How Elon Is So Productive

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Health conscious founders can get thorough bloodwork analysis and guidance on how to optimize your health and performance with MarekHealth. (code: HOUCK for 10% off).

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

• AI’s role in B2B software (Link)

• The biggest commonality in $10B+ founders (Link)

• 30 startup ideas to build in 2025 (Link)

• An exited founder’s learnings about recruiting an early-stage team (Link)

• Notes on the future of AI strategies within enterprises (Link)

• Paul Graham’s rule of thumb for when to launch your product (Link)

• Personal finance things to know as a founder (Link)

PS — our lead investor at Launch House was Flybridge (they’re great) and their co-founder Jeff Bussgang (he’s great too), who’s also an Harvard Business School professor, just put out a new book about finding PMF in the age of AI.

I got an advance copy and loved it, and asked him for a promo code for y’all — so FoundingJourney15 will get you 15% off.

I get nothing out of this, just thought it was worth sharing after reading it!

💡 Opportunity: AI Email Agent

No one really wants to be spending their day in their inbox.

There are some exciting AI startups trying to either automate or drastically improve the way we interact with email including Micro.so (which I’m an investor in) and Floodehq.com (which I’ve used and really like), and some others.

I expect 2025 to be the year we see consumer preferences start to expect a more automated email experience than the last generation of tools like Superhuman and Front are able to easily offer without changing their entire product.

There’s probably still room for some fresh eyes and approaches in this space, since these startups are still in the early stages.

But, be careful — email sounds simple but consumer expectations for these tools are sky high so you may have a bit of a grind ahead of you.

🧠 Framework: Elon’s Engineering Process

Whether it’s software, rockets, or cars it’s fair to say that Elon Musk knows how to get results from engineering teams.

Here’s his step-by-step process to do engineering better:

I also broke it down as a more broad productivity framework here:

📈 Trend: Faster Growth

Are startups growing faster than ever before?

Paul Graham thinks so:

At the surface, this seems likely to be false — even if we perceive the growth as faster, it’s probably just recency bias, right?

Maybe not.

There are at least 4 reasons why this current wave of AI startups might actually be growing faster than the ones that emerged early on from the shift to mobile, the dotcom era, and other new paradigms:

• First, there are simply more people who are connected to the internet and therefore can sign up to use your product.

• It’s also easier to get started with a new product. There’s better online infrastructure. For example, back in the 90’s in order to use Amazon to buy something you needed to hear about it from a friend (in person or on a phone call), or maybe some news report. Information just moved slower.

• Taking that one step further, our ability to get hyper-targeted with our marketing and sales are orders of magnitudes better than in the pre-social media era. So your ICP can be bombarded with reminders you exist for pretty cheap either with organic social or paid ads.

• Lastly, we simply understand how to build and sell software products much better. Our efforts are more effective.

All of this basically makes the case that the infrastructure of the internet has dramatically improved, and therefore enabled faster validation and growth.

It’s not a crazy argument — it’s probably true.

💬 Quote: Product Distortions

There are plenty of good reasons to ship a product before it’s polished.

Frustratingly, there are also plenty to NOT ship before it’s polished. These are often less discussed, because they tend to lose most arguments when push comes to shove, but they’re still valid.

Here’s a good one:

Read that last sentence again — do this when the blocker to growth is uncertainty at the top of the funnel. If people aren’t willing to try the product or learn more about it, you need to impress them.

Typically this happens when you’re going after:

• A high price point

• Enterprise-level users

• Users with large public footprints (i.e. creators)

A friend of mine built an app for creators that took well over a year to launch, simply because they secured partnerships with very large creators who refused to be associated with the app until the design and UX met a certain bar.

You can argue it’s not worth going after those types of users early on, and in most cases you’d be right, but in the other cases you need to make sure your product builds that trust quickly.

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