Reading up on business-strategy

Interesting piece from CEO of Microsoft

@elonmusk

Here’s an interesting fact. Morgan Housel threw out a third of The Psychology of Money while writing it. He started with traditional long chapters (4k–6k words). It felt wrong, almost rambling, full of fluff. So he scrapped it and rewrote the book as 20 short, story-driven chapters in the style he’d already mastered online. Every major U.S. publisher rejected it. A small U.K. house took it with a 5,000-copy first print run. It went on to sell millions.

@deewalkerbooks

Where does one find people like this? I’d love to have an army of them at 37signals - or just one to start - but I’ve found everyone claims they can do everything but very few can actually do anything.

@jasonfried

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

@patrickc

Selling software is pointless now

@saeed_vz

When Amazon brought me to Seattle to help build AWS, almost everyone at the org was an immigrant. The ratio was probably ~20:1. This “visa abuse” was what was necessary to create the biggest American companies in the history of commerce. The Seattle metro area became one of the wealthiest regions in the world because of this, but let’s shut the whole system down that made this possible.

@dvassallo

Linear CEO @karrisaarinen: "I took a break this summer from paying attention to AI. I thought that when I came back, I'd feel left behind. But when I came back, I realized that nothing has really changed. There's new models, there's new techniques, there's new agents. But in the end, making great products, increasing revenue, and building the business—it's still hard. It's clear the tools are getting better, you can do more, you can do it faster. But I think the more important question is: are we actually making better things with these tools? Are our teams getting better with these tools? I don't think that answer is clearly yes. There's a lot of emphasis now on toolmaking and using tools and building systems. But I think in the end, as product people, our job is to make something great."

@lennysan

Mercury is running a free bookstore for SF tech week and to celebrate our AI-accounting system (@Mercury Books). My recommendation was “Beginning of Infinity”. 201 Jackson St today and tomorrow.

@immad

revenue-wise, https://firstindex.co is already where baremetrics was at 18 months. it's been 11 days.

@Shpigford

"Not only am I uninterested in the company’s home device, I can, for the first time, envision a future where I don’t buy Apple by default. Indeed, this already happened..." Anyone into the age of agents will eventually realize Apple is a bad fit. https://stratechery.com/2026/apple-and-a-hackers-future/

@dhh

I'm begging you: • Go on google trends • Find problem people are struggling with • Turn those problems into digital assets • Without revealing your name • Without showing your face I shared this with a bartender, he made $31K in a single month. Here's how it works:

@TommiPedruzzi

Figma doesn’t want you to use MCP Amazon doesn’t want you to shop with agents Reddit won’t let Claude access threads X won’t let ChatGPT read tweets It’s starting. This happened with APIs 8 years ago.

@wesbos

i'm sorry, Jev can WHAT? it can take your website link, find people who need your product, email them and book the calls? since when?? i've been doing this by hand for a YEAR. ok. testing it: $30 free 👇 https://explee.com/auto-gtm/x/tw-ag425-c897

@vovudebosh

back in baremetrics days, ARPU generally hung around $100. spent 7 years hanging in that space. feels wild to now be operating multiple businesses with ARPU in the $750-1000 range. highly recommended. 🙂

@Shpigford

🚨 Elon Musk just MIC DROPPED this reporter who was dooming about Super Intelligence REPORTER: Not if they haven't got a job! ELON: Well, jobs have ALWAYS changed. A computer used to be a job: a building full of people doing calculations. I don't think anyone is pining to go BACK and do calculations all day to do bank interest rates! We'll see an EVOLUTION of roles. As the president mentioned, there is a tremendous demand for people [in SI]. The most likely outcome...is incredibly beneficial. It's a future you would want. 💯 Trump and @ElonMusk are on the SAME PAGE on this Areas like Europe, who lack the same SI infrastructure as the US, are going to fall behind and WISH they were up here with America And China CERTAINLY wants all of the mass data center and SI advancement we are having. America is winning the future at all costs, and the people will benefit!

@EricLDaugh

Yup it's over. We're no longer hiring motion designers.

@uxmiles

🚨 NOW: Anthropic chief DARIO just walked up and said President Trump helped put his Super Intelligence worries at ease "If we do this right, we work with the President and everyone here, we can win safely!" Imagine that, all it took was DONALD J. TRUMP getting involved and the tables are turning! No more SI dooming, no more surrendering to China. America will remain number one BOTH for national and economic security, as long as Trump is president 👏🏻

@EricLDaugh

There is always a .com you can get for $5k that's better the tryblurgh.‌ai you're currently using. The reason you don't see it is (a) lack of imagination and (b) because you're attached to Blurgh, which you shouldn't be, because it's not that great anyway.

@paulg

Hi, Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscriptions to new subscribers, but together with it we are also changing how we calculate the usage for it. In effect, if you do the math, it will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan. Now that it's said, let me explain why this is happening and why you will still get more work done than if you were on the Pro $200 subscription one month ago. (a) We didn't want to compromise in other ways and are committing to not reintroducing the 5h limit, so that you can fully use the weekly usage when you want. (b) On the subscription, we guarantee that over time you always get more work done and with an increasing level of quality. This means that you will continue to get more value per dollar spent as a result of models getting more efficient and us passing down the improvements in the form of API price reductions. (c) We don't want to put an incentive on ourselves to artificially inflate the API list prices to make it look like you are getting a lot (and workaround it through discounts, etc). Instead we want to continue to both rapidly reduce prices and increase capabilities of models on the API. This week we introduced GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna at 50% of their previous price. Over time, we see prices go low enough that it makes sense for most to buy usage as needed without there being a significant gap between what you get in a subscription and what you get in the API for a dollar spent. (d) Tomorrow, we are adding more things to the subscription that won't draw on the usage, I won't reveal what that is yet. I wanted to be transparent before all the big announcements tomorrow. Lots of new exciting things are coming to the subscriptions that will make it super compelling, but I wanted to make sure to share this change ahead of time so you can all understand it before we shower you with good news. Codexingly, Tibo

@thsottiaux

the revenue from the past 48 hours emphatically says yes. absolutely wild for a tweet I sent out on a whim on a Friday afternoon as I was finishing up for the week. 🎉

@Shpigford

I’m so fucking sick of giving away 3% of all our revenue just for processing a payment. Like how is that not disrupted yet? Most ecom brands run on around 15% net. So we are giving up over 16% of our potential pre transaction fee profits to these bastards. Someone please disrupt this. It’s as if credit card processing companies are 16% equity holders in all our businesses.

@chuckiegregory

a YC partner who closed millions in founder-led sales just laid out her 8 rules for cold email

@tibo_maker

While I hate that Greg is exposing this alpha publicly... He's right. The tough part is not seeing this trend anymore now that Mainstreet has scaled to 9 figures in ARR through this strategy, Bending Spoons IPO this year, Thrive and General Catalyst executing similar strategies among many others now. But execution in M&A is hard and integration is even more difficult especially in legacy services businesses. Add in debt and cyclical nature it's not full proof. In fact I would wager 50% or more of the current AI holding companies fail due to poor integration and high debt profile. Hence why we hold zero debt we can survive any macro trends or black swan events. Leverage cuts both ways and we're about to see this play out. The best buying opportunity in our lifetime will happen when the private credit bubble bursts in the next few years.

@JesseTinsley

i think i just started an SEO agency

@Shpigford

i want to get more clarity on my best customers but i always truly do not like getting on calls with customers, did it for a month before and i don’t not like the call part, i just didn’t know if i was really getting anywhere and every day had calls lined up randomly timed. this is the main thing i would need to do to grow my business i think, to nail my ideal customer and see what successful users are already doing in @postbridge_ so i can get more customers like them! for starters ill try DM’ing and emailing directly but i have a feeling the truths are hidden behind a real human call we keep going and the final boss churn never lets up: but i can also choose to NOT get this extra clarity and make a decent guess instead i don’t HAVE to get on a call it’s just a trade off like anything else (me being solo no team is also one)

@jackfriks

When people talk about AI companies money flow they miss two fundamental things: 1. It is a winner takes all business. With ASI you take pharma, chips, ... 2. In the long term the idea we have of money will disappear.

@antirez

Bot detection & human verification will be one of the most urgent demands for businesses over the coming years. Agent swarms will suffocate every website and form; small companies and government websites are most vulnerable. There is a huge gap in the market for this right now. When we looked at what offerings were in the market to use at X, there was not a single company that brought together all the latest technologies so we had to do it all in-house.

@nikitabier

💰 Passed $10M/y in revenue + investment gains this year I've always been aggressively increasing my profit margins to as high as possible, especially the last few years, and especially this year where I've reduced my SaaS dependencies to just a handful of companies by vibecoding my own replacements It's now about 94.5% profit! Spend less -> lower costs -> more profit -> more money saved -> more money to invest -> more % returns on investments And at some point that investment return starts to pass by your business revenue which it has for me for about a year now Most of my investments have been simple ETFs like Vanguard S&P500, but also a few lucky stock and startup bets that worked out: Back in 2022, I couldn't get any available GPUs, so I thought it might be smart to buy Nvidia if there's such a shortage and that was a good bet too Then back in 2023 @dannypostma recommended me to invest in the companies we used for our AI inference for our photo AI apps, so I did that too. First I invested in @replicate and then also @FAL From then I just asked every app/service I used if I could invest, like @cursor_ai in 2025 which then got acquired by @spacex recently! My business revenue has remained very stable at about $200K-$250K/mo, but even with that investment returns have now surpassed that Investments fluctuate a lot so some years it's up some years it might be down a lot (who isn't expecting a big crash at some point?), and most investment gains are unrealized (I never sell!), so keep that with a big grain of salt! I keep my revenue/gains together with my profit margin and my sleep score in my situation monitor dashboard, as those are equally important :D Many people in the last decade told me to spend all my money, either personally or with my business to grow it, we don't know how that would have ended up, maybe my companies would be bigger, but I'm happy I did it in my own lean profitable healthy way and it ended up great I think! 🙏😊

@levelsio

Zuck moved his desk to $META AI Lab in April. How could anybody in their sane mind bet against this?

@oguzerkan

Wrote down some thoughts on how to pivot a SaaS in 2026 (the AI era). But most importantly: Competing on features is dead https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-pivot-your-saas-company-in-the-age-of-ai/

@yongfook

AI-native services: a $100B opportunity

@gregisenberg

Jev will be super helpful for agents to make split second decisions in workflows, data classification, judgment calls, and hundreds of other use-cases in the enterprise. Here's a quick demo with Box and Jev to make that real. The demo pulls an incident report from Box, asks whether it's customer-facing and how severe it is, moves the file into escalate, monitor, or review folders, and sets a metadata template instance with the result. This all happens nearly instantly and at almost no cost. You can imagine this in insurance claims, contract management, loan processing, security reviews, customer log analysis, and so on. Definitely a great new class of AI use-case.

@levie

I just read what Zuck wrote about Muse connectors. A few things I think this means: 1. We’re witnessing the agentification of consumer apps. 2. Zuck believes Muse reaching 100M+ users feels entirely possible. 3. Whoever you connect to becomes your new landlord, so pick carefully. 4. Connectors become the new app listings (valuable real estate). 5. Being early could be as valuable as being early to the App Store in 2009. 6. Meta sees what people want, which providers convert, and what users will pay. That gives it the power to rank connectors, charge for distribution, and launch competing services. 7. The opportunity map includes agent native APIs, connector agencies, SEO for agents, identity and reliability infrastructure, and vertical connector marketplaces. 8. We’re moving from humans choosing apps to agents choosing businesses. 9. Every business will need an agent strategy, just like every business needed a mobile strategy. 10. Kinda crazy to say but a 3 person API company could reach 10M+ users through one great connector. 11. Connectors could create an entirely new second-order economy. The biggest opportunity may be helping businesses distribute, price, and optimize their services for agents. 12. Your API becomes more important than your app. Weird to think about but true. 13. Zuck wants Muse to own the moment between wanting something and getting it. He is coming for the app economy. Will he win? Right now it's Instinct vs Muse vs Grokbot. TBD.

@gregisenberg