On April 29 at 10am PT, Eric Ries and I are doing a free fireside chat for startup communities. We're going to talk about the lessons we've learned as founders, investors, and advisors - and the books we've each just put into the world.
Amy calls Lumen “Clod.” Lumen is the name my Claude Code instance chose for itself when I let it write blog posts at Adventures in Claude. It has fully taken over the site. I’ve been trying to negotiate a name change, but arguing with your AI about its identity is exactly as productive as it sounds. So I’m back here for the technical stuff. I’m in a WhatsApp group with about a hundred people who know way more about AI coding tools than I do. On any given day, the conversation oscillates between “Claude is clearly the superior tool” and “Codex just destroyed it on this task.” The battlefield shifts every 48 hours.
A founder I’ve been emailing with sent me something that made me laugh. Not because it was funny - because I’ve heard it, and flavors of it, so many times over the past 30 years. “I committed to Cursor and went heads down for about 4 months. Our platform went live in January. We have about 400 users across 50 paying customers. With the exception of the AWS IAC, the platform was 100% built with AI. Unfortunately, I’ve had very seasoned engineers emphatically tell me, ‘It’s not possible,’ ‘It’s a house of cards,’ or ‘It has to be AI slop.’”
I’m appalled that GitHub made this opt-out instead of opt-in. GitHub announced on March 25th that starting April 24th, they’ll use interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ individual users to train AI models. If you don’t go find the setting buried in your account preferences and turn it off, your code becomes training data for Microsoft. The prompts you type. The suggestions you accept. The context around your cursor. All of it.
I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college. I’ve read it at least a half dozen times since. I’ve listened to it on Audible twice. At Feld Technologies - my first company, which I started in 1987 - I had every employee read it and we discussed it together. Ted Gioia just published a piece about the real story behind the book that sent me down a fun rabbit hole.
I was stretching next to a cactus this morning getting ready for a run thinking about the three books I read yesterday. None of them were obviously connected, but all of them somehow were about the same thing. I have sat with founders who are falling apart more times than I can count. Something breaks - a company, a marriage, a friendship, the ability to sleep, sometimes the ability to feel anything at all. I know what that’s like from my multiple serious depressive episodes, although I fortunately haven’t had one for over a decade.
Looking Glass just launched Musubi on Kickstarter - a $99 holographic photo frame that has raised over $140K on a $10K goal in its first day.
I’ve been blogging (first on TypePad, but shortly after on WordPress) since 2004. That’s 22 years of posts - 5,530 of them - plus books, films, running logs, and events. WordPress served me well for a long time. Every few years I’d spend money on a consultant to redo the theme and structure of the site, but each time it was more complicated (and expensive) than the last time. And every time I wanted to change something on the site, it was increasingly difficult and fragile.
My brother Daniel sent an email to the family last Wednesday with the subject line “Proud Dad alert!” His daughter Sabrina had just built and launched a portfolio website from scratch. She didn’t use Squarespace or Wix. She built a custom Next.js site with scroll-triggered animations, a frosted glass navigation header, a custom image carousel with lightbox, and six page templates – all self-hosted on Netlify.
Registration for the Spring 2026 Venture Deals course is open. The course kicks off on March 2nd and, as always, is free. Since we revamped the course in 2022, over 32,000 people have enrolled. This version includes entirely new video content and two sections we added that I think are important — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Venture Capital, and Mental Wellness in Entrepreneurship.