LinkedIn finds out about tech news a week after we all talk about it on 𝕏. If our plan works, we could shorten that to as little as 5 days.

Great @Fortune piece on @davidsenra today. Years ago, David kept texting me and @karimatiyeh to back a podcast with fewer than 1,000 listeners. "Trust me on this one." We did. That podcast became @tbpn. It sold to OpenAI this April and along the way did more for @tryramp's profile than any ad money could buy. What the piece gets right about David and mostly leaves between the lines: he's read 415 biographies of the people who got it right and he turned that discipline into a place the rest of us go to study. @FoundersPodcast isn't a podcast so much as a school for builders. It's why the founders I asked didn't describe it, they revered it. When you've studied the greats that obsessively, you can tell the sublime from the merely great — and you'll bet everything on the difference before the rest of us can see it at all. David earned that audience one obsessed listener at a time. Summarizing a book a week, alone in a room, scraping by for years before anyone was listening. The fame didn't change him. Neither did the money: he turned down $50M buyout offers to keep Founders his, and he takes no equity in the bets he sends others. For David, great work itself is always the point. The lesson I keep relearning from him: when you find talent like that, don't hedge. Back them completely. The returns aren't linear. Nothing better than watching a friend succeed. Grateful to be in business with him too — Founders Podcast, the new show, whatever comes next.

BREAKING: @Katie_Roof is joining Business Insider as Editor at Large

Next time you pitch a VC, bring an air horn and compare your business to it, says @johncoogan. "My business is like an air horn. At any moment, it could blast off like a rocket ship." No one will fall asleep on you. They'll all be too worried you're going to blast the air horn.

FULL INTERVIEW: Engineers Edward Coristine (@as400495) and Tai Groot (@taigrr) just released an ML model called Rampart for the National Design Studio. It's a local-first, open-source AI privacy model that runs entirely in the browser. They joined TBPN to explain the model and why the National Design Studio launched it. 0:25 – National Design Studio launches Rampart 1:40 – Why Rampart is open source 2:40 – How NDS trained the model 3:55 – Use cases for the model 5:25 – How NDS thinks about side quests 6:25 – Team size, workflow, and why they work seven days a week 8:00 – Recruiting top talent to the National Design Studio

Happy Monday. On today's stream: - @as400495 (ND Studio) - @taigrr (ND Studio) - @ChadRigetti (Sygaldry) - @PimDeWitte (General Intuition) - @yadinsoffer (Traysar) - @jxmnop (Engram) - @neilmovva (Sail) - @jakobdiepen (Discipulus) - @caltchek (Cadence) See you on the stream.

Excited to announce a $30M oversubscribed fund. 🇺🇸 El Segundo is the world's best place to build hardtech and we're the pipeline for founders from across the world coming here to do it. Joining @tbpn later today to share more. If you're at the earliest stages of building hardtech for critical industries reach out now! Link to Axios article in thread.

GPT-5.6 Sol preview — it's a good model:

Just 48 hours after launch, Taste Labs CEO @thaiscbranco_ says inbound demand has been "absolutely insane." "The reason we took so long to launch is because we already had more demand than we could serve even before the launch. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it."

After speaking with Dana White, Ed Catmull, and Rick Rubin in the same week, @davidsenra noticed a common theme: they create the things they want to see in the world. "The theme through all those interviews is they're just building the product they want to use and they want to see. Ed Catmull makes movies he wants to watch. Dana White puts on fights he wants to watch. Rick Rubin makes the music he wants to listen to. That is a key to having taste."

more diversity, more quality. let's raise the bar! thanks for having me @tbpn x @taste_ai_

John: People tend to think AI is going to cure cancer with a prompt like, 'What's the cure for cancer?' and AI outputs some E = mc²-level math equation. More realistically, it might be that a guy gets really rich from AI image generation, then funnels that into a medical technology that can detect cancer a couple months earlier, so cancer rates decline a bunch. But it's not just like, you prompt it and get a magic pill. It's much more complicated than that. Because curing cancer, or reducing cancer rates, is a process — like an industrial process — more than a single clever trick.

.@markgurman says 2027 will be Apple's biggest product year in its history. Here's what he says is coming out: Spring 2027: iPhone 18, iPhone Air 2 Fall 2027: iPhone 20 (20th-anniversary iPhone), iPhone 20 Pro Max, Apple's second foldable phone

I'm always thrilled to have more Noams at @OpenAI, but I'm especially thrilled to welcome @NoamShazeer!

BREAKING: The great country of Poland has made an $11M investment in ElevenLabs

Raven Resonance CEO @tomthecarrot explains the 3 beachhead use cases that will allow AR devices to actually scale: "The first is micro interactions. This is something where you're in and out of the display within 5 to 10 seconds. Examples are next navigation direction, phone notifications, changing music, or cooking instructions." "Second is reference material. This is where you can AirPlay your phone screen or pin up relevant information. If you're working on something with your hands, you want something that is hands-free that's going to give you that information. Ideally you can ask an LLM or an AI to help you with that task." "Third is spatial experiences, which is what we've seen from Specs. There's a lot of spatial work that we want to do in the future as well. But I think right now, you want to build toward what is the iPod of AR before you build the iPhone."

Happy Wednesday. On today's show: - @markgurman (Bloomberg) - @MerrillLutsky (Graphite) - @EricNewcomer (Newcomer) - @SwamiSivasubram (AWS) - @tomthecarrot (Raven) - @ryanjdaniels (Crosby) - @zaygranet (Bland) - Carter Reum (M13) See you on the stream.

Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware, Lunchtime for AI Leaders x.com/i/broadcasts/1lJQRRAqV…

YC's @garrytan explains why now is the time for young founders to go into hard tech: "With AI, everything is open. It's so much easier. You can do mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. If you don't understand it, you can [still] build it... We're in a new age."

Y Combinator's @garrytan says he wants his new project GBrain to be the Postgres for agents: "The thing I realized is, a human can only keep 7, plus or minus 3, things in their head. But a computer with an LLM can keep about three Harry Potter books in its head." "Then, when you think about what most computer systems are, you should think of the Library of Alexandria — thousands, maybe millions, of books. It's even bigger than that. It's the whole internet." "You could basically take all the relevant info about customers, or any person that anyone at the company has ever even met. You can have that in like, 100,000 or a million markdown files that comprises everything that the business is. That's basically what GBrain can do." "The magic moment for GBrain is basically being able to take any 'book' that exists in your entire business, and making sure the 3 books that really matter for the thing you're trying to do are loaded." "And that's basically ASI. You don't have to write software anymore. You can just straight-up use Hermes agent or OpenClaw plus GBrain."

Jordi: "Everyone's been talking about the 1-person, $100M-revenue company, but there's a much stronger incentive to just hire the incremental person." "Do you want to be the company that gets an award that doesn't matter, or do you want to win?" "It's not even a real award. It's just something you can say on the internet. Then people will debate it — they'll be like, 'Well, you hired this freelancer. You have a lawyer. Does that really count?'" "I feel like it will never actually happen."