Founding a startup is a cognitive sport. Most founders treat themselves worse than their company treats its infrastructure. Just build things as fast as possible. Don’t worry about what’s going to break until it falls apart. There’s no time. The phrase “tech debt” is a cliché because it is everywhere. “Founder physiological debt” is the same. I’ve been watching the gap between founders and the help they need for over thirty years. The data underneath it is grim. Founders are 50% more likely to report a mental health condition than the rest of the population. 72% say the job has affected their mental health. Only 23% see anyone about it.

Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup in 2011 and changed how a generation of founders thought about building companies. He’s been an inspiration for me, especially around writing about entrepreneurship. Eric has a new book coming out on May 26 called Incorruptible. The premise is one I think about a lot. The Lean Startup helps you build a valuable company. Incorruptible is about how and why to protect it, keeping a company mission-driven over the long term instead of letting it rot from the inside.

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.