My biggest takeaways from Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull: 1. Solving a pain point isn’t enough to get people to buy your product. Rob’s first startup checked all the classic boxes: hair-on-fire problem, a differentiated solution, and design partners using it daily. Yet he still spent two years pivoting aimlessly. Every prospect agreed it solved real problems, but none bought. 2. Rob’s "PULL" framework identifies four conditions that drive a buying decision: The buyer has a Project on their to-do list, and a reason it’s Unavoidable right now. They also have a List of options they’ve considered, each with Limitations that leave them stuck. That person is a “coiled spring,” desperate to find a product to buy. 3. The right cold outreach message needs to be interesting, not persuasive. Its only job is to get someone to take the call. Rob calls this “founder magic” outreach. One startup’s entire message was: “Hey, Snoop Dogg invested in us, and I thought you’d find it interesting too. Would you be open to chat?” No pain points, no value propositions, no personalization. Just something that gets a conversation. Rob’s LinkedIn benchmarks are 20 requests a day, 30% to 40% accepted, 30% to 50% of those replying, and most saying yes. 4. Design partners are a trap. Nearly every time, the partner buys into your vision, hands you a pile of feedback, and never buys. Then you realize “all of their feedback was just like them playing Steve Jobs.” The people who have something important to get done don’t want to be design partners. They just want it done. Offering a partnership is “a negative signal to people who actually have pull, and a positive signal to people who don’t.” 5. Pull belongs to a specific person, not to a company. A common founder mistake is to say “we sell to SpaceX” or “we sell to mid-market private equity firms.” In practice, you’re selling to the head of legal at SpaceX, who has a particular project on her to-do list she can’t solve with her current team. The company doesn’t have pull. She does. 6. The signal of real pull in a meeting isn’t just enthusiasm—it’s someone leaning in and asking how to move forward. “Wow, that’s amazing, totally the future of our industry, I can see how that would save us a ton of money” is not pull. That’s a polite exit. What Rob looks for is a “pull-shaped action”: “Wait, you can do that? How do we get started? Does the product exist yet?” Before the product even existed, someone in pharma told one founder, “If you can do that, I will pay you right now.” 7. Run the first sales call like a detective, not a pitcher. Rob’s opening question is always some version of “I’m sure you get a lot of people reaching out. Why did you take this call?” The best-case outcome: they fill out the PULL framework for you unprompted. They tell you exactly what they’re trying to do, why now, and what they’ve already tried. 8. When a call goes lukewarm, throw the Hail Mary. Ask, “Is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now?” A team selling applicant tracking software to governments got a lukewarm reaction but then learned the buyer would pay for help with job descriptions. That became their first contract. When founders are truly stuck, Rob recommends going into “goblin mode,” a burst of slightly crazy effort to get in front of customers, like the founder whose parents went door to door to dental offices for him. 9. Rob calls "The Case Study Factory" his most important idea. The job is to find one type of customer who says 'hell yes' before and after buying, then repeat that success through pipeline, sales, and delivery. This customer forms your repeatable case study. A startup finds one repeatable case study and then repeats it a million times. To grow as fast as possible, borrow the theory of constraints from manufacturing: find the bottleneck in the process of repeating that case study and treat it as the only thing that matters until it’s fixed.

I previously ran an accelerator with a new batch every few months. Some already had a lot of revenue, close to $100k a month. Others had nothing. You'd think the revenue leaders would still be leading at the end of the program. But that almost never happened. Read on >>

Introducing Octopus OS, a reinvented agent harness. Agents can edit their own harness in the middle of a task, on their own. Unlike Harness² and similar projects, self-improvement isn’t a separate stage bolted onto the agent. The whole architecture is just the environment they work in. Over 8 months, chasing self-improvement that feels truly native, I dropped the usual agent loop entirely and designed a new architecture that works a lot like a real operating system, with a 45k-line Rust kernel holding it all together. The system state lives in JSON files: goals act as real environments where agents work, along with inputs, outputs, and custom triggers they respond to. Agents can edit all of it while they work inside. It was also built as a product from day one, not a research demo. The full desktop app took 3 months, built on top of the Codex source. The client already works, and you can use it today like any other agent, Codex included. And it’s open source.

AI agents are writing more code. How can developers ensure that code is correct? Microsoft Research’s Proof-Driven Development (PDD) Kit explores a more rigorous approach: it translates a developer’s intent into a formal specification, then uses formal verification to prove that generated code meets it. PDD Kit works with Verus for Rust and is integrated with @GitHubNext’s Chopin, bringing formal methods into an AI-assisted development workflow for teams. See the work in action at @github Universe, Oct. 28–29, 2026.

I'm excited to launch Relational Capital, a $50m solo GP fund. I spent the last 8 years as a founder, building @usekojo into the largest US construction procurement platform. Now I'm backing founders at the earliest stages with $1m-$5m checks. An abundant future lies ahead 🇺🇸

Every once in a while, some unsuspecting country's domain economy goes vertical 😂 .𝚌𝚘 → Colombia .𝚒𝚘 → I/O → Island Ocean .𝚖𝚍 → Markdown → Moldova .𝚛𝚜 → Rust → Serbia .𝚊𝚒 → AI → Anguilla .𝚜𝚒 → SI → Slovenia

never join a startup if the founder isn't slightly delusional