not have had were not done in a way I feel right expressing.

• Ayahuasca in the Amazon: Unfortunately, following on from some positive effects of the ketamine therapy, and some shiny new medication, I still hadn’t been able to get into a good place, so in mid-2023, I did something that has been top of mind for me for close to a decade; I booked a week-long Ayahuasca retreat in the jungles of Peru. This was what I could only explain as a weeklong waking nightmare.
  
  I walked into the center with 22 or 23 other travelers, all there for one reason or another: lost loved ones, retrenchment, a general feeling of being lost in life, etc. And although I felt like I was walking in with a relatively good outlook on life, I walked out of there 10 times more mentally shattered than when I entered. This was very disappointing and hard to come to grips with. It probably took me three months to fully recover to my baseline, which was depression.
  
  Why was it so difficult? Well, I have had what you would call a ‘Hero’s Dose’ of other psychedelics in the past, and when quite deep during my ketamine experience, but ayahuasca is something unto itself. And if you are on the wrong end of a deep ayahuasca experience—which I was on each and every one of the ceremonies—you are in for a night of hell. I spent the majority of the week thinking I was going insane or thinking much worse things than that. I felt like, for whatever reason, the experience was very counterproductive for me.
  
  There was also the fact that each ceremony started at 8pm and sometimes lasted until 4am, with breakfast three hours later. I feel like people were irritable and exhausted due to the sleep deprivation they went through during the week. The experience cost around $5k when you add up the program, flights, etc.

Jungle.

• Brain scans at Amen Clinic: Following my trip to the jungle, I sought help from the Amen Clinic, a professional brain care clinic in the U.S. I wanted to assess the overall health of my brain because I had a sneaking suspicion all of my problems stemmed from an unsuccessful backflip-on-a-dancefloor attempt I made when I was 28. The attempt left me unconscious, soiling my pants, and unresponsive for a total of 43 minutes. As I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, the doctors called my parents to tell them I was suspected of having brain damage and spinal injury.
  
  The results gave me good news, irrelevant news, and bad news. The good news was that my brain was in incredible good condition for a 37-year-old. The irrelevant news was that it showed signs of chronic depression and anxiety. The bad news was that I was still searching for answers.
  
  _{*Note: In case you were wondering, that was my one and only backflip attempt in this lifetime. Officially retired from drunken gymnastics.}

My brain on depression.

My brain on anxiety.

• BONUS: Ezra cancer scans: Around this time, I decided to drop by for a scan at Ezra, a clinic that has a tagline that reads, “We found cancer’s greatest weakness—early detection.” I thought now that I am getting older, I should start proactively looking after not only my mental health but my physical health too.
  
  Two weeks after the scan, I was told that I had a 6 cm tumor in my lungs. It took four weeks, multiple specialists, a three-day stint in a German hospital (oh yeah, we were on holiday), a bronchoscopy, and a biopsy for them to tell me that ‘there was nothing to worry about.’
  
  Ezra is awesome, I think. If you can get ahead of a scary diagnosis like the big C, it can and will save your life. But I’ve also heard mixed reports of the efficacy of the scans and lots of people like me who basically had a bad flu going through hell to find they were actually fit as a fiddle. I guess the stress is worth it; cancer is preventable, in a way, if you catch it early. (shrug) The scan itself costs around $3k and is recommended annually or biannually.

The report.

The diagnosis.

My recent and/or current stack

Phew, man, that last section was kinda heavy. Before I dive into the things I am doing right now to live a happy and healthy life, I want to take a moment to tell you that I actually don’t feel like I have depression today. I still have massive bouts of social anxiety, and I bail on a lot of things, but I actually feel pretty good overall.

Let’s take a quick look at how and why I can say that, considering everything you just read.

• Desvenlafaxina (depression meds): Well, for starters, I am on medication. For the longest time, all the way up until last year, I stayed away from medication. There was one small period in which I was on meds, but my grandpa took his own life after his lifelong medication was discontinued and then changed on him at ~70 years old.
  
  Plus, add to the fact that every study under the sun will show you that meds are about as efficacious as improving sleep, exercising once or twice a week, etc. But anyway, I am on them, and they seem to be ok.

• Brain care pills and GABA: I say brain care pills and GABA, even though they are one and the same, because I want to really make a highlight of the GABA part. GABA, or Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid, seems to be an incredibly successful way for me to be able to really take the edge off my anxiety.
  
  I mainly get anxiety in social situations, nothing else really. It’s the reason I love writing but hate podcasting. Podcasting just stresses me out. In my younger days, I would pull the rower down in my bedroom—yes, I had a rowing machine in my bedroom—and bang out 5km or some 500m sprints to try to blow out the anxiety cobwebs. Today, because I am sin / sans the bedroom rower, I use GABA.
  
  I also use a combination of personally recommended cerebral supplements from my work at the Amen Clinic. Every morning, midday, and evening, I have a combination of saffron, GABA, omega-3, and more.

The good gear.

• Sport, competition, weightlifting: For me, I have been very active—training and sport-wise—basically all my life. First, it was Aussie rules football, then CrossFit for a split second, then weightlifting. The last thing I competed in properly was weightlifting, lifting at the 2016 National Championships as an 85 kg lifter.
  
  I feel happier when I have a goal and something to work towards. In 2016, my goal, even though I started weightlifting at 28, was to represent Australia. It was going to be hard because they don’t usually give spots to people who don’t have a long runway in the sport, unless you are the best in the country.
  
  Funny thing was, after the 2016 comp, I gave myself the following week off, and then that extended to a fortnight, then a month. And then I didn’t really train hard again, aside from a quick dash into powerlifting, until last year. Now I have a new goal. My lifetime goal is back on, training towards a 120 kg snatch and a 150 kg clean and jerk. And my looser, funner goal is to be the internet’s strongest startup founder.

Source.

• Whoop, Eight Sleep, outlet timer: One thing I love right now is my Whoop. It helps me track my training, my recovery, and most of all, my sleep. I also have an Eight Sleep bed, which is supposed to improve my sleep, but we hardly even use it, really. No shade on Eight Sleep, they’re cool, we’ve just not really seen the benefits.
  
  Whoop, on the other hand, I live and breathe. Another small change that has positively impacted our lives is installing an outlet timer on our modem. At 10pm every single night, our internet cuts off. And yes, we turn it back on from time to time, but most of the time we do not.
  
  A phenomenal way to force a habit of getting off the devices, Netflix, and so forth early and prepping for a consistent bedtime.

• No socials, no SIM card. I think it’s been nearly three years now that I have been without a SIM card, and much longer, maybe 4-5 years, since I have had any social media on my phone.
  
  My long-term plan was to throw my phone in the bin and just use the Apple Watch, but unfortunately, it’s actually impossible. You can have the phone and just store it away, but you can’t just live without one. Which is kinda shit.
  
  I really just want an Apple Watch for podcasts and audiobooks, as I’d be heartbroken without them. I invested in Humane, which ended up a total flop, mainly because I believed in their mission of ridding the world of the scourge of our time, the smartphone. I think it’s coming, a world without phones, but it may still be some time yet.

• Working with a dietician and a chef: My partner and I both started working with a dietician recently, and it’s been quite good. I am now pretty diligently tracking my body fat, lean muscle, etc., for the first time ever, and I am really enjoying it. I started at 22% body fat, which isn't super high, but I got it down to 18% pretty quickly.
  
  We also pay for a cook to come and prepare our meals for us every so often now. Granted, we were doing this ourselves, but we do it every fortnight just to free up Sunday a bit and because it’s quite economically feasible in Argentina, where we are currently living.

• Weekly breakfasts: I still struggle a fair bit socially and pull out of a lot of things, and weirdly, once it gets past 4pm, the chances I’ll bail on something go through the roof. So I do breakfasts. On Wednesdays and Fridays, I catch up with a couple of Athyna team members from different departments.
  
  We spend very little, sometimes zero time, speaking about work. It’s just a great way for me to spend some time with people, and especially with the team in a less formal space. I really love it.

Legends.

More legends.

• And most importantly, my partner and my dog: And it goes without saying, the most important part of your mental health stack should be your closest partners in crime. Your loved ones. For me, that would be my partner, Taina, and my dog, Ziggy. 

LOL at Ziggy.

Things I want to try

And lastly, for the sake of it, here is a short list of things I think I would like to try in the not-too-distant future to hopefully be happier and healthier again.

• More co-working time: Before COVID, I worked remotely, just like I do now, but I probably went into my co-work 2-3 days per week. Today, I probably go in 0.2 times per week. Once every 5 weeks, maybe less. Granted, I work from home, and Taina and Ziggy are around, but it’s still nice to get out and say hi to some new people, be around some energy, etc.

• Serious gut health work: And the one major stone I have left somewhat unturned is my gut health. I did a program for a few months some years ago, but I left feeling like there was a lot more work to do. And the more research that we do, the more it seems that the gut-to-brain link is hugely important to the creation of serotonin. I do plan to dive heavily into this at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Summary

Well, that was quite the experience diving into all of that with you. If nothing else, I hope this mental-health-in-public type post reminded you that we all go through ups and downs. And especially those of us who are ambitious and/or stupid enough to try to take on the world through entrepreneurship. Anyway, that’s it from me. I am off to walk Ziggy while I listen to a very light podcast to get back into a regular mood. Maybe old school Ricky Gervais, yes, that will do it, Ricky Gervais it is.

New Zealand.

Extra reading

• Waking Up, Sam Harris - September, 2014

• Tribe, Sebastian Junger - May, 2016

• Lost Connections, Johann Hari - January, 2018

• How To Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan - May, 2018

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Source.

Source.

Source.

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

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That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡  P.P.S. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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