Evidence of Exceptional Ability

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Here’s why your US dev budget goes 3x further in LatAm (Link)*

• Going to any conferences this year? My friend built an AI agent to contact anyone else who attends with you (Link)

• Alex Lieberman shares free AI business idea (Link)

• Ben Lang on why vertical AI agents could be 10x bigger than SaaS (Link)

• Andrew Gazdecki on the power of deadlines (Link)

• Matt McGarry's 10 best tips for turning info products into a living (Link)

• Jen Abel on when to hire Head of Sales (Link)

• Aaron Levie on how AI agents will expand the size of the software market (Link)

• Peter Yang on what software's next chapter is really about (Link)

 Opportunity: AI Permitting Solution

Do you hate going to the DMV?

Probably, right?

You don’t hate the people there, they’re just doing their jobs.

But DMVs have the reputation, and often back it up, of being incredibly inefficient.

The permitting process for new housing (especially in places like San Francisco) is arguably worse.

The problem here isn’t whether AI can do it better. That’s obvious.

The problem is how do you convince various government entities to buy in?

🧠 Framework: The Core 4

My friend Lenny writes a great newsletter on (mostly) product management.

But a lot of it applies to founders too.

He shared this framework from a few founders on how to increase velocity within your startup.

Since speed at a startup tends to be tied to engineering productivity, a lot of the examples are based around dev experience.

Implementing this, like Vercel, Intercom, and Dropbox have, sets up an interesting dynamic since the metrics tend to have natural tension with one another. Frameworks where that’s true are often the best, they reflect your whole decision making process and hold you accountable.

So, if you’re going to implement it yourself, do the full stack, don’t pick and choose.

📈 Trend: AI Drug Discovery

Did you hear that Reid Hoffman is back in the game?

The PayPal Mafia OG and LinkedIn co-founder just started a new company that uses AI to discover new drugs.

It’s hardly the first AI drug discovery company though, but the fact that people who have enough money and connections to do basically anything, like Reid, are still focused on the space tells me there’s likely a ton of upside left.

It makes sense.

If the future of SaaS is personalized SaaS, then is the future of drugs personalized drugs?

A lot of smart people are betting on it, at a minimum, making discovery and research more efficient.

So at next year’s Super Bowl when the pharmaceutical ads have more money to spend on marketing, you can thank Reid for giving them that budget back from R&D.

💬 Quote: Evidence of Exceptional Ability

How long do you spend getting to know someone before you feel confident enough to hire them?

How much information do you feel you need to collect?

Do you really need all of it?

If I told you that you could determine whether someone would be a valuable addition to your team without ever seeing their resume, what college they went to, or where they worked, would you take it?

What if I told you that you could get all (or, at least, most) of what you actually needed to know by asking one single question?

I saw the Elon-ism below recently and absolutely loved it, it reflects what I’ve seen in practice.

I’ve probably hired roughly 50 people. Not an obscenely high number.

But I’ve also vetted tens of thousands of founders for our membership and residency programs at Launch House. Each month we’d get over a thousand applications, and I refused to delegate the initial vetting.

A few years on, now, I’ve seen the same thing play out over and over, the people who had done something exceptional before (even if it was totally unrelated to startups) were the most likely to repeat that by building a lasting, high-growth company.

And this is the best question I’ve heard to figure out quickly if someone actually has or not: