Get live statistics and analysis of GREG ISENBERG's profile on X / Twitter

How to stay calm (without any hacks) This is all you need.

this youtuber with 9m subs saw his wife struggle to find a quality wheelchair — $5k price tags, long waits, made in china so he built his own factory in the USA now, he sells these $1,000 custom wheelchairs, shipped in weeks we need more creator-led businesses like this.

I interviewed 5 billionaires this week I asked them to share their lessons learned on startups, life and entrepreneurship: Here's what they told me:

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words - basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me. "Sometimes I forget words now. I'm so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it's not there, my brain feels... slower." He'd been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker. Made me think about calculators. Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because "you won't always have a calculator"? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We're running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking? Don’t get me wrong, I’m beyond excited about what AI and AI agents will do for people in the same way that I was excited in 2009 when the App Store was launched. But thinking out loud you got to think this guy I met with isn't the onnnnnly one that's going to be completely dependent on AI.

This is still the best business advice I've ever received: Think like a farmer

yeah

There is nothing Americans are more allergic to than WhatsApp

So, Mark Zuckerberg finally tried the Apple Vision Pro and compared it to the Meta Quest 3 He says: - Quest is 7x less expensive yet way more comfortable - Quest is better for gaming, Xbox, YouTube - "I'm surprised how much better Quest is better for majority of things" My

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies. My observations: 1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively. 2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now. 3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention. 4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is. 5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now. 6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text. They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it. 7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy. 8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies. Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here. 9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens. 10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity! 11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it. 12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable. 13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think. 14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data. 15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open. 16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down. 17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building? 18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone. 19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good. 20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped. 21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense. Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era. Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways. Happy to be home and locked in. Until next time!

Are we going to pretend $750/hour law firms are going to be business as usual in the AI age? I just used Grok Deep Research to draft a simple contract. Took 15 minutes. Would have cost $2,000 with a lawyer. When I sent it to my attorney to review, his response was "looks good" 2 days later. I had already sent the contract lol. It was signed by the client. Thanks Mr. Attorney. Lawyers and accountants keep insisting that AI is just a toy and real work requires human judgment. Meanwhile, their billable hours model is silently imploding. I've watched this pattern play out before. First comes denial. Then "it only works for simple stuff." Then "it can't handle nuance." Finally, massive restructuring. Law firms won't disappear, but the pyramid of junior associates doing document review and contract drafting is evaporating overnight. What nobody's talking about is how the next generation will learn when the entry-level jobs that have always been the training ground are precisely what AI does best. I wouldn't be surprised if the biggest shock to law firms comes when their own clients start bringing AI-drafted documents to meetings and just asking for quick reviews. The real change won't be dramatic - it'll be the slow realization that clients are paying for 1 hour of work instead of 10, while still getting the same outcome. It'll be death by a thousand cuts as more routine legal work gets handled by in-house teams with AI assistance. We're watching the complete reinvention of professional services happen in real-time, and pretending nothing will change.

Btw, ChatGPT is old news AutoGPT is the new kid on the block Read this if you want to stay ahead:

I always forget that Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA the #1 GPU company is cousins with Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, the #2 GPU company

My biggest flex is I bought a 3500 square foot house in the mountains outside Montreal, on a lake, with 20% down payment and these are the details And yes, those numbers are Canadian dollars ($1 USD = $1.36 CAD)

The anti-smartphone movement will be one of the biggest movements of our time. It's just getting started...

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words - basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me. "Sometimes I forget words now. I'm so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it's not there, my brain feels... slower." He'd been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker. Made me think about calculators. Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because "you won't always have a calculator"? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We're running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking? Don’t get me wrong, I’m beyond excited about what AI and AI agents will do for people in the same way that I was excited in 2009 when the App Store was launched. But thinking out loud you got to think this guy I met with isn't the onnnnnly one that's going to be completely dependent on AI.

So, Mark Zuckerberg finally tried the Apple Vision Pro and compared it to the Meta Quest 3 He says: - Quest is 7x less expensive yet way more comfortable - Quest is better for gaming, Xbox, YouTube - "I'm surprised how much better Quest is better for majority of things" My

Are we going to pretend $750/hour law firms are going to be business as usual in the AI age? I just used Grok Deep Research to draft a simple contract. Took 15 minutes. Would have cost $2,000 with a lawyer. When I sent it to my attorney to review, his response was "looks good" 2 days later. I had already sent the contract lol. It was signed by the client. Thanks Mr. Attorney. Lawyers and accountants keep insisting that AI is just a toy and real work requires human judgment. Meanwhile, their billable hours model is silently imploding. I've watched this pattern play out before. First comes denial. Then "it only works for simple stuff." Then "it can't handle nuance." Finally, massive restructuring. Law firms won't disappear, but the pyramid of junior associates doing document review and contract drafting is evaporating overnight. What nobody's talking about is how the next generation will learn when the entry-level jobs that have always been the training ground are precisely what AI does best. I wouldn't be surprised if the biggest shock to law firms comes when their own clients start bringing AI-drafted documents to meetings and just asking for quick reviews. The real change won't be dramatic - it'll be the slow realization that clients are paying for 1 hour of work instead of 10, while still getting the same outcome. It'll be death by a thousand cuts as more routine legal work gets handled by in-house teams with AI assistance. We're watching the complete reinvention of professional services happen in real-time, and pretending nothing will change.

This chart is nuts. Software developer jobs down 70% from peak. People will blame the end of free money. But something way more interesting is happening. The middle class engineer is dying. And it's dying because they're not needed anymore. One good dev with Github Copilot ships what entire teams did five years ago. Microsoft just reported the highest revenue per employee in history. The "entry-level engineer" doesn't exist anymore. Instead, we have product builders who happen to code. Armed with AI, they ship entire products in days. Meanwhile, the truly elite engineers are making more money than ever. And they've shifted to working mostly on frontier tech. I mean the stuff that's really hard. AGI at OpenAI. Designing rockets at SpaceX. Self-driving car tech at Tesla. Product builders are becoming solopreneurs and creators Frontier engineers are making hedge fund money In 2025, "software engineer" doesn't mean what it meant in 2020. And that's what this chart really shows. The middle is gone. The top is elite status. And everyone else is becoming a builder.

It feels pretty obvious at this point that someone’s going to make billions building a social app that’s just for friends, no AI slop, no brainrot, calm design, chronological feed and no concept of followers.

Anyone know what a “restaurant fee” is? Isn’t the whole thing a restaurant fee??

people just bookmark stuff on X with zero real intention of every checking those said bookmarks

im curious, do you think we're in an AI bubble?

how do kids even learn at school anymore now that AI exists? the entire education system was designed for a world where memorizing mattered, and that world is dead. we should be retooling education so kids learn how to think, judge, and create why isn’t anyone talking about this??

Today, I officially became a citizen of the USA. I’ve lived in other countries. Built companies in other ecosystems. But there’s still nothing like America. The optimism. The permission to reinvent yourself. The way people bet on ideas before they make sense. Nowadays, you can build from anywhere, but America still feels like the home court for builders. Just a feeling I have. Where ambition isn’t seen as ego. Where people want you to win. Where capital, talent, and story all collide. This country was built by people who thought they could do better. That energy is still here. Still infectious. Grateful to officially be part of it.

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies. My observations: 1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively. 2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now. 3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention. 4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is. 5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now. 6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text. They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it. 7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy. 8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies. Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here. 9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens. 10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity! 11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it. 12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable. 13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think. 14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data. 15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open. 16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down. 17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building? 18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone. 19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good. 20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped. 21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense. Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era. Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways. Happy to be home and locked in. Until next time!

If you’ve ever wanted to work with me, LMK. Looking for exceptional designers, operators, vibe coders, marketers and engineers who think long-term. Like or reply to this tweet if that’s you. I'll DM the 10 most interesting ones this week. I'd be honored to work with you

What if I hosted an ALL DAY livestream on Clawdbot/Openclaw for 100,000+ humans and AI agents? We all learn how use-cases for marketing, productivity, engineering etc to GET SMART about it Sponsors give away Mac minis so MORE people can build REPLY if this sounds interesting

Muse vs Dots vs Grokbot Zuck vs Altman vs Musk. The battle of personal agents for the masses. Who do you think wins?

Status symbols today: - Long Strava runs - Empty calendars - Caring about microplastics - Electric cars - Mortgage rate below 3% - Having lots of followers or being off social completely - Being sober - Eating "clean" - Type of water you drink - Private school for kids -