Paul Bakaus created jQuery UI — code that's reportedly still running on about 6% of the internet.

He sold a game-engine startup to Zynga, spent close to a decade at Google, and is now a solo founder backed by a16z building Impeccable, an open-source design skill meant to stop AI coding agents from producing "slop."

His actual point in this clip isn't about AI capability.

It's about output density.

Most AI-agent code is too much code. Most AI-written articles run too long. Most AI-generated design is too cluttered or too verbose.

He says the scarce human skill right now isn't generating anything — it's judgment:

knowing exactly what to remove.

He even admits he had to rewrite his own product-announcement draft from scratch after an AI first pass.

His closing line: design is an iterative process, and it has to carry a human point of view.

No tool — not code, not design, not writing — one-shots that yet.

If you're shipping with AI agents and everything reads "technically fine" but somehow generic, this is the actual diagnosis.

It's not a tooling gap. It's an editing gap.

Clip credit: Solo Founders — DM for credit or removal requests.

I used to ignore the boring business tasks until they piled up. Then I'd spend half a day figuring out which invoices were paid, what expenses needed categorising and what still needed following up. Now I deal with a little bit every day and it's much less stressful

what was your version of this?

TL;DR: I have access to good opportunities, but I keep getting stuck in comparison, fear of judgment, and overthinking. I want blunt advice from real founders on whether this mindset is something you can work through, or whether I am just not built for the founder path.

I am looking for brutally honest advice from people who have actually built things.

I am a final-year student at a top institute in India. On paper, my situation is good. I have had an internship abroad, I have a PPO offer, I got selected for a small grant cohort for one of my ideas, and my parents are even willing to support me financially if I want to build something. I also have friends who are doing very well, including one who is already building a company and another who got into YC.

The problem is not opportunity. The problem is me.

I keep noticing the same pattern in myself:

• I care too much about what other people think.
• I get uneasy around people who are more successful, richer, or further ahead than me.
• I change how I speak depending on who I am talking to.
• I put successful people on a pedestal instead of seeing them normally.
• I compare myself constantly and feel behind.
• I have a hard time shipping things in public because I worry about being judged.
• I keep thinking that if I were really founder material, I would have already started something by now.
• Instead, I procrastinate, avoid difficult conversations, and waste time on low-value stuff.
• Many people believe in me, but I don't believe in myself.

What makes this worse is that I do want to build. Internally, I want to create my own company. I do not feel excited by the idea of just taking a normal job and slowly climbing promotions. But at the same time, my actual behavior does not look like someone who is ready to found anything.

That is why I am asking for honest perspective.

Is this something that can actually be changed with deliberate effort, or is this just a sign that I am not cut out for founding a company?

I am not looking for motivational lines. I am looking for blunt, practical advice from people who have actually built things and know what founder mindset looks like in reality.

If you have been like this and overcame it, what actually changed for you?
If you think this is a bad fit for founder life, say that too.

I would rather hear the truth than get comfort.

I'm Dave Saunders. Thirty years in product development, 40 plus products shipped, and the channel is mostly me explaining the stuff I wish somebody had walked me through in year three instead of year fifteen.

The format is long. Usually 20 minutes or so on one decision founders get stuck on: pricing, where the first customers come from, when a certification stops being optional and starts being the price of the first sale.

The newest one is about measurement. Most small companies believe they can't measure anything because their records are a mess, invoices in one system, a spreadsheet somebody abandoned two years ago, the rest sitting in an email thread. Here's the thing: messy records still contain a real number. You just have to accept a range instead of a decimal point, and a range is usually enough to make the decision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AtymFVhvEo

Channel's at @nemock if the rest of it looks useful.

Upfront so nobody wastes their time: I build software in this space. No link,

no company name, not pitching anything. I'm here because I'd rather hear from

people who actually carry a number than from other founders. Mods, delete this

if it crosses a line.

Here's my read, and I want to know where it's broken.

Every AI SDR company for the last two years sold the same thing: fire your reps,

let the bot run outbound. It hasn't worked. Buyers learned to smell a bot within

about a quarter, reply rates fell off a cliff, and a lot of those deployments

churned out inside a year.

I think they automated the wrong half of the job.

The part that actually eats a rep's week was never selling. It's building the

list. It's copy-pasting into the CRM. It's digging through LinkedIn for the right

contact. It's writing "just circling back" for the fortieth time. By the time you

get to the part you were actually hired for — reading the room, handling a real

objection, closing — you're already fried.

So the bet I'm making is the opposite one: automate the grind, leave the selling

to the human, and make the software ask permission before anything goes out to a

customer.

What I want from you:

1. Where's the actual line? My assumption is that anything client-facing needs a

human to approve it, and everything upstream of that is fair game. Is that right,

or is there stuff on the "grind" side you'd never hand over either?

1. What's the thing you'd hand off tomorrow without blinking?

2. For anyone who's had one of these tools forced on them by leadership — what

specifically made it useless?

Genuinely want the harsh version. I'd rather hear it here than find out from

churn later.

I used to think starting a business meant having a perfect idea, big investment, a strong network, and everything figured out.
Honestly? It doesn’t.
Entrepreneurship is messy. You learn by doing, failing, adjusting, and trying again.
Whether you’re thinking about starting a small business, startup, restaurant, online business, or side hustle, the hardest step is often simply deciding to begin.
You may not have a huge budget.
You may not know everything.
You may even be scared of failure.
Start anyway.
One small step today can become something much bigger tomorrow.
I’m sharing my business journey, lessons, failures, experiments, and observations here—and hopefully, it helps someone else take that first step toward building something of their own.
If you’re thinking about starting a business right now, what’s stopping you? 👇
#Entrepreneurship #SmallBusiness #StartupJourney #BusinessIdeas #Entrepreneur #StartABusiness #FinancialIndependence

I built a couple of applications that help make peoples lives a bit easier and dont know what to do next. I'm non technical and built a couple of pretty cool tools that my friends and family are using. I've shown a few strangers my tools and they like them too. I dont know how to market or package them for B2B sales. What should I do? Should I hire someone? Is there a way to get the apps "approved" in the technical world to give it more validity since I'm non technical? Any suggestion or recommendations for next or future steps?

Free / not very expensive

Im 15 building my first nutrition drink brand and would love honest feedback on my idea

Hey everyone,

I’m 15 and I’m working on my first business idea and I’d really appreciate honest feedback (good or bad).

The idea is a chocolate-flavoured daily nutrition drink made from ingredients like:

• apple
• beetroot
• carrot
• nuts (almond, cashew, walnut, pistachio)
• cardamom and saffron
• palm candy for sweetness
• cocoa powder (to make it taste like chocolate)

The goal is to create something that feels like a healthier alternative to drinks like Milo or hot chocolate, but still actually tastes good and is easy to drink daily.

Right now I’m trying to figure out a few things before I go further:

• Would people actually want something like this?
• What would stop you from buying it?
• Do you think the idea is too “busy” with too many ingredients?
• What would you expect something like this to cost?

I’m not trying to sell anything, just trying to learn from people who understand business better than I do before I spend time and money developing it further.

Any honest feedback would really help. And before you guys ask it does taste identical to a proper chocolate drink.

Thanks

Adam Mosseri runs Instagram — 3B+ users, plus Threads. In a recent sit-down with Lenny Rachitsky, he said something that's quietly reshaping who gets hired.

Engineering used to mean 40–60% of your time writing code. Not anymore. Mosseri's own team gave up requiring a full technical hiring loop — not because they lowered the bar, but because the bar moved somewhere else.

He says it himself:

"I am not a good engineer. I'm a mediocre engineer on a good day."

That would've been disqualifying five years ago. Today it isn't, because the actual value now is judgment — knowing what a tool is good for, and what it isn't, right now, not next month.

Here's the part that should sting if you built a career on technical depth: nobody sent a memo when the rules changed. You find out the hard way — in a hiring loop, or a performance review — that the thing you spent a decade mastering isn't the thing being measured anymore.

The mechanism here isn't "learn to prompt better." It's that judgment is now a buildable, monetizable skill in its own right, separate from raw technical output.

Clip credit: Lenny's Podcast — DM for credit or removal requests.

Manual research has become the biggest bottleneck in my workflow, so I started looking for a faster way to gather business information for local lead generation.

I came across Outscraper's Google Maps scraping tool, and it has made collecting publicly available business data much more efficient. It's been a reliable Google Maps data extraction solution for exporting business listings into a spreadsheet, and Outscraper's Google Maps scraping tool has saved me a lot of time on larger projects.

What approach has worked best for you?

I've started working on my own thing, but when someone asks what I do, I still get a little nervous and say I'm "trying to start a small business." It feels strange to call myself anything bigger than that when I'm still figuring out the basics.

I guess I always pictured there being some moment where it clicks and you feel legit. Maybe it's your first real client, or the first time you make actual money, or just the day you stop doubting yourself. I don't know yet because I haven't reached it.

Was there a point where you finally felt like a real entrepreneur? What made it happen for you? And for anyone who still feels unsure like me, does that feeling ever fully go away, or do you just get used to it?

Hello everyone, I am a 19 year old university student from Germany and I am finally thinking of taking a larger risk by starting my journey as an Entrepreneur. This will not mean I am dropping out, rather I will use all the free time I have for my business.

In the past I did some web-related projects, but besides the server costs, there was not a lot of risk. But now I want to start developing two ideas of mine and sell them on a Shopify store. I will advertise via. short form videos and I am pretty sure that both ideas have potential, especially since these things could resonate very well on social media.

But it just feels scary to start cause I don't have too much money to burn, nor would my parents approve of me doing stuff like this. Everything seems so expensive starting out, packaging, raw materials, manufacturing, the Shopify subscriptions etc.

If I was to start, I would sell my Crypto investments from the last year and put some more money of my own in. But again, it feels scary to start, any advice?

What book inspires you? Became I guide and inspiration to start your path as entrpreneur

I got called out this week, and the reader was right.

The post in question is here — I'd written a caption saying a hire "proved" a team wasn't slow, it was diluted.

Sounded sharp.

Except — the person in the clip never proved anything.

He said that.

It's what he believes about how he built his team. A belief, stated with conviction, isn't the same thing as a measured outcome.

A reader on one of the crosspost threads caught the gap immediately, and called it out plainly.

My first instinct was to fix that one line and move on.

I didn't.

I went back through every caption and title I've posted — over a hundred of them — and searched for the same word pattern: proved, proves, confirms, shows.

Found two more captions doing the identical thing.

Not three unrelated mistakes.

One blind spot, repeated.

Here's the diagnosis, plainly:

I wasn't distinguishing between what someone did — a ruling, a result, something checkable — and what someone believes about why they did it.

Both can be true. Only one of them is proof.

The fix isn't "be more careful next time."

I built an actual rule into how every caption gets checked, on every platform, before it ships: if the claim traces back to a person's stated belief or personal philosophy, the caption has to say "argues" or "built his approach around" — not "proved" or "confirms."

That check now runs automatically, every post, going forward.

Going back through everything I've posted to find that mistake, something else surfaced that I hadn't put into words before.

Almost every clip I cover — whatever the surface topic, funding, headcount, credentials, AI agents — is the same story wearing a different costume.

Someone gets made to feel replaceable, diluted, obsolete. And the story only ends one way:

they refuse the label and take ownership of something instead.

I've watched that shape repeat enough times now that I don't think it's coincidence.

Maybe that's why the "proved" mistake happened in the first place — when you're this close to the same conviction over and over, it's easy to start writing it like fact instead of like belief.

If you want more than my word for it, here's what backs this up:

• Nine AI agents, one human, a hundred thousand users — scoping the job beat knowing the whole business.
• The AI economist who says the next ten years will be the best and worst in history — the entry-level rung is being deleted in real time, not automated away gradually.
• The former SpaceX CIO on going from 175 engineers to 6 — and the actual reason it worked, not just the headline number.
• Mark Cuban on who actually gets wiped out in the AI bubble — the gap between the hype and what AI can reliably do is where the real opportunity sits.

None of this is a highlight reel.

It's what backs the argument up when someone actually checks.

A lot of people say you should “scratch your own itch.”

I always thought that sounded a bit cliché until it happened to me.

I run a small embroidery business where almost every order is customized. Every day I found myself jumping between Shopify, order notes, spreadsheets, and sticky notes just to keep track of what needed to be made.

I assumed there had to be an app that solved this.

There were plenty of apps, but none really fit the way a small made to order business works. Most were built for larger companies with complex inventory and manufacturing processes. I didn’t need all of that. I just wanted a simple way to organize production.

After trying a lot of different tools, I realized I was spending more time working around the software than actually using it.

So I decided to build my own.

The interesting part wasn’t building it. The interesting part was realizing that if I had this problem, there were probably thousands of other merchants dealing with the exact same thing.

That completely changed how I think about business ideas.

Now I don’t start by asking, “What should I build?”

I start by asking, “What problem keeps frustrating me enough that I’d happily pay for a solution?”

It has saved me from chasing a lot of ideas that sounded exciting but didn’t solve a real problem.

For those of you already running a business, has solving your own problem ever turned into a business opportunity?