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Introducing Quest, the personal agent that studies you like a profiler.
Quest is for believers-only. It requires radical transparency: full access to your life so your agent can craft your memory.
If you give it a shot, youâll unlock a personal advisor, always in your corner, helping you and encouraging you to start your quests.
Quest is built different:
1. Memory from day one: 100+ wiki files created on you, all your relationships mapped.
2. Phone-Use: Quest has its own Android phone, and can control messaging apps like WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok.
3. Fluid UI: Quest builds tailor-made iOS mini-apps around each of your quests.
4. Mothership of AI Assistants: Quest can manage your Instinct and Muse on your behalf.
5. Self-Improving Proactivity Harness: Quest reacts to anything, not just your email, and its proactivity evolves from your feedback and its own mistakes.
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Moats! Does anyone have one anymore?
Yes. Yes, they do.
But only a small subset of what people call moats create real long-term value and defensibility.
Not actually a moat:
1. Distribution: This does matter more than ever. Building products has gotten easier, but getting them to customers has not. Distribution, however, does not create durable defensibility. It helps create the raw ingredients for one, but it is not itself a moat.
2. Execution: Yes, speed is critical for startups. But a company that has to sprint forever is not a good business. Ultimately, it will misstep, slow down, and competition will catch up. Speed gives a company more shots on goal as it tries to build a great product and a great business, but it must eventually find something more durable.
3. Brand: The idea is that when everyone is building the same thing, the most resonant brand will win. But for startups, brand works more like customer acquisition spend: Put money in, get growth out. Itâs not something that will effectively keep others from competing long-term. Brand can become a true moat over time (as with Coke or Nike or Apple), but it just takes too long to really matter for most startups.
What you're looking for is compounding advantages: a self-reinforcing flywheel that gets stronger and stronger over time, ultimately making a company very hard to compete with long-term.
There are only four compounding advantages that really matter. Every major tech company has at least one:
1. Switching costs: The more deeply embedded a product is in the way a customer works, the harder it is for that customer to switch. This increases retention and revenue per customer, which can be reinvested into the product.
2. Network effects: The more users a product has, the better it gets for everyone. This increases engagement and attracts more users.
3. Scale economies: The more volume a company has, the larger and more efficient its operations can be. This lowers unit costs, funding lower prices or a better product at the same price, further driving up volume.
4. Data effects: The more usage a product has, the more data it generates. This data can be used to improve the product and increase usage.
If you canât see the potential for any in the startup youâre considering joining, thatâs a red flag.
In todayâs incredible post, @danhockenmaier shares a simple framework you can run in about an hour after getting an offer:
1. Identify a startupâs compounding advantage
2. Gauge how strong it could get
3. Measure whether itâs working
Inside: dozens of real company examples, the specific metrics to track, and benchmarks for what good and great look like.
Read it here: lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tâŠ
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News: Weâre moving NFX to self-funded. Taking it private. No more external LPâs after fund IV. The four GPâs stay intact. 8 more big seed investments to make in Fund IV, so hit us up. After that, we'll be doing $100K - $3M investments w/ our own money. Thanks to @homebrew who led the way! @NFX @GigiLevy @peteflint @omri_drory
nfx.com/post/self-funding-nfâŠ
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fomo has entered into an agreement to acquire Mobula.
over the last year, Mobula has grown into the largest onchain trading infrastructure provider by most KPIs - 70% of the top 10 onchain trading apps by volume now run on Mobula.
At the same time, Fomo became the largest onchain trading app by volume and DAU.
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I started playing poker in 2006-2007 when I was in college. Deposited $50 with my mom's card, and made 100K during my first year, playing almost entirely cash games from NL5 to NL1K. It was a different time, rake was lower and the fields were much easier to beat.
I decided to go full time. Had a pretty hard fight with my parents but somehow managed to convince them.
Going from NL1K to NL5K was really tough for me. I was going back and forth from 10K to 100K trying to take shots. Then one day I decided to try PLO. I was really on tilt, and young me was a massive degen. I split my remaining 10K into 4 tables of PLO 25/50 with almost 0 experience.
I was basically clicking POT POT POT and it worked pretty well against people who thought PLO was about nut peddling. Made my 100K back the first night and got hooked immediately.
I think regs at the time chased me because I wasn't a PLO specialist, so naturally most of my volume became HU PLO. I turned my bankroll into 1 million within a year. I was naturally good at the format.
Between 2008 and 2012, I battled anyone who sat, and some top players considered me the best HU PLO player at the time. Ben Sulsky, @PhilGalfond and Ben Tollerene were definitely headaches.
It was very hard to find action. Most regs were bumhunting, and waiting all day with all the sites open wasn't very interesting to me. I really liked the challenge part of poker, not just the money. I considered my bankroll a bit like a video game ELO. Maybe this dissociation from money helped me climb the ranks.
My next step was going to Macau to play live high stakes with 2 of my best friends, Romain and Cyril. Allez les 3 mousquetaires!
Adjusting from multitabling HU PLO to 9-handed live NL was extremely difficult for me. I was insanely impatient, played 50% VPIP and was getting punished. To be honest, I probably never really learned haha.
Somehow luck struck again and Short Deck started becoming popular in the Macau games, a format somewhat similar to PLO. Hands run much closer in equity and the games are very dynamic compared to NLHE. Range advantage changes on every street. People were overly weak and playing too many hands wasn't as -EV.
Jungleman, Trueteller, Ivey, Dwan and the Chinese bosses were my everyday game for some time.
With my poker profits I invested a lot in tech, including Nvidia at around $3-4. Did I say I was lucky?
Covid came and basically stopped a poker career I was already reconsidering.
In the long run, I know very few poker players who stayed successful. Rake, bad debt, access to good games, new geniuses coming into the game... it makes it almost impossible.
That was my poker chapter. The next one is for another day.
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âThe lifestyle of âan entrepreneur âat its core is: âI can take more pain than the other guy, and I'll prove it.â
ââThere's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.â
ââYou almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens and you don't even get mad.â
ââThere are benefits. âBut you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen, you're unbothered.â
ââThere's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.â
â @travisk
My conversation with @travisk, founder of Atoms and Uber.
0:00 Building Atoms & the Meta Problem of Management
3:51 The Appeal of Impossible Problems: Starting Over in China
12:19 Uber vs. Didi: Copycats, Hypergrowth & China's Rules
21:02 How Network Effects Become an Efficiency Fortress
31:48 Capitalism vs. the Taxi Cartel
44:05 The China War Goes Global & the Entrepreneur's Capacity for Pain
54:04 Life After Uber: Lawfare, Media Narratives & Reputation
58:21 What Founders Get Wrong About Venture Capital
1:08:35 The Fundraising Playbook: QED Storytelling & a Five-Room Auction
1:18:38 The Uber Coup, Radical Accountability & Outgrowing Fear
1:26:42 Why Specialized Robots Beat Humanoids at Industrial Scale
1:31:30 Finding Your Sport: Food, Mining & the Physical AI Stack
1:40:14 How to Build Many Companies Inside One Company
1:46:33 Entropy, Civilization & the Meaning of Progress
Includes paid partnerships.
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Madame Celeste Amarilla,
Vous ĂȘtes une femme mĂ©prisable et indigne de sa fonction.
Vous ne reprĂ©sentez pas le Paraguay, ce pays qui a transpirĂ© la passion et lâhonneur tout au long de la compĂ©tition. Par votre inconscience et votre racisme dĂ©complexĂ©, le monde entier a dĂ©jĂ oubliĂ© le parcours et lâeffort historique que vos joueurs ont rĂ©alisĂ©s durant cette coupe du monde pour laisser place Ă une dame incompĂ©tente donnant la pire image possible de son pays.
Je ne laisserai jamais aux gens comme elle, la liberté de laisser propager leur haine et leur racisme à travers le monde.
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Chills - Thierry Henry on growing up playing in the suburbs of Paris (and why 54 World Cup players are from there)
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Man do I want Paraguay to lose. Not just because they deserve to, but because I don't want to have to watch any more of them.
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I raised $3.5M to build the AI lab I've been dreaming about.
And I'll be its CEO until I find someone better than me.
It's called Naijm â "star" in Arabic. Based in Dubai, backed by the business community here in the UAE. This isn't a bet on a pitch deck: three companies are waiting to buy our services before I've hired a single person.
The model is simple.
We go inside massive enterprises, take their most expensive process, and rebuild it with agentic AI. We get paid on the savings we prove. If the client doesn't win, we don't eat. Efficiency and cost reduction â unsexy words, enormous money.
Why the UAE? Because nowhere else on earth can you build this. No AI Act. No Brussels drag. None of the American lifestyle that burns people out over a parking spot. Here, an entire nation is racing into AI â and the leaders pick up the phone.
The lab is bigger than one product. It's the infrastructure to create and deploy many ideas. Some of what we build will become companies of their own, run by the people who built them. I'll back them.
Now I need the crew.
Ten people.
Four jobs: engineers, hackers, biz devs, storytellers.
Autonomous people only â I have no managers to give you and no roadmap to hand you.
I want people so smart they never bore me.
I want full-stack people who understand business.
I want to build polymath paradise.
I'll pay up to $200,000 a year, in a country where you keep every dollar. The bonus can run 2â3x the base, written on the same savings number our clients pay on.
If you've ever thought about working with me one day, this is the moment.
The application takes thirty minutes. No CV. It starts with a blank page.
Link in the comments â€ïž
PS: I also raised with the same people a $20M fund as a solo GP, to invest in AI companies that want to distribute in the UAE â to the same clients we're already talking to. It's good to be back âïž Send me your pitch: [email protected]
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WhatsApp may be the statistically best app we've ever made.
It's a product manager's dream with its unparalleled addictiveness (DAU / MAU) of 87% and stickiness (M1 retention) of 86%, both #1 in the world while having the #1 most monthly active users for any non preinstalled app of 2.7B users.
Here are the top 25 most used apps in the world by MAU on both these metrics. Some surprising observations:
â There are now 15 1B+ user apps in the world, 8 by Google, 4 by Meta.
â The 3 that aren't are TikTok, Telegram (!) and ChatGPT
â Telegram has more users than Spotify, Pinterest, Netflix, Amazon, Snap!
â ChatGPT's one month retention is #5 after WA, Instagram, Chrome and Youtube. 2yrs ago, it was been #20 by M1 retention
â Shopee, a shopping app in southeast Asia, is huge and retains users better than Amazon!
Useful way to break down consumer businesses especially within certain categories (X vs Reddit vs Threads is a good one). It's shocking how few new apps have been able to break through in the past 10yrs.
