Cobby ~ The Seventh Codekage 🥷🏾

Claude charges for image inputs by pixel size, not by the text inside them. So you can turn a wall of context into one dense PNG and pay for pixels instead of tokens. Here is a repo that does that 👇

Whether you like it or not, when you're an early founder, your most important hat is recruiting the best people to be around you. Assuming you're funded, at least 50% of your time should go to recruiting. And posting on LinkedIn at this stage is probably the wrong move. It's critical that your first hires are A players. The best way to hire them is to proactively go after them. The two main mistakes you want to avoid: 1. Waiting passively for someone great to find your job post among thousands of others and get excited enough to apply. Moreover, chances are this will never happen. A players usually have strong networks. They don't go through LinkedIn and rarely need to apply to join a good company. 2. Spending a lot of time looking for the perfect match, failing to find it, and settling for someone not as good as you wished. Both paths lead to the same place: hiring B players. Because finding A players willing to take the risk of joining an early startup is incredibly difficult. But it is absolutely critical that you don't lower your bar. Medium term, this will cost the company far more. Early B players will only hire more B and C players. And even if you eventually convince an A player to join, they'll leave soon after, because A players can't stand mediocrity. At the early stage, and even much later, the best way to hire A players is to go find them, meet them, and slowly but surely build a network of A players you would love to hire, while getting better at pitching your company and vision. You want them to understand that your vision is worth taking the risk to join an early stage company and cutting their salary by 2 or 3x. And that no amount of money will replace the excitement and the opportunity of working with you on this mission. A great piece of advice I got from my friend @Altimor, that became a sacrosanct rule for me: at the end of every meeting, ask them who they'd love to work with, who is the best at X, and ask for an intro. A players always recommend A+ players. And you get to be introduced. The best hiring advice I ever received. Keep your network warm. Slowly but surely, your odds compound. Not just because you multiply your shots, but because they'll increasingly see you as an A player too, vs yet another random early-stage founder with no future. Especially if you prove you're executing on what you told them you'd do. Of course, the ideal scenario is to build this network long before you need to hire. But realistically, if you're struggling to recruit, it usually means the network isn't there yet. The best time was yesterday. Today is the second best time to start. GL!

After 3 incredible years and 1.6M students later, my journey at ALX Africa has come to an end. It has been a life-changing experience, during which I made a lot of friends, worked with an incredibly dedicated team, and met so many talented students. A few numbers. We scaled from a few thousand students to 1.6M students on our platform. Students loved it and many of them took more than one course: 4M total! For the famous #ALX_SE Software engineering program, our SE students made an average of 2,000 commits and our checker reviewed 180M of their projects. That’s 2B lines of code… and that was before Claude Code. They actually wrote these themselves (unless Kimba said otherwise :) A big thank you to all my SE team mates, I am so proud of what we have accomplished, and I will really miss you all. Thank you to Fred for the trust he put in me and always supporting my crazy new and disruptive ideas. Thank you to my students. It was an honor to work with you, watch you struggle but relentlessly move forward, no matter what, until you got this job. To those who are still struggling finding this job, keep pushing forward. Don’t let go. You got this. You all have worked so hard and I am so proud of you. You are the greatest thing I've ever been part of and I can't wait to see what impact you will have on the world. It’s your turn to shine now, and hopefully for some of you to give back to the community whenever you are in a position to. I hope you’ll keep sharing the good news with me when you get this internship, this job, or when you launch your company. These messages are everything to me. In any case, I’ll be watching you from afar, and you can count on me to continue answering all your LinkedIn and X messages. Can’t conclude without ALX Africa’s signature: continue to “Do Hard Things”. Remember who you are, where you are coming from, and where you set out to go. I’ll see you there soon. With love. J PS: Want to know what's next for me? Drop your email here: forms.gle/uXkakKduHgx9tpDT6