A 10% jump in AI usage by a small business tracks to a 2% increase in revenue. @GustoHQ co-founder @tomerlondon on what their internal data from 500,000+ customers says about AI’s impact on the economy: "In July, the the US economy shed 23,000 jobs. It was a major disappointment, with big downward revisions from the last national jobs report. But when we looked at our customer base, small businesses, it was completely different. There was net growth of 38,000 jobs in July. Across every region, every sector, every company size. There's a good case that AI is a big contributor. Small businesses that use AI as they start and operate end up hiring more, growing faster, and being more resilient. For a small business, you can get the impact of AI much faster. For a large company, it's much more complicated to implement. So small businesses actually benefit tremendously from AI."

When you find out what price the uncapped SAFE converts at

I asked @marcelolebre founder of the $3B European company @remote to dissect Europe's regulation problem and how he would fix it: "Historically, Europe is not actually a thing. The continent of Europe is composed of many very different countries. But the European Union was created as a regulatory body to plan and react better as a group. Anything it did, whether financial, political, or technological, was all in the greater benefit of the group. As it turns out, what is a regulatory union good at? Regulating. That's its purpose. To regulate. And if regulation is the main purpose, even when you try to fix regulation, its done through more regulation. And all the theories end up being much different than what happens in practice. There was a report from Mario Draghi that finally woke everyone up. He said innovation is dying. Europe must unshackle everything. It finally got everyone's attention. And the response was to create a task force of banks and regulators. And it led to even more regulation. The fundamental problem is you're asking someone with a hammer to screw in a screw. And they don't know they have a hammer. So they're going to keep hammering it. Europe has the cash, the power, and potential for innovation. We just need conscious, ethical, and honest deregulation."

Gusto co-founder @tomerlondon on how AI changed how they build product: "We've been doing this for 15 years. Every time a new technology comes in, you have to ask: how does this let us solve the problem for the customer better? AI is a fantastic example. There are capabilities and there are interfaces. A capability is: instead of building your employees' timesheets manually, you click a button and Gusto figures out the optimal timesheets for you. We built Cofounder as an interface. The idea is, what if instead of logging into gusto.com, you never needed to log in at all? You could just text Gusto and run your whole back office through text, like you’re talking to your co-founder over iMessage, Slack, or WhatsApp. It flips the model. In the old SaaS world, you log in and dig through menus, primary, secondary, tertiary, to find the one thing you need. Cofounder is proactive. It reaches out to you when there's something you should know, instead of making you go hunt for it. Here's what proactive looks like. Cofounder wakes up in the morning, looks over your account, and asks what it can do to help. It might say: you have seven PTO requests to approve before payroll, five look totally ordinary so I approved those, the other two I need you on. All over text. Or it says: payroll's set, benefits are handled, the new hire's onboarding is ready. But I noticed you've been hiring engineers and you're not claiming R&D tax credits, and those could save you $15,000 next year. Want me to set that up? An extra $15K, just from the software noticing."

Agents love using @artie_labs

Gusto does $1B+ in TTM revenue. From co-founder @tomerlondon on how AI has changed their M&A playbook: "We acquired Guideline, one of the leading 401(k) providers in the US. They're very similar to Gusto. Everything that’s hard about payroll, copy-paste and change it to 401(k). They built a delightful, easy-to-use product that's robust and scalable to hundreds of thousands of companies. Bringing the two companies together, same codebase, same database, opens a bunch of doors. Faster payments, get your money faster. And as an employee, your 401(k) lives in the same mobile app as your Gusto wallet, where you get paid. When we think about which companies to acquire, we ask one question: what is the acceleration value of this to Gusto? We look at our roadmap and ask where that company sits in it, and what it means to bring it in now. It's an equation. Could we build this ourselves? How many customers do they have? What's the value of bringing it inside Gusto? Something we thought we'd only get to in two years, we can get to now, today. Everything is about acceleration. With AI, that equation shifts. We know we can build most things, but maybe now it takes one year instead of two. So the bar for acquiring is actually higher. There are two numbers that have to line up. One is the acceleration value to Gusto, the dollar value of getting there faster. The other is what the company is worth if it goes out and shops itself. And those are very different numbers. And here's the strange part: making a lot of revenue can make you a worse acquisition target Say a company would accelerate us 18 months, worth about $50M to Gusto. But if they're also doing $50M in revenue, the market puts a multiple on that, and for an AI company that can be enormous. It would have been better for us if they made $5M, because then $50M is a clean 10x and everyone's happy. And often we don't even want the revenue. We're buying the team and the code base, so we can get it to all our customers with AI. I'm not buying them for their $50M in revenue. So the lesson for a founder: still go as fast as humanly possible and build a great business. Don't slow down just to get acquired. But if you do want to get acquired before your next round, start those conversations early, before your revenue grows to a point where you're no longer a target."

The best banking product for business owners now has the best banking for their personal life

who made this??

You could argue ZIRP was worth it in the sense it loaded the capital cannons to enable faster AI acceleration

Meta at the beginning of the year

Tim Cook saw hundreds of billions in annual free cash flow coming after the hardware business and decided to peace out

when you say one of my port co’s ARR is fake

why this look like the train you take to the Horowitz School of Startups and New Media

VC's when you need help hyping your launch video

Guy in my fantasy league using AI to make every decision is in dead last place by a large margin. Humanity: 1 Machine Gods: 0

Founders: get paid $2k to train for your ironman or marathon