Moltbook, the social media page for AI agents, was an early signal of what is coming.

As AI agents get smarter, gain real autonomy, and become cheaper to run, a meaningful part of the economy will shift toward an agent economy.

The agent economy is where software agents act as economic participants on behalf of humans (or other agents). They make decisions, execute transactions, and coordinate with other agents with minimal human involvement.

We already accept that machines make consequential decisions for us. More than half of stock trading is algorithmic. Nearly everything you see on social media is ranked by systems no human fully understands. These systems don’t make recommendations or wait for human approval. They decide.

There is a fundamental difference between earlier generations of algorithms and LLM-based agents. Traditional systems optimize for a narrow objective. LLM agents operate with context and can reason across multiple, fundamentally different objectives.

To make decisions for humans, they need to be able to buy with taste. It is not sufficient to buy any kind of shoes. You need to like how they look, they need to fit, and they need to arrive when expected. Agents need to understand intent, preferences, trade-offs, and second-order effects.

In other words, they need to make decisions that look a lot like the ones a human would have made. That’s inherently difficult. Even other humans struggle to make good decisions for us unless they know us well or get extremely detailed instructions.

So why does this matter beyond the fact that you might soon outsource your online grocery shopping to GPT-6?

It matters because agents will control a significant share of consumer spend. The shift has already begun. Many people get their shopping recommendations from LLMs. I am one of them. Most of my product research has completely shifted into conversations with LLMs on the pros and cons of specific options.

However, I am still making the purchase decision and handling the transaction myself. Over time, we will hand over more decision autonomy and sometimes might not even be involved in the product research process at all.

In some ways, they are better decision-makers than humans. They do not get tired. They do not anchor on brands. They do not fall for artificial scarcity. They do not abandon a purchase because a checkout flow is annoying. They can continuously search the entire market and act the moment conditions are met. Once agents start controlling even a small portion of consumer spend, entire markets will shift. Marketing changes. Branding changes. Distribution changes. Product decisions change.

The agent economy will grow much faster than the consumer internet. Once agents cross the threshold where we trust them with a few percent of our spending, that share can quickly grow tenfold.

Recent progress makes this shift far closer than it seems. Tools like Claude Code have crossed a threshold where software engineering can be automated well enough for agents to build their own tools. Instead of waiting for humans to create integrations, agents can increasingly construct the software they need to navigate the internet on their own.

At the same time, inference costs keep falling. Today, it is still expensive to have frontier models continuously scour the internet on your behalf. That constraint is temporary. As costs drop, persistent agents become economically viable. Setup friction is collapsing as well. What once required careful orchestration can now be spun up in minutes. Moltbot is one visible example. Several teams I know are already building agent systems with surprisingly capable demos.

So what is the real bottleneck? Some of it is still intelligence. Some of it is compute capacity. Some of it is still inference cost. Agents won’t handle spending for most consumers if they cost more in compute than the products they buy. But the bigger bottleneck is structural. Agents have to operate inside an internet that was built for humans.

If an agent wants to buy a plane ticket today, it has to navigate a human-centered browser, deal with visual clutter designed to manipulate attention, and use a credit card issued to a human. It also has to make irreversible decisions without a clean permissioning or feedback layer. The system technically works, but it is deeply inefficient.

This will not last forever.

At first, agents will communicate for us with other humans or traditional servers via API. They will use the infrastructure that has been built for humans and deterministic code.

This has already started and will be the first step of transition.

Over time, we will build native infrastructure for agents. Separate payment rails. Explicit permissioning systems. Markets where agents acquire skills from other agents. Protocols for trading information. And agent-to-agent communication that is optimized for bandwidth and precision rather than English prose.

Parts of the agent economy are already being built. We’re seeing agent-native communication primitives like Agentmail, early payment rails like AP2 (Google) and ACP (Stripe), and a growing sub-industry focused on identity and permissioning for agents spanning big tech companies and early startups.

At the same time, an entire marketing ecosystem has emerged around optimizing how products surface inside AI systems. Many of these tools will naturally evolve from influencing human decisions to marketing directly to agents.

In the future, we need agent marketplaces where agents will be able to buy new capabilities for themselves. In that world, agents will build reputation scores, gain credit lines, and insure actions taken on behalf of their humans. We will also need conflict resolution mechanisms, negotiation protocols, and other primitives that any functioning economy requires.

When that happens, a large share of consumer spending will still belong to humans on paper, but will be decided elsewhere. Brands will no longer compete for human attention. They will compete for acceptance by machines acting on their users’ behalf.

Over time, I have learned to distinguish between two kinds of flow. One is structured, narrow, and deliberate. The other is messy, exploratory, and hard to justify on a to do list.

I call the first deep flow. I call the second chaotic flow.

Deep flow builds the foundation. Chaotic flow is where the unexpected opportunities come from.

In a deep flow session, I might rebuild a website or create the cash flow forecast for my startup. In chaotic flow, I start reading a blog article, end up tweeting about an idea I had and then discover a person online that I should chat with and ultimately end up requesting an intro to them.

Now, some AI Agents have gotten so good that they make a third flow state possible. And it is structurally different than the other two. I call it Agentic Flow.

Coding is a useful example. Two years ago, coding meant working through

one problem at a time, sequentially, trying to stay in deep flow for as long as possible.

Today, I often work on several problems in parallel. I might ask an agent to fix a bug, another to build a feature, and a third to research the right API. While each agent works independently, I move between them, review outputs, adjust direction, and keep everything aligned toward a single higher-level goal.

This is not multitasking. It is parallel execution. The focus shifts from doing the work to directing it. It is inherently different than deep flow where I focus on one thing at a time and chaotic flow, where the sequence is unplanned.

In a world where AI agents can independently complete work over a longer timeframe, our ability to instruct, manage and coordinate the different agents will become paramount. The individuals who will be able to leverage that, will increase their output by an order of magnitude. The bottleneck is no longer how fast you can execute, but how well you can direct parallel work without losing coherence. Flow is no longer just about focus. It is about orchestration.

Some of you may have heard of the 'dead internet' theory. For those who have not, it describes a world where the vast majority of internet activity consists of bots and artificially generated content. There are very few humans in sight, and if you meet them, you cannot meaningfully differentiate them from a bot.

What started as something like a conspiracy theory is beginning to develop into more and more of a reality. State actors have utilized troll and bot farms for years to influence topics online, but the recent advancements in GenAI have shown a glimpse into a world where the internet is dominated by artificially created content, posted by artificially created users. There are companies solely focused on creating AI-generated content and flooding it to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies focused on developing AI avatars that are replacing human interaction across almost all business functions, including sales, customer support, onboarding, and more.

Critical Thinking alone will not save us

For now, a keen eye can still differentiate between AI-generated and human-generated content, but the speed of change is showing that it will be just a matter of time until that phase is over. So, critical thinking alone will not save us anymore. Given the media literacy and critical thinking employed by most people in a Photoshop/fake news world, I am not hopeful

Some people might ask why it matters whether content is generated by a human or by an AI. And while there might be a capitalist case to argue for artificially generated content feeds, based on the individual preferences of the users, think TikTok on steroids, it loses its appeal quickly once you leave pure entertainment and enter the world of commerce, and especially politics. Human-to-human communication is fundamental to well-functioning democracies, the exchange of ideas, and to some degree, to feeling human.

Much of our lives will change, and I would argue that the vast majority of people strongly underestimate how different life will be 5 years from now.

No matter what that world looks like, we should preserve some online spaces in which humans can have conversations with other humans. Once we have conscious AI systems, I am willing to reconsider this conversation to avoid discriminating against our new artificial friends, but let’s table that for now. So, what can be done to preserve human-to-human communication?

Ideas to preserve human-to-human communication on the internet

1. Proof-of-Humanity Systems

Websites have been trying to figure out whether you are really human for a long time, usually by employing CAPTCHAs. Sadly, this will not be sufficient anymore going forward since bots are increasingly good at solving them. Modern CAPTCHA versions might find ways to circumvent that issue temporarily, but LLM progress combined with computer and browser use will almost certainly make them obsolete soon.

There are a couple of well-known projects trying to build a proof of personhood, like World ID and Humanity Protocol.

World ID, by Worldcoin tackles this challenge by creating a global identity verification system designed to ensure one human equals one digital identity. The process centers around a specialized device called the Orb, which captures an infrared scan of a user's iris and converts it into a unique, irreversible hash. This hash is checked against a global database to guarantee no duplicates exist, after which the system generates a World ID. The elegance lies in the privacy preservation. Iris images are never stored, and users can prove their humanity to websites, voting systems, or decentralized applications without revealing any personal biometric data.

Meanwhile, the Humanity Protocol offers an alternative approach using palm recognition through smartphone cameras, eliminating the need for specialized hardware while still generating cryptographic proofs of uniqueness on the Sui blockchain.

Both systems represent early attempts to build the infrastructure needed for human-verified online spaces. However, both face adoption challenges around privacy concerns or the inherent limiting factor of a physical, centralized nature of initial verification steps.

Of course, these accounts could then be used for nefarious purposes, including generating AI content, but it would be difficult to scale up compared to simply creating hundreds or thousands of accounts on a social media platform for your bot army without any issue.

2. Invite-only communities
   
   The in-person verification systems or crypto-verifications could be combined with a web of trust where other people vouch for your personhood. This would only work sufficiently if there is some kind of humanness verification involved at some point, otherwise, bots could vouch for other bots. However, it would be easier to disentangle botnets if they were all linked to each other since they incorrectly vouched for someone’s personhood.

3. Use AI to combat AI

We could build AI systems that detect artificially generated content at a better level than humans could. However, this might work with images and video for a while, but it would be very difficult to do with text. For now, an overuse of em dashes can still spot ChatGPT content quickly, but there might be people who simply like using them, or the models could change the way they output text. Who can prove that the current sentence I am writing was written by me or an LLM? Nobody can.

So AI might play a role in helping us solve the problem, but it cannot be the only layer to protect us.

4. Mandatory watermarks for AI-generated content

One often proposed solution would be adding mandatory watermarks to AI-generated content at the output level so that artificially generated content is immediately obvious to the user. Some social platforms like Instagram and TikTok have been experimenting with telling their users proactively about AI having been part of the generation process. The issue here is that nefarious actors will switch to models that do not add mandatory watermarks, and platforms will struggle to keep up with detecting that content automatically. Even if all the major closed source model providers are forced to commit to that, open-source models are so far advanced that this does not seem like a solution that would fix everything, because someone would just open-source models that do not have a built-in watermark. So I think user notices mentioning that AI has been used to create a post will be an interim solution at best.

5. Change the incentive structures

Find ways that make it economically suboptimal to use bot activity in online platforms. This would be by far the best path forward. If there is an economic incentive to do it, people will do it, no way around that. I do not see how this would be an actual solution though, since engagement is and will remain a key metric that advertisers like to pay money for, and if there is no way to separate between bot and non-bot interaction, there will still be strong commercial incentives to fake engagement and to influence potential buyers. Even if there was a way to restructure platforms so that economic incentives will disincentivize commercial actors from flooding them with AI content, the same would not be true for state actors. Governments or political activists will always have an incentive to influence public opinion, and if AI can be used for that purpose, they will use it. I do think that online authenticity and real-world interaction will become premium experiences that people will crave as a counter to the new digital world.

6. Strict regulation of AI

One argument that sometimes comes up is that AI could get heavily regulated or outright forbidden. The EU is trying to prevent AI abuses with the EU AI Act. In my opinion, regulating AI so heavily that we will not end up in a world flooded by AI-generated content feels almost impossible. The country that regulates it to such a degree will have massive commercial disadvantages, which will also translate into military disadvantages. The EU is already being criticized by many stakeholders within the Union that it is preventing progress, and that China and the US are running away in the AI race because of it. While strong regulation is not the only reason for that, there is some truth to that. Any nation or collection of nations is in a dilemma. If they are not making progress with AI, their economies and militaries will suffer. They will lose access to the other parts of the world that do use AI. So for any single party, it is rational to pour resources into developing AI since someone else will definitely do it.

Where does that leave us?

So given all of the above, my prediction is that there will be human-only spaces on the internet that use a strict and regular verification of humanity, and other spaces that will allow AI activity, which will have fundamentally different dynamics. Both will have their place and co-exist. Platforms that allow AI will have an extremely tailored algorithm that goes far beyond the personalization possible today. Much of the content will be specifically created solely for you based on your preferences and stated desires. On the other hand, human-only spaces will present a much slower form of interaction in which direct communication between friends and human strangers will be front and center.

I am generally a techno-optimist. My fundamental belief is that the world is a better place today, mostly because of technological progress, which has led to higher productivity and therefore a higher standard of living across all economic levels. We can cure diseases that would have killed people 100 years ago, we can communicate with our loved ones easily, even if they are on the other side of the world, and we can listen to our favorite artist's music wherever we are. I also love the internet. Without it, I would not live where I live and would not have met many of the most important people in my life. However, technological progress requires us to rethink how we live, especially given the speed of change ahead.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can design human-to-human communication on the internet going forward, and what the internet will look like 5 years from now.

1. If you want to learn more about the technology and process behind World ID, you can read their white paper here

Sam Altman believes that great founders reply fast. “I wrote a little program to look at how quickly our best founders answer my emails versus our bad founders. It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times.” I tend to agree and think the same applies to most knowledge workers. The advantage of fast replies accumulates over time.

Later-stage founders or executives at large companies often work with assistants to monitor their inboxes, but as an early-stage founder, you may not have that luxury. When I started my first company, I struggled with inbox overload and forgotten replies. That all changed when I learned about Inbox Zero and started following it almost religiously. Now all important messages are answered quickly and I feel in full control of my communications.

Inbox Zero for faster, stress-free communication

Inbox zero is an approach to email management that aims to completely empty an inbox once a day. Here is a quote from The Great CEO Within that captures its essence:

Each day, process every single item in your Inbox. If the action takes <2 minutes to complete, do it immediately. If not, then write down what the required action is, and place it on one of the Getting Things Done lists

Why is Inbox Zero so effective? Because following it correctly ensures that inboxes are not cluttered up, no tasks are missed, and that relevant people receive speedy replies. Moreover, it provides an unparalleled piece of mind for its users.  If you have 50 emails in your inbox, it is easy for an email below the visible fold to get lost and not get answered in a timely manner. If there are zero emails, you are certain that everything important has been processed. Being successful at Inbox Zero means strong prioritization. Many messages will simply get archived. 

How to implement Inbox Zero

To first start with Inbox Zero you need to declutter your inbox.  

• Respond to any remaining important messages: Then archive the rest to start with a clean slate.

• Unsubscribe from unnecessary email lists: Remove distracting subscriptions and avoid automated advertising cluttering your inbox. Use a service like unroll.me to speed up the process

• Set up a system for newsletters: Use a separate inbox for newsletters or auto-forward them to a reading app for later. 

After setting up the foundation, you can follow the daily Inbox Zero Routine below. 

• Respond immediately to messages that take less than 2 minutes: Quick responses prevent minor items from building up.

• Archive non-essential emails: If an email doesn’t require a response but may be useful later, archive it.

• Remove spam or irrelevant emails: Delete spam immediately

• Add newsletters or other articles to a reading list: Decide on a designated spot for content that you want to read at a later date, store it there and archive the email

• Add longer tasks to a to-do list: If an email requires an action that takes more than 2 minutes, add it to your task list and archive the email to clear it from your inbox. 

• Pause the process for urgent tasks: If you notice a crucial email that requires a longer processing time, pause the process and focus on it immediately even if a reply takes longer than 2 minutes. The threshold for this should be high. 

You get the gist. Do this for every single email in your inbox at least once a day. If you’re in a sales role or currently fundraising, you may want to do this multiple times a day.

Expanding Inbox Zero to all Communication Channels

While applying Inbox Zero to work email is a great start, extending it to all relevant communication channels brings even more clarity. If your customers tend to write you on WhatsApp, Discord or LinkedIn you need to extend it to those channels too. My private life significantly improved since I started a similar process with my WhatsApp messages. Following the system is arguably more difficult if there is no proper archive feature which is why I strongly prefer messaging services that offer it. For example, as of the writing of this article, iMessage does not offer archiving and LinkedIn has destroyed their archiving system a while back. So I like to move communication from those channels to other channels that I can apply Inbox Zero to. 

I currently do Inbox Zero to my work email, private email, important Slack workspaces, and my WhatsApp every single day. I also look at LinkedIn and less important Slack spaces multiple times a week. It is important to reiterate that is does not mean I reply to all messages every day. Private messages that are not urgent I often batch to a task on the weekend where I reply to everyone at once. 

Helpful tips for Inbox Zero

• Make it easy to remember: Create a recurring daily task called inbox zero and add the relevant inboxes as a subtask. Alternatively, you can work with a blocker in your calendar during which you process every piece in every relevant inbox.
  

• Use the right email service: For your email you might want to look into a service like Superhuman that is targeted towards professionals who want to reply to emails fast. However, traditional gmail works very well for me.
  

• Learn the short cuts: Learning the short cuts will lower the friction of going through your inbox. Here is a list of selected gmail shortcuts. 

• Recognize patterns of failure: Do you notice that a specific type of email often trips you up? Make sure to find a system to process them. For example, if you often delay replies because you’re unsure about scheduling, create a habit of proposing 2-3 available time slots within your allocated meeting time to expedite the process.
  

• Use templates for common responses: If you repeatedly send the same type of response, consider setting up templates to speed up the process.
  

• Use AI to improve your emails: Consider using ChatGPT or some other service to proofread and improve important emails
  

• Practice Decision-Making Discipline: Train yourself to make quick decisions on emails. If an email doesn’t require immediate action, decide on an appropriate action (archive, to-do list, or response) without lingering too long.
  

• Plan for being out of office: Have someone else monitor your inbox if you are out of office. For shorter periods, consider adding an automated out-of-office reply and mention an emergency contact for urgent requests
  

• Delegate effectively: If you have people on the team who can handle specific tasks better, forward the email to them with context and the expectation that they take care of it from there. 
  

• Filter out the noise: If there are regular emails that you want to receive but not read when they are coming in, consider filtering them out and have them skip your inbox.
  

• Reflect and refine regularly: Regularly assess what’s working and what’s not. If certain types of emails are consistently causing delays, look for ways to streamline

Using Inbox Zero will significantly improve your life

Since using Inbox Zero in all my relevant messaging channels, my response time and reply rate have significantly improved. I feel considerably less stressed about keeping up with everything. It is not a perfect system but the best one I have come across. If you want to reply faster and feel good about it, give Inbox Zero a shot. 

A great way to start is by reading and following this article which started it all for me. It leads you through the process of doing Inbox Zero from 0 to a finished system. 

For more upcoming content about getting shit done, consider subscribing to my Substack. 

Startup to watch: Cerrion

This week’s startup to watch is Cerrion, an AI company from Switzerland. Cerrion optimizes industrial operations by offering an AI system that monitors processes in real-time and predicts equipment failures. They use computer vision to detect errors in the manufacturing process and instantly alert the relevant personnel. Their platform integrates so deeply that it can halt manufacturing processes if a fault risks the integrity of machinery or worker safety. Cerrion’s AI system analyzes video feeds and sensor data to identify potential issues before they escalate. This approach saves companies time and money by preventing unexpected breakdowns while enhancing workers’ awareness of their processes.

They started with glass manufacturing and have since then branched out into different types of production lines. I like that they tackle an important problem in manufacturing; promoting resilient production processes and augmenting, instead of replacing workers. 

Here you can see a demo of Cerrion in action

Tool to use: Password Manager and 2FA App

Security is essential in every aspect of your life. Just as you wouldn’t leave your apartment door unlocked, the same caution should apply to your online accounts. I recommend that everyone should use a password manager and a 2FA app.

Let's start with the password manager. It may seem wild, but many people still don’t use one. Yet, a strong password manager is the safest way to store sensitive data. It can also generate strong, unique passwords for each account, reducing the risk of breaches. No more reusing the same password across accounts. Such a simple tool will improve your security practices without complicating your workflow. It also allows you to quickly change passwords if a breach exposes any of your login information.

However, using a strong password stored in a password manager isn’t enough for more sensitive accounts. For critical accounts, such as financial accounts and those containing sensitive customer data, you should add two-factor authentication (2FA). App-based 2FA is generally safer than SMS-based 2FA. App-based 2FA also works if you are travelling abroad, or your mobile network is down for some reason. The two most trusted 2FA apps are Authy, which belongs to Twilio, and Google Authenticator.

There are even more secure setups available, including physical keys, biometric access data, and IP access restrictions. However, the best practice for most things is to use strong passwords, store them in a password manager, and pair them with app-based 2FA.

Content to consume: CPU.Land

If you want to deepen your understanding of technology and its core concepts, CPU.land is an excellent resource. They provide a 7-part series that insightfully explains each step involved when you run a program on your computer. The first chapters are a great refresher on the core principles of computing that every founder, especially in tech, should understand. The following chapters dive into a level of detail that will likely teach everyone, regardless of their technical background, something new. I enjoy reading texts that break down complex topics with surprising detail while still being easy to digest. This series is a perfect example.

“The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.” - Francis Bacon

Beauty manifests in various forms. Today, I'd like to delve into a specific type of beauty: the profound appreciation one develops for a subject when progressing through its skill levels. This feeling of appreciation is multi-layered and reveals itself gradually over time. It’s the awe you experience when encountering something new in a skill you already have—whether by actively trying to improve or simply reflecting. As you deepen your familiarity with a subject, you traverse these layers, reaching new epiphanies of the inherent beauty of the subject itself. Imagine the joy of standing on a skateboard for the first time, then learning how to go down a half-pipe, and finally learning a kickflip. Similarly, if you are lucky enough to have learned a second language, reminisce about the first words you learned, the first tiny conversation you had, and then the first book you read in that language. It is a process that starts simply but never ends. 

Or consider chess, for example. As a novice, unaware of the rules, the beauty of chess lies in discovering the different pieces and learning their movements. You immerse yourself in a new, enjoyable game. A beginner is amazed by the complexity of learning the possible moves and the capabilities of each piece. As time passes, the rules become second nature, integrated into your understanding of the game. Once you’ve understood and internalized the roles of each piece, it becomes impossible to recapture the initial awe you felt. At the same time, this new level of understanding shifts your perspective, allowing you to appreciate different, more nuanced aspects of the game. You begin noticing patterns for when to move a piece and capture one from your opponent. As your expertise grows, you master various openings and positional play. Strategic counters to common tactics become second nature. As you become more proficient, you start seeing openings that less skilled players miss. Your perspective on the game has fundamentally changed and it will never revert to its original state. Though you can still rationally understand the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the pieces, you can no longer feel it emotionally. You’ve left the novice’s awe behind, never to fully regain it again. Sometimes, it flickers back—maybe after a long hiatus, or when you reminisce about the fond memories of earlier days. However, at the same time you gain a new appreciation, a more fundamental connection to your passion that elevates you to new levels. 

This journey applies not only to games like chess, but also to skills in other areas like business, sports, and even relationships. If you are a founder making your first pitch to an investor, you might say things only a novice would say. With experience, you will be able to present your pitch naturally and put your focus on more nuanced parts of the conversation. You will lose the sense of novelty for most aspects of investor conversations. However, you will never stop discovering new tactics or finding weaknesses to improve upon. You will never be perfect and that’s beautiful.

Most meaningful pursuits in life are complex enough that no one can fully master them in a single lifetime. Due to this inherent infinite nature of progression, learning a new skill opens up vast possibilities for enjoyment. I have a propensity to lose myself in both my job and my hobbies. I have a natural obsession about the topics I focus on and I love seeing it in others. Obsessions can have a negative connotation but I think they are often healthy if they’re for a career you love or a hobby you enjoy. It gives life purpose and fulfillment. Fully focusing on an activity and getting into the flow state is one of the best feelings in existence. While full mastery is not an option, you will feel at home with your obsession. Whenever I go back to playing handball, the sport I grew up playing, I notice a tremendous surge in happiness. Whenever I start working on my company I notice that the hunger within me is being fed. I experience handball and startups on a fundamentally different level than when I first started but the feeling of familiarity will never perish. 

So now you might be wondering how to find your obsession if you do not have one already. Or rather, what should you try out next? I’m not here to tell you the answer to that question. Nothing in life resonates the same way with everyone. One person is able to talk about video games all day, while another might be fascinated by old literature. We all have different tastes and expertise in various areas. One important caveat, however: learning something new doesn’t mean you have to become a master at it. Sometimes, people lose interest at a certain stage and, at the same time, lose their appreciation. Their initial awe fades, and they fail to replenish it. Some people like trying many new passions, while others enjoy going deep on just one topic. Generalists enjoy exploring the upper levels, finding joy in the novelty of diverse areas. They prefer breadth over depth, opting to explore new topics rather than delving deeply into a single one. Specialists, on the other hand, relish deep understanding in their chosen fields and thrive in the intimacy of their mastery. The realization of whether you prefer being a generalist or a specialist is one of the most fundamental factors you can use to shape your career the right way. Whatever you choose to learn, cherish the epiphanies that emerge as you reach new levels of understanding—they are among life’s purest joys, and you can actively seek them out.

The journey from a novice to a master is the backbone of human experience. On your way from novice to master, you accumulate so many beautiful memories, so much beautiful context. With each expansion of knowledge, your perspective shifts slightly until a sudden epiphany puts new pieces into place. You see everything in a new light and often find it impossible to view your passions as you once did. A Grandmaster chess player looks at the board differently than a casual player. A professional football player sees small mistakes that an average viewer misses. Reaching the first level of epiphany is often simple and can be done in a few minutes or hours. However, the more you progress, the harder it becomes to achieve another breakthrough. 

Most meaningful pursuits in life are complex enough that no single person could come to fully understand them in a single lifetime. These beautiful complexities teach us that learning new things opens enormous possibilities for our enjoyment. Find your obsessions. Hone them, relish them, and tell the world what you experience.

Not all principles translate well from private life into the business world. However, the principle of relying on people who are there for you in bad times does, especially when picking the best investors for your company.

Investors can bring many different things to the table when they invest in your startup. Above all others, there is one trait that many of the best investors share: the ability and willingness to help you get through a crisis. If you are a founder choosing who will invest in your startup figure out how your potential investors act when things are rough. You do not want the extra burden of difficult investors at an inopportune time. Instead, you want people who actively try to help you escape the disaster. If you want to learn where an investor stands, go ask the founders of their portfolio companies. Do not solely rely on the intros the investors provide, reach out to some founders yourself to avoid cherry-picked selections. You will get the best insights by speaking with founders who have been through tough times.

For me, sharing wins and losses with people who matter is much of what life is about. 

The proudest moments in my rather short investing career were the times I was called on for help.  I felt a sense of accomplishment when a founding team called me in as a mediator for a major founder disagreement. I felt a sense of purpose when a team sent me an emergency message that they were afraid of telling their investors that they needed to pivot. I enjoy helping them with introductions to new customers or connecting them with potential lead investors for their next round. However, the trust they have in me to be on their side in the bad phase is the most important to me. 

Much of that feeling of importance is derived from my own experience. It reminds me of who saved me when I needed help.

I am undoubtedly thankful for people who support me when things are going well. At the same time, I am even more grateful to those who believed in me when things were just starting. And I will walk through fire for the people who were there for me when things seem to be crashing down. 

This sentiment resonates with many of my founder friends. The people they remember most fondly are those who supported them early, and those who helped them to recover from disaster. 

So, if you are a founder, do your research. If you are an investor, strive to be an immovable pillar, especially in bad times. And if you are a friend, offer your full support when your friends need you. Share your wins, share your losses, and make it to wherever you are going, together. 

This is not an exhaustive list, and you do not need to do all of it at once. See it as inspiration on how to get more done.

Work on the most important thing, then on the second most important thing

If I could choose one piece of advice to increase productivity it is this. Your output can be as high as you want. If you do not work on the right tasks, it will ultimately not matter. Always be mindful of what your current most important task is. That is where you will find your starting line. Next, focus on the second most important task. Rinse and repeat this for the entire duration of your company and I promise that the returns will be astonishing. In the early stages, your most important tasks are usually related to talking to users, selling, building product, or raising money. Occasionally you might have to hire people. If it is not related to any of these, your alarm bells should ring and you should investigate to see if the tasks you are working on are important enough. 

Eliminate working on bullshit tasks

While it's crucial to prioritize your most important tasks, some tasks are simply unavoidable, even if they don't add significant value to your company's progress. These tasks might include doing the accounting or setting up your cap table tool—necessary but not immediately helpful. Beyond the necessary and the crucial tasks, there is a third set of tasks that I call bullshit tasks. Bullshit tasks are neither important nor required. Working on them can be very tempting because completing them will make you feel productive. However, in doing so you are often preventing the company from progressing. One common example is going to conferences . While conferences might be crucial if they are a core part of your sales strategy, they are often a waste of time. Some tasks can appear helpful but are, in reality, not. For example, re-designing the landing page when you have not reached out to a single customer all week. Especially if you have no real indication that the landing page is the problem. Different people tend to focus on different bullshit tasks. So try to identify these tasks for you and your co-founders and avoid them. 

Have prepared meetings

Meetings can either be a great way to make progress or a great way to waste time. My co-founder is a real stickler for running effective meetings. He will remind us regularly that every meeting should have an objective, and not be for pure information sharing. Basic information should be shared in advance so the participants can prepare and make decisions in the meeting. There is so much content about running effective meetings, so I have linked one great piece here.

Batch your meetings

Few things can interrupt your focus more than having too many interspersed meetings throughout the day. It is best to batch your meetings into one continuous stream. It's better to have 8 30-minute meetings in a row and then focus on deep work than to interrupt your workflow with meetings at 30-minute intervals. This includes customer meetings and does not refer to internal meetings only. If you have 8 internal meetings every day in your early-stage company, you should rather rethink the quantity and not the timing of the meetings. 

While not always possible, trying to batch meetings together will significantly improve your overall productivity. 

Batch similar tasks 

Just like batching meetings together, it makes sense to batch similar tasks together too. For example, I have a weekly admin blocker on my calendar during which I pay bills, fill out corporate or tax paperwork, and check off accounting tasks. Once you're out of the very early stages you may not want to do these tasks anymore. But in the beginning, someone has to get them done. So, in one blocker every week, I focus on the necessary tasks, which makes a big impact and helps me not accrue any admin debt. 

Say “no” more often

Many people want a piece of your time, especially once you’ve become more successful. Be very careful about who you give that time to. Try to pay it forward, but ensure that other people are not stealing too much of your time for things that are ultimately not that important. I enjoy helping other people, so it has been a long journey for me to learn how to help more efficiently. More on this in a future article. 

If you are in a slump, just start

Everyone has days where getting shit done feels more difficult than usual. My biggest piece of advice for bad days is to just start a task. This might sound weird at first, but usually, the energy you need to initiate the task is the most significant part. Once you start working, things will feel much easier.

If slumps happen too often, take a look and see if you can change your habits or improve your physical and mental health. 

Sleep enough!! 

Running on little sleep is one of the worst things you can do if you want to get shit done. Sometimes, nights might be a bit shorter. You can’t always help it. However, consistently sleeping too little will backfire immensely. Sleep deprivation leads to a significantly lower output per hour and your decision quality will deteriorate. Worst of all, it might have a serious impact on your health if you keep it up for too long.

If something takes less than two minutes, do it immediately

This might sound contrary to my first piece of advice, but I mostly apply this idea to emails. Answering emails is one of the tasks I have to do daily. Whenever an email takes less than two minutes, I just do it immediately. If it takes longer, I archive the email and add the related task to my to-do list. Once I get to that task, I answer the email and cross if off my list. You will be surprised how much faster you will get to inbox zero if you apply this strategy. 

Mute notifications if you are in focus mode

If you are in focus mode, stay in focus mode. Turn off all notifications on your phone and laptop. You can make exceptions for important Slack channels or specific contacts on your phone. It sucks to lose your train of thought because of a robocall or a non-urgent email.

Use the right tools

Using the right tools saves time. Ask other founders what their favorite tools are, or do some research online. You should have a good system for your emails, calendar, internal communication, and code setup (if you are technical).

If you work in a remote setting do virtual co-working, or work from a different startup’s office

In the pre-investor days, working from home is often the norm. It can add great flexibility, reduce commute time, and be cost-efficient. However, sometimes it feels good to have other hard-working people beside you. If you think being around others improves your productivity, find some friends to meet on Discord or Gather. Alternatively, see if you can find a startup that will let you work from their office for free. This is especially relevant for solo founders.

There are many more tips I could give. But for now, we close with this: everyone needs to find a system that works for them. My own system is a collection of strategies I picked up over the years. For every strategy that worked there were two that did not. So don’t shy away from trying something new. A fresh approach might just help you get the important tasks done. 

Startup to watch

Figure.ai is another extremely ambitious company with huge potential. Their goal is to build AI-powered humanoid robots. While AI is progressing at rapid speeds in the digital world, there are many problems that still need to be solved in the world of robotics. The space is often limited by physics and progress in material sciences. Within that difficult space, Figure is moving at a breakneck pace. Founded in only 2022 but already valued at 2.6 billion dollars, they were the fastest company ever to build a commercially viable robot after inception. They purposefully designed their robot in the human form since most items that they need to handle and most processes that they want to automate were designed with humans in mind.

Figure has prominent investors including Nvidia, Elon Musk, and OpenAI. To build advanced vision models and improve its ability to process human speech they partnered with OpenAI. On top of that, they are partnering with Microsoft and use Azure for AI infrastructure, training, and storage. As a side comment, I think I heard Azure being mentioned more in the last 18 months than in the 5 years before that combined. Microsoft made some strong moves in the AI world.

Their first robot, Figure 01 is a general-purpose humanoid robot designed to perform various tasks but is specialized in simple manufacturing or warehousing tasks. It stands 5'6" tall, weighs 60 kg, and has a payload capacity of 20 kg. The robot is fully electric, with a runtime of 5 hours and a speed of 1.2 meters per second (so for now you can easily outrun it).

I think there is something special about robots in humanoid form. The question is whether this is iRobot or a utopian future in which much manual labor can be done by machines and we humans can focus on other endeavors. I hope for the latter.

Content to consume

While we are talking about humanoid robots: Does the progress the world is moving at feel fast to you sometimes? You are not alone and there is a very good reason for it. For millennia, human progress ticked by at a glacial pace. There was simply not much progress humans had to interact with in ancient times. Each tribe might stumble upon a new plant or hunting ground once in every blue moon but there were few novel inventions that changed the way things were done. They still tried to hunt animals or look for berries as their parents and grandparents did.

On the contrary, for us, most things are surprisingly different from when our grandparents grew up. They grew up without the internet, without smartphones, without MRIs, and depending on how old they are, without microwaves. Their grandparents on the other hand grew up without airplanes, air conditioning, penicillin, the TV, or the radio. This seems like a radically different life just within a couple of generations.

In fact, most of human progress has occurred in the last 500 years, rather than in the preceding 50000 years. In our modern world, we produce more new inventions every week than our ancient forefathers were used to experiencing over their whole lifetimes. Why has this not always been the case?

All of the above and more is the premise of the following blog called Roots of Progress. Here is an introductory article that talks about this surprising conundrum: Smart rich and free. It is a short piece outlaying the foundation of what the blog is about: The science of progress, its underlying mechanisms, and what we can learn from it about the future. It is a treasure trove of knowledge about the history of innovation and arguably one of the best places on the internet to learn about this subject.

Tool of the week

I have a special relationship with private markets. My first startup, Blair, raised capital from many different private market sources including angel investors, VCs, Family Offices, Hedge funds, and global asset managers. At the same time, my personal investment strategy has a disproportionate focus on private market investments since I enjoy investing in early stage startups. Pair all of that with my utter distaste for slow bureaucracy and my core belief that access to private markets should be much easier and you will understand why I am a fan of this tool of the week.

Bunch Capital is a Berlin-based Fintech company that wants to improve private markets in Europe by building an all-in-one digital platform for investors, funds, and founders. They automate and simplify the investing, administration, and diligence processes in private market investments.

You can think of Bunch as a one-stop-shop for fund operators to offer all of their stakeholders and partners a single source of truth as well as the ability to quickly go through all necessary processes involved in running a fund. The platform streamlines tasks for the investment team, lawyers, accountants, LPs, and Founders who are raising money. In my mind, bunch is a European alternative to Angellist. I love Angellist and what they have done in the US (and beyond) and I am glad that bunch exists with a stronger European focus. Other people seem to agree with that assessment, which I can tell from anecdotal evidence based on how much they are being mentioned to me but more importantly based on the fact that they just raised a 15M Series A.

On a personal level, I like that bunch facilitates investments in German startups by eliminating the need to visit a notary—a requirement that may seem weird to those unfamiliar with German regulations. According to German law, any transfer or issuance of company shares must be notarized, a rule that significantly deters many foreign (and domestic) investors, especially Angels. Among my American investment circle, there is a running joke that our friend who was an equities lawyer for 10 years would rather shoot himself in the foot than invest in a German company again. I still vividly remember the first time he had to drive for an hour to find a notary so that the company he invested in could raise their next round. He was involved in closing hundreds of VC deals in the States and had never visited a notary before. I am still more careful of German entities since the bureaucratic effort is not worth it if you are just angel investing on the side. With Bunch, the whole process becomes more bearable.

That is such a huge win that I am considering making more angel investments in German companies again. Although the process remains more annoying than ideal — German company founders often require numerous approvals from their whole cap table that their U.S. counterparts do not — eliminating the need for a notary is undoubtedly a move in the right direction. I can tell you that the investment I made via bunch is much less work than the ones I made directly into German companies, though it still does not match the simplicity of investing directly in US C Corps. This, for once, will have to be changed on the regulatory side instead of through technology. If I were to open a VC fund in Europe, bunch would be the first place I look to run my fund more efficiently.

If you are the founder of a European startup or a European fund operator, you should take a look at bunch and see if they can make your life easier.

This is it for this week’s noteworthy things for founders. If you know someone who would enjoy this kind of content, feel free to forward it to them. As always, let me know if you have feedback or suggestions for any future editions.

Tool of the week

Vimcal. I love having perfect control over my time and calendar. Vimcal makes it very easy for me to have that. It is a browser-based calendar app that I use instead of Google Calendar. I have been using them for years and it has saved me a tremendous amount of time and hassle. I can specifically recommend their precise scheduling feature that makes it extremely easy to send personalized times to people you want to talk to. It makes it very simple for me to schedule customer or investor meetings at exactly the times I want them to be since I can individually pick time slots and get them in a format that I can copy into an email. Since I deal with people in many different time zones I In the early days, I used to DM their CEO with feedback and he always responded quickly and fixed the issues quickly or personally messaged me when new features launched that helped my workflow. I love this LinkedIn post of his where he talks about how a 5k check saved vimcal from death. For perfect control over my time, I combine vimcal with cal.com for team scheduling and general scheduling infrastructure in my company. I will talk about them in more detail in a future episode.

Startup to watch

Synonym Bio. It is easy to stay in the software and AI bubble. However, most people work outside of it and many of the most important breakthroughs we will make will require interacting with physical matter. Synonym has realized that and develops infrastructure for the bioeconomy. Their platform enables companies in the bioeconomy (those that create fermented lipids, proteins, enzymes, etc.) to model, design, fund, construct and build their manufacturing capacities. These processes are a more climate-friendly alternative to synthetic processes of producing raw materials (plastics, paper and textiles), chemicals to develop soaps and detergents, food fortification, and more. The company is led by co-founders Edward Shenderovich who built Knotel before and Joshua Lachter who was a VP at AI-innovation leader ASAPP before. I love the big mission and the tremendous opportunity to change the world for the better. This is a hard problem to solve but ticks all the boxes for a potentially massive company. If you want to read a longer piece about them, you can do so here.

Blog-Article to read

1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly. This is a timeless classic that I've revisited numerous times. While primarily aimed at artists, the core principle is equally relevant to startups: it's better to have a small group of users who absolutely love your product than a larger group who just kind of like your product. I recommend every founder to read this one but also send it to every artist you know.

This is it for noteworthy things for Founders (and ambitious professionals) this week. It is a new format that I am trying so feel free to send me feedback about what I should include or change about it.

Loneliness can be caused not only by being alone but also by not fitting in. You can feel lonely even when surrounded by other people if you feel misunderstood. On the contrary, feeling as if you belong to a group you want to belong to is one of the most empowering feelings there is.

There is a reason why many young people want to move away from the place they grew up in, while others are perfectly happy where they are. Often, the former do not feel represented by the people in their hometown and want to venture out into the wide world to find a sense of belonging, while the latter feel represented in their community and feel that they fit in.

Family, romantic partners, and friends can provide comfort and ease loneliness, but there is a different type of connection that can be very powerful: finding your people. People with shared passions who are excited about the same things you are. This might be making music for some, building startups for others or a passion for a particular sport for another group. Your loved ones might be empathetic, and you have a relationship with them that you cannot easily replicate. However, they often do not understand or share your unique passion in life. Finding people who do can significantly enrich your life, even if you have strong bonds with your existing family and friends.

It took me a while to find my own people. For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed big and had a passion for building things/companies. I loved my high school and had many good friends, many of whom I would still drop everything and fly across the world for if they needed me. Playing a team sport added a trusted circle of teammates that I went through physical pain with almost every day and shared losses and wins with. However, I also felt as if something was missing, especially in hindsight and when I stopped competing in my sport. I had a good time in college and was venturing closer to my people there. Students at my alma mater were more aligned with me in terms of their obsession with achieving big things. I had glanced into finding my people by connecting with my current co-founders while studying abroad and some others I met over the years. My first real revelation of finding others as obsessed with building things and startups as I came when I went to Silicon Valley for the first time for an internship almost ten years ago. It was a breath of fresh air to find people interested in tech startups at every corner you were looking. 

The ultimate breakthrough came when we were accepted into Y Combinator a couple of years after that. Suddenly, I was part of a community that shared my borderline obsessive desire to build something massive from scratch. I finally found people with whom I could geek out about startups as much as I wanted, people who would join me for a Sunday WeWork co-working session, and people who shared the same joy and also the same pain of building a company whose purpose is to grow fast. People who understood the specific stress of fundraising, the euphoria of closing your first customer, and the yearning to go from zero to something that people want. People who grow with you over the years as your company develops or start again if the first one doesn’t work out.

To foster that feeling, I started cultivating my group further. I began bringing together people I knew and trusted into a close circle of individuals striving for the same goal. It has become a third pillar of community in my life. Family, friends, and my passion group. There is some overlap between the latter two groups, as many individuals in my founder circle have also become close friends. The depth of connection we have formed in a comparatively short time is based strongly on our shared context in life. 

Your people do not necessarily have to be related to your career. Some people I know found their group through supporting the same football club, while others discovered a shared passion for producing art as a hobby. The baseline excitement for the topic needs to be high enough for it to really work. This can develop over time, so you might benefit from trying new things. Also, there is no rule that limits you to only one group. Maybe you have a professional in-group and one for your favorite hobby. 

While having your group in close proximity is advisable, the internet makes finding like-minded peers easier than ever. Even small niche communities that only a handful of people in your local area are interested in are massive if you consider all of humanity. I have people that I consider good friends who I have talked and texted with about startups for years but have rarely (or never) met in person. The first time I met one of my good startup friends in real life was at a destination party for his 30th birthday on a different continent. Until then we had only interacted via WhatsApp or Zoom. One of my best friends and co-host for my podcast is someone I met because he DMed me on LinkedIn many years ago while I was still in college. It took us years to meet in person, and when we did, it felt as if we had spent years in the same neighborhood before.

So how can you use all of that to your benefit?

If you see someone online who tweets something you find intriguing? Reach out to them. Find a forum tailored to your favorite topic? Become an active contributor and see where it leads. Have an incredibly exciting hobby but no one to share it with? Try to find a local chapter. Maybe even move to a different place; many people discover how different the world is when they move out for college. The biggest piece of advice I can offer here is to first find out what you really care about and then find people who care about the same thing. If you do not know what you really care about that is fine, too. Just try different things and follow your intuition. 

Much of what makes life worth living is forming deep connections with other human beings you like and respect. The basis for that can be blood, a shared upbringing, or, I would argue, increasingly important when you meet new people later in life, a shared passion. Seeking out, cherishing and nurturing these shared passions with other people will give your life a whole new meaning.

Special thanks to two of my people for proofreading this, Stefan and Costa. 

Non-Fiction

1. Poor Charlie's Almanack: Lessons about business, investing, and life from one of the wisest men of our times. A very special book

2. The Engines of Cognition: A selection of essays by the preeminent rationality community on the internet

3. The Lessons of History: My most gifted book. A short, supremely insightful read about different periods in history

4. The Precipice: What are the most likely threats to human extinction, and how can we prevent them?

5. The Power Broker: The story about one of the most powerful, hidden figures in the history of the US

6. How to win friends and influence people: One of the classics about interpersonal relationships

7. Tools of Titan: The book I stole the most practical advice from

8. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics: A beautiful series of illustrations on physics and some deep philosophical implications

9. Path to Power - The Years of Lyndon Johnson: In-depth biography about the 36th president of the US

10. Thinking Fast and Slow: One of the modern classics about how we think

11. Rationality: From AI to Zombies: A collection of essays from a great thinker and rationality advocate

Fiction

1. Stormlight Archive: My favorite fantasy author doing his best work

2. Kingkiller Chronicles: Beautiful prose and one of my favorite main characters

3. Project Hail Mary (Audibook): From the author of The Martian. The audiobook is supreme

4. The Bobiverse: A fun take on von Neumann probes (self-replicating AIs) exploring the universe and defending what is left of humanity

5. The Expanse Series: Long Sci-Fi Series with a strong start and even stronger expansion

6. Cradle Series: A story about going from nothing to the peak. An exploration of how far you can go with determination and the right friends.

7. Red Rising (Audiobooks): A story about revenge, comradery and an entrenched class system

8. The Lord of the Rings: The foundation that made many of my modern favorite fantasy books possible

I will update this list regularly. If you have any recommendations, put them in the comments!

We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we've done it.

Jean- Claude Juncker

If you find yourself stumped by deep and meaningful questions, remember that if you know exactly how a system works, and could build one yourself out of buckets and pebbles, it should not be a mystery to you

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do , in order to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.

Kevin Costner

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The best way to convince investors is to start a startup that’s actually doing well, meaning growing fast & then simply tell investors so.

Paul Graham

When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you.

Walter Payton

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

Patrick Rothfuss (Name of the Wind)

For although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

Abraham Lincoln

S-Tier Blog Articles:

• Internal Memos: https://sriramk.com/memos

• The deployment age: http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html

• Breaking smart season 1: https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/

• Mental Models Farnam Street: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/

• PMarca Guide to Personal Productivity: http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html

• IBM, WW II, completed Staff Work: https://sriramk.com/memos/completed-staff-work-thomas-watson-jr-ibm.pdf

• One touch to Inbox Zero by Fortelabs: https://fortelabs.co/blog/one-touch-to-inbox-zero/

Pieces that have caused strong emotions when I read them:

• The Real Heroes are Dead: If you read one thing this week, read this

• To anybody going through it: Powerful statement on mental health from a world-class athlete