Jon Matzner

I make referrals for products and services I like without expecting anything in return. But sometimes things show up. Thank you @MatznerJon @cdolan92 we can rocks paper scissors for where this gets hung up

you guys aren't using AI enough to steal customers from your sloppy business influencer competitors. SPECIFIC EXAMPLE THAT HAS BEEN LEAKING FOR YEARS: - a particular influencer's company has been publishing candidate videos on a private vimeo channel for YEARS. - they think they are smart (they aren't) so the channel is private, but the candidates links aren't (a simple google dork away)! - bc their owners are swapping golf/private jet/vaccine tips instead of running their company they use the same metadata for each upload. This is completely in the clear - public info. - Plug the pattern in to a very very basic facial recognition tool to find linkedin profiles... give that to an LLM with playwright & apify.... now you have linkedin profiles of candidates in a markdown file. VOILA! - feed those results to an LLM with some linkedin api love, and look for candidates who got a job at an American company within 60 days of original upload. GUESS I FOUND THE CUSTOMER. I wonder if Aesthetic Home Investments is this competitors customer? (I'll ruin the surprise, they are) Why I am I sharing this now? 1) We've already got the whole dataset going back years 2) We have way better ways (that produce even better data) 3) We've been retooling our outbound offer and are about to start attacking. YOU SHOULD DO THIS TOO. Distribution isn't a moat if you are telling the world who your customers are.

Interesting bits from Brian’s Airbnb earnings call about AI agents and consumer behavior: — Airbnb gets ~500k bookings a day — ”very non-material” traffic from Muse/Instinct — says people *want* to browse: average user looks at dozens of listings and 25+ photos — 90% of users message the host — most traffic comes between 9 to 5 when people are at work (using Airbnb as escapism) — 80% of travels say they like doing their own travel research

Let me tell you a story about how unethical Anthropic is. In April, the Anthropic team began heavily courting our engineering team to tell them corporate secrets, technical details, and future plans for @cfosilvia. They pretended their interest was due to our exploding popularity and accelerating compute usage, but it quickly became apparent that Anthropic was fishing for details on how we built our product and why it was so popular. This included the Anthropic team trying to wine-and-dine our engineers, including a infamous steak dinner where someone told our team "don't worry about it, this is on Dario." Our team was not born yesterday, so we quickly realized what was happening and refused to share sensitive information and technical details with the Anthropic team. As we suspected, Anthropic was trying to get information from us, so they could build a competing product. Some people on their team must have a guilty conscious because they messaged us a few days ago to give us "a heads-up" that they were launching a competing product. Thankfully, the Silvia engineering team has been aggressively working to get off the frontier models for the last ~ 6 months. That effort has been highly successful, because our compute costs are ~ 97% lower when we use our own model & hardware, the latency is lower, and the accuracy of answers materially increases as well. The sad thing for Anthropic is they have now released an inferior product and they had to sell their soul to do it. The only thing worse than being a trillion-dollar company that can't beat a 10-person team is being a trillion-dollar company that no one trusts and everyone knows is unethical. Serious investors continue to choose @cfosilvia over ChatGPT, Claude, and other frontier companies because these products are not optimized to solve the actual user problem. Today, Anthropic launched a Claude wrapper that is masquerading as a personal finance product. Best of luck to them. But I will take the Silvia misfits vs the Anthropic losers any day of the week. if you want to support people trying to do things the right way, and help investors be more informed, then consider signing up for Silvia today: silvia.com

great meme. where most people get it wrong is that in order to pull it off, you have to design your entire company around the strategy of being the low-cost provider. Everything you do and everything you ARE has to align with being able to deliver at a lower cost than your competitors. They have to be UNABLE to match your prices, not just unwilling. If you can do that then you are golden and will become the market leader in your space. But if you're not ALL in on that strategy (including developing unique assets that enable it), then you're better off being all out. some entrepreneurs don't fully understand all the dominoes that have to be in place to make that work, and instead just "reduce prices to win contracts" which hurts them. They would be better off finding ways to raise their prices. and it's not just a matter of choice: most companies don't have a realistic path to develop the competitive advantages to pull off being the low-cost provider. You have to know who you are and where you are and choose a strategy that matches.