Tools for progress #64: Managing burnout and AI consequences
Doomprompting Is the new doomscrolling, Tokens are getting more expensive, On motherhood and evolving ambition
We (humans) read hundreds of articles on company building, angel investing, and self-management and curate the best ones into a weekly summary—helping founders and operators stay on the top of their game.
Better thinking
Is AI going to destroy our ability to think? (2 minute read)
A writer worries that AI tools are making us dumber, citing MIT research showing cognitive decline from AI use. They distinguish between deep understanding and surface-level knowledge that sounds smart but crumbles under pressure. They fear we're becoming people who can mimic expertise but can't actually think when it counts.
Why aggregators ate the internet (8 minute read)
Alex Komoroske (Stripe/Google) explains how a 1990s browser security decision accidentally created today's data silos, making big tech platforms unstoppable. Every app becomes a fortress - your data gets trapped and can't talk to other apps. AI could either make this worse or finally fix it, thanks to new secure computing tech that lets data carry its own rules.
Doomprompting Is the new doomscrolling (7 minute read)
Where social media trained us to passively consume, AI trains us to passively ‘converse’ and ‘create’. Our prompts start thoughtful but grow shallower and shorter as the replies become longer and more seductive. Before long, we’re not thinking deeply and are hooked onto a machine that never seems to run out of suggestions. AI gives you even more options, then appoints itself your guide. It tells you it’ll save time, then proceeds to steal it while you’re happily distracted. Just as we were learning to guard our attention from social feeds, we’re confronted with a new slot machine targeting both our attention and our intention to think and feel for ourselves. Each new technology asks us again: convenience or cognition? This time, we should see the trade coming, and choose wisely.
Operational tactics
Consumers don’t care about your AI (3 minute read)
Consumer AI founders are discovering their customers actually dislike hearing about AI - it signals cheap automation when people want premium human service. Unlike B2B buyers who chase AI trends, consumers just want results. So if you’re in consumer, lead with benefits and skip over the AI talk. But in B2B, buyers want to hear about AI (they probably have an OKR to be using it).
Dude, where’s my moat? (11 minute read)
Sure, speed matters early on, but real defensibility comes from owning unique data and building products that get smarter with use. There’s a big argument around whether moats still exist in SaaS/AI, this piece argues yes, but caveats that there’s a few kinds, and some are stronger than others. And importantly, the type of moat you can leverage changes as your company grows. Domain expertise and speed can act as an early moat, but they quickly level out. Data control and data loops become the enduring ones. And this invariably requires evolving your product from a point solution to a platform.
Steal these prompts: 4 AI workflows to help you ship better products
Brian Balfour, Reforge CEO, isn’t a fan of AI slop like most of us. If you want a half-baked product strategy document, ChatGPT or an equivalent AI tool, can spit one out in a mere 10 seconds. But the output tends to be generic and wouldn’t pass a rigorous executive review. To achieve better output, Brian advocates for breaking tasks into into smaller components and bringing conviction, subject matter expertise, and data, to your prompts. 4 well-designed prompts outlining how you can create a feature taxonomy (from your customer’s eyes), turn a product strategy into a compelling narrative, frame every PRD within the context of that strategy, and blow it up before you send it for executive review, are included. This should sharpen the way you think about using and leveraging AI tools.
Refer and we’ll send you our favorite books as a “thank you” for spreading the word.
Venture investing
Startup diligence guide: navigating venture capital diligence (5 minute read)
Bling Capital, a pre-seed and seed-stage VC with investments in companies like Lyft, Palantir, and Instacart, has created a cheat sheet to guide founders through investor due diligence. The primary goal of diligence is for both founders and investors to align on a believable plan to reach the company’s next milestone towards becoming a venture-scale business. Although diligence depth may vary depending on the investment stage, founders are better off partnering with investors who ask thoughtful questions, avoid skipping diligence (because of fundraising round’s dynamics), and challenge your thinking constructively. The best partners help each other see around corners and get ahead of problems they may collectively face.
Tokens are getting more expensive (7 minute read)
Despite LLM inference costs declining by 10x every year, margins have gotten worse, Windsurf’s been sold for parts, and Claude Code rolled back their original $200/month tier. What’s going on here? When GPT-4 launched at $60, everyone used it despite GPT-3.5 (the previous state-of-the-art model) being 26x cheaper. That’s because demand persists for the best language model(s) and the number of tokens consumed per task went supersonic; ChaptGPT used to reply to a one sentence question with a one sentence reply but with deep research mode, takes more time and compute. The short read describes in greater detail how the unit economics for several AI startups is fundamentally broken and they’re dead companies walking. They just don’t know it yet.
Honey, AI capex is eating the economy (5 minute read)
AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom of the 19th century. One analyst recently speculated that, based on Nvidia’s latest datacenter sales figures, AI capex may be ~2% of US GDP in 2025. That’s up from less than 0.1% of GDP in 2022, representing a 20x increase or more. However, this surge has unintended consequences. Capital is being aggressively reallocated at the expense of other sectors, meaning entire categories are being starved of investment and large-scale layoffs are already happening. The irony is AI’s driving massive job losses well before it has been widely adopted.
Managing your career
On motherhood and evolving ambition (6 minute read)
From our friend, Natasha. “Force of nature” is a cringey phrase thrown around too lightly, but it’s deserving here. Natasha is just that. Here she reflects on the impact motherhood has had on the trajectory of her ambition. Her honest take on evolving identity, impossible tradeoffs, and finding new ways to define success feels refreshingly real.
Where are you on the burnout spectrum? (5 minute read)
If you’re feeling burnout, a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress, know that you’re not alone. In today’s always-on world where chronic stress is normalized, many people don’t realize they’re burned out until they’re deep in it. The first step to burnout recovery is awareness so you can take action. If you’re experiencing work-induced panic attacks all the time, stress eating regularly, and constantly getting sick, please consider taking a break and prioritize the essentials: good sleep, eating real food (not just takeout and snacks), moving your body daily, and scheduling time for play. Remember to take care of yourself.
How to be an empathetic manager (without becoming a therapist) (7 minute read)
Empathetic leaders often do a lot of invisible emotional labor. Sure, your direct reports and cross-functional partners should be able to talk about the impact of work problems but only up to a certain point. If you only focus on what’s wrong, your team may feel angry and disempowered. Instead, putting a limit on your team sharing their frustrations prevents you from feeling drained and emotionally dumped on. Wes Kao, co-founder of Maven, recommends being both real and authentic with your team. Here’s how: 1. Avoid being their therapist 2. Direct the conversation towards an actionable direction 3. Steer clear from sharing solutions 4. Push back gently to help the recipient reframe the situation. Try it out this week and see which tactic lands.