Mark

there is no moat

I'd like to share a little about what I've been working on at my new company @ultrametricai with my cofounder @tylerlastovich. We have been exploring how we could automate the startup itself, leaving founders with more time to focus on their exact mission. Enter our first release of the Open Startup Repo: github.com/ultrametricai/ult… A common foundation for transparent automation of the startup. After close to 20 years in silicon valley, backing hundreds of amazing founders & startups, being in the trenches of founding Heyzap (YC08), then solo founding @golden, going through 2 acquisitions and working behind the scenes with some of the iconic companies today, I'm witnessing the largest change to how we work I could have imagined - a truly monumental era of creative abundance. I believe the next generation of companies will largely run themselves: from operations, code, product upgrades, growth, vendor control & selection, process execution, special situations, strategy etc etc. That leaves founder time for 'the art' at the very niche core: the (currently) unautomatable, the special leaps humans tend to make, and north star setting. We want founders to go super deep into the main problem they are trying to solve and not get held up doing anything else, from searching for domain availability with trademark checks to setting their company up, to running their processes on autopilot. So to help that broad foundational layer for starting and running a company, we have spent around a year exploring how to help founders focus on their mission across different verticals, geos, stages and initial starting conditions. Our first few attempts at making something useful actually failed as the market and AI was moving so fast; it just got absorbed into the models or other product releases. We saw polsia happen, openclaw, then grokbot, muse, dots, etc era as the astras, fables, opuses, kimis and jevs rolled out. What seemed to have been missing along the way was a common repo to identify, unify, open and normalize all the lego bricks that startups have to interact with (vendors, processes, business logic, law, best practices, surface areas, art of the possible). As the number of software vendors blew up, the interfaces to drive them multiplied, the international startup founder blew up as silicon valley moved from a specific location to a state of mind and global movement. Unlimited pre seed funding in unlimited vertical sub markets and permutations has brought us to the age of infinity but we have yet to achieve being able to type into an agent a very simple sentence with very complex implications 'just setup my company and make $1m/m'. We have ended up with a hybrid mismash of computer use, API calls, plugins, shifting surface areas (API/MCP/CLI/plugins/chats/musish futures), and changing model absorption to vendor balance making it an exciting and unstable time. As our first step we started to rank all the vendors that startups interface to when going about their journey in terms of how agentically controllable they are via their APIs, MCPs, CLIs etc and computer use compatibility as we are largely switching from a UI driven world to the agentic control surfaces and onto full automation. We have 100 ranking areas you can check out with an overall open ranking here: ultrametric.ai/overall Then we looked at the processes that startups do and how the vendors rank for the sub steps or process as a whole and how this changes across geos. Open processes: ultrametric.ai/processes Then we started to hack on an open repo for startups that would contain all the components we are going to need for a common foundation for founders across the globe even if our gov processes vary so much from Bengaluru to SF or Lisbon to Shenzhen. The founder spirit is geo-invariant. We have looked at special founder/startup situations, the business logic that will make open modules for the startup that we can hack on together, ranked law firms, government services and interfaces, stacks that go well together. We have mapped the law and lore that maps to startups and the schemas that make up the data objects and documents. But also the open documents and the missing gaps. MUCH TO DO. All the BS processes and fluff work that founders waste their time on needs to goto zero. I want to see more supersonic planes, cancer drugs, seemingly impossible missions done and increase the bang for buck founders have with their funding. This is a work in progress and we are keen for the community to come hack on the repo with us here: github.com/ultrametricai/ult… Lets get into the structure of the general repo and the visualizations we made on ultrametric.ai site with example links: - Open rankings: ultrametric.ai/overall - Open rankings example (online payments): ultrametric.ai/arena/payment… - Open ranking example 2 (cap table): ultrametric.ai/arena/equity-… - Open processes: ultrametric.ai/processes - Open process example (Incorporate C-Corp) ultrametric.ai/processes/inc… - Open situations that founders face: ultrametric.ai/situations - Open startup simulator (you can test our different initial starting conditions): ultrametric.ai/startup-sim - Open modules (e.g. cap table, payroll logic etc - we'd love help improving these) ultrametric.ai/open-modules - Open law (we are interested in how law changes the processes, situations and normalizing this over time) ultrametric.ai/open-law - Open lore (we are interested in the historical lore of startups, the rules of thumb and heuristics that might guide your agent): ultrametric.ai/open-lore - Open fields (we are interested in how the schema for the data connects to the open modules, business logic, open documents and artifacts of each process eg how is a EIN defined?) ultrametric.ai/fields - Open documentation (eg SAFE notes and missing! docs) ultrametric.ai/open-document… We have looked at YC companies as well in terms of which ones do well agentically: ultrametric.ai/yc We are interested in stacks and how people are changing their work: ultrametric.ai/stacks We are interested in what is automatable and where the agentic ceiling is currently and how to push that up in all areas: ultrametric.ai/rankings/proc… There is more for you to explore and a lot more coming in terms of how you will be able to navigate business in an optimal way in your chosen surface area; whether you are hanging in grokbot, dots, muse, claude, terminal, chat, or whatever is coming up in this exciting time. We have a lot of data to collect, clean up and help agents navigate the vast landscape emerging functionality the entire startup ecosystem has to offer. Come join us getting your vendor in, ranked or that access pattern you have wanted or getting the data more accurate in terms of which vendor is best for a process or steps. Or open a module of something that currently cost money that could be free. Also come play in our discord for founders and join the chaos (we can solve each others issues including fund raising tips from me personally): discord.com/invite/3aHky836q… It's time to lift all the boats in the harbor and I'm extremely excited as to what the community of hackers and painters will hack into the repo, what asks they will have and whether we can shift normalization of processes globally, gov agentic interfaces and have common repo for founders that grows over time. I expect a lot of experimentation along the way, bugs and upside... I appreciate our backers having faith in us as well from @ycombinator with @garrytan to @immad doing a sizable check (congrats on $1bn rev homie) to @darbyw (congrats on Stripe buying @clerkyinc), @drewhouston form @Dropbox and also @pioneer_fund @tomerlondon cto @GustoHQ and hopefully this is 'boring' and complex enough for Charlie Songhurst :> @delingpole @Liquid2V @ivolo from @segment @ryanpowe @sonicaghi of @kong @DellyTamer+ other supporters (@michaelwfrank, Fundamental ventures and if I missed you sorry moving fast!). [And don't worry, all vendor rankings are open scoring methods so no favors are being done if someone backed us and is a vendor they have to compete with how agentic and automatable they are just like anyone else.] PS: we have bugs and many quality upgrades to make but thought better to go out early and fix as a community. PPS: we have other stuff to launch we just thought this was a great place to start and have 200 PRs coming out pretty soon but I still want to know what is broken or doesnt make sense or inaccurate. Special thanks to current and past team members for getting us here and all the experiments we did you know who you are.

Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are: • Proprietary data • Network effects • A physical component

#RE2026CAPCOM まとめ(ΦωΦ) 他は話が早くて写真で精一杯(ΦωΦ)

a Waymo run down San Francisco's iconic Lombard Street. built with fable 5.5 + threejs play here: teleoperator.mindblown.ai

I've attempted to map everything in oncology in a public website and open source repo for all. The site is trying to get all cancers, products, technologies, bottlenecks, people, startup opportunities with 1000+ ideas for upgrading the field. If you have a loved one with cancer and you are technical or can engineer, go take a look, file improvement requests or bugs or help with the open repo and make this the best open and free info resource for individuals, researchers and educational use. This should save people time, aid AI oncology projects and generate positive action. If you are not technical just complain in this thread about broken or annoying or things you want and I'll fix them live. Some of the interesting pages: Treatments: onco.cc/drugs A gallery of the molecules being used onco.cc/molecules/ And targets: onco.cc/targets/ The technologies in oncology: onco.cc/technologies/ 1100 ideas for helping oncology: onco.cc/ideas/ Bottlenecks on oncology: onco.cc/bottlenecks/ Open questions (LETS GO RESEARCH PEOPLE) onco.cc/open-questions/ Startup requests (LETS GO STARTUP PEOPLE) onco.cc/startup-requests/ Mechanics of cancer: onco.cc/mechanics Battlefronts: onco.cc/fronts/ Isotope supply: onco.cc/isotopes Key papers: onco.cc/key-papers Pipeline funnels: onco.cc/pipeline Cancer by type: onco.cc/cancers/ Institutional rankings: onco.cc/institutions/ The startups: onco.cc/startups/ Heros and heroines : onco.cc/heroes/ Key medical people: onco.cc/people/ Here is the project roadmap: onco.cc/roadmap/ Models and data sets: onco.cc/models/ There are other views as well, take a browse. Try making a PR if you have an upgrade to this on the repo here: github.com/judegomila/OnCo If you are biologically/medically minded and something is wrong, file a bug as well or say on the thread and we will get it fixed live. If this is a useful project star the repo and help get it calibrated. I've tried to add some other languages but I cannot speak them so tell me if that doesnt work well. I believe we will crack oncology and having total information dominance is key to the problem. Let the feedback flow!

I recently went through a translation of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. The introduction chronicled the evolution of swordsmanship and martial arts in general from pragmatic battlefield necessities to sports, historical curiosities, and hobbies. It was interesting to hear how in the post-WW2 occupation when martial arts were banned, Judo was represented as equivalent to western wrestling, and Kendo later to western fencing. The poignant undercurrent for me is that I can see many programming skills following that path. There are probably dozens of people reading this that remember hand assembling opcodes to hex and still have some magic numbers burned into their memory, but even the small group of people still programming in assembly today (hey, @FFmpeg !) don’t work at that primitive level now. AI is making many other programming skills much less critical. We aren’t there yet, but carefully writing code completely by hand is moving from a -jitsu to a -do. Code-do? Codo? That’s ok! The retro computing scene is delightful, full of people building and exercising old skills for the love of it. But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter. Musashi would probably have been pretty enthusiastic about assault rifles.

We have a real epidemic in startups around demo slop Founders used to have to practice religious faith in their products and it would take at least 2 years to see results. Now it takes 2 weeks to make a digital product (but not video games or movies). And then the founder quits if it doesnt work because they never experienced the pain of having to believe and exchange life points for something so they never grow a sense of conviction. that means people who could be founders are instead demo slop content creators. because they make money from the frontier labs to advertise instead of finding something to dive deep into and this trend will get worse overtime

A junior partner at a top vc told me he was worried i wasnt coachable. I said, i dont see what you can teach me given youve never founded or run a successful company.