Hey y’all — I just got back from a week in Costa Rica with Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk and 7 other founders.
The group included YC founders, founders doing $6M in revenue with 0 employees, and with a total amount raised well over $100M.
It’s been a while since I helped run an IRL mastermind, and it has me more fired up to build than anything I’ve done in the last year.
The quality of discussions and learning from each other pushed my thinking forward, but also just getting to be around a highly curated group of killer builders for a few days was so refreshing.
I’ll be sharing a lot more from the retreat soon, and we’ll be running more throughout the year. Stay tuned.
Anyway, here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → AI Agent Trust Scores
Framework → 10-80-10 Rule
Tool → Customer.io
Trend → College-Educated Job Loss
Quote → Just Build It
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🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Become a certified AI consultant and deliver true ROI with AI when others are stuck in "perpetual pilot" mode (Link)*
Austin Rief shares the worst advice for a founder (Link)
Valeria Rozova-Rosenblatt reminds why you shouldn’t be afraid to pivot (Link)
Rahul Nanwani shares everything he’s learned about startups in one post (Link)
Nick Telson-Sillett on what the hardest startup phase is (Link)
💡 Opportunity: AI Agent Trust Scores
As the world gets more complex, change accelerates.
I know I’m not the only one who feels like every day I’m heads down on my business, I miss at least one major AI-related update.
This is how it feels during times of massive disruptive change.
Even at the founder retreat I just hosted, where we gathered a group of killer founders, the #1 topic of excitement and discussion was agentic AI.
But no one has time to keep up with it all.
Trust scores for agents (an idea I spotted on Ideabrowser), based on some centralized standard, rating them on qualities like how often they hallucinate, how much the actual functionality matches the marketing, and the quality of their outputs would be a valuable certification-style business to set up.
Spotted on Ideabrowser
🧠 Framework: 10-80-10 Rule
If you’re the founder, you don’t need to do everything.
Jeff Seibert (founder of Crashlytics) says to delegate the middle 80% of projects.
He wants to be involved at two places:
The initial 10% → Jeff wants to understand what the team is trying to do, why they’re doing it, the approach they’ll take, and if everyone is aligned.
The final 10% → Near the end, Jeff wants to check in on adding final polish, tweaking copy, perfecting the details, and making sure it feels well thought through.
It makes sense. Is that middle 80% really the highest leverage way you should be using your time? The messy middle is where you’re making hundreds of micro decisions that eat away at your mental bandwidth. And most of them are likely better suited to the people closer to the actual problem anyway.
The best leaders know when to show up.
🛠 Tool: Customer.io
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Engage users based on real behavior, improve onboarding, and build stronger customer relationships without adding headcount. Helpful AI handles the busywork, so your team can focus on timing, strategy, and getting it right.
Built for growing B2B SaaS teams ready to turn messaging into meaningful growth. Try it free for 14 days.
📈 Trend: College-Educated Job Loss
Do you want your kids to go to college?
I wish I hadn’t gone myself.
Thankfully I escaped without much debt, but even over 10 years ago I could tell the value of my degree was trending down. And the social / network experience is something you can self-engineer.
As LLMs eradicate the old guard of entry level white collar work, we’re seeing the value decrease faster and faster.
It’s due to a combination of factors though:
Degrees are easier to obtain (larger student body + easier grading standards) which makes them less likely to help you get your foot in the door somewhere after school
Traditional entry-level work is less cost effective to have a human do, due to advances in AI (and the knowledge you’re being taught at most schools is already outdated in industry)
Sky-rocketing tuition and related costs have dramatically outpaced wage growth
Low-cost, accessible alternatives are rising, making the opportunity cost of a 4 year program feel larger
As layoffs accelerate (I bet a lot of other boards and CEOs saw the stock price bump after Block’s recent 4k AI-related purge), the value will plunge even further.
💬 Quote: Just Build It
In 2015 I was living in my hometown, Philly.
I was working as an engineer at a small healthtech startup.
In my spare time I was cofounder dating and thinking about ideas.
One time I had lunch with this founder who had an idea he was sure was going to be the next big tech company.
Or, at the very least, he was excited about it.
So excited, or so sure, that he was scared that someone would steal the idea.
He’s seen The Social Network and was just hoping to not become Eduardo Saverin.
So when we met up the first thing he had me do was sign an NDA.
I was to green to know it at at the time, but NDAs don’t really matter.
If you’re a tiny company, the last thing you should be spending your valuable time on (rather than talking to potential customers, building your product, or literally anything else) is litigation.
Plus… let’s be real, you probably have no money for it anyway. And any money you do have would be better spent elsewhere.
If you start spending on litigation around an NDA, chances are you’ll be out of business before you’re able to enforce anything.
So if someone’s approaching you with an NDA, it’s certainly a bad sign for their understanding of what they’re even trying to accomplish in the first place, and how hard it is.
More than that, even in a world where building products is easier than ever due to LLMs, ideas are only as good as how well you execute and grow them.
Don’t think about ideas.
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas.
No one cares about ideas.
Just build the thing.
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