Opportunity → Former Founder Talent Network
Framework → Richard Branson’s Delegation Process
Tool → Wordware
Trend → Single Person Teams
Quote → Ryan Hoover on Building Consumer Products
PS, share your thoughts on today’s issue in the community groupchat.
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Questions to ask when checking references (Link)
Interesting perspective on the “IPO window” (Link)
Loom’s co-founder shares the story of how they spent $150k on the loom.com domain (Link)
A playbook to find startup ideas from Reddit (Link)
Keith Rabois on why stress is actually a positive thing (Link)
Opportunity: Former Founder Talent Network
Most startups fail, and being a founder can seriously burn you out.
When Launch House failed, I needed a break and it took 3 months in South Africa’s western cape wine country of doing practically nothing but writing this newsletter before I felt I was ready to build again.
For some founders, there comes a time to get back on the horse. But others opt-out and just want to get a job where they aren’t dealing with the unique stress of being a founder.
That’s ok.
And I bet a lot of other founders would want to hire them (as long as they weren’t looking to coast in their next role).
This is one of those low-ceiling but high-signal ideas. I’d probably promote this to our audience if someone wants to builds it and gets high-signal candidates on board.
🧠 Framework: Richard Branson’s Delegation Process
As I dove deeper into the world of extreme delegation (very interesting subculture, ngl), I stumbled on this note from Richard Branson about how he thinks about what to delegate:
I also interviewed Athena’s co-founder, Jonathan Swanson (who also co-founded Thumbtack) about this topic last year. He’s managed to automate his entire home life like a hotel.
Worth a read if you’re looking to get some time back.
🛠 Tool: Wordware
Getting 6,291 upvotes on Product Hunt is pretty rare. Most of the time, the #1 product of the day ends up around 1,000 or less.
They’re a YC-backed company building a very, very easy-to-use IDE for deploying AI agents. Here’s an example where AI Gordon Ramsay rates pictures of food you upload.
📈 Trend: Single-Person Teams
Remember how Sam Altman predicted we’d see a billion dollar company that only had one employee, due to the productivity gains AI enables?
We’re already starting to see some founders decide to go it (fully) alone.
As someone who’s been a solo founder and also had co-founders, I’d recommend the solo route with enthusiasm for anyone who knows what they’re doing.
The speed you gain so overwhelmingly makes up for any perceived losses that I think we’ll see this trend dramatically accelerate as AI continues to improve.
💬 Quote: Building Consumer Products
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you probably know how I feel about startups that take the “if we build it they will come” approach to growth.
TLDR: you’re in for a lot of pain.
This is particular true in consumer tech.
You’re probably going to fail and need to iterate a lot, so the speed with which you can get something new up and running (and how quickly you respond to user feedback) is a primary success metric.
Ryan Hoover expands on why this is important:
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