It’s 5 days in paradise with YC founders, founders doing $10M in revenue, and just an incredible group. 10 founders in total in a mansion with in-house massages, surf lessons, and a private chef.
But we’ll mainly be there to go deep and work through our toughest challenges together.
Reply to this email with why you’d be excited to join and I’ll follow up directly.
Anyway, here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → IVF Insurance Calculator
Framework → The 6 War-Fighting Functions
Tool → Hex Security
Trend → LLM Decreased Token Prices
Quote → The World Rewards Audacity
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Opportunity: IVF Insurance Calculator
Until I came across this idea on Ideabrowser, I didn’t even know IVF insurance issues were a thing.
But I’d imagine that for the people undergoing the 432,000 IVF cycles that are completed in the US per year, they know it very well.
Turns out it isn’t very clear what’s covered by insurance, how much will be, etc. Basic questions.
A simple idea to help with this would be a calculator that understands and can correctly interpret various plans to let people know what to expect.
That part should be free, but then you can monetize by taking commissions on cases where they want to change their insurance to ensure they are covered.
Spotted on Ideabrowser
🧠 Framework: The 6 War-Fighting Functions
It’s no coincidence that one of the most commonly cited business books is The Art of War, by Sun Tzu.
We treat business as war without the violence.
We think in tactics, strategies, and how to win the day.
That’s why I like this framework from Chris Petkas, a navy veteran.
He thinks about his business in terms of “functions”, meaning a core operational capacity. Think of it like a bundle of tasks, people, processes, and systems working to complete an objective.
Chris says that in the military, they ask themselves which function is failing during chaotic times. Specifically, they look at the 6 war-fighting functions, and they can be applied to business as well:
Command + Control → Strategy, leadership, and delegation from the executive level (mostly). This is where you set your objectives, priorities, and authority.
Movement + Maneuver → This is how you position your “forces” to create an advantage. For example, building your product or fulfilling your service offering.
Intelligence → Finding the signal wihtin the noise. This is all about data collection and how we interpret it.
Fires → Growth, sales, and marketing, these are outbound forces working to achieve outcomes.
Sustainment → Your operational and financial work that keeps the business from feeling too much stress.
Protection → Maintaining your leverage and reducing your risk profile. Controlling your downsides.
🛠 Tool: Hex Security
One of the scariest parts of LLMs now being so commonly used is that if someone decides to try and hack your product, they can now take unlimited shots on goal to probe for vulnerabilities.
Before, this was limited to the time they physically had to write exploits and therefore the risk was dependent on their skill. Not anymore.
Agents can probe 24/7. So Hex is building 24/7 defenses. They’re back by YC.
Your team doesn’t realistically have the bandwidth to pentest all the time, but well trained agents can. As you change your codebase, they automatically look for new vulnerabilities.
📈 Trend: LLM Decreased Token Prices
“Intelligence” is cheap.
And it’s getting cheaper. Fast.
The price per token is decreasing at a dramatic rate across all foundation models:
This is the exact race to the bottom on price that we wexpected when I declared LLMs were over, over a year ago.
As tokens continue to get cheaper, what users can afford to do with LLMs will increase.
A combination of deflating prices and increased capabilities means value will accrue at the application and data layers rather than with the foundation models themselves.
It remains to be seen what OpenAI et al do to truly combat this. They want to be Apple or Google, and avoid becoming Sybase (exactly, you’ve probably never heard of them) or the AOL of this era.
💬 Quote: The World Rewards Audacity
It’s in the word.
Potential.
Potential energy doesn’t cause change.
It sits around waiting.
It only becomes kinetic through audacity.
Truly, it is audacious to do things.
These days everyone is saying “you can just do things”, and, to be clear, you can. It’s great that you can. But the reason that phrase hits hard is because doing things is also audacious, ambitious, and aspirational.
In a world where most people feel paralyzed by the lives they’ve allowed the world to design for them, founders are audaciously designing their own. And the world rewards us for it.
It’s good to have potential, it’s better to act on it.