Identifying Opportunity
The world has gone inverted.
This morning I am hanging out, waiting to find out if Iāve got at third meeting for a due diligence project, so Iām catching up on Nate B. Jones after a busy week. What heās saying about the new location(s) for bottlenecks is showing up IRL all over the place for me.
Letās have a look at this.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If I look like I know what Iām doing, itās probably because I heard it from Nate first. This one was thirty minutes of my day I would not miss, I always watch his stuff AT LEAST ONCE, and often twice plus getting the transcript. So ā¦ you do you, but this is what I am doing ā¦ and I find it invaluable.
Nate Speaks:
Execution used to be rare and expensive. Now, at least for me, itās in a window I can alt-tab and that window does in an hour what used to take me weeks. This talk about corporate culture, about how so many things that have been drummed into us are just plain wrong ā¦ Nate is always good, this one is superlative.
Observations:
I spent three half days this week having those endless make your throat raw half shouted convention conversations and this is what I saw.
Several competitors in my space, but seemingly all conceptual, none of them were software developers in their own right, which I read as more validating than threatening. They all asked how soon weād be onboard people, it was really satisfying to say āalready startedā, even if it is just alpha testers.
There are a lot of bio-something Ph.D.ās trying to reinvent themselves, as it appears the big players just started letting people go and leaning in to AI can do research faster. gulp
The most interesting business opportunities for me were NOT health care related, the followups I have this next week are all āsomething elseā, while my cofounders scored all the series A investor conversations.
Every one of those opportunities came because the person I was talking to heard something I said, looked over their shoulder, and waved to someone else theyād recently met. Networking at AI speed.
Having this flag šŗš¦ on my LinkedIn profile proved to be an excellent conversation starter.
Conclusion:
The masses are encountering a situation where everything they know is wrong. This āworld inversionā happened to me three times in the first decade of this century. My ex-wife relapsed after some years of sobriety, cratering my first wireless ISP. My health failed due to Lyme disease, cratering the engineering company I built to replace the wireless ISP. The political consultancy I built was too successful, earning me the attention of right wing extremists, triggering another cycle of rebuilding.
The last eight months have been rebuilding for me, but rebuilding of the very best sort - AI not only let me diagnose a problem the medical billing industry had chosen to ignore, doing that has become the core of a new business thatās on track to get its Series A funding.
Iāve been a little bit breathless since that first payment to Anthropic on June 16th of 2025, but I think Iām handling it better than most.
How are you doing? Did you do Claude Camp? Did you get the free year of Perplexity? Did you sign up for Notion? These are the free to low cost things Iām broadcasting here, this is the tooling you need if you are an āAI immigrantā. If youāre not sure where to start, these three will cost you at most $60/month and you will quickly be getting time back and developing the sense of how to maneuver this brave new world.