Founding team @Hootsuite ($0 to $200m+ ARR). 3x founder. a16z Speedrun 006, building something new out of 180 Townsend Street...
San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2007
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Greg Gunn retweeted
Every engineer who joins Serval spends their first week on a luxury vacation with their own concierge, because we want you to start recharged. Not only that, but if you're referred, you'll each get $30k on top of the trip.
Let's build! serval.com/careers
Starting today, every engineer who joins Serval begins with a weeklong, $10,000 paid vacation. We’re building the next generational company. We need generational talent to see it through.
Our mission has always been to empower people across every team to turn their understanding of a problem into working, trustworthy automations. Making that function inside the largest enterprises takes world-class engineering.
That’s what you’d be joining us to do. There are foundational decisions still to make, and the engineers making them will shape the future of how big we can build this company.
We want you to arrive rested and ready to do the best work of your life. So your first week is a chance to get away.
And if a @getserval employee refers you, both you and that employee receive $30,000, on top of the vacation.
Come build with us: serval.com/careers
Fact: as of this week, my entire engineering team in Vancouver gets to work 1 hr earlier than any SF based startup.
Excited for the @MonacoGTM poker tournament.
Thanks @samdblond for the invite!
I wish uber synched w/ my cal so that it could suggest a destination based on the time and where I need to go.
@andrewgordonmac 🙏
Greg Gunn retweeted
Me 1+ years later realizing the Perplexity CEO was completely full of shit.
"Perplexity CEO predicts AI could replace recruiters and assistants in as little as 6 months (Fast Company 7.21.25)"
Greg Gunn retweeted
I think you can buy tickets YouCanSeeEverything.movie
Greg Gunn retweeted
We just announced Canada’s new Productivity Mega Deduction.
This cuts Canada’s marginal effective tax rate from 13% to 6.4% on new business investment — the lowest of any major economy in the world.
Canada is building big — and becoming the best place in the world to build.
More here: pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releas…
Greg Gunn retweeted
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.
Seriously VC Twitter…
You are using the r-word again?
Try harder to maintain your Kayfabe online persona without using language that punches down.
Do better.
Greg Gunn retweeted
more companies will be opening offices in canada
this is just the beginning
Greg Gunn retweeted
Offices that have recently opened up and/or are opening up in Toronto:
- OpenAI
- Harvey
- Decagon
- NVIDIA
- Opendoor
- Lyft
- EliseAI
- Zip
- Cognichip
Greg Gunn retweeted
Why Brian still obsesses over recruiting:
"Sam Altman (@sama) told me you're going to spend 50% of your time on hiring. I never did. It was my death blow.
As a leader, you can choose if you want to spend time hiring or managing. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you get to spend on management.
The first and last call I make every day is the recruiting team, still. I probably spend two, three hours on it every day.
The 2000s, I didn't. I thought it was all about having a recruiting machine, managing people. The great thing is I don't manage as much anymore because the really good people are self managing.
People should think about their first employee being a recruiter, not an engineer. Because they are the ones that get you every other person.
A company is as good as its people. The difference between the good companies and the great companies are the people."
My guest today is Brian Chesky (@bchesky), founder and CEO of Airbnb and one of the great consumer founders of the last 20 years.
Paul Graham coined "founder mode" based on Brian's experience running Airbnb. This conversation is about what comes after it, what he calls AI founder mode, and how it will force founders to focus even more on the details.
We talk about his eleven-star exercise for finding product market fit, why your first hire should be a recruiter, and why Airbnb's $100B IPO became one of the saddest days of his life.
Brian still comes across like the 17 year-old at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who picked to study industrial design. His heroes are all artists. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs, all of whom were working the week they died because they loved what they did.
Rick Rubin taught him that an artist is only an artist when they make things for themselves. Now Brian believes AI is the opportunity for all of us to do the same.
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
1:00 Studying Industrial Design
11:33 AI Founder Mode
17:02 Lack of Consumer AI Companies
22:10 Small Teams and Focused Problems
30:52 The Evolution from Founder to CEO
38:13 The 11-Star Experience
41:07 AI as a Canvas for Creativity
48:17 Detaching from Success
53:12 Founder-Led Moats
58:34 The Next Chapter of Airbnb
1:03:08 What Endures in the Age of AI
1:06:43 Lessons from Bodybuilding
1:10:20 The CEO's No. 1 Job
1:17:01 Activating Talent
1:20:39 The Kindest Thing
Greg Gunn retweeted
If you think AI replaces software engineers, here’s a quick thought experiment.
Imagine you’re a life sciences company. 10 years ago you want to invest heavily in lab automation, processing data at scale, and other software. You look at the cost of doing so and realize you can’t compete with tech for as many engineers as you need, so you pare down your goals and do what you can. Every new software project has a fixed cost of a certain sized team, so you can only do so much given budgets, ability to compete for talent, and other trade offs.
Now, AI comes along. And all of a sudden you have the *exact same* output tokens as the best tech companies in the world. Your engineers are using the same AI models as the tech industry, which means you have just boosted your engineering team by a some meaningful amount, while also neutralizing your differences with tech.
Do you continue with your pared down approach, or do you start to hire more engineers because each engineer is 2X or 5X more capable than before? In almost every company I’m talking to, they’re doing the latter.
Now extrapolate this to every bank, manufacturer, industrial company, retailer, and on and on. And extrapolate it not to just large enterprises, but also every SMB up and down the stack of these value chains. Oh, and also extrapolate this to other job functions, not just engineers. Resource scarce domains in marketing, legal, finance, design, and so on.
If you’re wondering why new jobs show up because of AI this is the reason. Any other view of what happens doesn’t contemplate the variety of unmet needs there are in the economy.
