Time100 Creator. Exited Founder. Serial Entrepreneur. Keynote Speaker. Bestselling Author. Applied AI Evangelist at Wispr Flow.
Miami, Florida
Joined November 2007
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It's official. I am on @substack now. You can subscribe to it here shama.substack.com/
I let my business school students use AI on their midterm.
The real skill they're learning is knowing when to reach for AI and when to wrestle with the problem first.
I call it friction maxxing, and they're on board.
Wrestle first.
The CEO of Tommy Bahama told me one of the biggest shifts he's seen in 25 years is mothers and daughters shopping together.
No dashboard flagged it. He saw it standing in his own stores.
AI is the accelerant. Human behavior is the signal.
Much of office work is bureaucracy we invented to manage other bureaucracy.
Hand that layer to AI and you find out what's actually left of the job.
For some roles, plenty. For others, less than people would like to admit.
Heartbroken. Austin lost two great entrepreneurs, Joshua Baer and now Adam Robinson. Both were builders who opened doors for so many founders, and friends to so many of us. Sending love to their families and everyone who knew them.
Here's my response to @vgr's Cognitive Mercantilism. I think he's two-thirds right. Intelligence was never gold, and hoarding AI access is modern mercantilism. But it isn't groceries either. You can stop farming and still eat. Stop thinking and you lose the taste for it.
Aug 26: Instinct launches an invite-only agent that texts you.
Oct 28: ChatGPT ships the same thing in a US Pro beta.
Two months from startup proof to platform feature.
If your edge is the interface, you're on that clock now.
AI is an accelerant and an amplifier. Automate a team that isn't thinking and you get a very efficient team that isn't thinking. Fix the thinking first.
Ok, Meta - I see you. Ya’ll - don’t sleep on this feature from Muse.
One of the biggest challenges with teaching people AI has not been with the technology itself, but in the use cases.
You can hand people a genie, but if they haven't already spent a lot of time thinking about what types of things they want to build or do, chances are, often they will stare at a blank screen.
Meta's AI app Muse does the best job of solving this out of all the other applications out there right now. Whether you use Muse as a daily driver or not, I highly recommend checking this feature out. Hit the light bulb icon when you download the app, and it will give you the most personalized, let's call them “recipes” of things it can do for you.
Do not use your name as handle for @bot. It's going to get very confusing.
Use an agentic assistant name so when it's signing up for things or confirming things for you - there is no confusion.
This could usher in the next great renaissance for small businesses, and @Shopify is extremely well positioned. People bought from Amazon because it was the least amount of friction.
Now you can support any business that you actually want with the same (greater?) level of ease.
