Paul Helmick

Response Alexander Graham Bell received when trying to sell his telephone patent to a telegraph company for 100,000 in 1876

I’m in love with this sentence: “Never underestimate a person who practices self-education in their free time.”

This amazing visual shows how many people are alive in the United States based on the generation they are part of

Lessons we learn too late

High School Priorities for My Kids While most high schools are still optimizing for a world that no longer exists, these are my non-negotiables: 1. Classical Education Great books. Philosophy. Rhetoric. Writing. Debate. Logic. The ability to think clearly, argue precisely, and write with force. Be more human. 2. Build with AI Agentic coding. Workflows. AI agents. Engineering. Not “using ChatGPT.” Making things of value. 3. Entrepreneurship $100k+ by 18. The only durable path to wealth is building a business. In the world that’s coming, two things will separate the winners The ability to think deeper and more independently than the models (aka be more human) The ability to wield the models to create value better than everyone else I want my kids to inherit the wisdom of the past, master the tools of the future, and have the courage and imagination to build something entirely their own♥️

America's K-12 crisis in a nutshell: The average 18 year old student scores at the same level as a top 10% 9 year old in Reading

Sequoia Capital just hosted AI Ascent and gathered 150 of the top AI minds like Demis Hassabis, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Brockman, Boris Cherny of Anthropic 🤯 And Sequoia just gave one of the clearest frameworks for where AI is going. The core idea: - AI is not just another software wave. - Cloud expanded the software market. - AI expands the services market. That means the next giant AI companies may not sell tools, dashboards, or copilots. They may sell the work itself. The full breakdown: 1/12. AI is the biggest platform shift yet Cloud took software from roughly $350B to $650B. AI opens something much larger: A $10T+ services market that machines can now start to address. 2/12. This wave is moving faster than cloud or mobile Every technology wave creates billion-dollar companies. But AI companies are reaching massive scale much faster. What took decades in cloud may take years in AI. 3/12. This is a computation revolution, not just a communication revolution The internet changed how information was distributed. AI changes how information is processed. That is a much deeper shift. 4/12. We are moving from faster horses to cars The first AI apps made workers 10–40% more productive. Useful, but not transformational. The next generation creates 10–40x improvements. 5/12. Sequoia’s practical definition of AGI is simple Forget the philosophical debate. If a system can be dispatched to do a job, recover from failure, and keep going until the task is complete… For business purposes, that is what matters. 6/12. The race is now for the services economy Software companies used to sell systems of record. AI companies can now sell outcomes. Not “here is software to help your lawyer.” 7/12. The best moat is not the model In AI, the underlying technology changes too fast. Today’s breakthrough becomes tomorrow’s baseline. So the moat is not just technical capability. The moat is customer intimacy. 8/12. Founders should wrap around customers, not model releases Most technical founders want to chase the latest model. But the model layer keeps shifting. 9/12. Affordance matters more than people think Raw model power is not enough. A terminal, API, or blank chat box may be powerful, but most users don’t know what to do with it. 10/12. The diffusion gap is the opportunity Frontier models improve every week. Enterprises absorb change over months or years. That gap is massive. 11/12. 2026 is the year of agents 2022–2024 was chat. 2024–2025 was reasoning. 2026 is agents. 12/12. Services is the new software AI is moving from helping humans do cognitive work… to replacing entire categories of cognitive work. Actual work, done end-to-end. Full breakdown here: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026: The future of AI theaiopportunities.com/p/seq…

Paul Graham one-pager on how to start a startup:

We are living in a time where we have access to infinite intelligence. People decades ago could only dream of having the tools we have right now to build a business, a career change, or a world-changing discovery.  This is the best time to be alive, and I won't get tired of saying it.

Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy. It enables high-speed communication with computers or humans simply by thinking. Output bandwidth will vastly exceed the fastest human speech or typing in a few years. Read that sentence again.

Elon Musk on why his companies move faster than anyone else. "I'm constantly addressing the limiting factor. Whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. If capital is the limiting factor, I'll solve for capital. If it's not the limiting factor, I'll solve for something else." He then said something most managers never figure out: "If something is going really well and making good progress, there's no point in me spending time on it.The irony is if something's going really well, they don't see much of me. But if something is the limiting factor, they'll see a lot of me." He spends his time entirely on whatever is blocking the next step. Not on what's interesting or what he's best at. But on whatever is the bottleneck right now. Most leaders do the opposite... They gravitate toward what they're comfortable with and away from the hard problem.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to: Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund    alzresearch.org/giving/ Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources     alzfdn.org/donate/ Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia