Working on something new in K-12. SmartPass co-founder (acq). Angel investing. Forbes 30u30
Joined January 2014
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Peter Luba retweeted
I’ve never quite understood the appeal of software that gives you a blank canvas and building blocks to make your own tools.
I’d rather use a purpose-built product from a team whose judgment I trust, or build something custom for my exact needs.
The awkward middle ground makes you do the design work, but limits you to someone else’s building blocks.
And in companies, everyone ends up building their own systems, leaving the organization to deal with the complexity.
With AI making custom software easier to build, that tradeoff feels increasingly hard to justify
Peter Luba retweeted
every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath.
except for our product, of course.
in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much.
we're special that way.
Peter Luba retweeted
I've finally invested in enough unicorns (at seed) that I have confidence in the traits unicorn founders have in common.
If you fail to hone these traits, you will fail to build a $1B+ company in my experience.
/ 1. Velocity consists of speed
Matt Loszak from Aalo showed me this the most: The best founders are viscerally uncomfortable with slow progress.
They feel it as a physical irritant, not an abstract concern.
They obsessively refactor how they’re pursuing goals to identify clever shortcuts and rethink their roadmap from first principles.
Speed leads to high momentum and a compounding returns on knowledge and product.
It’s necessary to maintain your headstart in a market, otherwise the faster competitor will beat you within a couple years.
/ 2. Velocity consists of direction
The best founders regularly surface from heads-down execution to ask whether their path is still the right one — whether a better route to the destination has opened up, or whether the destination itself has shifted.
Pathfinding prevents the common failure mode of executing brilliantly in the wrong direction.
It requires intellectual honesty and the willingness to kill plans that no longer make sense.
The best founders set a recurring quarterly calendar event to re-assess all their goals.
/ 3. Mission alignment
The journey to building a unicorn is long.
Without a mission that goes beyond financial outcome, most founders lose steam and start phoning it in. Then they get surpassed by competitors who are hungrier.
The mission doesn't have to be world-saving — but it has to be genuine to you.
/ 4. Asking for advice and integrating it
The best founders ask smart people for advice and implement the good advice immediately. The moment they’re shown a better way, they update their processes.
They don’t assume they’ll stumble into better ways organically; they set aside time each week to learn from others and shortcut their development.
They assemble a counsel of advisors who are the best in the world at what they do and they sell them on the mission.
/ 5. Brick-by-brick hiring
Adam Guild of Owner showed me this the most.
Unicorn founders treat each early hire as weight-bearing. They run a deliberate process to find the best person in the world for each role — not whoever is closest at hand ("hiring within arm's reach") from their existing networks. (Unless they are the best).
The foundation built in the first ten hires sets the ceiling for everything that follows. A single mis-hire in a key seat early on compounds. Getting this right means the team itself becomes a competitive moat.
@itsdruvv and I have been reading about how K–12 edtech companies grew, and we’ve developed a useful heuristic: what stops working if a school removes that product?
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Take away the software that helps a school find a substitute, enroll a new student, or tell parents about next month’s field trip.
Does someone reopen Excel? Pick up the phone? Spend Sunday night doing that work instead of preparing lessons for the week?
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Peter Luba retweeted
New essay:
The case against conversational interfaces
• Natural language is a bottleneck
• The "pass me the butter" test
• AI as augmentation
↓
julian.digital/2025/03/27/th…
Peter Luba retweeted
My favorite quote from Atomic Habits by James Clear:
"It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.
If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.
To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment."
Peter Luba retweeted
This tweet is evergreen; if you find a way to quietly chuckle at what usually bothers you, you can just glide through life towards what you love + want, instead of being constantly yanked off of your emotional axis, always expending excess energy just getting back to baseline.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Peter Luba retweeted
folding concepts, not removing them:
most products keep adding features horizontally – new tabs, new tools, new "things" – because it feels safer than consolidating. but that's how you get bloated interfaces nobody can navigate.
the better way: fold concepts that should've been the same all along. when you merge "issues" and "bugs" into "database with status property", you're not taking anything away. you're revealing the truth that was always there.
the trick is layers. people start with simple, familiar concepts. as they go deeper, they discover the power underneath. they're never overwhelmed because they only see what they're ready for.
the hard part is the transitions. people who loved the old "bugs" tab feel like you took their thing away, even though it's still there and more powerful. you need to guide them through the folds gently.
this is why single-purpose apps can't evolve. their whole identity is "we only do X". but reality is messy. concepts and roles start to blend. the future belongs to systems like Cursor and Notion that are infinitely malleable, so it could fold and unfold to match how you actually think.
Peter Luba retweeted
you know how sometimes you read text and it just stinks of ai?
wikipedia has a great list of tells: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe…
i thought it'd be fun to put all of it into a system prompt to avoid having text sound AI generated - it works pretty well.
prompt in the reply below:
Peter Luba retweeted
I've noticed I'm a better designer when I review other people's work than when I work on my own. This is not a new observation. People have noticed that e.g. critiquing is easier than designing. That designers struggle to design their own portfolio.
Peter Luba retweeted
When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed "dream sheet" with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams.
It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method.
Here's exactly what Shohei did 👇
1. First, some history.... The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese junior high track coach. He took a team ranked last out of 380 schools and, using his system, turned them into the #1 team in the region within 3 years. They held that top spot for the next 6 years.
2. You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick."
3. Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal.
Ohtani's 8 pillars were:
• Body
• Control
• Sharpness
• Speed
• Pitch Variance
• Personality
• Karma/Luck
• Mental Toughness
4. You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines.
This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan.
To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like:
• Showing Respect to Umpires
• Picking up trash
• Being positive
• Being someone people want to support
5. The method goes far deeper than just technical skills. It forces you to analyze your weaknesses and build confidence. It also has a highlight on service to others, emphasizing that humility and contributing to your community are essential for personal success.
6. The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice.
The legend continues!
Shohei Ohtani is the NL MVP for the second straight season!
ALT Shohei Ohtani NL MVP Pictured: Shohei Ohtani smiles while wearing a road gray Dodgers uniform. Below, Ohtani yells while wearing a home white Dodgers uniform. In the lower right corner is Ohtani’s signature in Japanese.
Peter Luba retweeted
In 5 years from now, probably 95% of the tokens used by AI agents will be used on tasks that humans never did before.
I just met with about 30 enterprises across 2 days and a dinner, and some of the most interesting use-cases that keep coming up for AI agents are on bringing automated work to areas that the companies would not have been able to apply labor to before.
Most of the world hasn’t quite caught on to this point yet. We imagine AI as dropping into today’s workflows and just taking what we already do and making it more efficient by 20% or something. Yet most companies realize that most of the time they’re doing far less than they could because of the cost or limited capacity of talent.
This shows up in different ways across every industry. In real estate it’s ideas like being able to read and analyze every lease agreement for every trend and business opportunity possible. In life sciences it’s being able to rapidly do drug discovery or improve quality by looking through errors in data. In financial services it’s being able to look through all past deals and figure out better future monetization. In legal it’s being able to execute on contracts or legal work for previously unprofitable segments or projects.
And these are just the Box AI use cases that deal with documents and content. The same is going to be true in coding, where companies tackle software projects they wouldn’t have done before. Security of all systems and events they couldn’t get to. And so on.
If you are working on AI Agents right now, the big opportunity is to bring enterprises “work” for problems that they couldn’t do before because it was nearly impossible to afford or scale.
And if you’re deploying AI agents in an enterprise, consider what things you’d do more of (or differently) if the cost and speed of labor became 100X cheaper and faster. This is going to get you the real upside of automation.
Peter Luba retweeted
If you’ve forwarded the Shopify ai memo to your team but don’t know what to do next, here are a few specific things you can do to generate ai momentum in an org that’s not there yet:
- simplify buying: get infosec and finance to give you a budget and fast tracked approval process today
- create your building-w-ai channel for sharing wins, fails, and asking for new tools
- create slack emojis for devin, cursor, Claude, ChatGPT and slam them anytime a workstream uses or needs AI
- tap a single engineer to be in charge of experimentation, adoption, and driving usage of tools
- connect your team to a peer company that’s a little ahead of them on AI for inspo and info
- ask “where is the prototype?” when given docs or figmas
- add “prompt”, “prototype link”, “run link” sections to your document templates
- run an exec training and half day hackathon
- run quarterly all company hackathons
- every time a doc is added to a specific folder, zap a AI generated summary to a slack channel
- headcount request form now has “this role has already been automated partially by…” section
- yes allow coding copilots during eng interviews but a rubric for evaluating them well
- AI fluency in career ladders and levels
- identify toil, solve it with AI. Don’t threaten the fun parts of jobs, take away the painful grind
- hire junior folks that don’t know better
