Ben Cera

Polsia is about to hit $25M run rate. Next stop: $100M ARR. And things keep accelerating: $0 → $1M in 12 weeks $1M → $10M in 10 weeks $10M → $20M in 6 weeks I just published one of my favorite and most successful aisloP episodes yet: “The Run Rate.” I tell the whole story, from idea to $20M, month by month. The episode ends in Tokyo, where I went a few weeks ago. Probably the best place on Earth to take a deep breath, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible. I came back with an even bolder vision for Polsia. The road from $25M to $100M is going to look very different. Polsia v2 is coming soon.

There are unspoken rules in Silicon Valley that are inscrutable to outsiders (Europeans, lots of founders outside the Bay, etc.) One of the most important ones is: sell the vision before the product can prove it. ie: you don't wait until the product is perfect to tell everyone on Twitter what you're building. You don't raise a small round because you're scared to ask for the big one. Doing these things is experienced as thinking small, and people move their attention to the founder who isn't. But you do the exact opposite in a city like Paris. In that world the whole point is to build in silence, keep your burn low, and only show the product to a few people once it's ready. And if you get loud about something that isn't perfect yet, it feels like overselling. Essentially, in SF attention is a mechanism to get to a great product, in Paris a great product is a mechanism to earn attention. I suspect this is why despite having so much beauty and potential, Paris isn't where innovation is happening right now. Founders are unable to parse or adapt to the new rules, and so someone in SF builds the same thing, raises a huge round, and outmarkets (runs laps around) them.

Stuck between AI will cure cancer and apocalypse

What would you do if you were starting a company in 2026?

Having an affair with a spy is a billionaires right of passage at this point Elon, Rupert Murdoch, now Jensen Huang Stay safe out there boys...

Everyone should experience building a business It's the most healthy & purposeful thing you can ever do

Either get into wearable AI, hardware, or farming...

You'd scale 1000x higher (& faster) with a good mentor I'm all for solo business, no cofounders, etc But to become the best you need to learn from the best Fortunately, I had Travis Kalanick (Uber)

Most people wait until they feel ready to start. I've been building companies for 10 years. I've never felt ready. Not once. You start first. The ready part comes later.

I hit a $20M run rate in 7 months and all I did was: Make my product better Talk to customers Post founder-led content Ruthlessly focus on the basics and you can do it too

I've met a lot of customers in person and it's crazy to me how most founders have no clue what their customers are asking for. You can't fix your product, onboarding or roadmap until you know what's really broken. I've automated most of this at Polsia. Here's my setup: 1. Report during the conversation Agent log every issue while talking to customers: > Is it a real bug? > Is it a feature request? > Is the customer just confused? It's a direct part of support so everything is logged. 2. Read every ticket A PM agent pulls all tickets from the day and ranks how critical it is. It's usually not a bug at all. 3. Build everything with an agent Top tickets go straight to an engineering agents that builds the fix. So we don't just know what customers want. We ship the fix as well. 4. Check what it built against what might break We QA each fix, then ask Codex to double check it's safe to ship. The build is easy so focus on verifying it's right. 5. Turn it into scope Agents only push to production on their own when every rule is met: > Severity: lower-category bug > Payments: fix doesn't touch them > Onboarding: fix doesn't touch it either > Second opinion: Codex agrees it's safe > Everything else: comes through me first Then we just widen the scope as models get better. This runs our bug fixes, features, releases and roadmap.

AI can write the code now. It can run the ads, answer the emails, ship the site. It still can't tell you what's worth building. That part is still on you.

Blind ranking AI models w/o knowing what comes next

Touch grass once you've made it.

Where does a one-person company hit its limits? I'm talking about it with @julianweisser and @bran_don_gell at @every on Thursday. Drop your questions below. xitter.gq/every/status/211767495…

How to cut your AI compute without downgrading your product: First... figure out what your users are doing. > How complex their tasks are > Which tasks need an answer right now > Where you're running the biggest models Knowing your workload is key here Then set up 3 things: 1. A routing layer that sends every task to the right model based on complexity (small open source models for simple tasks, bigger ones for complex work, frontier models only when essential) 2. Full caching on your prompts plus tighter prompt management (cached tokens are much cheaper & smaller prompts stop the model from doing unnecessary things) 3. Batching for every background task (anything that isn't time-sensitive runs only when the GPU has spare capacity) Now you have an AI product that: > Serves the same quality > Handles more users > Stays affordable for you All without charging customers $500/month

I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 2 decades. Word of advice for the younger hustlers: The grind never stops. There’s always another problem to solve. And if you’re ambitious. You need to live in a city that inspires success. I love Paris, but nothing beats SF. The air is different here. Find your version of that city & move there immediately.

Note to young ben: Just keep hustlin' for 20 more years, it'll all pay off.