Jim Fish retweeted
Let me be blunt. Those who are afraid of AI feel deep down that they are impostors & have no edge. If you have a 1) clear mind, 2) a deep, not just cosmetic, undertanding of your specialty, 3) and/or are original enough to reinvent yourself when needed, AI will be your friend.
Jim Fish retweeted
Before it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, the way to do it was to be on the winning side in a military or political dispute.
After William conquered England in 1066, he incorporated 21% of the land in England as his royal estate.
Then came the rewards for his close followers: 57 people were given control of half the land in England.
Based on the origin of names in the Domesday Book, we can see that almost all major landholders were Norman; only a few hundred English landholders (mostly with smaller lands) are named, who in total possessed just 8% of the landed wealth in England (this figure includes ecclesiastical landholding as well; if only private landholders are counted, it would be even lower)."
Jim Fish retweeted
A DN discussion showed how in-cylinder pressure testing can reveal exhaust backpressure, even with no codes. Read more here: diag.net/msg/m6crbsawwklbur1…
Join free @ diag.net #DiagnosticNetwork
Jim Fish retweeted
The ARR multiple fallacy
ARR multiple is not the right way to think about sub-20% growers.
Simple framework:
If you’re growing sub-20%, you get a 10-30x EBIDTA or FCF multiple. If you use this rubric, Miro is very fairly valued by Bending Spoons.
Only 30%+ growers get the luxury of an ARR multiple.
The reason is that 30% growth means you’re doubling in 3 years and so the revenue base will be 2x in 36 months, and the margin structure will look different at 2x scale. Cash flow today is a rounding error against that. So you value the trajectory, and ARR is the cleanest proxy for trajectory.
At 15% growth, doubling takes 5 years. That's close enough to "never" that the market stops paying for the future and starts paying for the present. The present is earnings. If you're not producing them, you're not a growth company anymore. You're a bad value company.
The mistake founders make is anchoring to the multiple they had at 40% growth and thinking the ARR multiple just compresses. It doesn't compress. It gets replaced. You cross 30% on the way down and the entire valuation framework switches out from under you.
Which is why the worst place to be is 20-30% growth with no FCF. Growth investors won't pay for it. Value investors can't. You're priced by whoever is least excited,a really painful place to be.
Jim Fish retweeted
There are edge cases where this doesn't work, but surprisingly few. You can make almost any decision about a startup by asking which choice would make you grow the most, and you'll almost always get the right answer.
Jim Fish retweeted
fundraising before @ycombinator is very different from fundraising after.
i thought fundraising meant weeks of meetings and follow-ups.
we haven’t even properly started raising yet, and we’ve already seen investors commit hundreds of thousands within a single 30-minute call.
The yc ecosystem is unreal. there’s no better place to build a startup imo.
Every single thing in life has pro’s and con’s. AI is a subset of this. Sure, there will be second order effects - but to try to halt progress is a lesson we seem doomed to repeat - over and over and over.
Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
Steven Sinofsky on lessons from history about banning technology in education: "Preemptive regulation is the enemy of progress."
"New tools give us new ways to fail doing old things. And more importantly new ways to succeed at doing new things."
"Hire native AI users. Let them do native AI things. Let’s together see what a new technology can do. That’s how optimists and builders approach new things."
Full piece from @stevesi: a16z.news/p/banning-ai-in-la…
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Jim Fish retweeted
The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.
Jim Fish retweeted
Detroit impressions:
• The downtown is full of beautiful buildings. All of them seem to have been built specifically in the 1920s. I guess that is after the city had accumulated enough auto wealth but before the twin hits of Modernism and the Depression. (I hadn't known that the GM Renaissance Center, built as a revitalization project, was at the time the largest private development in US history, and also at the time the world's tallest hotel. It may be large, but it is not pretty.) The downtown is surprisingly depopulated -- both the streets and the sidewalks feel empty. That said, it didn't feel at all unsafe. There are lots of great homes in the suburbs.
• The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation is amazing, and it's worth visiting Detroit for it alone. Among many (many) other things, it contains the oldest known surviving steam engine in the world, the actual Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a deconstructed Model T, a deconstructed Eames Chair, and many great cars, agricultural equipment, locomotives, industrial specimens, and more. (They have the Lincoln Continental that JFK was riding in when assassinated -- which, apparently, was returned to service and used by several subsequent presidents.)
• The museum made me wonder why American car design peaked in the mid-60s. (This fact is very evident at the museum.) The LLMs blame the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. (Not quite wtfhappenedin1971.com, but close.)
• Good food exists but it is hard to find.
• The Heidelberg Project also exists and is unique.
• We stayed at the Dearborn Inn, which is wonderful, and contains cottages modeled after the homes of significant American figures. Dearborn (and Hamtramck) are now predominantly Muslim, apparently for reasons that go back a century to Henry Ford's $5 wage. Dearborn felt noticeably prosperous (we stopped for coffee at a fancy Japanese cheesecake cafe); Hamtramck did not.
• Michigan.gov says that the Hispanic population of Michigan is just 6%. Coming from California, the absence is very striking.
• The Detroit Institute of Arts is remarkable, particularly the room with the American landscapes and the section with the Dutch masters (especially The Visitation). An obvious question is why there is nothing quite like it in the Bay Area given how much richer the latter is than Detroit ever was -- we techies are just so uncultured by comparison. The Diego Rivera murals are amazing (and quite strange; you can see why they were controversial).
• Detroit is full of historic plaques -- they are truly everywhere. This is presumably due in part to the fact that Detroit has a lot of history, but it still has many more than places with comparable historical depth. Some research suggests that it might be related to generous tax credits for historic preservation. Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing.
• I recommend a visit! You overall leave with some sense for how exciting America must have felt in the early 20th century.
Jim Fish retweeted
I've been doing this long enough to know there is no karma
Folks do awful things and do just fine
But I've also been doing this long enough to know if you are really, really good to a lot of people
A few will really surprise you down the road and pay it back many times over
Jim Fish retweeted
The person who built Claude Code just showed exactly how to use it.
30 minutes. Free. Straight from Boris Cherny himself.
Most people using Claude daily are missing 40+ features hiding in plain sight.
This single session is worth more than any $500 course.
Bookmark this before you forget. 👇
Jim Fish retweeted
Marc Andreessen says don’t ever do diamonds in the rough. Only do diamonds.
"This is actually an investor ego thing, I think, which is you basically say, 'Wow, I'm the investor that's gonna go find the thing that nobody else knows about... I'm going to go do the thing nobody else can think of.'"
"The general pattern is... if it's got merit to be investable for venture, there are a lot of really smart and hungry VCs out there, and they are working extremely hard to sniff these things out, and it's their full-time job, and it's all they do."
"I think it's really unusual to have the diamond in the rough, and usually if it's the diamond in the rough, it usually means two things... a company that's offside in some fundamental reason, it's in the wrong place, or it's structured wrong."
"There's a reason why it's a diamond in the rough that actually ends up becoming a big problem."
@pmarca with @HarryStebbings
Jim Fish retweeted
For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.
Jim Fish retweeted
Someone asked about tricks for meeting eminent people. I said the best plan is just to do really good work. Then you'll tend to meet them organically. In the worst case you'll see one whenever you look in the mirror.
Disagree. Just like the early internet - was unusable by most until a front end (Netscape, Mosiac) was built. This is. Short term phenomena that ALL new tech goes through.
“It’s stupid and it’s a dumb robot until it works - and it’s a dishwasher” - Ben Evan’s.
Anthropic co-founder: by 2026, the world is going to be very different.
But you won’t see it.
No drones overhead. No robots on sidewalks. No visible change walking around your neighborhood. The transformation happens in the digital layer, in spaces built for AI systems to trade with each other, in seas of tokens flowing between silicon minds.
Clark built a sophisticated predator-prey simulation in 5 hours. A decade ago the same project took him weeks. Then his baby woke up screaming and he went back to diapers.
That’s the entire adoption story right now. The capability is here. The human bandwidth isn’t. You need curiosity, time, access, and the skill to convert ideas into prompts. Most people have one of those. Maybe two. The funnel narrows fast.
So by summer 2026, people working with frontier AI will feel like they live in a parallel world. And they’ll be right. The gap between what’s possible and what most people experience will be wider than any technological divide we’ve seen. Not because the technology is restricted. Because the human prerequisites for engaging with it are rare.
The crypto economy moved fast but you could ignore it. The AI economy already touches too much of regular reality for that. The parallel world is coming whether you engage with it or not.
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Jim Fish retweeted
There will be 2 types of companies in the future.
Those that are great at AI, and those that used to be in business
Jim Fish retweeted
This is a misquotation. What I actually wrote was "If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage."
If you want to get quotes right, copy and paste from the original essay.
Jim Fish retweeted
Agree, this is a problem to fix.
BUT:
1) Throughout human history, blanket bans on massive technological shifts have never succeeded.
2) There is a world where AI provides more jobs and more broadly easier ways for people to participate in the economy with dignity, which should be the goal.