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.

Sabrina is a senior at Scripps College pursuing dual degrees in Science, Technology & Society and Fine Arts. She’s a product designer and fine artist – not a software developer. She built the entire thing using Claude Code.

She wrote a blog post about the process, describing what it’s like to direct an AI when you don’t know CSS. She “had to get precise in other ways” – using design vocabulary and visual references instead of code snippets. When bugs appeared, she described symptoms and shared screenshots rather than reading stack traces.

A line that stuck with me: “Vague prompts produced generic designs. Clear creative conviction produced something that felt like mine.”

This matches what I see building with Claude Code every day. The quality of the output tracks directly with the specificity of the input. “Make this look better” gives you something generic. “I want warm tones, editorial layout, and a buttercup accent color for hover states” gives you something that looks like a real design decision was made. Sabrina’s version of this was arriving at each session with strong opinions about what she wanted – gathered design references, prepared content, and a clear vision for the aesthetic.

She did over twenty feedback sessions across an eleven-day build, with about four to six hours of active work. The AI didn’t eliminate iteration. It made each round faster.

Go look at the site. Her art section showcases monotype, pastel, watercolor, and cyanotype work. The projects section covers her product management work at StackHawk, including a product launch she led end-to-end and research for an AI-driven security testing tool. The design is clean and typography-focused, with a dark footer and those buttercup accent colors she specified.

After I saw the site, I did what any uncle who is a nerd would do – I ran a security review. The results were solid. TLS configuration is correct, no sensitive files exposed, no source maps in production, and HTTP redirects to HTTPS correctly. I sent Sabrina a list of security headers to add and some DNS records worth configuring – about ten minutes of work that addresses the findings.

Sabrina is looking for roles in product design and product management after graduation this spring. Her portfolio is at sabrinafeld.com.

This week’s The Founders is awesome. It reminds us that there are real people and real families behind every startup. I’ve experienced this over and over again in my 17 years in Boulder and it’s reflected in both the Startup Communities book that is out and the Startup Life book that Amy and I are in the final copyedit phase of and will be out by January.

Take a few minute break from your day to enjoy the lives of some great entrepreneurs in a dynamite startup community that are part of an extended family that I’m proud to be associated with.

Last night I had dinner with my brother Daniel, one of the partners at Slice of Lime, a Boulder-based web design and development firm. He and I were at TechStars at the end of the day where I gave a talk on “How To Be A CEO.” Afterwards, we had a nice dinner together at The Cheesecake Factory (his choice – I don’t think I’d been there in a decade – and it was surprisingly good), a great talk, and dynamite brother hang out time.

We do this once a month and have committed to each other to try to do this every month for the rest of our lives. For the first 25 years of my life we weren’t that close. While I don’t remember being an asshole older brother, I’m periodically reminded by Daniel about things I did that, while they fall in the “typical older brother” category, also could be consider major asshole moves. We became very close when he moved to Boulder 15 years ago (less than a year after I did) and we’ve never looked back.

We’ve modeled our relationship after our father (Stan) and his brother (Charlie). I’m very close to both my dad, who is one of my best friends, but also very close to Charlie who introduced me to computers when I was 11 and has been a great mentor to me, always inviting me along to meetings with major companies like Lotus, Microsoft, IBM, and DEC when he was the CIO at Frito Lay in the 1980’s. In 2000, Charlie and I became business partners when Mobius Venture Capital invested in The Feld Group and I joined the board. Over the next four years, I worked closely with Charlie and his partners at The Feld Group as they built the company before selling it to EDS in 2004.

While I’ve always viewed my relationship with my dad and Charlie as special, part of what drives that is their incredibly close relationship. My dad is older by about the same amount that I am older than my brother and, while there is the typical older brother / younger brother entertainment, these two guys completely have each other’s back, no matter what. Whenever my dad tells me he’s heading out to Charlie’s farm to hit baseballs (Charlie has a baseball diamond on his property), I can hear the joy and excitement of the kid from the Bronx who taught me how to hit a baseball in his voice.

So Daniel and I try hard to emulate the relationship and take it to another level. While we talk plenty about business stuff, we also spend a lot of time talking about our lives, what is driving us, what stresses us out, and what we strive to do better. We talk about things that only brothers can talk about and instinctively know when the other needs help and support. Often – we just hang out.

As I sit at my desk at my office in Boulder at the end of a Friday of another intense week, I think about how lucky I am to have role models like my father and his brother, both for themselves as individuals and for their relationship. Daniel – thanks for being an awesome brother. And dad and Charlie – thanks for leading the way!