36 - Building my 2nd 8-figure business, powered by AI, and all bootstrapped. Almost at $1M ARR after 4 months. 📈 35 - RapidDev hit 1,025% growth over three years. 34 - took 40 team members to Egypt for four days because remote work is lonely 33 - crossed 200 hires and learned M&A on the fly 32 - unlearned the VC startup game and figured out how to run a real business 31 - founded RapidDev, because it was crazy that companies weren't building with no-code 👨‍💻 30 - raised $8M, company got acquired, daughter was born. 29 - still convinced the next thing had to be bigger than the last thing 28 - deep in the grind, too busy to notice it was the grind 27 - became a dad, started a company, and went through business school in the same year. No clue what I was doing, where I was going, or how any of it fit together. 26 - got into Harvard Business School (yes, even Harvard makes mistakes) 🤓 25 - became a husband. Family life in the Navy isn't easy, so entrepreneurship became the next adventure. 24 - learned that I thrive under stress and in chaos, which is a strange thing to be grateful for 23 - the military taught me what leadership actually costs 22 - in uniform, nowhere near a cubicle 21 - internship at a Fortune 100. Saw my future in a cubicle, hated it, joined the Navy instead 🎖️ 20 - switched majors to engineering thinking I'd learn how to build something real 19 - worked in a research lab and realized the quiet, methodical path wasn't for me. Also met my future wife there, mixing chemicals. 🌶️ 18 - federal grants came through. Picked the college farthest from home that still had in-state tuition. 17 - a chip on my shoulder from growing up somewhere with no economic prosperity 16 to 1 - upstate New York, 30 minutes from Canada. More cows than people. 🐮 0 - born

I booked a massage therapist for my wife in 60 seconds by texting my AI agent. And yes, if you aren't texting your agent yet, then you are behind... Here’s what happened in the background: - Gave it literally the worst prompt ever - Figured out what I meant, found the right location, and checked availability - Booked the appointment and paid with my credit card (yes, I trust my agent with it at this point) - Sent the confirmation straight to my wife’s email Total effort on my part? Almost 0️⃣ Stress? 0️⃣ Husband points? 🔟 😏

It's crazy how people have mixed opinions about AI. Some think it’s overhyped. Others think it’s underhyped. I totally get why: People are experiencing AI in completely different ways. If your experience with AI is asking ChatGPT to rewrite an email, summarize a meeting, or do some research, it’s pretty easy to think the whole thing is overhyped. I used to think the same way. But last year, my opinion completely flipped. Today, I’m 100% sure AI is actually underhyped. Once AI started getting really good at coding, I saw what agentic AI was capable of, and my entire perspective changed. Since then, I: - Gotten deeply involved with OpenClaw. - Hosted ClawCon in Boston. - Built high-impact agents for my own work and for other businesses. I’m lucky that my business keeps me at the cutting edge of this stuff. I get to see capabilities before they become easy enough for most people to use, and those experiences have made me much more bullish. Based on what I’ve seen this year, most people have no clue how powerful this is going to become.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Who wants to be my co-founder and make $1,000,000,000?? I met a guy who had this idea back in the early 2010s. He searched through patent databases for interesting consumer products that had been invented but never commercialized. Then he built landing pages for them, spent a little money on ads, and tested whether anyone tried to buy. One of the products kept converting. So he contacted the patent holder, licensed it, manufactured the product, and eventually went on Shark Tank!! The story unfortunately ends with Chinese knockoffs killing the business... 😅 But imagine running the original playbook today with AI: → Agents search through thousands of uncommercialized patents. → AI figures out what the actual product could be, estimates the market, and builds landing pages for the strongest ideas. → AI then runs a few ads to see what people actually want, → Then you build a real business around the winners. You could test thousands of products before spending any serious money on inventory or manufacturing. I know how to build the agents to run this. We build systems like this every day at RapidDev for ourselves and our clients. The hard part is getting the whole thing to work reliably. The research has to be useful, the product has to make sense, and the ads have to tell you whether anyone actually wants it. It’s easy to generate thousands of pages of AI slop. I’d want a system that helps us decide which products are worth putting real money behind.

I find life so far is a game of first learning the “truth” and then unlearning it so you can relearn the real TRUTH

I messed up. In July, I raised the public goal for my 2nd business to $3M ARR by the end of the year. September closed at $72,935 MRR, and I’m realizing I got ahead of myself. Quick reminder for anyone following along: Earlier this year, RapidDev built an internal system to create high-quality conversations with potential customers. It worked for us, so we started selling the service to other companies. Here’s the revenue progression: March: $0 April: $1,449.52 May: $3,858.18 June: $23,770.87 July: $56,951 August: $59,750 September: $72,935.02 You can probably see why I got excited. We went from nothing to almost $1M ARR in a few months. Our original goal was $1M ARR by December, and suddenly that felt too easy. So I tripled it. Then August grew just 4.9%. I delegated too quickly, got distracted, and didn’t catch technical problems fast enough. We fixed a bunch of that in September, and revenue grew 22.1%. That’s a good month. But spending more time with the business has made me realize that some of our assumptions about how quickly we could scale were wrong. Now I don’t think our current approach can get us there as quickly as I thought. I still believe we can build this into a $10M business - I just don’t have the path figured out yet. I’m getting the team together again in November and December to revisit some of those fundamental assumptions. We need to work through what’s limiting growth and what we need to do differently. I’m confident we can figure it out with the right people in the room and enough focused work. Back at it.

Instinct, Muse, and all these new AI agents are getting a lot of attention. Most of them will be dead or acquired in 2 years. Here’s why: They’re building products on top of models from OpenAI and Anthropic. They make the models easier to use, connect them to your tools, and package them into something that can do your work. That’s useful. But OpenAI and Anthropic can build those products too. And they have every reason to do it. We’ve already seen this happen with coding. The models got good enough to write code, and suddenly we had Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, Devin, GitHub Copilot, and a bunch of others. Then OpenAI and Anthropic came out with Codex and Claude Code. Now those other tools have to answer a pretty tough question: why should someone use us instead of going straight to the frontier companies? Some will have a good answer, most won't. The same thing is happening with general-purpose agents. OpenAI and Anthropic are coming into that market with ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork. And the incentive is even bigger this time. Only a fraction of the world writes code. Every business has information to look up, systems to update, follow-ups to send, and work that agents could eventually do. Maybe some of these agent startups will build something truly defensible. But if the only advantage is a nicer interface on top of someone else’s intelligence, I wouldn't want to be the founder of that company.

Imagine GDP growing at 10%. Sounds crazy when you look at the last few decades. But what happens when AI agents become a general-purpose productivity engine? Here’s a simple way to run the math: -> 40% of economic activity gets exposed to AI agents -> Agents make that activity 25% more productive -> 50% of exposed companies actually adopt them --> 40% × 25% × 50% = 5% That’s a 5% increase in economy-wide productive capacity. Spread across 5 years, that alone adds roughly one percentage point to annual growth. And that’s only the direct, first-order impact. The second-order effects could be much bigger: - Software becomes dramatically cheaper to build, which makes starting and testing new businesses cheaper too. - Tiny teams supervise entire groups of agents and produce what previously required hundreds of employees. - Scientific research happens faster, and every resulting discovery creates another layer of productivity. Goldman Sachs predicts AI adds ~0.4% to annual U.S. GDP growth. McKinsey estimates 0.5% to 0.9%. Those are safe, conventional forecasts built on old tech adoption curves. I think the upside will be much bigger when companies rebuild themselves around agents. Are you building for a standard 2% growth economy, or preparing for something we’ve never seen before?

I'm the biggest AI enthusiast in the world and I still think replacing your marketing team with AI is one of the stupidest things a founder can do. I lost count of how many times I've heard “I just use AI to do all my marketing now.” No offense, but to me this sounds so stupid. When the cost of producing something trends towards zero, the supply becomes infinite. And when everyone uses the same models to make the same posts, designs, videos, and motion graphics, the value of that work gets pretty close to zero too. AI is great for automating repetitive workflows. But marketing is art. It still has a soul, requires taste, original ideas, a deep understanding of the customer, and the judgment to know what’s actually worth saying. It comes from real experiences, strong opinions, and a human being who genuinely believes something. AI is extremely useful inside that process. Used correctly, it makes talented marketers more productive and much more impactful. But don’t expect it to decide what you believe, what makes you different, or why anyone should care. I still want talented humans making those decisions at my companies, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Damn, today I turn 37. Here are 37 lessons on life, business, and building with good people I've learned along the way: Mindset & resilience 37. Your starting point doesn’t decide where you end up. I grew up somewhere with more cows than people and very little opportunity. You can find your way out. 36. Your worst day doesn’t decide the rest of your life. You still get to choose what you do next. 35. Think in decades and move today. Building something great takes time. That doesn’t mean you can waste today. 34. Move while you’re scared. You don’t have to feel confident to get started. 33. Love the game you’re playing. You’re going to spend a huge part of your life doing this. Make sure you actually enjoy the work. 32. Be willing to unlearn. What got you here might be exactly what holds you back next. 31. Give luck more chances to find you. Meet people, share what you’re building, try things. Keep putting yourself out there. 30. Learn to make good decisions. AI can do more of the work, but you’re still responsible for deciding what to do and whether it’s any good. Health, family & character 29. Decide what enough looks like. There’s always going to be someone richer. Know what you’re chasing before you spend your life chasing it. 28. Protect your energy, not your time. 27. Work on your mind. Therapy has made me a better leader and teammate. 26. Your business will take every hour you leave available. 25. Build something great without becoming someone you dislike. Who I become along the way deserves as much attention as the company. 24. Remember who helped you get here. You didn’t do this alone. Money, focus & risk 23. Default to bootstrapping over raising money. 22. Being cheap can get expensive. Great people are often worth far more than they cost. 21. Give your best idea enough attention. A hundred half-built ideas won’t beat one well-executed business. 20. Back what works and keep experimenting. Put 80% into proven opportunities and 20% into new ones. 19. Know which risks you’re taking. Move fast when you can undo a decision. Take your time when you can’t. 18. Verify bargains. I once bought a $25K business that was completely fake. People, leadership & culture 17. Finding the right partner can completely change what’s possible for the business. 16. Choose partners who are good at what you aren’t. 15. Hire for how fast people learn. 14. There's great talent everywhere. Some of our best people live nowhere near a tech hub. 13. Build around people’s strengths. Help them get really good at what they do well, then pair them with people who are strong where they aren’t. 12. Most problems are 'who' problems, not 'what' problems. 11. Help people believe in themselves. 10. Take culture seriously 9. Get the remote team together a few times a year. 8. Stop being the bottleneck. Give your team room to do their jobs so you can spend time thinking about what comes next. Relationships, visibility & trust 7. Tell people what you’re building. People can’t bring you opportunities if they don’t know what you’re doing. 6. Show up when someone is losing. That’s when people need you most. 5. Reputation takes decades to build and minutes to destroy. 4. Most of life and business is about clear communication. Products, customers & AI 3. Build for people you understand and can reach. 2. Ship sooner. Fix it as you go. 1. AI will be bigger than we think. Look at how much has changed in just four years, then remember that the pace is still accelerating. Still figuring plenty of this out. Grateful for the people I get to build with, and the people who’ve been there through the ugly parts too. 🙏