You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup.
Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch.
I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it.
The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊
"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".
Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.
- The company works 7 days per week.
- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.
- He built a cafe in the office because there was
A related lesson from @bchesky: if you're a founder struggling to hire the right exec, you may need to do the job yourself first.
Brian is an incredible storyteller. He idolized the great storytellers, such as Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. This was critical for Airbnb, since it was a category creator that romanticized travel. Inviting a stranger to stay in your home felt idiotic. Telling the right stories, connecting them to the mission, and even insisting on professional photos built the trust the company needed to grow.
But Airbnb is also a scaled operations company. Ensuring seamless bookings and check-ins. Sending payments. Supporting hosts. Serving customers. Providing hospitality. Complying with international regulations, laws, and tax remittances. He had to idolize the great operators like Amazon too.
Finding the right operations leaders took time. Brian spoke to the best, learned the craft, and did the job himself until he understood it well enough to know what to hire for.
In 2025, Airbnb booked 533 million nights and experiences across 220+ countries and regions. Nearly 17 guests checking in every second.
That scale doesn't happen if you hire for a job you don't yet understand yourself.
Why Brian still obsesses over recruiting:
"Sam Altman (@sama) told me you're going to spend 50% of your time on hiring. I never did. It was my death blow.
As a leader, you can choose if you want to spend time hiring or managing. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less
Brad Jacobs has built several multiple billion-dollar companies.
Discover the mindset, action plan, and power of simplicity that will transform your results.
We also discuss:
+ How to spot trends before anyone else
+ What music can teach you about business
+ How to ask
I vibe-coded this MVP using @anything to fix a recruiting problem I kept running into: slow & messy enrichment.
Best vs Full Enrichment, name cleanup + primary email control, accurate personal emails. And it’s fast.
MVP is live → tinyurl.com/verro-demo
Love the way @ivanhzhao breaks down:
1. capability
2. agency
3. taste
most of the time I see "taste" brought up it downplays the strategic element (which is more important than anything visual)
h/t @benblumenrose + @joulee
Google just launched a killer new product for kids (and their parents!)
You can now ask Gemini to "create a storybook" from a prompt - and even add photos and drawings.
It generates a beautiful, interactive story, which Gemini can read aloud 🤯
Cursor changed everything for designers.
I went from sketching UI to shipping a full agent OS.
The gap between ideas and reality is closer than ever to zero.
Here’s the story:
Polaroid is the anthesis of AI Slop
The lowest tech camera with an immediate, tangible memory that doesn’t get lost in your iPhone camera roll.
Polaroid's market size in 2024 was valued at approximately $2.93 billion and expected to hit $5 billion by 2030.
I pulled the most recent post I could find on here for each program. Some of these focus on specific areas (AI for Conviction Embed, Games for a16z Speedrun), while others focus on specific stages (pre-product/idea for SPC, Seed stage for Arc). x.com/JPBrebner/stat…
Here's the takeaway from this image or any of those lists of accelerators/early stage funding programs:
There is so much capital out there for talented founders. So many programs.
The question is what will help you avoid a local max and find your global max.
I'll talk more about what's next soon. For now, I wanted to reflect on what I've learned. Plus share a bunch of photos from behind the scenes!
Thank you 🖤
leerob.com/vercel
CodeRabbit has been named in @Redpoint’s 2025 InfraRed 100, celebrating the most transformative infrastructure companies!
To see the whole list and read the InfraRed report, check out the link below!
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