independent AI and markets research founder @contangresearch
Joined August 2025
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Tim Start retweeted
1. Never stop exercising or learning.
2.Accept compromise to begin relationships.
3. Manifest the power of compounding.
4. Never gamble.
5. Have kids and be a good parent
6. If it flies or floats, rent it.
7. Buy half the house you can afford.
8. Art in the eye of the beholder is cheap.
9. Be thankful for and to all.
10. Be charitable.
Tim Start retweeted
As reported in the @WSJ, we have raised a Series B to bring Hermes Agent to new frontiers (and, yes, build a mobile app)
Thank you to our investors including @nvidia @M12vc @SamsungNext @robotventures @usv @ycombinator @MenloVentures, among others
wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/…
sharing my thoughts on our recent fundraise.
we did alright for a couple of goofballs
nousresearch.com/a-note-on-o…
Tim Start retweeted
i was having dinner with someone recently who asked why i spend so much time reading & posting on x. she had a pretty negative perception of the platform mostly shaped by the mainstream narrative around it.
my answer was simple. x is where the future gets beta tested.
you basically get to watch ppl build things, talk through ideas, show off stuff, & argue about where everything is going, way way before it reaches anyone else.
there really isn’t another surface on the internet quite like it.
Tim Start retweeted
i have an extra iphone permanently sitting on my desk that exists entirely for the mirror app on my mac.
that way my agent can use my iphone through my desktop exactly like i would, & it can even download an app if necessary from the app store.
which means both my computer & phone are effectively automated through a singlular interface. i can say something as simple as “respond to the seller on ebay” & the agent can decide whether to use the website or just drive the iphone app.
sometimes the app is actually cheaper to operate, more reliable, & works way better than trying to navigate the web.
the coolest part is that i no longer have to think about which device or interface a task lives on. i just state the intent & the agent figures out where/how to execute it.
Tim Start retweeted
Most problems in life come from four sources
1. You don’t earn enough money
2. You are overweight or your appearance is bad
3. You believe you are your body or bank account and lack a spiritual conception of being
4. You spend no time doing stuff you like
Tim Start retweeted
You don't need a PhD in a topic before you can start doing it. You don't need to watch 10 YouTube videos, 20 podcasts, and read 5 books before you start.
That only gets you stuck in a cycle of mental masturbation and feeling like you never know enough.
Most people should start learning only after they've started doing the thing.
Tim Start retweeted
YOU WANT IT FOR A REASON
Take what’s yours. The thing that you seek also seeks you. You’re capable of achieving anything. Eliminate doubt. Always remain hopeful. It’s only a matter of time. Winning is inevitable. Miracles are real. Everything is possible. It all starts in the mind.
You have an UNLIMITED amount of energy to get the things that you desire.
Increase the effort → speed up the results.
4 rules we stick by when a real product goes into a fully illustrated ad:
1. pick the mode before you prompt — photoreal product in a drawn world, or product sculpted too. Mixing the two mid-set is what stops four panels reading as one campaign.
2. the material mismatch is the point. Everything is plasticine, the mask is not. That break is what makes the eye read a real object instead of a prop.
3. the problem owns the frame, the product takes 15-20%. Panel one is a sleeper ripping a mask off at 3AM. The mask sits on the nightstand.
4. never let micro-text on the product render as letters. The woven tag comes out as emboss, or Nano Banana invents a word onto your client's packaging.
that's it. one clay world, four arguments, one product that survives all four.
The EU AI Act's transparency rules went live on August 2. AI-generated image, video and audio must be labelled and watermarked, and a model has to identify itself as one. Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral and OpenAI have all committed.
The watermark half is already done for you — Google says every Nano Banana image ships with SynthID embedded. The label is the work: which line of the ad carries it, at what size, on which placement. Decide that before the creative, not after it's approved.
$300k in two months for an AI meal planner. The app writes a weekly menu and a grocery list, and three other meal planners landed in the same store inside the same two months.
So the product is not what separated them. The TikTok output did — the app is what the video sends you to. That's the DTC lesson arriving in software: creative is the channel, not the thing you pick after you've chosen a channel.
🚨New trending app: $300k in 2 months
Mise is an AI meal planner that creates your weekly meals, grocery list and recipes based on your goals
They are going insanely viral on tiktok with these videos:
Ten frontier models math results announced
Five reproduced by a different lab's model inside 24 hours with generic prompt, no internet access, and four of the five by what look like independent arguments.
That is the economics of generated output stated in a single week: whatever one model can produce, another produces a day later without ever seeing the first one's work.
It reads identically in ads. Any panel we render is renderable by anyone holding the same tools by tomorrow.
What isn't reproducible in a day is knowing which of the four panels deserves the budget, and there is no prompt for that, only the result read.
OpenAI unveiled 10 frontier math results from its unreleased Astra model: 24 hours later, an Anthropic researcher says the already-available Claude Fable reproduced five of them.
According to Levent Alpöge, Fable worked autonomously with a generic prompt, no internet access and safeguards against the OpenAI solutions leaking into context.
Only one of the five used essentially the same argument. The other four may be independent proofs.
It seems that OpenAI is now reaping the first-mover success with scientific breakthroughs in new models.
Seedance 2.5 holds 30 seconds in one generation
This is simply insane and takes up to 50 reference assets into it.
The part worth copying from his breakdown is the timestamped storyboard. A single 30-second generation has no cuts inside it, so every beat change has to be written as a time range in the prompt, you are directing, not editing.
The trade runs both ways. The 30-second cut we built yesterday is five 6-second clips hard-cut together: five chances to re-roll one bad beat, instead of one 30-second roll you keep or bin whole.
Long generations buy continuity. They cost you the cut, and the cut is where mistakes get fixed.
i just figured out the best way to use Seedance 2.5
latest model from ByteDance lets you generate up to 30 second continuous videos and accepts up to 50 reference assets (images, videos and audio) all in one generation
most people overcomplicate it, the real trick is in the details
my prompt structure looks like this:
[1] global scene + visual style
[2] character descriptions
[3] timestamped storyboard (0-5s, 5-10s, 10-15s...)
[4] camera movement
[5] negative prompts
[6] ending constraints
for example, instead of saying: "girl doing her skincare routine with x product"
you tell it exactly what happens every few seconds, where the camera moves, how the emotion changes, what should never appear
i put together the exact framework i use and leaking it all to you right now
here's what you're getting:
> the prompt formula for 30-second videos
> how to Use Seedance 2.5 at a fraction of the cost
> the best way to use reference images/videos
> transitions, camera movements and negative prompts
RT + reply "SEEDANCE" and i'll send it over (must follow so i can dm)