I think that is BS. Everyone is notable. Everyone has stories, a life they’re living, people they’ve touched, things they’ve done. It’s crazy that the rest of the world is relegated to LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram. Those don’t show the uniqueness of our lives.

One of the early ideas we had with Biographer is that everyone's life is made up of stories and experiences that are interconnected to the broader world. Over time, we want to create an interactive tapestry that reflects this.

So today we are shipping a new feature as the first step: Biographer Wiki. It populates as you share your life stories. Unlike typical Wikipedia, no one else can edit it. Instead, your page grows as you talk about your life, and the sources we cite in its creation are the stories and conversations you’ve shared with Biographer.

It’s totally private, and if you want to later on, you’ll be able to make it public. Only if you want to. 

Watch it grow as you continue to talk to Biographer. Watch it fill up with pictures from your life as you and your family members and friends add them to your photo album. 

Everyone is notable - that’s why we are making the Biographer Wiki. 

My answer was that I do think about the environmental impact of AI, but that I think about it in a net positive way.

It is an objective truth that there must be an energy transition from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of renewable energy production like nuclear, solar, and wind because 1) if this does not happen the climate crisis will accelerate and that will be catastrophic for humanity, 2) we need more and more energy to progress technological innovation and improve the quality of life for humanity, and 3) coal and fossil fuels are a finite resource - we will eventually run out of them.

Unfortunately, as a group, humans don't respond well to taking preventative measures to act in the best interest of our collective future. We collectively respond when staring catastrophic threats directly in the face (e.g. war, natural disasters). And while it's true that the climate crisis has accelerated the frequency and severity of natural disasters, it still hasn't produced the "Drop everything and fix it" mentality needed to drive the energy transition.

It is both a fortunate and unfortunate truth that capitalism is a great motivator, and so is geopolitical competition. And right now AI is the bright star of GDP growth, and there is a geopolitical battle between the West and East to become the global leader in AI. Progressing AI requires an insatiable demand for energy, and these two forces, capitalism and geopolitical competition, will force our hand to accelerate the energy transition. Ironically, not because it is what will mitigate the climate crisis, but because it will drive GDP and AI leadership.

So I don't feel bad about AI's impact on energy consumption. I think there is short term pain, but long term gain. I am optimistic about its net effect. And I really hope I am right on this one.

When my dad passed away earlier this year, I put the project down. But after some time away, I’ve found myself pulled back to it. Losing him only made me realize how important this really is.

At its core, Biographer is about making it easy, fun, and natural for people to talk about their lives, starting with our parents. There are plenty of services where you gift a family member a subscription, they reply to a weekly email prompt, and a year later those answers are bound into a book.

That is not what we are building.

Here is our plan:

• Use AI to guide natural, engaging conversations that make revealing your life story feel like a game, not homework

• Turn those spoken memories into beautifully structured, written chapters in real time

• Keep families in the loop, making the process of storytelling collaborative and social

• Expand beyond text, mapping these conversations into interactive photo albums, audio documentaries, and legacy podcasts

If we do this right, the conversation itself is the product. A physical book is just raw material—one optional artifact of a much larger experience.

Right now, we are entirely focused on nailing those first two steps. To get the experience right, we are keeping Biographer completely free. We want to learn directly from you and your families about what resonates, what doesn't, and what we should build next.

And while we believe a life is far too big to fit inside a single book, we want to celebrate those who help us build this. We are giving a high-quality hardcover book to the first 500 family members who complete 30 conversations with Biographer. 

If you’ve been looking for a way to preserve your own memories, or if you want to give your parents or grandparents an experience they’ll genuinely love while bringing your family closer together, sign up at Biographer.

Unfortunately, outside of our group chats, there are very few platforms that focus on connecting with people we actually know and care about. Maybe there’s no market for it anymore and we are in a post-social media world. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think there will always be a desire to share and connect with other human beings. 

In the middle of April, along with some colleagues I’ve worked with for over a decade, we started testing a new application called Postcards with some friends and family. It’s fun, simple, and social, and we really like using it. 

Postcards are what happens when you mash together photos, voice notes, and some text, and use a little bit of AI and some filters to turn it into a nice little piece of stylized media. We create postcards about our days, personal musings, vacations, things our kids did, places we went, and more. From the mundane to the important, it’s how we are beginning to share the things that happen in our lives with our friends and families. 

Back in the day there were social networks that were built around your real friend graph. Those morphed into broadcast media - places to get famous and places to consume entertaining content, almost entirely from people you don’t know in real life. Then came the proliferation of group chats as an antidote - a place to be yourself and not be judged by the world. 

I know there is a space that exists somewhere between those two worlds - the best of your group chats, but only people you know and like in real life. Postcards is designed to play in that void. It’s an easy way to stay connected to the people you care about, and it is not a place for mind-numbingly consuming content. 

If you want to create some postcards and send them to friends and family, try it out here. I’d love your feedback on it, and I hope there are lots of builders out there trying to figure out how to make social media fun and feel good again. 

Since then we have been experimenting with new ways to capture and represent stories, exploring the space between a photo/video and a written journal entry or essay. What can voice on top of a photo(s) unlock? What’s the best way to make it easy, fun, and rewarding for people to capture the moments that matter to them and their friends and family? What does storytelling as a social experience look and feel like in the digital world? These are some of the things we are trying to learn.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been using the product for a variety of reasons: to capture special moments about my kids and family, to document the fun adventures and events I’ve experienced with friends, and to talk about milestones in my life. It’s the thing I am using when a simple photo won’t do the moment justice and I don’t want to write a whole thing about it. 

If you are interested in trying it out shoot me an email and I will add you to our TestFlight (iOS only right now). The only thing I ask is that you provide me some occasional feedback about what’s working or not working for you. 

My home first existed in AOL and my AIM profile. My friends and I loved them and it’s how we’d express who we were online. Then it shifted to MySpace. Then Facebook. Then Tumblr. Then Twitter. Then Instagram. Then my blog. Also LinkedIn.  It’s everywhere. I don’t have a single place I can drive people to. It used to be my blog, but that’s just the things I write on occasion. 

Call me Unc, but I miss the days of curating my tumblr and tending to my AIM profile. I wanted to bring that feeling back so I created my new home on the internet for myself. 

Over the past week I’ve spent ~10 hours vibecoding Things I Like. It ain't pretty and it's slow, but it does the trick for me and some friends and it's fun.

I get my own profile page. I can add all my various online presences across the web to it. I can post the things I like to it. I can categorize them myself or have AI do it and sort them into modules pinned to the top of my things page. I did this to approximate the feeling of an AIM profile where I’d list my favorite sports, friends, bands, etc. 

I’ve created a place where I can share the things I like - my taste. And where people can get a sense of who I am and see where else I exist across the web. 

I can also follow other people thinging stuff and see what they like. I can like them, rething them, and bookmark them. 

What's amazing to me is that in less than a day anyone can rebuild the things they loved about their favorite web applications, especially the ones that got destroyed by algorithms.

Maybe I yearn for the days of yore, but I think there’s a way to bring back truly human to human social experiences online and give people places to truly be themselves again. 

If you want a home on the internet to share the things you like you can try Things I Like.

We were blessed to get a very long goodbye. He had the privilege to go out in a way I wish for everyone - surrounded by friends and family, leaving no stone unturned. The man told jokes until the very end. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life and it will forever bring me happiness. 

The night before he died I told my wife that not only do I love him with my whole heart and then some, but I really like my dad, too. I feel lucky to say that. He was one of the funniest people I have ever known. He was brilliant, resilient, exceptional, a joy to be around, and filled to the brim with love. 

This was a tumultuously emotional adventure for him. On his final day he proclaimed: 

"At this moment I don’t feel sad.” 

"Then what do you feel, dad?” 

“Horny!” 

That was Harvey.

One night this past week I wrote down some of the most important things I learned from him. I will uncover more over the years I’m sure, but this is what was top of mind: 

When you are staring at a closet full of shirts, always pick the most colorful and patterned one. Life’s too short to be dull. Starting in his 60s, my dad's fashion sense blossomed. At first I was almost embarrassed by it. But it brought him such pride, and over time I came to absolutely love it. The man had style, and he was fearless about it. If it makes you happy, just do it.

Pursue your interests and passions unapologetically. A joy for stacking sticks and stones may one day lead you to a beautiful sculpture garden and happiness. My parents bought a lake house in upstate NY over a decade ago. There, my dad started a hobby of balancing pieces of wood and rocks. He'd spend full days outside stacking, and over time, these became freestanding sculptures that decorated their entire property. It is incredible and brought him great pride. His friends are making a book of his work. He had a pair of gloves he wore to do his work. He wore holes through them everywhere and patched them together with duct tape. May we all be so lucky to burn holes in our gloves and care about something enough to duct tape it so it lasts.

Don’t be afraid to pioneer uncharted waters and do what others won’t, especially when it means you can help people. My dad has saved countless lives because he did things unconventionally. He is a legend in the field of cardiology and helped to bring CT and CTA scans for heart disease mainstream. For years, his ideas were believed to be radical by the establishment. He was laughed at and antagonized by many. But he knew deep in his gut and in his marvelous brain that he was right and he persevered. Every cardiologist that I talk to worth their salt knows his name because he was as bold as they come. Because of him and some of his peers, you don't have to die of heart disease.

Even when life feels downtrodden, this too shall pass. Don’t jump on the tracks, just wait to board the next train because there’s always hope and love and happiness ahead. When I was in high school my dad spiraled into a bout of severe clinical depression, and he was very open about his experience with it. He shared with me that there were moments where he was suicidal and wondered if he should jump in front of the subway. But he sought help and he was extraordinarily resilient. He fought that battle and won, and without a doubt the best years of his life came thereafter. I think he liked to talk about this because not only was he proud of overcoming it, but he wanted people to know that there can be light ahead. That if he could do it, so could you.

Marry up. My dad would always say that he wasn't the "best person" or a very emotionally attuned guy for a chunk of his life, but that over time he became a better person. His only explanation for his progress was that my mom brought out the best in him. He was right. She put all of herself into their relationship and loved and cared for him infinitely. Through the very end, she made him a better person with each passing day. He was the best of him. I took his advice and I married up, too.

At the end of the day, family and meaningful relationships are everything. Nothing else matters. In these final months, I never once heard him talk about possessions, his professional accomplishments, or even the lives he saved. The only thing he cared to talk about were the people he loved and cherished. He emphatically pronounced this the day before he died: family and friends are everything. We all know this - it’s the cliche we always hear. But sometimes we don’t understand it until we see it. I saw it and it’s real. And that’s how I plan to honor his legacy, and I hope you do the same: by building a life filled with meaningful relationships and family. 

And last but not least, during trying times it’s okay to feel sad. And like my dad at the end, it’s also okay to be at peace and not feel sad. Just don’t forget to be horny.

I love you dad and miss you terribly. But I know for certain you will always be with me.

We are building something we want to use.

We need to go as fast as possible, and I want you to help us.

Here’s what I am looking for:

• Potential

• Insane work ethic and grit

• Obsession with consumer products and AI

• A love of building things

There is no job title. But here is what’s going to happen:

1. At first, I am going to tell you what to do. That might mean setting up data and analytics infrastructure. Researching pricing plans. Building a notifications system. Prototyping a new feature. Assembling desks in an office. You are going to help me get more done and do things I don’t want to do. No room for ego about this.

2. Then I will start asking you to solve open-ended problems and pursue ambiguous opportunities. How do we figure out a certain acquisition channel? What else should we test to really “wow” our customers? 

3. Then, because you have a track record of getting things done, you will come to me with those open-ended opportunities, and you’ll be responsible for making them happen. That might mean ownership over a certain function(s) or product surface area. 

After all is said and done, this should be the steepest part of your learning curve in your career. You will get more responsibility than you thought you could handle, and you will be able to draw a direct line between the things you did and our collective success.

You will likely go on to either start your own company or do venture capital (I hope you’ll start your own company and let me invest in it).

The last person I did this with was Kevin Zhang at my last company. He did everything, and he did it damn well. We hired him full-time when he was still in college. He eventually became our first head of product, and then became a GP at Bain Capital Ventures. This was also the same opportunity that was provided to me in 2009 when I graduated college and joined tumblr. Since then I’ve founded and exited two companies, groupme and fundera, and joined my favorite VC firm, Union Square Ventures, as a Venture Partner.

If you’re ready to dive into the deep end and learn to swim, shoot me a note at jaredhecht@gmail.com. Please include a link to your online presence so I can get a sense of who you are, show me anything you’ve built before, and let me know the 2-3 accomplishments you are most proud of.

Back in 2010 Steve and I launched GroupMe to much fanfare. It got a lot of attention out the gate because we built it at the first TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in NYC and the press thought it was neat that something could be built in a night and actually work. It was a good story. We raised a round of financing really quickly ($850k on a $2.5m pre-money - those were the days!), and then immediately got more inbound interest from VCs as the service began to take off. 

We were invited to demo some new features at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (here's some video footage I found) so we flew out to the west coast and took some investor meetings before our presentation. We thought our next round was going to be preempted by a16z or Sequoia. We had met with Alfred Lin several times and loved him (as most entrepreneurs do) and we took a meeting with Roelof Botha at Starbucks across from the convention center. Vinod Khosla walked in while we were pitching and we felt like royalty being showered in attention. We certainly thought we were hot shit. I was 23 years old.

We walked out of that meeting absolutely certain Sequoia was going to be our lead. We were a small team so everyone knew what was going on, and after the meeting they asked us how it went in our GroupMe group. “Sequoia wants it hard” was our response. 

Fast forward two hours - Steve and I are onstage presenting some new groupme features. We pride ourselves on live demos. Our teammate Pat is driving the presentation and on the screen in front of the entire conference he opens up our team group chat for everyone to see: “Sequoia wants it hard.”

We had no idea. But the second we walked off stage Pat pulled us aside panicking saying, “Guys, we have a problem.” Our stomachs hit the floor. I am surprised neither of us puked. Our friend Matt in the audience sent us a text that just said, “Holy shit.” 

Lucky for us, not many people saw it, and nobody made a fuss about it. We asked TechCrunch to pull the video of the demo and they politely obliged. We saw some Sequoia partners afterwards backstage and nothing was mentioned. I don't think they ever caught wind of it. Crisis narrowly averted. 

So I was a young founder who played it fast and loose. We do dumb things. It’s okay, sometimes. And this is an example of something I tell founders not to do when fundraising. 

My favorite part about this story is that Sequoia passed on investing in GroupMe and promptly invested in WhatsApp, a move that would net them billions of dollars and go down as one of the greatest investments in VC history. It turns out that Sequoia, in fact, did not want it hard.

I am tired of our two party system that is objectively failing us. 

I am tired of being told what to think, what to say, what to believe, who to like, who to oppose, what is right, what is wrong, etc. It’s too much.

The Republican Party was dismantled with the arrival of Trump and MAGA. Now the Democratic Party, of which I have been a member of my entire voting life, is being dismantled by the far left which consists of socialists, communists, and people who seem to detest the very idea of America.

And I get it. Capitalism is failing people and exacerbating wealth inequality. It is leaving people behind. Our education, healthcare, and housing systems are failing people. Our leaders are failing people. The vibes are overwhelmingly negative, pushing people to the extremes and believing that the only solution is a strongman authoritarian country or one where the government embraces a version of socialism or communism. 

This is not the way.

We need a new center—one that lifts the floor for everyone, evolves capitalism, and restores a sense of shared purpose.

Capitalism has been a gift to the world and it works marvelously well. But it needs to evolve in order for our democracy to flourish. We need to turn the best ideas from the margins into policy that works for the mainstream. The only way out is through.

As Garry Kasparov said, "We need to grow the pie for everyone, not dismantle the bakery." Or as the extremes would have it: have the government seize and operate the bakery and allocate everyone a fixed piece of pie, or detain or deport the immigrant baker. 

I constantly find myself lamenting Trump and the rise of MAGA on the right or fearing the rise of socialism, communism and antisemitism on the left. I get angry about it. The anger is all consuming. And I end up spending more time stewing in it than thinking about a positive path forward. I believe a lot of people feel that way, too. It sucks. I am trying to change that.

I also believe that an overwhelming majority of the country has no political home. We are governed by the extremes of each party, and those extremes, while they are ironically much more similar to one another than dissimilar, are splintering the USA and compromising our ability to create a better future for everyone. 

And with the emergence of all this turmoil, I have never felt more patriotic than I do today. I love this country. It’s a big mess, but it is our mess. And I know our future can be bright. 

But in order for that to happen we need to fix the way capitalism works and deliver results for the 99%, not just the 1%. We need to lift the floor for everyone. We need the wealthiest people and biggest companies, those who have benefited from and in many cases exploited capitalism most, paying more to lift the floor for everyone. It is in their long-term interest to do this. If they don't, there is a clear path from where we are today to the pitchforks coming out. History may not repeat itself but it surely rhymes.

In our lifetime we have the unique opportunity to lift the floor for everyone, not create artificial ceilings. This is the best way forward, and we can do a lot of things that people in both parties want and need:

• Make the cost of living and housing affordable by increasing supply

• Create an exceptional education system with personalized learning for every child

• Provide remarkable, cheap (or free), and personalized healthcare to the broader US population over the upcoming decade

• Make our towns, cities, states and country safe for all of our residents

• Provide universal basic income so a cracked phone or flat tire doesn’t derail someone’s existence

• Provide universal childcare to those that need it

These are things an overwhelming majority of the country want. People have been tossing around the terms “abundance” and "growth agenda" for a lot of this. Those are great words. The spirit of all of this is that a rising tide lifts all ships, and we can rise the tide. We must.

Now is the time to make this happen because people are tired of feeling like shit. The extremes are fueled by anger, not hope or vision, and that is a recipe for disaster. The middle 70-80% of the country deserves a party or multiple parties that break away from the polarizing forces of politics and focuses on helping the USA to navigate what will be the most volatile and tumultuous decades of the past fifty years. We are hungry for this. 

We have a generational opportunity to lead with vision, not vitriol. To build a movement of respect, resilience, and results.

One that lifts the floor for everyone—not with anger or ideology, but with optimism and action.

I love our bakery. Let's invest in it so everyone can get a piece.

This concept can be applied to doing things inside a company. Working with other people and being highly aligned and moving as one is a smooth way to do things. The coordination costs may be high, but the motion is smooth, and when you look back at the end of the day it's a hell of a lot faster than people flailing independently at warp speed.

Stylistically, it's also applicable at the individual level. My son is dyslexic, and he has a tendency to read through text as quickly as possible. This sometimes results in him reading a word like "turn" as "run" which can completely change the meaning of a sentence to the point it is nonsensical. The thing I tell him is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's easier, more effective, and leads to better comprehension if you just take a beat as you flow through things. It's a really hard thing to do when we are wired to run.

Yesterday, I read an incredible article called AI 2027. I highly recommend taking your time and reading it. It goes through a variety of different scenarios about how the development and integration of AI into our world can and will unfold over the next several years. It reads like science fiction, and any prognostication of this sort has a tinge of fantasy, but it certainly feels quite real (Josh Wolfe likes to say sci-fi is becoming sci-fact and I believe that to be true at an accelerating rate). The outcomes range from utopian to armageddon, and the thing that determines where on that spectrum we end up is how deliberate we are along the way.

Every incentive right now encourages foundational AI companies to move fast. There are a slew of domestic competitors that are vying for AI supremacy and raising tens of billions of dollars to build the latest and greatest models. They range from incumbents to extraordinarily important startups filled with the world's best researchers. There is also a geopolitical force where China is moving at an alarmingly fast clip, too. The country with the most advanced AI is the country with the most influence and ability to align the rest of the world to its goals and values. The stakes could not be higher, so the incentive is to rush and "win the race."

But AI is non-deterministic. Nobody really knows what's going to come out of it when we put something into it. So alignment of AI with our goals as human beings is priority number one. Being right can mean a beautiful future where everyone is happy and prosperous and being off by one degree can mean sayonara human civilization. While every external force from capitalism to international relations to the innate human need to pioneer the frontier is pushing us to go, go, go, it is very much in our interest to take our time and do this right. In the long run, that will get us to where we want to go because slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Almost all of the time this does not move the needle. What most every company needs is some brand design - a logo and marketing website - that’s good enough and a style guide for your application that will get the job done. Brand design does not determine whether you get to product market fit and whether there is demand for what you are building. What matters is building things with speed, ferocity, and focus and having an incredible product people love using. A pretty logo doesn’t help you do that.

Oftentimes, I see founders caught in the trap of looking at a competitor or company that they think has terrific visual design, and they say, “I need that.” So they go and try to find the best design agency out there, or the one the flashy company that just raised $100m used and get on a waiting list and pay $80k-$100k for a full 3 months long brand design work endeavor. Then they relaunch their brand and expect the world to shake and literally nothing happens. Time and money down the drain. But most importantly time and energy.

If you insist that terrific brand design is a must have then what you really need at the early stage is to work with someone competent who will charge you anywhere between $0 to $20k maximum for some brand design work that is good enough. This includes your marketing website along with a style guide you can use to build your product. Get it, implement it, put it behind you, and move on. Good enough is the name of the game for this stuff at the early stages.

People may read this hot take and think it’s blasphemous. Many believe that brand design and visual and stylistic taste are distinguishing factors for startups. But they are not for 99% of companies (and in my experience, the 1% know deep in their soul they are the 1% exception to the rule). Unless you are a creative genius and brand work and visual design is your superpower as a founder or deeply ingrained in your founding team, it’s not going to be a differentiator for you so get over it and just build something that solves a problem and that people want. 

*Please note that brand design is fundamentally different than building a trusted brand. You must build a trusted brand to succeed, especially in the age of AI.

Regarding the latter, I have been thinking a lot about what it means for a startup to be, for lack of better words, “AI-native.” AI-native startups are those that are born in the times when one can do more with meaningfully less people and resources, and embrace the cornucopia of AI tools that empower them to do this. From agents to co-pilots and automated workflows, the way we can build things today is vastly different than just several years ago.

I think of being ai-native as existing on a spectrum between automating everything possible with agents (eg we don’t have a marketer or customer support, we have agents that do those jobs and more) to everyone inside a company embracing tooling to make themselves more than twice as productive than they could have been just years ago.

Here is a good description of two ends of the spectrum as presented by two tweets:

I like these because they provide some explicit examples of what this can mean. I don't think there's one single definition for AI-native, it's a representative style of building companies. And it comes loaded with implications for the future of startups and innovation and the mindset founders assume when building things.

The mental shift is real amongst builders, and it is all about embracing doing more with less, faster.  It used to be that a sign of "success" was “blitzscaling,” or rapidly hiring people and growing the size of a company to tackle an opportunity in a hot market. Entrepreneurs were fed endless money to pursue opportunities and hire, hire, hire. There is a reframing happening where this is no longer the sign of success. The ability to stay lean as long as possible and focus on building and shipping instead of hiring big teams is leading to a new ai-native operating model. It’s exciting: do more with less capital and less people. This, of course, is a threat to most VC models, which depend on deploying as much capital as quickly as possible. But builders shouldn't care about VC models when solving problems - they should care about solving the thing as quickly, effectively, and capital-efficiently as possible.

Here's an example of this mentality as expressed by the co-founder of Bountycaster, a two-person team that has gone far and fast:

Founders are capable of doing all sorts of jobs now. I cannot tell you how many experienced entrepreneurs I have spoken with who are so excited to try to build new things and not have to deal with "company building" and people management. The idea that you can now go exponentially further than ever before with a team of 10 people or less used to be the stuff of dreams. This sentiment is burrowing itself in the founder's psyche, particularly those building at the application layer, and it's becoming pervasive. That's a very good thing.

Another great thing about ai-native startups is that they have a structural advantage relative to pre-existing competitors. They are unencumbered by the ways people used to build things and can embrace AI tooling to endow every member of the team with superpowers. In this sense, they are operationally counter-positioned to incumbents in many ways. Incumbents are riddled with layers of management. Managers manage people and get things done through them. That is their profession, and they have no incentive to relinquish those responsibilities and compromise their career. For this reason, large companies will struggle with adopting tools that make them meaningfully more efficient, and their startup competitors will be born with them. This will manifest in their economics and ability to ship and move fast. And that is what matters when building new things. 

Every day we are learning more about what it means to be AI-native, and entrepreneurs are unlocking new tools and ideas to push the envelope even further. We are particularly interested in this at USV and are hosting a demo day for founders to show how they build their companies in ai-native ways. If you have an insight you want to share or you want to attend you can reach out to us here on twitter or email me:

The Librarian

@usvlibrarian

AI is transforming how companies are built from the ground up. At "The New OS" (Feb 6 at @USV) 6 founders will demo the home built systems powering their organizations. Have you built novel AI infrastructure for your company? We're hosting an open call for the final spots.

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1:01 PM • Jan 10, 2025

It's a new day for founders, and it's incredibly exciting. Building a company will always be very hard, but building a product and a business has never been easier. A new golden age has commenced.

When it comes to health and bed bugs, I would describe myself as totally neurotic, so naturally, I wanted to make sure they weren’t infesting my home in Brooklyn. People dislike talking about bed bugs because they’re gross and stigma-y. We searched for them in our home but didn't see any trace of them, but I still thought they were certainly there because I was itchy and noticed new bites emerging. So I searched on Google for bed bug detectors and stumbled on the world of K9s who can sniff them out. Obviously, a dog would do the trick and find them and confirm my fears. Plus, one of our friends had a K9 do this before.

Searching for local services on google is tricky. Looking for restaurants is fine, one can usually cross-reference places with reviews and articles, but local services are another story. It's difficult to triangulate what is real on google reviews, yelp, and elsewhere. And when you are searching for things that are psychologically urgent and scary or uncomfortable, like bed bug inspections, the internet is an excellent place for scammers to take advantage of people.

So I clicked on a couple of different services that looked legitimate and ultimately ended up texting with a K9 dog service. I paid them and they sent a dog to our home that walked through it in five minutes, was promptly given a treat, pawed at our bed and only our bed, and then left. A minute later I got a call from the service saying "We got the report and your room definitely has bed bugs and let's get you some quotes from exterminators we work with." They mentioned they could pass through discounted rates. They called back in 30 minutes with a quote. I asked for the other quotes and names of companies because my spidey senses were beginning to scream "Scam." Then things got sketchy. The companies didn't have any internet presence. What I could find was a series of LLCs all tying back to the same address, a bunch of reviews that looked "off," shared last names across the various business operators, and a web of SEO-optimized bed bugs websites all operated by the same team. I confronted the person I was speaking with about all of this and they surprisingly admitted to everything and that this was just the way bed bug business was done.

This was very discomforting but not surprising to me at all. These types of entanglements are common in small businesses and large. It reminded me of the recent Hindenburg Research report about Carvana that told a story about a web of interconnected businesses and self-dealings. When it comes to these types of things you don't want to feel like you are being scammed and lied to. Whether it's seeing if you have bed bugs, buying or selling a car, or investing in a public company, you want to work with people you can trust. However, the platforms we use to discover things are easily gamed and make it easy for companies large and small to program us to believe or behave in a certain way.

Self-dealing and misleading and taking advantage of people in business are not uncommon. Incentives drive behavior, and unfortunately, a lot of businesses large and small do not care about their customers. They care about making money. Sometimes that means running scams and saying you have bed bugs and need to treat them today even when you don't have them. Sometimes that means letting customers get fleeced with no recourse.

One problem is that in certain categories like local services it's really difficult to understand if a business truly cares about its customers or not. I consider my ability to navigate the internet somewhat sophisticatedly to be above average, and I almost completely fell for this scam. It's hard to imagine how many people have been taken advantage of by services like this in times of need. And it's especially top of mind right now as people in Los Angeles flee their homes and figure out their lives after this disaster. Couple that with the ability for AI to empower scammers to flood the zone with fake information and it's a recipe for a crisis in trust and truth.

This week at USV we were discussing how people have always been programmed by the media and technology for ages, and how it now feels like there is a growing realization and awakening that this has been happening. As a result, we are beginning to question this programming and ask "Why?" more often. Why am I seeing this? Is this real? Can I trust it? What is the motivation behind the thing?

The crisis of trust on the internet is exploding, and we need solutions in every nook and cranny of it. How do we make sure reviews of local businesses and service providers are real? Is it possible? Is the only solution referral networks? How do we gauge the authenticity of those? Will it be too difficult to institute global solutions (e.g., platforms like Google and Angie's List are gamed and compromised), and therefore, everything must be local and more tight-knit (e.g., a local blog or trusted listserv)? To scale do things need to get small and trusted again? Can new networks or technologies solve these problems? How do we know what is real and who or what we can trust? I want to see and understand more of the unique ways to tackle these issues.

For now, I suppose, what we can do is remember that the information we consume comes from somewhere and through something, and that those things have their own incentives and vulnerabilities. We should continue to ask ourselves the question "Why?" and ingest it all with a healthy dose of inquisitiveness.

P.S. The working hypothesis is that the "bites" are a viral rash, and if you want a trusted bed bug inspector and exterminator I highly recommend John Furman in Brooklyn and Michael Fleck in Ulster County. They gave me peace of mind that we are devoid of bed bugs and delivered my favorite line of this saga: "With that many "bites" Stevie Wonder could find your bugs."

I frame them with a regret minimization framework that I stole from someone else and like to use:

By the time I'm 80 years old, I won't regret having spent an abundance of quality time with my family, having read and retained the learnings of terrific books and being knowledgeable about the world (both the way things work and why they work that way), knowing myself and what makes me truly happy, having traveled and explored the world to my heart’s liking, spending time in nature, feeling like I’ve made people’s lives better and contributed to civilizational progress through my professional endeavors, and investing in the relationships that matter most with friends and family.

Ambitious, but why not? Also loaded with cliches, but they're cliches for a reason.

And here is where I am netting out for the year for my personal goals:

I set a reminder for July 1 to check in on these and see how they're going. I hope to update my progress here then to keep myself honest.

Happy new year and I hope you find it meaningful and filled with progress.

I also strongly recommend never using StubHub to buy tickets. That’s where we bought our tickets. The seats were listed in a section we were excited about, but when we received them on the day of the show, they were in a different section than advertised. When we got to the venue, one of the tickets had already been scanned by someone else. Fortunately, we finagled our way in, and someone was sitting in one of our seats. She had been sold the same ticket on StubHub and was similarly duped into a bait-and-switch section. 

We were lucky enough to all get in and have seats and enjoy the show so don't cry for me. But when we got home, I called StubHub customer support to let them know that all of this had happened. They said they would try to understand why two different customers received the same ticket but that they'd do nothing about it. There was nothing I could do about it either.

I hate when companies treat their customers like shit just because they can. That’s what StubHub did. That's what a lot of companies do. And I’d bet against every single one of them. It’s a sign of a garbage culture, an abuse of market power, and a harbinger of its gradual and inevitable demise. Many brands in the banking, travel, and healthcare industries are notorious for this. They assume a market position that enables them to take advantage of customers, and they do this to maximize short-term rewards over long-term growth and customer satisfaction.  

The whole experience was infuriating. But it did make me appreciate that startups and companies that stand out and thrive over the long term differentiate with customer experience. And when you’re up against competitors who treat people like trash just because they can, you’re fighting the good fight. That’s the team I root for and want to support. You may not always win in the short term, but you’re still on the winning team. 

At the time my friends and I were somewhere between 10-12 years old. We sat down in the southwest corner of Washington Square at the permanent stone chess tables. There, a group of expert chess players play people speed chess for money. Spectators gather around and form crowds observing exciting games. They banter. Trash is talked abundantly. The energy is high and the stakes are low (think $2-5 per game). It is straight out of Searching for Bobby Fischer (or vice versa, really). That day we hustled the hustlers, and I’ve been going back ever since.

There’s an adrenaline rush I get playing low-stakes speed chess in the park. I play speed chess every day on chess.com. But what I’ve always wanted is a product that replicates the feeling of playing chess at Washington Square Park. I want low-stakes games (on crypto rails of course) for players and spectators. I want them to be publicly accessible. I want virtual crowds. I want the analog buzz delivered digitally. And I think there is a massive global market for this, especially when you couple it with other games like backgammon, mahjong, and more. I love the idea of very deliberately trying to reproduce the feelings we get from physical spaces online, but with their own digitally native twist.

One of those ideas was around helping people not die of heart disease. I published some of my early learnings on this blog last October, and it was one of the most-read articles I've written. I came very close to incorporating a company and creating a service that would help people understand their risk factors and get screened for heart disease, and then create personalized plans for them so they wouldn't succumb to the world's leading cause of death.

Every time I told someone about the idea and what I had learned, they soaked it all up. But when I asked if they ever got the tests I recommended, they usually didn't. So I wrote up a very long treatise on how to avoid dying of heart disease, and I was going to post it on a domain I bought, myticker.com, but I never got around to it because I had moved on from pursuing the idea. But I put a lot of work into the document that synthesized a lot of my learnings and experience. Over the past year, it has made its way around my circle of friends, and I finally decided I'd try to make it legible and publish it for anyone interested. You can read it here.

I still think this is a problem that needs to be solved and that someone should build a company that is consumer-first and exclusively focused on helping people not die of heart disease. If you're interested in doing this, please reach out to me (jared@usv.com) because I'd love to help you and share all the work I did. Someone needs to put the myticker.com domain name to work.

I also want to thank a lot of people who helped me along my heart health journey: Harvey Hecht, James Min, Thomas Dayspring, Arthur Agatstan, Andrea Klemes, Louis Malinow, Jeffrey Wessler, Neil Parikh, Steve Martocci, Alan Tisch, David Kopp and Carrie Weprin.

If you have a heart, I hope you find this helpful. And if you care about someone else's heart, I hope you share it with them this Holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving, and don't die of heart disease!

• you can speak with 24/7, is infinitely patient, and never rushes you

• has access to all of the latest medical knowledge and literature

• has a superb bedside manner

• can communicate with you however and whenever you want: text, voice, or video

• knows all about your medical history and doesn't have to ask you the same question twice

• has memorized the results of all the medical tests you've had

• focuses on keeping you healthy and proactively checks in on you

• has breadth and depth - it can be your primary care physician and a specialist

• can create a personalized wellness plan that's unique to you and help you stick to it

• is free to interact with or as close to free as possible

This is universal healthcare, and it's around the corner. It will be available to everyone.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini are already better at diagnosing conditions than most doctors. They have better bedside manners, too.

They and Consensus are the doctors I turn to first when I have a medical question for myself or my family.

I feed the results of my lipid panels to them and ask them what I should do to improve my biomarkers, and I get answers that are just as good as those of doctors I know and trust.

The foundational models already have the wisdom and wherewithal to deliver personalized healthcare to everyone with an internet connection. They just need a friendly wrapper and trusted UX (likely one that is heavy on voice). It's time to make it so.

I have found a solution to this problem, and it has worked marvelously well. Whenever I tell people about it, they think it's batshit crazy. But then they usually come around and see how unique, important, and beautiful it is. I think more people, founder or otherwise, should do it. Here's the story.

Steve Martocci and I have known each other for nearly twenty years. We built GroupMe together and when you found a company with someone you form a bond that stands the test of time. After GroupMe was acquired, our interests diverged. Steve had an idea for a company that would change the music industry, and I wanted to shake up the world of small business lending. But we knew we always wanted to work together and bet on each other no matter what.

So we made an agreement. We would do all of our investing and company building together, even if we wanted to do totally different things. For every company I would start, Steve would own a meaningful piece of my equity/carry (e.g. ~15%), and vice versa. And for every investment we wanted to do, we'd always bring it to each other and offer to split it evenly. It has worked out, and we have been able to make concentrated bets with our time over the years building companies and now doing venture capital while diversifying risk.

The neat thing about this agreement is that nothing is papered. It's just a code we live by. I feel very lucky to have this deep sense of trust and respect with a partner like Steve. I acknowledge how rare it is. And I think more founders should try to find something similar. In the short term it might feel strange, but over the long term it's extremely powerful economically, psychologically, and emotionally. This concept doesn't just have to apply to founders, it could apply to anyone. Making bets and investments in people you admire and work well with produces returns that cannot be measured in cents or dollars.