A Walk In The Park (part III) feat @toddsaunders 00:00 Software should fit your business 00:16 Meet Todd, the councilman 03:01 From Google to flooring software 07:51 The $10M pivot 11:55 Life after the exit 17:35 Vertical vs. horizontal software 23:21 The college startup story 24:35 Cofounders and the Dalton Mills name 28:06 Why raise VC again? 32:43 Who Todd wants to hear from shot on @iPhone, edited on @descript 📍westfield, nj

I spend ~2 hours a day programming, building side projects, tinkering obsessively, trying new repos.. I get basically a DM a day asking “aren’t you a VC, why are you doing this?” Unlike other eras, things are moving SO fast that if you don’t do this, I simply don’t understand how folks will ever learn what’s coming next. For me, it’s quite simple if you want to invest in the AI era: 1) You have to understand the model capabilities to see where the next set of models will improve - still so much alpha in reading technical papers (model research) 2) You need to see what tools do they need to be successful and complete even longer long horizon tasks (infra) 3) You need to understand the harness capabilities that will make these models help building autonomous companies (app layer) You can obviously learn this by talking to researchers / builders and simply betting on founders - and I do that too. But, I was never honestly good at learning without getting my hands dirty so just leaning in to what I know best. It’s also honestly so fun! So, my push to other folks who want to learn is just get started and find time to tinker daily. Once you do it for 10 days, I’m sure you’ll be equally obsessed!

I have been obsessed with self driving companies for more than a year now.. tried a LOT of products, none of them met the bar and decided to just build one myself with "claude" in the loop. Introducing my first experiment: nosugarforkids (dot com) 🙅‍♂️ > catalog of only healthy snacks for kids (surprisingly this didn't exist) > you can chat to get recommendations for school, lunches, snack boxes > built a "tier" list based on the nutrients and what's actually good On the autonomous side, I have a Claude agent that wakes up once a day to do the following things: > checks catalog for new additions > prunes any products that may be dead > finds new content ideas to help increase reach > checks dataforSEO and Google Search Console for performance > writes and edits new pieces that might be useful to help > keeps quality high, and tries to not introduce slop > (new) reaches out to publications to get backlinks Even with ZERO backlinks today and no social presence whatsoever, site has organically grown to ~6k impressions a day and 60 clicks. Lots of rough edges still, but parents give it a try and tell me if it's helpful!