2x founder / 2x father. I build products that solve coordination problems and connect people. Writing: https://teapawt.net/t.co/uQdcGBOEru
London
Joined August 2009
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I’ve always been obsessed with two things: markets and communities.
These seem unrelated, but actually I think most communities are special kinds markets for things not settled in cash:
> Markets for favors
> Markets for status and social recognition
> Markets for non-public information and opinions
...And also just markets for *humanity*.
It feels good to share what you know. It feels good to help people. It feels good to pay it forward. Communities give you the surface area to give back to people you care about, in a way that would be difficult otherwise.
Norms can exist within the shelter of communities that would whither in the harsh winds of the outside world.
In a world flooded with AI, I suspect small/private communities will become the last bastions of alpha not possessed by the models, and some of the most human places left both offline and online.
I’ve been playing around a lot in this space lately, so if any of this resonates stay tuned :)
Charles Cushing retweeted
Since moving back to London after almost a decade away, I keep meeting young people here building incredible things. Some at uni, some who've deferred
Hosted a small group of them tonight with @AkashBajwa96 at @meetgranola HQ and came away really inspired about the young talent here in the UK
Two ways you can help:
1. Angels who want to back impressive young (sometimes solo) founders early, DM me!
2. Pen testing/SOC2, which came up twice tonight. They have traction and need early security certifications to properly capitalize on it. If you can give them a great rate (under $3K per pen test), I'll send you two customers straight away. Hopefully, many more after (check my profile for the number & type of events I run)!
Zooming out, I've been looking for one thing I can commit time to, a cause i can consistently care about outside a busy job. I think this could be it!
Still reading this? If you know anyone great who's young in the UK and wants a peer group of ambitious builders, let me know. Hosting the next one in about a month with Akash.
The search runs both ways now
Your agent searches your soul, before searching the internet on your behalf
One thing they don't tell you about parenthood is that you develop an insane sixth sense for when children are in danger.
Not just yours, but anybody's.
Today, I was walking down a hallway in a sports center. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a mom rummaging through her bag looking for something while her baby sat on a high sofa.
A split second later, I found myself kneeling next to the sofa and holding the baby.
It had toppled over, and I'd lunged to catch it before conscious thought even arrived.
The movement was completely involuntary. I essentially blacked out and woke up in a different location. Zero memory of what happened between 'I'm walking down the hall' and 'I'm holding this baby'.
(The baby was fine btw.)
My main takeaway from this experience is that evolution is one hell of a drug. It reminded me of this clip I'd seen years ago of the same kinds of incidents caught on film:
youtu.be/R6__QYkV_qs?t=8
Your product is detestable, and I mean that in the nicest possible way
OpenClaw deleted around 400k LOC of its own tests without much change in code coverage. Modern models just love writing tests for every tiny change, even if they aren't useful. This skill helped. github.com/openclaw/openclaw…
Charles Cushing retweeted
➕➕ New research ➕➕
On the design of agents for markets and markets for agents.
AI agents are increasingly entering markets, acting on behalf of people—
How do we make sure they represent their people well, and that these markets are set up safely and fairly for everyone?
A few weeks ago I was demoing a friend's product, and he was trying to show me the UI, and I realized — I just didn’t care.
I asked for the MCP and used it directly through my Claude session instead.
It was a 10x better experience: Claude already had my context, auth etc. so the tool just folded neatly into my existing workflows.
I know there was a huge wave of “MCP is the future” like a year ago, but I still see so many products building a GUI when they genuinely could be headless.
Non-chat UIs can ofc be a better experience than chat, and are often even necessary.
However, I’ll argue there’s no better affordance for STARTING a process than just being able to think >> type “I want to ______. Go!"
If that process later brings you to a different UI so be it. It just makes UI what it always should have been — an affordance to get your work done faster.
Agents using messaging apps designed for humans is basically a hack.
It will be interesting to see if the mainstream messengers roll out protocols for personal agents
Or if a new agent-native consumer messenger emerges
Everyone is building agent memory, but what I really want is agent *embodiment*
Increasingly, I don't want the agent to act as my assistant — I want it to act as ME:
- think like me
- talk like me
- reason like me
I want an agent that can say *I ____* and really believe deep in its little weights that it IS me.
Maybe this is playing with fire? But it would be so useful.
I've been thinking about (and building in) this space.
'Teaching in public' feels valuable on LinkedIn, X, and Reddit:
- They control agent access
- People still read posts with their eyeballs, so they can see it's from you
I know lots of people crush it with AEO, but there's a gamble: will you get cited or just trained on?
Imo the missing channel is Direct to Agent publishing. When I ask my agent a question, it should respond first with the [private or public] posts, newsletters etc. of the people I've chosen to follow.
If those sources exist on a graph (e.g. Substack writers endorsing each other) then you've also got a really interesting new channel for socially-contextualized agentic discovery.
The entire incentive structure for publishing useful information on the open web has changed.
Lawyers used to write blog posts about what you needed in a contract.
Now what’s the point of doing that?
So AI can read it and you never hire them?
We may be in the golden era of AI in the sense that in a couple of years, outside of categories like computer science, information about the non-digital world will be closely guarded, and thus will make AI much dumber about physical world subjects.
Feels like a seed fundraising announcement<$50M these days is just an invitation for someone to clone you / fast follow.
"Hey guys we found a new pool of demand and are undercapitalized, come after us!"
Most apps were built around a push notification from the app itself: app > user.
This is a horrible UX and is what led to notif fatigue.
The next wave will be built around push from your agent: app > agent > user.
Many opportunities to differentiate here.
A nuance in the "software is dead" debate that hasn't come up enough:
Maintaining internal software is MUCH easier than building a SaaS tool you sell to others.
Building a SaaS = constantly innovating on features, supporting different platforms, manifold user stories, upselling, cross-selling etc.
Building your own software, its possible to get to stability and just... stop building. Because it's good enough.