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Pedantically, literally everyone can be a founder.

At this moment, you can decide that you are starting a company. You are now a founder.

(This is why Founder is historically an unprestigious job that smells a lot like Unemployed, though the startup hype cycle of the last 15 years changed that.)


We had a great experience doing this in a much less hardcore way through this company: https://withtheseringshandmade.com/

I'd recommend to anyone who is interested but does not have the skills to make a ring on your own. Great weekend trip from Seattle too.


We did something like that as well. Cost was comparable to just buying rings (most of that was the gold, anyway). We started with a blank strip of metal with the correct cross-section, which was first bent, then soldered together, then sized appropriately and polished. Was a fun day.


How much did you end up paying?


I don't remember exactly, but somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000.


I think the only way to avoid race to the bottom is to offer relatively high end services, competing on price is a recipe for disaster.


What do you mean by selling Education?


run training platform like coursera vs developing the courses


> "Is the kernel of this advice to start with a known problem which is already solved with a paid service, and then just sell that service more efficiently?"

Yep, this captures what I'm saying.

> "why is this a better strategy for a startup"

If you can build a differentiated product it's great to do that, but it's a lot more difficult/expensive than it used to be.

Incumbent product companies will pursue full automation, but probably won't compete directly with service businesses because it's not their wheelhouse. E.g. GitHub built Copilot and maybe they'll try to ship a "fully automated" AI software engineer. But until their AI software engineer is actually fully automated (which I would guess is 10 years away at least), they won't be competing with software development agencies.


Even if AI doesn't help with any aspect of the service itself there are a ton of efficiency gains to be had from "the rest" of the work, which will make service margins less ugly. Every business still neeeds some form of sales and/or marketing, support, and back office administration.

And for a lot of services there'll be creative ways to squeeze efficiencies from tech/AI. For example roofing businesses used to send a guy to your house to give you an evaluation + quote; increasingly, they now send drones (https://www.roofer.com/).


The claim that there's a lot of efficiency to gain from _tech_ isn't interesting. I'm guessing when the author talks about AI, they're not suggesting to build a fleet of drones.


(I'm the author)

The "why now" is any significant new efficiency gains that are available without a ton of cash.


Drones aren’t AI though?


Nice, what do you guys do?


I wonder what (if anything) is the impact of the leading spaces on each line of the multiline string, which are an artifact of wanting to keep the prompt pretty within code.

Hopefully not much, but I've heard horror stories about trailing spaces...


As far as I can tell that only really affects the smaller models - GPT-4 / Claude / Gemini all seem pretty much impervious to weird whitespace in my experience.


Don't get it twisted—the MIT Startup is still based in SFBA


The publicity might be a short term win but there is a dangerous narrative for Apple that it feeds: that they are no longer a design-obsessed company that prizes art and creativity and channels that obsession to build the best products.


Also: Products version 15 are boring and the only way it generated awareness was through bad press, not features.


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