2x founder / 2x father. I build products that solve coordination problems and connect people. Writing: https://teapaw.org/t.co/uQdcGBOEru
London
Joined August 2009
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Charles Cushing retweeted
next its probably Claude Calendar → Claude DocuSign → Claude Inbox → Claude Payroll → Claude Domains → Claude Cash
then it gets crazy, Claude OS → Claude Chips → Claude Classroom → Claude Medical → ClaudeX → Claude Conquest
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.
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?
Charles Cushing retweeted
Your software needs one of these or it’s worthless:
1. A network effect
2. Corporate relationships
3. Physical atoms
Charles Cushing retweeted
This is basically my view. Really doing things well takes almost 10x more effort than most people think
Step 1 of any project is to “finish” it and realize it’s busted. Then you have 90% of the work left.
Not that many are patient enough to do the 90%. They think the project is “rotten” and unrepairable, and they move onto the next 10% project, never learning to go the whole way.
Charles Cushing retweeted
Can we all just pause for a sec and reflect on how fucking important Tailscale is, and how nobody ever talks about them? I don't think I've ever seen a more useful service with a more invisible corporate footprint.
Charles Cushing retweeted
Jev is going to change the prosumer/consumer AI landscape by unlocking a specific thing:
Ad-supported + free AI native apps
this is going to usher in a generation of new AI-native marketplaces, social networks, photo apps, messaging, calendars, email, collab tools, and much more.
Why? Previously, if you wanted to have an AI-native app with multiple/fast LLM calls on every screen, the math just didn’t work - inference costs just couldn’t be paid back from throwing a few video ads or affiliate links. So there were really just two solutions:
1) be a massive company and subsidize AI costs
2) charge a subscription fee to cover inference
(or both)
So what happens when you take a different approach that’s looks to be, initially, >400x cheaper than a more general LLM? I think it means that app developers are going to make their apps smarter and different in interesting ways. It won’t be as generically powerful as LLMs, but instead folks will create highly differentiated point solutions. You may not have a generically powerful virtual admin to schedule all your meetings, but you may have a free/ad-powered assistant that can comb through your inbox, filter for only important emails, figure out important dates, prioritize contacts, and do other interesting 80/20 work. Same for generically powerful virtual companions, or app builders, etc - it may be that we can hybridize the LLM and future Jev-like models that adds “wow” features at 1/1000ths of the cost, to make the economics work.
If folks hear of interesting new apps/interactions/etc built on Jev, I’d love to hear it!
Charles Cushing retweeted
Unpleasant thing that most people don’t know about, which is that there is only one single producer of Amoxicillin in the United States
Even worse, this lone producer has only one single manufacturing facility — the only remaining FDA-approved facility able to produce this class of drugs domestically
And that this sole manufacturing plant fell into bankruptcy in 2021 (competition from overseas manufacturers), where the Department of Homeland Security had to step in to broker an acquisition deal to ensure it would survive
Massive single point of failure. Disaster waiting to happen.
There are many other cases like this
It should be mandated by joint US National Security and FDA policy that our nation have strategic distributed domestic manufacturing of Antibiotics and other critical drugs that can survive contact with disruptions
Even at cost / fully subsidized by the government — They are too important to rely on external producers or single production facilities
Charles Cushing retweeted
I’ve been thinking about a concept like a “coordination overhang.”
It is the gap between what any group of people could achieve in collaboration, vs what they actually achieve. I think the agents used as coordination technology could help meaningfully decrease the gap.
Any group of people (e.g. teams, labs, communities), has latent potential for what they could do together. There is some much better version of the collaboration where the right questions come up, relevant knowledge gets surfaced, hidden complementarities are discovered, and everyone leaves knowing what to do next.
Reality usually lands somewhere below that. Each person enters with only a partial view of what everyone else knows, has tried, is curious about, and can contribute. A group can have an excellent conversation and still miss the most valuable thing it could have done together.
Simple example: two individuals meet at a conference. One has been stuck on a problem for months, while the other has already developed a method that could help solve it. Neither side realizes the connection, so they have a perfectly good conversation about their work and move on. Sometimes those things are naturally uncovered and it feels serendipitous. But intuitively it's likely that is a lot more that goes unsaid.
AI agents could become a new coordination technology for closing this gap. They could analyze everything people have been working on, identify relevant overlaps before they meet, bring the right context into the conversation, run analysis across the group’s combined knowledge, and then provide the tools to turn a promising connection into actual work. They would essentially be cranking the dial on serendipity.
The people still decide what matters and whether to act. The agents make more of the group’s latent potential visible and actionable.
This is a high-level thought rn, but we at @JoinEdgeCity are working on improving these kinds of collective intelligence processes by running experiments using multi-agent systems.
h/t to the folks at @RenPhilanthropy and @indexnetwork_ for the work they're doing in developing these ideas with us.
Charles Cushing retweeted
retention high enough will inevitably fuel growth.
growth rate high enough won't bring up retention.
~every startup that growthmaxxed yelling "distribution is king" "capital can buy growth" without achieving true retention/users who truly love their product, share the same fate: implosion, or pivot.
Charles Cushing retweeted
The Clock is Ticking to Fix The Social Contract.
The wealth transfer from young working people to older, pension-drawing, home-owning baby boomers is unsustainable.
The numbers are staggering. Under-35s pay over £35bn/year to home-owners.
That's enough for 610k first-home deposits.
Enough to cover 776k student loans.
And even enough to pay for two new Elizabeth Lines.
Britain can't continue this way.
Charles Cushing retweeted
biggest startup learning so far: ignore literally everything and everyone that is not immediately ultra critical to what the biggest problem is right now
everything that feels like it's "probably super useful in 3 weeks" is completely useless, NEVER do it
Charles Cushing retweeted
I don’t expect my 2yo to understand everything I tell him, but I’m not going to arbitrarily constrain what I talk to him about according to my assumptions about what he can and cannot understand. the road to understanding begins with dim awareness. takes time to get anywhere
Charles Cushing retweeted
My main rule for understanding social problems in one's life is: It is always the other way around. There's a layer of delusion, veil of Maya. You think cause -> effect. But turn the two around. It's the other way around. Suddenly it will all make sense.
Same for character: It's always its own opposite. People who feel deeply lazy work insanely hard. People who feel they're bad run charities. Angry people are sad. Fast people think calmly and slowly. Shy people go on stage. Cold people write romances. Passionate people write level-headed papers. The lonely host parties. The sated are quiet. It is always the other way around in all things people.