Here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → Consumer AI
Framework → Duolingo’s $12B Gamification Playbook
Tool → Boardy
Trend → Return to Office
Quote → Founder Vesting
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Helpful tip if you’re having a hard time raising money for your startup (Link)
The job title identity crisis (Link)
How a notetaking app made $600k last month (Link)
Sam Altman on the early, difficult times at OpenAI (Link)
Get 2 months free on your first global hire, in any country and let Remofirst handle all your payroll, HR, and local compliance.*
Opportunity: Consumer AI
This is a call to arms!
Where are the breakout consumer AI companies?
Where are the three-person co-founding teams of:
Cracked engineer
Social media algorithm hacker
Obsessed designer
More seriously, I think folks are choosing b2b applications of LLMs over consumer because they want to make money quickly and think that’s the way to do it. I really do believe there’s some shared low-level, subconscious anxiety about not having enough money when (if) AGI becomes real.
No one wants to be trapped in the permanent underclass.
But AI enables new possibilities in consumer as well.
Someone’s going to create the next TikTok.
🧠 Framework: Duolingo’s $12B Gamification Playbook
Gamification gets a bad rap.
There, I said it.
10 years ago everything was getting “gamified” as a way to drive engagement and retention, and the term sort of got associated with low quality, “hacky” product choices that trade-off user experience for juicing metrics.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Duolingo has continued to grow long past when many people thought they’d hit a peak:
They’ve done this, largely, by mastering tasteful gamification.
Here’s what they do:
🛠 Tool: Boardy
Sharing something a bit different this week…
Boardy is an experiment from Andrew D’Souza, who grew Clearco to $100M in revenue, has launched Boardy.
It’s an AI that helps you meet people you’ll find interesting.
Send it a message on LinkedIn with your email and phone number, and it’ll call you to learn more about you before matching you with people.
Who knows, maybe you’ll get matched with me!
📈 Trend: Return to Office
Is remote work dead?
No, it isn’t, but big companies might like you to believe it is.
Ironically, I see more value in working in person for small startups than big companies, but I imagine the waste from people abusing the system has gotten too detrimental for some companies to put up with.
Personally, I work remotely and intend to keep it that way indefinitely. I need my space to think as I work. The office was never for me.
As this trend continues, look for opportunities around AI-powered employee services, as most companies know they have to woo their employees back into the office (and retain them, as they may jump ship to a remote-first company).
💬 Quote: Founder Vesting
Co-founders disagree and leave companies.
It doesn’t get talked about a lot but it’s just plain true.
Should that, along with the fact that companies are taking longer to go public than ever before, change the norm for founder vesting packages?
This is probably a larger topic for a Saturday deep dive, but here’s what I’d call “The VC Take” from Sheel: