Auren Hoffman 📚

all CEOs should be focused on product first ... and spend at least 50% of their time on the product. any company that hires a CEO that is not product-first will fail. if you are running a car compa...

before you ask a person for advice, ask AI first. about 80% of the questions people bring to advisors can be answered better by AI. it has unlimited patience and zero judgment. save humans for jud...

new summation pod with Karl-Theodor (KT) zu Guttenberg Germany’s fmr Minister of Defense and fmr Minister of Economics and Technology. we cover why Germany was a sleeping beauty for 30 years, why ...

AIs using the browser is insanely inefficient my colleague Nimna created a claude skill for cowork to make it 800% faster - and open sourcing it comment “skillz” here and i will get you to browser...

we are experiencing the rise of disposable software the craziest thing: literally EVERYTHING we are building today is not going to last more than 9 months. it is like we are building a home made o...

the perfect seed investor archetype: founder in an important emerging category that other founders respect, probably based in SF, socially active. that person sees better deal flow than any instit...

now that OpenAI is making acquisitions ... there are 3 companies they need to complete their adtech stack: PubMatic Viant Technology LiveRamp

there are tons of quiet decision points where GPs can favor themselves vs. LPs. just like VCs have term sheets that are founder-friendly, they should have systems that are LP friendly. No need to...

the single biggest past constraint in building a software company has always been hiring great engineers. AI has essentially removed that constraint. a small founding team is now 10-50x more produ...

the four moats that seem to be (kinda) holding in SaaS: (1) proprietary data. (2) deep customer relationships. (3) speed of iteration. (4) business process lock-in. everything else is up for grabs.

tech companies NEED to be run by technologists. Boeing, GE, Intel. same story every time. the moment you hand the keys to finance people, R&D dies.

stat that blew my mind: the US now imports more from a 25 million person island than from China

new summation with fmr Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on how the US lost 30 years of chip manufacturing, why we now import more from Taiwan than China, Intel's $70B mistake, Andy Grove's 35-year mentorin...

never join a board of directors as an independent outside director. you don't add value and it is just performative. if you have real ownership of the board, great. otherwise, if you can help th...

the most successful people have a little bit of introspection… but not much

seed investing at scale is like 97% operational, 3% strategic. almost all great investors are the opposite: very strategic, not operational. so while seed investing has the highest annualized retur...

most people in startups still don't understand QSBS. here's the short version invest in a company valued under $75M. hold for 5 years. the first $15M of gains are completely federal tax free. many ...

well, at least claude is an honest liar

hallucinations are the creative process, not a bug. if your AI never hallucinates new things, it only comes up with ideas people have had before. let one part hallucinate freely and another verify...

new summation with Harmonic cofounders: Robinhood CEO vlad tenev and CEO tudor achim. Harmonic is an AI lab pioneering the path toward mathematical superintelligence. their AI model Aristotle just ...