Tell her everything… That’s on your heart, not what’s on your mind.

19 years in business. One lawsuit of my own. A lot more advising others through theirs. Here's what...

Every time I've taught a class, I got more out of it than my students did. Teaching forces you to...

19 years in business. One lawsuit of my own, a lot more advising others through theirs. Here's the...

I told my two new business partners: I know what our product and service looks like. Let's go sell...

Watched someone drop real money on an AI course. A month later it was obsolete. That's not a...

To get into his founder house you do three things. The third one is why most people never show up: Contact 40 people you've never met and sell them something that doesn't exist yet. Half the applicants never finish it. It's free to join. That's not the barrier.

Spent half a day this week drafting the operating agreement for a new venture with my two...

Level 1: you talk to it. Level 2: you build with it. Level 3: it runs without you. Level 4: the whole business runs that way. Almost everyone who says they're "into AI" is on level 1 and calls it adoption. A tool you have to operate is a tool that stops when you stop.

That's it. It isn't clever. It just means the models are interchangeable and the work isn't. Switch brains this afternoon, lose nothing. A vendor gets acquired or blocked, I lose a tool. I don't lose my business. bledsoe.life/writing/the-ai-…

Connections. Gmail, YouTube, Meta, Cloudflare, Drive, Telegram. About forty of them. Same capability people loved about the all-in-ones. The difference is the credentials live on my machine instead of in a company's database.

A repo. This is the actual brain. Every file, every decision, every instruction for how the system thinks about my business, in a Git repo I control. Lose the laptop, pick up where I left off. A team can share one.

An interface. I use Conductor. An app on my machine that connects to whichever models I want working. It's the screen I look at. It's also the piece I could throw away tomorrow and replace by Friday. That's the point.

People keep asking what I run instead of an all-in-one AI platform. Three pieces. None of them exotic. All of them mine.

"Which AI should I use" is the wrong question. I use all of them. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. The question that matters is where the work LANDS when they're done. If the answer is "their servers," you didn't build anything. You visited.

Manus moved from China to Singapore to get out from under Chinese jurisdiction. Beijing barred both founders from leaving the country anyway, then unwound the deal. Changing your address doesn't change who has authority over you. Same is true of your terms of service.

I left Manus in April and told everyone I could to do the same. It wasn't foresight. I didn't see any of this coming. I'm not that good. I just couldn't answer one question about my own position. On the 23rd, the people who stayed lose eight months of work.

Your platform doesn't have to die for you to lose everything. It doesn't have to get hacked, go bankrupt, or turn evil. It just has to change hands. You're not a shareholder. You're a line item in someone else's unwind.

One question tells you how exposed your business actually is: If this platform vanished tomorrow, what would I still have? Whatever the answer is, that's what you own. Everything else was borrowed.