Podcasts about 300k

What does it actually look like to build a real estate business you love — from scratch, without cold calling, as a self-described introvert who hides from cameras at family parties? Eddie Brady went from government employee to full-time agent in December 2021 with half the income he needed. Today he helps 2–3 families relocate to Maryland every single week, largely through a YouTube channel he almost lost forever. In this episode, Eddie and Neil Mathweg break down the entire journey — the YouTube strategy that grew his GCI from $100K to $200K to $300K year over year, the Black Friday morning he woke up to find his channel completely deleted, and the Instagram funnel he built in response. You'll learn Eddie's batching system, his "never excited to record" mindset, why your email list matters more than your follower count, and how the Three Pillar Plan creates momentum that compounds over time. If you've been putting off YouTube because you don't feel ready — this episode is your permission slip.

Dillon gives a preview of what's coming at the next Vertical Design Build Summit — speakers covering workforce development, prefab, design-build, and leadership — before diving into a candid conversation about what it really takes to build a career in the trades. He breaks down the reality behind the "make $300K as an electrician" headlines, what attracts and retains apprentices, and why glorifying the paycheck without explaining the grind does more harm than good. He also talks about career growth from the employer and employee side — how companies can create real learning opportunities, and how individuals can take ownership of their own development. Plus, a great story about a guy who went from painting parking lot stripes to CIO of a $150 billion company.

Arizona is getting $300K to help the teacher shortage, is that all it's going to take?

Most product businesses don't have a recall plan. Not because they've decided against it. Just because the moment hasn't arrived yet.Melanie Nolan built Naternal Vitamins to eight million dollars in four years without running a paid ad for the first two. She built it on trust. Then in April last year, a manufacturing error created iodine variability across fifteen thousand units of her prenatal supplement. The TGA required a full voluntary recall. She refunded nearly three hundred thousand dollars in a single month. And came out the other side still growing, with 95% of her customers still there.That outcome is not accidental. In this Playbook episode, Nathan unpacks three things every physical product business should do before a recall arrives, not during one.Today, we're discussing:Why recall infrastructure fails when you build it inside the crisis rather than before it [lesson one]The four systems Naternal built after the recall: recalls@ email, Google Drive docs, batch tracking, fillable forms [lesson one]Why going first on transparency is the commercial move, not just the ethical one [lesson two]How 95% of customers stayed after a $300K refund month because of how Mel communicated [lesson two]Why the brands that come through a crisis are the ones that move toward the problem [lesson three]The $22,000 recall insurance policy that was worth every cent [lesson one]Explore Naternal Vitamins | Connect with Melanie Nolan | Hear EP620Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community 

Milena Simsic made $300,000 in commissions in her first year as a realtor, without any prior real estate connections, using nothing but TikTok and Instagram. She had no social media presence before she got her license. She figured it out in public.  Milena is the founder of WindSocial Realty in Windsor, Ontario, and the publisher of the Windsor Real Estate Insider, a newsletter and magazine that grew to 9,000 subscribers in under a year. She also runs Windsor REI Social, a 3,000-member community that fills events with 100 to 200 investors. She is currently switching brokerages from EXP to Real and building a community for realtors who want to learn AI-powered marketing.  In this conversation, we cover: Why Windsor's single-family homes have held value while student rentals and investment properties have softened What the Gordy Howe Bridge delay and the EV plant mean for Windsor's growth trajectory How Milena made $300K her first year as a realtor off TikTok and Instagram alone Why she replaced her virtual assistant with Claude AI and built her CRM systems in an afternoon How the top agents implementing AI are going to absorb market share from those who are not Why she left EXP for Real, and what Real is getting right that most online brokerages are not The health crisis that doubled her business once she fixed it Why business owners are particularly vulnerable to loneliness and what she did about it How Windsor REI Social went from monthly to biannual events and why that made it bigger  Milena's arc is the arc TAFI was rebranded to celebrate: a factory worker and ICU nurse who saw where the highest-leverage play was, went all in, and built a media brand and a business that works without grinding 60 hours a week. CONNECT WITH MILENA SIMSIC Windsor Real Estate Insider: https://www.windsorrealestateinsider.comInstagram / LinkedIn / Facebook / YouTube: search 'Milena Simsic' Chapters00:00: Introduction and Cold Open 01:20: Milena's background: factory worker, nursing, COVID, Windsor 03:00: Breaking news: brokerage switch from EXP to Real 04:00: Windsor Real Estate Insider magazine, 9,000 subscribers 05:30: Windsor market conditions: what is holding and what is not 07:00: The Gordy Howe Bridge delay 08:30: EV plant, population growth, downtown development 09:30: What investors are doing in Windsor right now 13:00: $300K first year off TikTok and Instagram 17:00: Building Windsor REI Social to 3,000 members 22:00: AI adoption gap: top agents vs. everyone else 28:00: Replacing a virtual assistant with Claude 31:00: How many hours per week to run the business 33:30: Teaching other realtors AI-powered marketing 38:00: The Windsor pageant: why she entered, first runner up 41:00: The autoimmune condition, the health pivot, business doubling 45:00: Salsa dancing as the one thing that started everything 48:00: Business owner loneliness and why dance helps 51:00: EXP vs. Real: why the switch and what Real is doing differently 58:00: AI tools, Fiverr comparison, what Claude does that nobody else can match 01:01:00: Advice for young people: build your skill set, buy a business, zero excuses 01:03:00: Wrap up and where to find Milena 

Accredited Investors: Catalina Island deal closes soon. Join waitlist: somerscapital.com/investIn this episode Rich Somers sits down with Rich Torres to discuss how business owners and real estate investors can use credit as a tool to access capital, build leverage, and create more financial flexibility. Rich breaks down why he believes people should stop relying on debit cards and cash, how credit card points can turn everyday spending into travel rewards, and how strong credit profiles can open the door to $100K, $200K, or even $300K in 0% interest business funding.Rich also explains the process of fixing credit, building credit, keeping utilization low, and using funding strategically instead of recklessly. From launching a business to scaling an existing company or funding real estate opportunities, this conversation gives listeners a practical look at how credit can become one of the most powerful tools in their financial arsenal when used the right way.Connect with Rich on Instagram: @rich_somersInterested in joining The 7 Figure Creator Mastermind? Visit www.the7figurecreator.com to book a free intro call.Interested in joining our Boutique Hotel Mastermind? Visit www.somerscapital.com/mastermind to book a free call.

There are two ways to get your student loans forgiven — and the one nobody talks about could leave you with a six-figure tax bill. Most physicians know PSLF. Far fewer understand taxable forgiveness — the IDR path that hands you a massive tax bill 20 years down the road. Jimmy and Justin break down a real listener question (anesthesiologist + dentist, $400K in loans at 7%) to show why "married filing separately" math isn't as clean as it looks, and why your repayment plan now hinges on a looming July 2026 deadline. Resources mentioned: Looking for a CPA that does more than just file taxes each year? Check out Gelt, the proactive tax strategy partner that Jimmy personally uses, and receive 10% off the first year through the MMM link. Get $100 off a Student Loan Consult with Student Loan Planner: moneymeetsmedicine.com/loans Looking to refinance your private student loans? Click here to learn how to find the lowest interest rates out there. Every physician must get disability insurance before leaving training! Get a disability insurance quote from Money Meets Medicine Disability. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Producer Troy reveals how a ribbon purchase froze the work credit card... So we ask what did you cost the company? From a $300K order to a $150K accidtnaly deal! Join the Itty Bitty Hitty Committee HERE!Instagram: @THEHITSBREAKFASTFacebook: The Hits Breakfast with Jono, Ben & MeganSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New data shows former politicians are taking the taxpayers for a ride. A new article in the Spinoff has revealed the Government has been spending around $300,000 per year to provide Crown limousines to former Prime Ministers and their spouses - even though the service goes mostly unused. Remuneration Authority chair Geoff Summers says it's unclear if these costs could be cut as a result. "All it says is that when a person stops being a Prime Minister, as the Royal Commission said way back then - it inevitably attracts obligations of a social nature that don't disappear with retirement." LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Want to quit your job and build a real land investing business?

Greg Fischer did not plan to spend ten years in recruitment. He joined a solo healthcare practice in LA as employee number one, figured it would pay the bills, and planned to open a gym someday. He never left.Instead he built one of the most profitable staffing businesses in the US. $4.2 million in NFI, $1.4 million net profit. 38 people and a seven-figure equity stake with a $50 million exit on the horizon.But he walked away with nothing!The push toward the exit had quietly changed how the business ran. “I think we started looking at people as much more like resources and just a means to an end than actually people.” Greg had spent a decade building his career on the opposite belief. But the drift was so gradual he hadn't noticed it.“I couldn't be the person I wanted to be and be in a good, healthy working dynamic. It was going to be one or the other.”On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Greg Fischer, founder of Well Oiled Machine, tells the full story. The gym that cost him $150,000. The 10 years building someone else's company. The walk away. And how he built a lean, profitable rec-to-rec from a mountain town in Colorado with no cold outbound and twenty clients in year one.Greg Fischer is not chasing the big exit this time. He is building something small, profitable, and built entirely around the person he decided he wanted to be.If you have ever wondered what it actually costs to chase a number, and whether the person collecting it is still someone you recognise, this episode has the blueprint.----------Episode Sponsor: AtlasAdmin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies.It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era.With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords.Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow.Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform.No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue.Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting.Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts.At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

Welcome to the Financial Freedom & Wealth Trailblazers Podcast! In today's episode, we're talking about how to break out of underpaid roles, reposition your skills, and land a career that pays $150K to $300K a year. Alison Hemmings is a Career Glow Up Coach for executive women and founder of Newo Executive Solutions Inc. She helps ambitious women land $150K–$300K senior roles, fractional leadership positions, and consulting opportunities — without job boards and without shrinking themselves to fit a job description. With over 12 years of experience as both an executive recruiter and coach, Alison brings rare insider knowledge of how hiring decisions are really made. She has built a community of 22,000+ executive women and hosts the Getting Black Women Paid podcast. Based as a digital nomad in Colombia, Alison is on a mission to help women stop being passed over, underpaid, and underestimated — for good.Connect with Alison Here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonhemmingshttps://www.instagram.com/coachalisonhemmingshttps://book.coach-alison.comGrab the freebie here: Message "Careers" to Alison on LinkedIn for free training https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonhemmings===================================If you enjoyed this episode, remember to hit the like button and subscribe. Then share this episode with your friends.Thanks for watching the Financial Freedom & Wealth  Trailblazers Podcast. This podcast is part of the Digital Trailblazer family of podcasts. To learn more about Digital Trailblazer and what we do to help entrepreneurs, go to DigitalTrailblazer.com.Are you a coach, consultant, expert, or online course creator? Then we'd love to invite you to our FREE Facebook Group where you can learn the best strategies to land more high-ticket clients and customers. QUICK LINKS: APPLY TO BE FEATURED: https://app.digitaltrailblazer.com/podcast-guest-applicationDIGITAL TRAILBLAZER: https://digitaltrailblazer.com/

In episode 365 of The Real Jason Duncan Podcast, you were probably told that college is the price of success. Ali Hemyari never paid it and spent twenty years building the proof that it was never true. Ali Hemyari is the founder of Nashville K-9, recognized by Bloomberg as one of the world's greatest canine training facilities, the only civilian in the state of Tennessee to complete the police-mandated SWAT Canine School recognized by the National Tactical Officers Association, a TEDx speaker, keynote speaker, pilot, triathlete, Make-A-Wish fundraiser, and author of The Success Code. He has built close to twenty companies across multiple industries and commands K-9 units for multiple police departments — as a volunteer. None of it required a diploma. Today, Ali sits down with Jason for a conversation that's going to make a lot of guidance counselors uncomfortable. The lie is one of the most universally distributed beliefs in the world: go to college, that's where success comes from, without it, you're starting behind. And here's what that belief actually does — it hands the definition of readiness to an institution. It tells people to wait for permission they already have. Ali stopped waiting. Then he built twenty companies to show what that looks like. This episode dives into: 1.Why the college lie is the most universally distributed lie handed to teenagers — and why questioning it still feels irresponsible to most people 2.Where Ali's belief about college came from growing up in the eighties and nineties — and how deep it ran before he started seeing through it 3.How he ran a marketing company in college, funneling students to bars on the UT Knoxville strip — and what that taught him that the classroom never did 4.The Vanderbilt MBA grads who showed him 50 charts for a dog treat business the dogs wouldn't eat — and what happened when they ignored his advice 5.Why years one and two of college are largely wasted — and what years three and four actually offer 6.Walking into the SWAT Canine School as the only civilian in the room — what he had that the credential guys didn't when real pressure started 7.The HVAC tech making $300K and the mechanic who out-earns the MBA — and why nobody wants to say it out loud 8.Why professors who have never practiced what they teach are producing laborers, not entrepreneurs 9.His TEDx talk: "Dogs don't fail, leadership does" — and how that one line maps directly onto the lie about college 10.Why the institution doesn't make you successful — the person leading does 11.The real reason universities won't fix this problem (it starts with money and ends with tenure) 12.The lie hiding inside work-life balance — and what he actually wishes he had been told at twenty 13.What he knows now that he wishes the world knew If you've ever wondered whether the path you were handed was the only path — or if someone you love is about to spend $200,000 to find out the hard way — this episode is required listening.

Block Out by Grand Games is scaling to $300K/day — and it doesn't even have an Android version yet. It's about to become Grand Games' biggest title, overtaking Magic Sword, and the whole thing is a masterclass in perfect execution over original innovation.Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg break down Block Out, the deterministic sort puzzler that's quietly become one of the most aggressive scalers in mobile. The conversation covers how Block Out's iteration is now out-earning the game it borrowed from (Color Block Jam), the level-design difference that makes it more casual and more approachable, the UA upgrade that Jakub estimates at 500%+ over Grand's earlier games, the iOS-only / US-only / single-AppLovin-campaign soft launch playbook (the same one Pixel Flow used), the blended-ROAS interstitial strategy driving 32-36% ad revenue, and the 1,000+ creatives and 260 playables now powering the scale. Plus the bigger Grand Games story: a $70M raise, $105M+ total funding, and a template machine that takes proven concepts and executes them better than anyone.The thesis, straight from the episode: Grand Games doesn't do giant innovation. They do perfect execution.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 the 500% UA upgrade03:50 The numbers — $300K/day, 140K downloads/day, iOS only06:40 The Grand Games template — perfect execution, not innovation10:25 What a deterministic sort puzzler actually is13:25 Block Out vs Color Block Jam — the level design difference20:50 The soft launch playbook — one AppLovin campaign, US only21:45 The ad question — blended ROAS and 32-36% ad revenue26:30 The UA breakdown — Mintegral, 1,000 creatives, 260 playables--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

Amy Phillips and Deanna recap The Valley (and the after show), saying the after show is more enjoyable and noting the series' Vanderpump Rules vibe, including another Domino's party. They discuss Zack and Benji's chaotic housewarming—folding chairs, no opener, a heartfelt “Oscar speech,” and the drama of Zack's ex-roommate allegedly destroying a Monster-branded fridge, sofa, and TV—plus how Kristen's generosity and Zack paying her back reflects well on both. They roast Tom Schwartz's disheveled confessionals, cover his relationship with “Kiana/Kiani,” and debate why Scheana and Brock aren't on the show while Lala fits in better this season. They criticize Danny's sneaky drinking and misogynistic behavior toward Nia, note the couple's therapy/counseling and possible financial motivations to stay on TV, and touch on Jesse and Michelle's divorce, a secret $300K loan, and Michelle's claims Jesse quickly cycled through women before landing with wealthy Lacey. They also highlight Janet's perspective shift while Jason is injured, and condemn Brandon for not picking up Brittany's pain meds and wanting to be paid.LUMI GUMMIES Lumi Gummies are available nationwide! For 30% off your order go to: https://lumigummies.com/ Code: DRAMABORN SHOES Go to https://www.bornshoes.com/  today for a 15% discount plus free ground shipping on all full-price shoes when you use my promo code DRAMA for 15% off and free shipping available exclusively to our listeners for just a limited timeFor more Drama, Darling, and exclusive content, subscribe to: http://Patreon.com/dramadarling Follow Amy Phillips on Instagram: Instagram.com/meetamyphillips Follow Drama, Darling on Instagram: Instagram.com/dramadarlingshow Amy on TikTok tiktok.com/@realamyphillips Email Drama, Darling with YOUR comments, questions and drama:  DramaDarlingz@gmail.com Drama Darling Shop https://drama-darling-shop.printify.me/

David is joined by Jake Benjamin, who quit a $150K union job in 2019, built Benjamin's Powerwashing from scratch to $3M in revenue with a 40% net margin, and recently turned down a near 8-figure acquisition offer at 32 years old. They break down what actually drives profit at this level, from pricing your brand above the market and building a lean team structure to handling price objections, running inside sales, and the mindset behind saying no to a life-changing exit because you know you're just getting started.See where your business stands —Take the free Growth ScorecardListen to the full audiobook free — Get Off The TruckFollow HSBC Social's:Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | HSBC Accelerator | Jobber | Home Service Business Coach Email: info@homeservicebusinesscoach.com

Free: Build an AI Data Analysis Agent in Codex https://clickhubspot.com/eqfk Ep. 429 Is AI-powered data analysis light years away from replacing humans?  Kipp and guest Sundas Khalid (data science and AI leader) dive into how agentic analytics is transforming data science, what human judgment still brings to the table, and how to master cutting-edge AI tools for your work.  Learn more on how to leverage Codex and other AI tools for real-world data analysis, the crucial mindset shifts and skills every data-driven professional needs, and why asking the right questions—and validating AI output—will set you apart in the age of agentic analytics. Mentions Sundas Khalid https://www.youtube.com/sundaskhalid Codex https://openai.com/codex/ Gemini https://gemini.google.com/ Claude https://claude.ai/ Get our guide to build your own Custom GPT: https://clickhubspot.com/customgpt Resource [Free] Steal our favorite AI Prompts featured on the show! Grab them here: https://clickhubspot.com/aip We're on Social Media! Follow us for everyday marketing wisdom straight to your feed YouTube: ​​https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGtXqPiNV8YC0GMUzY-EUFg  Twitter: https://twitter.com/matgpod  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matgpod  Thank you for tuning into Marketing Against The Grain! Don't forget to hit subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts (so you never miss an episode)! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-against-the-grain/id1616700934   If you love this show, please leave us a 5-Star Review https://link.chtbl.com/h9_sjBKH and share your favorite episodes with friends. We really appreciate your support. Host Links: Kipp Bodnar, https://twitter.com/kippbodnar   Kieran Flanagan, https://twitter.com/searchbrat  ‘Marketing Against The Grain' is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by Hubspot Media // Produced by Darren Clarke.

One student loan decision in the next few weeks could cost — or save — a physician six figures. On May 1, 2026, the Department of Education finalized the 134-page rule rewriting federal student loan repayment.  Dr. Jimmy Turner goes solo to break down what changed and the moves that protect six figures. What you'll learn: Why the July 1, 2026 cutoff decide whether you keep IBR at all The consolidation trap that can permanently lock residents out of IBR The RAP interest subsidy that keeps a $300K balance from ballooning during residency The RAP-to-IBR playbook for PSLF: which payments count, and when to switch Married or in a community property state? How filing separately changes the math Resources: Every doctor needs their own occupation disability insurance. Get it from a source you can trust: https://moneymeetsmedicine.com/disability  Have private loans? You should refinance those to the interest rate you can find. To do that, check out Juno: https://moneymeetsmedicine.com/JUNO Looking for a new CPA? Use the one Jimmy uses (Gelt). Get a 10% discount when working with them here: https://moneymeetsmedicine.com/CPA Looking to save $100 on a student loan consult? Visit moneymeetsmedicine.com/loans Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Three stories we talk about today on your Daily Detroit, finished as finalist in Hour Detroit's Best of Detroit (thank you!) Detroit's beloved Dutch Girl Donuts is back in the headlines, and we start today's episode with the sweet news: a free donut sneak peek of their new East Grand Boulevard location this Friday morning. We talk through what the second shop means for the growing Milwaukee Junction / New Center corridor that's picking up steam. Federal prosecutors allege a former Detroit People Mover procurement director and a contractor steered more than $300,000 to a company for work that was never done, using a string of phony invoices. We dig into what that kind of money could have meant for real projects, why oversight failures keep eroding public trust, and why Detroiters are rightfully tired of people stealing from the city. And lastly, a response to a listener question about Governor Gretchen Whitmer's support for the massive Stargate AI data center in Saline Township.  Instead of another hot take, we lay out a "steel-man" case for why state leaders might say yes: jobs, tax base, Michigan's long-term economic challenges, and the reality that AI isn't going away.  We also get into the other side and wrestle with the environmental concerns, local democracy blowback, township vs. city power, and what it means for a small community that loudly said "no" and was overruled anyway. Feedback as always - dailydetroit - at - gmail - dot - com or 313-789-3211. Make sure to follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get shows.

Eighteen months ago, Rachael was deciding whether to quit her full-time job and go independent.Today, she's built a business that will clear $300K this year, with almost half a million dollars in opportunities in her pipeline.But what's most interesting is who she became along the way.Not less emotional.Not less ambitious.Not someone who stopped caring.She became someone who trusts herself.In this episode, I talk with Rachael Plitch about what it actually takes to go from low belief to high belief while building a real consulting business.We talk about:How to land your first $60KHow to stop using anxiety as the fuel for successHow to sell results instead of your time and availabilityHow to reclaim your calendar without under-deliveringAnd how to become your next-generation self now instead of waiting years to feel ready.Most importantly, Rachael didn't just make more money. She built a new relationship with work, pressure, time, and herself.If you've ever wondered whether you could really leave your job, build something of your own, and become the kind of person who can handle it… this episode will show you what's possible.

272: In this episode, I sat down with Ari Page, CEO of Fund & Grow, to break down how investors can access 0% business credit and use it like a line of credit to fund real estate deals.(Show Notes: REtipster.com/272)We talked about how this strategy actually works, how much funding you can realistically expect, and where it makes sense (and where it absolutely doesn't). If you're a land investor or real estate investor trying to scale without relying on traditional lenders, this is a powerful tool—but it comes with real risks if you don't use it correctly.Ari also explained how stacking business credit cards works, how some investors are getting up to $300K in funding, and why your credit profile matters more than your net worth.If you've ever wondered how to fund deals faster without tying up your own cash, this conversation will give you a clear picture of what's possible—and what to watch out for.

What if a cat could run your business and make you $300,000? Meet Felix Craft — an AI agent built to operate an entire company solo. We stumbled down this rabbit hole and it got philosophical fast.In this episode, Josh and Will break down the Felix Craft story: an AI "CEO" agent making real money with zero humans involved. But that's just the launch pad. From there, we get into the bigger questions — can AI really replace human workers at scale? What does AGI actually mean? And what does it look like when someone builds a company designed to eliminate themselves from it entirely?Spoiler: we think work is about more than efficiency. It's about culture, creativity, and showing up for each other — and no AI agent is changing that anytime soon.--♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast.

Paul Strouts has run a business of four people.His first business, James Harvard, quickly grew beyond 100 people and sold to Hays for approximately £20 million at 32.He then spent a decade running Hays Life Sciences globally. Got headhunted to PE Backed Acacium and quickly made two strategic acquisitions.He now runs:3 brands.250 people.12 countries.Contingent, SOW, RPO and Solutions revenuePredicted £45 million GM in 2026.£12 million EBITDA target.He has seen every stage of headcount growth. The good version and the expensive version.This week on The RAG Podcast, Paul Strouts gives the most direct answer we have had on this show about when headcount creates value and when it just creates cost.We cover:- The first question Paul asks any founder who wants to grow from 5 to 20 people- Why you need a minimum of £500K to grow headcount properly, and what happens if you don't have it- When headcount genuinely creates value in a recruitment business, and when it becomes a cost- The ceiling Paul believes exists in life sciences, and why going beyond it risks diluting everything you built- How Acacium Life Sciences grew from 160 people to a £45 million GM operation through two targeted acquisitions- Why Paul sold James Harvard to Hays three years ahead of plan, and whether it was the right call- What working inside a global corporate taught Paul that founding a business never could- Why AI will not kill specialist boutique recruitment, but will change the lower end of the market permanentlyGrowing headcount is not the right move for every recruitment business. Paul is the first to say that. But if you are building a people-based business and you want to know exactly what it takes to do it properly, what it costs, when to bring in outside funding, and where the ceiling actually is, this is the episode.If you've ever wondered when headcount creates value and when it becomes a cost... this episode has the answer.-------------------------------------------------------------__________________________________________Episode Sponsor: Remote RecruitmentHiring shouldn't be slow, stressful, or expensive. That's why there's Remote Recruitment — the smart hiring partner for modern businesses. They don't just help you find great people. They help you access elite South African talent that's ready to deliver. No PAYE. No NI. No bloated overheads. Just trained, remote professionals who integrate seamlessly into your team. Their process handles everything: sourcing, shortlisting, onboarding, and retention. Fully managed. Fully supported. Fully remote. And now, Remote Recruitments has entered a new chapter. From ops to admin, sales to strategy, we're helping businesses scale smarter with people they trust, at a cost they can afford. Clients have seen: * Up to **60% productivity boosts** * **300% ROI** on BD roles * **30% faster completion** of operational tasks No overhead burden. No talent shortage panic. Just growth-focused hiring that makes business sense. Remote Recruitment is your flexible hiring solution for the modern era. **RAG Listeners:** Get 5% off your first hire + a free strategy session at www.remoterecruitment.co.uk/rag -------------------------------------------------------------Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn.Spending thousands on Recruiter licences. Building connections. Posting content. Sending outreach.But here's the problem. AI has turned all of that into a commodity. The same templated messages. The same AI-written posts. The same automated outreach landing in the same inboxes.When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening.The recruiters winning right now are not the ones shouting the loudest. They are the ones the market actually trusts.That's what we build at Hoxo. We help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche. A niche audience that knows you, respects you, and comes to you when they need someone in your market.We use AI to multiply your output. Faster content, smarter research, better engagement. But trust is the product, and trust cannot be automated.Our clients are turning their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Not through volume. By becoming the recruiter their market comes to first.To show you how it works, we've made a short training video exclusively for RAG listeners.In less than 10 minutes, you'll learn why most recruiters are getting zero measurable ROI from LinkedIn, how small, niche teams build the kind of trust that generates consistent inbound, and how to turn LinkedIn from a commodity channel into your most profitable one.Fill in the form today to see how this could become your agency's most profitable channel: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

In this episode, Bradley sits down with Brad Farris, founder of Anchor Advisors and executive coach, who has spent nearly two decades helping entrepreneurial founders build businesses that can grow beyond them. Brad shares his path from engineering to general management and explains why the skills that launch a business are often the same ones that later limit it.They discuss how the leader's role must evolve at each revenue stage, why profit often shrinks in the $300K to $500K range before it climbs again, and how Brad's three-by-five card method helps founders break their own job into roles that can actually be hired for. The conversation also covers the identity shift from doing the work to running the business, why sales is the last thing to delegate, and how resistance to systems keeps owners stuck.This conversation goes beyond delegation tactics and into the identity behind them. At what stage of growth are you operating from? Are you the bottleneck in your own business? And what would it take to let go of the parts of the work that are keeping you there? If you are navigating the shift from solo operator to business owner and want to understand what has to change at each stage, this conversation is for you.Visit https://workshop.blueprintos.com to register for the upcoming Above The Business workshop.ResourcesLearn more about Brad Farris and Anchor Advisors: https://www.anchoradvisors.comTake the Growth Phase Assessment: https://www.anchoradvisors.com/growth-phaseThanks to our sponsorsCoach P ConsultingCoach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:https://www.coachpconsulting.comBe sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.Autopilot RecruitingAutopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day, optimizing your applicant tracking system, posting job listings, and sourcing candidates through social media and local communities.https://www.autopilotrecruiting.comMention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.Direct ClicksDirect Clicks is built by business owners, for business owners. They specialize in custom marketing solutions that drive real results. From paid search campaigns to SEO and social media management, they provide comprehensive digital marketing support to help your business grow.Exclusive offer for listeners:https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusinessGet a free marketing campaign audit and actionable recommendations.About Above The BusinessAbove The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale.

Most agents think prequalifying sellers is just about motivation and timeline. It's not. When your seller is also buying something, everything changes, and if you don't know how to prequalify a seller in that situation, you're walking into the appointment with zero leverage.Here's what nobody talks about: a seller who says "I need $800,000 and I have no wiggle room" isn't being difficult. They owe $300K and they're buying something for $500K. That price isn't stubbornness, it's a retirement plan. Once you understand that, the whole conversation shifts.This is exactly what I cover in this episodef:✅ Why prequalifying sellers in real estate looks completely different when they're simultaneously buying, and the questions that expose that connection before you ever step foot in the appointment✅ The equity conversation most agents skip, and how asking two simple questions about what they owe and what they're buying gives you more leverage than any negotiation tactic✅ How to handle unrealistic sellers by understanding the why behind their number instead of pushing back on it blindly✅ The real estate seller questions you need to ask before the listing appointment to know whether this person is worth your time at all✅ A complete seller buyer real estate strategy for situations where both sides of the transaction are connected, including how to use their target property as a tool to unlock motivation on the sale✅ Listing appointment questions that filter out the tire-kickers and give you a clear picture of what the seller actually needs to make the deal workIf you keep taking appointments with sellers who seem motivated but stall out on price, this is the thing you've been missing.

Most ambitious men are accidentally building a "Job-Trap," a life that looks successful on paper but is structurally broken. Today, we perform a clinical audit on legacy with the man who built an indestructible brand: Dave Munson of Saddleback Leather. Dave transitioned from a barefoot youth pastor in Mexico to the CEO of a global empire with a 100-year warranty. In this diagnostic deep-dive, we identify the "Atomic Tasks" stealing your time and the systemic failures that keep most men from true "Internal Sovereignty." From living in safari tents for a decade to surviving a million-dollar theft involving the FBI, Dave reveals the specific roadmap for building a life with no breakable parts.   CHAPTERS:  00:00 - The "No-Breakable-Parts" Life  03:00 - Why I moved my family into safari tents for 10 years  10:05 - Youth Ministry to CEO: When the business became the ministry  15:21 - The sketch that built a 100-year legacy  18:52 - Marriage Systems: Why we switched to a smaller bed  25:31 - The FBI, stolen millions, and the "Job-Trap"  27:42 - The only 2 questions you need to ask your team [High-Leverage]  41:53 - "Success starts at home": Zig Ziglar's final lesson  47:53 - The legacy audit: What will they fight over when you're dead?   Munson's Links: Website: https://saddlebackleather.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidcmunson/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidcmunson  

In this episode, Eric sits down with Alyece Smith, business coach, TEDx speaker, autism advocate, and founder of Socially Ausome, for a candid conversation about ADHD, masking, burnout, boundaries, and what it really takes to build systems that fit your brain. Alyece shares how her son's autism diagnosis changed the way she understood neurodivergence, her own ADHD, and the cost of trying to operate like everyone else. After leaving corporate to prioritize her son's care, she built a successful business quickly, but found herself overdelivering, people-pleasing, working late into the night, and burning out despite outward success. Together, Eric and Alyece explore why "inconsistency" is often misunderstood, especially for ADHDers. They talk about under-stimulation, energy management, spark times, decision fatigue, boundaries, and why sustainable follow-through usually requires better support, not more shame. Alyece also introduces her F.L.O.W. First Thinking framework: Find your spark times, Link boring tasks with stimulation, Organize your overflow, and Work your week around your peaks. This conversation is practical, validating, and useful for anyone who has ever felt scattered, overextended, or exhausted from trying to work against their own brain. Summary In this episode, Eric sits down with Alyece Smith — business coach, TEDx speaker, autism mom, and founder of Socially Ausome — for a candid conversation about what it really looks like to build a business with an ADHD brain. Alyece shares how her son's autism diagnosis cracked open her own understanding of neurodivergency, eventually leading her to leave corporate, launch a six-figure business, burn out spectacularly, and rebuild everything on her own terms. She introduces her F.L.O.W. First Thinking framework, breaks down why consistency advice fails ADHDers, and explains why energy management — not time management — is the real key to sustainable success. This one is raw, practical, and deeply validating for any entrepreneur who has ever felt scattered, burnt out, or like they're just not built for the traditional business model. Key Takeaways You're not scattered — you're bored. ADHD brains are chronically under-stimulated. What looks like inconsistency is really a dopamine regulation issue. Energy management beats time management. Work during your brain's natural peak times (your chronotype) — not just whenever the calendar says to. Boundaries are a business strategy. Burnout wasn't from working hard — it was from having no limits with clients or herself. "That's not in our contract, but I'm happy to invoice you" was a turning point. Masking is exhausting and expensive. Pretending to be neurotypical burns energy that could fuel your actual work. Coming out publicly as ADHD was terrifying — and completely freeing. The 48-hour rule for pivots. Before burning something down, sit with it 48 hours. Still fired up? Probably a real signal. Not? Likely boredom or fear. Systems aren't one-size-fits-all. The right system is one built around how your specific brain works — not how productivity gurus say it should. Brain dump daily. A five-minute voice memo clears mental clutter and can be run through AI tools to generate action lists. Passion is your compass. Hyperfocus kicks in hardest around genuine passion. Can't stop thinking about it? That's your signal. Women with ADHD are chronically misdiagnosed. Internalizing symptoms leads to anxiety and depression, and many women aren't diagnosed until perimenopause amplifies everything. Timestamps 0:00 — Introduction & Alyece's background 0:47 — Her son's autism diagnosis and the research rabbit hole that changed everything 3:17 — Leaving corporate in 2022 to prioritize her son's healthcare 3:56 — Going straight into entrepreneurship — and immediately masking all over again 4:16 — Hitting six figures in six months, then hitting a wall 4:35 — Working until 2–3am and the unrealistic client expectations that drove it 5:15 — People-pleasing, poor boundaries, and faking having an assistant 7:14 — What it means to deliver excellence when you're miserable doing it 8:27 — The breaking point: her husband calls her out 9:20 — Becoming a "brick wall of boundaries" and what that sounds like in practice 26:27 — Coming out publicly as ADHD on Facebook — and the flood of "me too" responses 27:47 — Why she now loves being an ADHD keynote speaker 28:20 — Reframing ADHD inconsistency: dopamine, boredom, and under-stimulation 29:37 — The fMRI study: boredom registers as pain in the ADHD brain 30:25 — Why ADHDers start strong and struggle to finish 31:56 — Decision fatigue and the power of a personal uniform 33:04 — Introducing the F.L.O.W. First Thinking framework 36:31 — Applying Flow First in a corporate setting — $300K saved in one quarter 36:54 — The book and what's inside beyond the TEDx talk 37:15 — Where people get the F (Find Your Spark Times) wrong 38:00 — Why changing your schedule feels uncomfortable — and how to push through 39:00 — Harmful advice in the ADHD space: "just be more consistent" 40:29 — How women internalize ADHD symptoms differently — and the misdiagnosis epidemic 41:17 — One small, actionable shift for overwhelmed entrepreneurs 43:14 — The Voice Pen app recommendation 46:21 — Where to find Alyece and get the book The F.L.O.W. Framework: F — Find your spark times (when your brain is most alert and focused) L — Link boring tasks with stimulating ones (temptation bundling) O — Organize your overflow (a "parking lot" system for ideas and distractions) W — Work your week around your peaks (theme your days, not your hours) Resources Mentioned Book: Flow First Thinking by Alyece Smith - Get it on Amazon Website: sociallyausome.com Nonprofit: Caden's Corner / The Awesome Family's Foundation App: Voice Pen — voice memo to AI-generated action list Tool: ManyCam — virtual camera with timer overlay for Zoom calls Connect with Alyece Website: sociallyausome.com Facebook & Instagram: @sociallyausome (Skip the TikTok DMs — she's not in there) ADHD reWired Services Coaching Groups Adult Study Hall 1:1 Therapy & Coaching Additional Resource Mentioned: Neurodivergent + LGBTQ+ Pride Month Panel

What if your procrastination, your low energy, and your reluctance to make that sales call have nothing to do with your mindset? What if your body and brain are simply not resourced enough to support the business you're trying to build? Dr. Abiola Oladoke has spent years proving that this is not only possible but fixable, and the results she sees with her clients are quietly remarkable.What You'll Discover:Why procrastination and avoidance are often biological clues, not character flaws, and what to do when your body is telling you something is offWhat metabolic leadership means and how optimizing your body's core systems directly impacts your revenue, your decisions, and your visibilityHow one client went from struggling to show up for her business to generating $300,000 more by addressing what was happening beneath the surfaceThe pillars Dr. Abiola evaluates: nutrition, brain health, sleep, nervous system regulation, and physical capacity, and how each one shapes your business performanceWhy your mindset work may be hitting a ceiling because your biology has not caught up yetHow neurodivergence, including ADHD, can become a genuine leadership superpower when your body is properly resourcedGrab the free course, Stop Guessing and Start Signing Clients, and take your next step today: https://candymotzek.lpages.co/vfo/Want to see what's actually working for coaches right now? Download the free Coaching Business Insights Report 2026: https://candymotzek.lpages.co/business-growth-survey/Want to talk about what you really want from your coaching business? Book a free 30-minute call with Candy: https://stepintosuccessnow.comShe Coaches Coaches | Helping smart coaches build profitable, fully booked businesses

5/27/26Episode SummaryEpisode 186 reviews the Breeze product/landing page (wearbreeze.co) — a men's polo brand that targeted you on Instagram.What they do well: Tiered bundle pricing shown as price-per-shirt ($59 → $29 → $23 each), heavy social proof (300K+ customers, 16,914 sold, curated reviews matching the target demo by age/height/weight), and treating the product page as a landing page with strong copy and a cross-sell to shoes.Red flags: The "30-day wear test guarantee" contradicts the actual refund policy (unworn items only, returns shipped to UK at customer expense, despite a NYC phone number). Sizing copy says both "true to size" and "fits slightly small" on the same page. Permanent "low stock" badges, inflated compare-at prices, and an About page that only talks about shoes and reveals nothing about the people behind the brand.Takeaway: Lots of best practices worth stealing, but small inconsistencies erode trust the closer you look.Show LinksBreeze Landing Page - https://wearbreeze.co/products/capri-axVideo & Transcripthttps://jadepuma.com/blogs/the-shopify-solutions-podcast/episode-186-review-of-breeze-landing-page

Eighteen months ago, Dave got laid off after a 25+ year career.Today he's built a $300K consulting and coaching business.But what's most interesting is how he did it.Not with a perfect website.Not with viral content or “niching down” into oblivion.He focused on one thing:Building a revenue engine.In this episode, I break down the exact steps Dave took to go from corporate employee… to highly paid independent consultant.We talk about:How to land your first clients through word of mouthHow to replace your income strategicallyAnd how to build a predictable pipeline of high-quality buyers over timeMost importantly, Dave didn't just make money.He built a skill set and level of confidence that he can rely on for the rest of his life.If you've ever wondered whether you could really make the leap into independent work, this episode will show you what's possible.

$296,516.31. From a $37 offer. In five months.That's not a launch. That's not a viral moment. That's a self-funding sales pathway running in the background — and in this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on exactly how it works.I've been using low-ticket gateway offers in my business since 2019. The first time, I built the whole thing in an afternoon during COVID lockdowns to avoid creating a webinar I didn't want to make. Made five sales the next day on a $27 offer. This year, I did it again — same process, different strategy — and we've scaled to spending $1,000 a day on ads with an average 2x return. And for the first time ever, we're profitable on the front end.If you've been wondering how some coaches seem to always be growing, always making sales, always adding new people — this episode is for you.I'm walking through the full story: what I built, when, why it worked, why we stopped, and what made us come back to it. Plus what's actually changed in 2026 that's made this more profitable than ever — and what we've updated inside Paid to Grow 3.0 to reflect all of it.Paid to Grow 3.0 is on pre-sale right now at $197 — that's $100 off the full price. But only until midnight this Friday.

In this episode, we cover How I Scaled My Pest Control Business From 0 to 300k. This one goes through real lessons, hard-earned mistakes, and practical insights that can help current and aspiring pest control owners build their businesses smarter.Are you a pest control owner looking to grow? Join Our Facebook Group with 2,300+ Members: https://www.facebook.com/groups/pestcontrolmillionairesThe Pest Control Millionaire Podcast is all about helping small business owners scale their lawn and pest companies by talking to experts in the service industry.For business coaching and mentorship, visit pestcontrolmillionaire.com.Send your business and entrepreneurship questions to info@pestcontrolmillionaire.comand we'll answer them on the show!Produced by Sofia Salaverri and Dalton Fisher, Fisher Multimedia LLCFisherMultiMedia.com

Then the headlines come in hot: TSA officers at Miami International got caught stealing wallets mid-screening in a coordinated distraction scheme, a nurse wins $300K from Carnival for being over-served tequila over nine hours on a cruise (14 shots, grown adult, still won), Baby Jessica from the Texas well incident grew up and got arrested for domestic assault, a Boca woman crashed into a school bus and asked cops to take her to a church with a pool, and a California man returned Lego boxes filled with dry pasta approximately 70 times before anyone noticed. To close out the season, Rachel announces she's walking in a swimsuit fashion show benefiting BRCA Strong and POST SWIM, a swimwear company for breast cancer survivors (or anyone looking for more coverage and a confidence driven brand, and casually drops that she signed a book deal. Dale achieved a bucket list thing he cannot talk about yet and a new fashion habit he probably should not talk about, and zero regrets. Rachel is thriving with her TJ Maxx egg drawer and wants you to know that is a completely valid place to be in life.Episode Sponsor:Presented by 1-800 Call Lee — South Florida's trusted personal injury team. Learn more at calllee.com.Contact Rachel Sobel:Email: rachel@whineandcheezits.comWebsite: www.whineandcheezits.comFacebook:  Whine and Cheez - its by Rachel Sobel   Instagram: @whineandcheezitsTikTok: @rachel.sobel.writesContact Dale McLean:Email: dance715@aol.comWebsite: dalethehost.comInstagram: @UptownDale

 Interview with Stephen Soock, VP Investor Relations & Development, Heliostar MetalsOur previous interview: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/heliostar-metals-tsxvhstr-self-funded-growth-fuels-push-to-300000-gold-ounces-per-annum-9450Recording date: 20th May 2025Heliostar Metals is advancing a multi-phase strategy to transform itself into a mid-tier gold producer, targeting annual output of 300,000 ounces by the end of the decade. The company's recent performance highlights both operational momentum and financial strengthening, supported by three producing assets and a growing development pipeline.In the first quarter of 2026, Heliostar produced 11,743 ounces of gold at all-in sustaining costs of $1,996 per ounce, generating $14 million in net income. Working capital increased significantly from $40 million to $70 million, reflecting strong cash flow even as the company continued investing in exploration and development. While costs benefited from temporary by-product credits, full-year guidance remains around $2,100 per ounce.San Agustin has returned to production and is expected to deliver 50,000 to 55,000 ounces annually, with potential to extend its current 14-month mine life through ongoing drilling. At La Colorada, the company is transitioning to higher-grade sources while using innovative leaching techniques to extract additional value from existing material.Heliostar's flagship Ana Paula project in Mexico is central to its long-term growth. The underground development is advancing toward a feasibility study in mid-2027, with a construction decision to follow. The project targets annual production of 100,000 ounces by late 2028 and benefits from strong local support and existing infrastructure.The recent acquisition of the Goldstrike project in Utah adds one million ounces of measured and indicated resources, enhancing future production optionality while preserving near-term capital through deferred payments.Heliostar expects to generate approximately $150 million in internal cash flow over the next 2.5 years, funding much of its development pipeline. Combined with disciplined execution and selective financing, the company is positioning itself for sustained, self-funded growth.Learn more: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/companies/heliostar-metalsSign up for Crux Investor: https://cruxinvestor.com 

David is joined by Fred and Christine Hodge, the husband-and-wife owners of Clearview Washing in New Jersey, who built their business from a $500 startup in 2004 to $2.4 million in annual revenue and a spot on the Inc. 5000 list in 2024. They break down what it actually takes to push through the $300K ceiling and scale to seven figures, from building field and office systems while one partner is still on the truck to the exact hiring order Christine recommends at the $250K-$500K mark, why $500K to $1M is the hardest stretch in the business, and how to run a company together as a married couple without letting it erode your family.See where your business stands —Take the free Growth ScorecardListen to the full audiobook free — Get Off The TruckFollow HSBC Social's:Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | HSBC Accelerator | Jobber | Home Service Business Coach Email: info@homeservicebusinesscoach.com

Banks are pulling credit from good borrowers — here's how to protect your farm's financial future.

Don Ho is the Co-founder and CEO of Kaizen AI Lab, where he helps mid-market businesses implement practical AI systems with built-in governance and measurable ROI. Under his leadership, Kaizen AI Lab has helped clients replace expensive, legacy software systems — such as a $300,000-per-year enterprise tool — with custom AI-driven solutions in a matter of weeks, while ensuring rigorous cybersecurity and compliance standards. Don is a recovering attorney, a former tea and coffee shop entrepreneur, and an early adopter of emerging technologies, having successfully navigated industries from retail to law to AI. In this episode… Companies do not always need another bloated software renewal to solve a recurring operational problem. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is asking what AI can rebuild, streamline, or replace entirely, but how far can that really go? For Don Ho, the answer is that AI is already practical enough to replace major enterprise tools when it is applied with the right strategy, governance, and technical oversight. Drawing from his experience as an attorney turned AI solutions builder, Don explains how his team helped a client replicate a $300,000-per-year software system in about five weeks while accounting for cybersecurity, PII, HIPAA concerns, and penetration testing. His perspective shows that AI is no longer just a productivity add-on; it can become a serious business infrastructure decision when leaders understand both the promise and the risks. Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Don Ho, Co-founder and CEO of Kaizen AI Lab, about replacing expensive software with practical AI solutions. Don talks about building a $300K software alternative, using AI agents for implementation, and setting realistic expectations around AI adoption. He also shares advice on governance, compliance, and choosing the right use cases.

In this episode of The Unapologetically Rich Show, Shamina Taylor shares the powerful lesson she learned after experiencing her first $300K month—and why the income dip that followed became one of the most important wealth breakthroughs of her career. If you've ever had a big month in business and found yourself wondering why you couldn't repeat it, this episode will help you understand what's really happening beneath the surface. Shamina reveals why sustainable wealth isn't built by chasing your next financial milestone, but by expanding your capacity to receive, hold, and trust money consistently. Through her personal experience, you'll discover how nervous system regulation, emotional self-mastery, and wealth identity impact your ability to create lasting success, without constantly operating from pressure, fear, or the need to prove yourself. In this episode, you will learn: Why your highest cash month may not be repeating itself The difference between chasing money and creating from purpose How your nervous system affects your ability to receive and hold wealth Why money alone will never make you feel safe The hidden capacity issue that keeps many entrepreneurs stuck How emotional self-mastery creates sustainable success The mindset shift that helps you stop fearing income dips What it takes to make your next level your new normal  If you're ready to expand your capacity for wealth, trust yourself at a deeper level, and make your highest cash month your new standard, this episode is for you.

Episode Description Megan Collier (@megan_ugc, 300K+ on TikTok) is back on The Corporate Escapee for a Round 2 conversation, and the market has shifted under our feet. UGC, user-generated content, is now a real path to $2K to $15K a month for people wh...

You're looking online and seeing properties priced at $300K, $400K, $500K, or more. As a real estate investor, that won't cut it. What if you could get a deeper discount—we're talking $150K rental properties. Don't think it's possible? Henry has been getting deals just like this in 2026, buying them, making upgrades, and walking into serious equity with way less money in.  How does he find them? Today, we're sharing the exact methods. This is how to find off-market properties priced well below your area's average, even in 2026, even with methods people have written off as dead. This is the quick guide to getting your first off-market real estate deal. Henry goes over how to spot the “situations” that lead to lower prices, the list he builds to target the best potential investment properties, the methods he uses to contact sellers (it's not just cold-calling), and the tool he recommends every beginner to use to choose their deal-finding method.  Plus, if you don't have time to search for deals, we'll share an easier method to get them sent to you.  In This Episode We Cover How to find investment properties for around $150K even in 2026  The off-market deal-finding methods beginners can use to get their first discounted property  The two things Henry needs on his off-market list before he starts contacting sellers  Got no time to look for deals? This method gets deals sent straight to your inbox  How to use AI to speed up your deal-finding method and get in the game faster  And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠h⁠⁠t⁠t⁠ps://www⁠.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1280. Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠advertise@biggerpockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adriel Hsu went from BRRRR investing to building $2M luxury homes in Texas with 230 transactions under his belt. Here's how he evolved his strategy.In this episode of RealDealChat, Jack Hoss sits down with Adriel Hsu, an engineer turned real estate investor and developer out of Houston, Texas, who has completed over 230 transactions across flipping, wholesaling, novations, multifamily, self-storage, and now luxury new construction.Adriel breaks down exactly how he adapted to every market shift since 2016 and why he is now focused on building $2 million custom homes.Topics covered:Why he started with BRRRR, pivoted to flipping, and why tenants were never the moveHow he sourced off-market multifamily deals (14, 21, and 32 units) while syndicators were getting burned in TexasWhy he exited the $300-400K starter home market and moved up to luxury buildsHis economies of scale approach to new construction (building 3-5 homes on one job site)How thinking outside the box on a problem lot turned into $112K profitSelling shovel-ready, permitted lots as a low-effort exit strategyThe difference between finish quality at the $300K and $2M price pointHow he structures private lender deals: first position liens for short-term investors, equity splits for longer-term capitalHow he hired his first VA to handle cold calling and what that did for lead flowHis custom deal analyzer built in Excel that lets him make offers in minutesThis episode is built for investors who want to understand how to evolve their buy box as markets shift and how to move up the value chain without overexposing yourself to risk.

What if the reason you are constantly craving, constantly second-guessing, and constantly starting over has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with what is missing from your plate? The hunger-crushing combo is not a diet trend. It is an evidence-based framework that helps your body feel genuinely satisfied, your blood sugar stay stable, and your mind stay focused without the obsession, the restriction, or the rabbit holes that social media and diet culture keep pulling you down.In this episode of Salad with a Side of Fries, Jenn Trepeck and guest Abbey Sharp, registered dietitian and bestselling author, go deep on the science of protein, fiber, and healthy fats and why this trio is the most powerful tool you have for sustainable weight management and long-term health. They also take an unflinching look at skinnytok, infantilized femininity, the dangers of "what I eat in a day" videos, and how to stand firm in what you know works when the internet is working overtime to make you doubt it.What You Will Learn in This Episode:✅ How the hunger-crushing combo of protein, fiber, and healthy fats works together to activate satiety hormones, stabilize blood sugar, and help you naturally reduce calorie intake without restriction or obsession.✅ Why fiber and lean protein are chronically underconsumed by most people and the compelling research showing that simply adding more of these to your diet can slash calorie intake effortlessly and nourish your gut microbiome in the process.✅ What skinnytok actually is and why it is spreading so rapidly through social media algorithms, and the very real physical consequences of chronic underfueling, including muscle wasting and bone density loss, especially in young women.✅ How to evaluate any nutrition claim or online diet trend using a simple set of questions that protect your goals, your media literacy, and your long-term relationship with food.The Salad With a Side of Fries podcast, hosted by Jenn Trepeck, explores real-life wellness and weight-loss topics, debunking myths, misinformation, and flawed science surrounding nutrition and the food industry. Let's dive into wellness and weight loss for real life, including drinking, eating out, and skipping the grocery store.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Abbey's personal history with fear foods and how it shaped her evidence-based approach to diet culture08:43 Defining the hunger-crushing combo and why protein, fiber, and healthy fat work together as a system13:06 How protein drives satiety hormones, the thermic effect of food, and naturally reduces calorie intake while protecting lean muscle mass15:47 Why fiber is the underrated hero of weight management, blood sugar stability, and a thriving gut microbiome18:04 Why healthy fats provide the long-term satisfaction that protein and fiber alone cannot deliver at mealtime20:59 The benefits of incorporating the hunger-crushing combo onto your plate25:28 Skinnytok, its roots in Ozempic culture, and why it is normalizing disordered eating for young girls32:57 The concept of infantilized femininity, girl dinner, and how diet culture keeps women small in more ways than one37:02 The problem with what I eat in a day content and how social media algorithms trap viewers in a cycle of food fear41:40 Abbey's practical litmus test: how to evaluate any restrictive dietKEY TAKEAWAYS:

The Great Talent Redistribution: Where is Talent Actually Going in 2026 and beyond?  Is the start-up compensation model broken? How about big Big Tech? How about non-tech small & medium businesses? What is happening to talent, going forward? This and many other topics in this episode of Tech Deciphered. Navigation: Intro The Broken Contract? The Great Unbundling The Three (?) Destinations Alternative Cap Tables, Alternative Compensation Models Investor Landscape Fragmentation Operator Playbook and Predictions Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 77 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will focus on the great talent redistribution. Where’s talent actually going in 2026 and beyond? The Silicon Valley deal of the last 30 years, very low salary, stock options, you will either sell for a ton of money or IPO, and everyone gets rich, is seemingly broken. Or is it really? The dominant narrative says the tech middle class is dying. We disagree. There is obviously a lot of stuff going on whereby big tech is partially barbelling. There’s a superstar concentration on the top. There’s a bit of a seemingly allowing of the belly. We’ll come back to that. We don’t quite believe that is totally true. There’s a collapse at entry level. The belly is migrating into three, potentially even more, very different destinations: AI native startups, human-verified premium businesses, and the read the industrialized middle of the S&P 500 and SMB world. Each has its own cap table, each will have its own compensation model, and each will have its own investor profile. In some ways, this is the third episode in our Reset trilogy. We started with episode 75 on the SaaS-apocalypse. We talked about the great private capital reset in episode 76, and now we talk about talent redistributions. Bertrand, exciting times, not always positive times.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s exciting times because it’s a time of change. Of course, we have the doomsayers. If you listen to Dario Amodei of Anthropic, every white-collar job on Earth is going to disappear. I think I strongly disagree, and I suppose you too as well, we strongly disagree. It’s going to be more of a redistribution. If you look at the history of technology, this is what always happened. We forget how many jobs have disappeared over the past 150 years. We move from a time of 150 years ago. People were mostly in agriculture. Then you had a lot of weird jobs that disappeared from people transporting water to people bringing ice from the pools to people doing the job of computers. People forget that computer was a title given to human beings. We’re doing calculations. Then, of course, secretory jobs in the ’80s, ’90s, where suddenly anyone can type using a word processor, the rise of Excel, that sort of stuff. Many things have changed. Some jobs have indeed disappeared. Some jobs have totally transformed. Where you do these jobs have changed. I think we are at a similar stage where, thanks to AI, and I would say for now, or at least the rise of AI coding, there is a dramatic change happening. I don’t think it means that people will be without a job. It just means, from my perspective, that jobs are changing. You are not just doing a lowly coding level task that actually indeed could be replaced, but you are going to have more of builder type of mindset, a product manager type of mindset going forward. We also expect that the distribution of jobs, depending on the type of business, will be quite different.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The Broken Contract? Maybe let’s reset a little bit to the broken contract, or if it’s really a broken contract. There’s been this image in technology and tech that basically you get paid very little to work in tech. You get a bunch of stock options. The earlier you are in the company, the higher the level of stock option grants you get. Then you make a ton of money at some point because the company will either sell or IPO, and that’s heard of it. Obviously, there’s a lot of movements happening right now that are changing how these dynamics work. The first part is obviously AI, and in some ways, AI is shrinking companies. It’s not unheard of that companies with as little as four or five people reach 50 million in ARR. There’s companies with one person that have gotten bought for hundreds of millions of dollars or billion of dollars. Obviously, things are moving very, very fast, and therefore, there isn’t a large employee cap table. How would you share the upside? Would you actually give a couple of percentage points to an early employee rather than your 0.2-0.5% kind of thing for early employees? The second part is a little bit the other side of the table, which is the IPO market is seemingly in a drought. There’s not much happening in IPOs. Maybe 2026, at some point, there will be an unlock, but right now, it’s seemingly difficult to get your upside. Even if you’re an employee, you have to wait a long time. The median time of IPO has climbed over 10, 11 years, the longest in over a decade. Basically, not only you have to wait a long time as if there is an IPO drought, like we might be going through right now, when do I actually get my cash back? Unless the company gets bought, maybe there are secondary transactions along the way, maybe there’s something else. But obviously there’s a little bit of a reduction and lowering of the upside seemingly for this contract and for this place. The easy conclusion that I think many are taking is, because of all of this and all the layoffs that are happening, even in big tech, that serve the tech middle class is dying, that basically AI screwing the workers, et cetera, there’s also a lot of discussion that even it might be affecting the entry-level jobs as well. Everyone coming out of undergrad right now can’t get a job, et cetera. There’s this doomsday scenario that you’re alluding to that everything is changing. We have a slightly different perspective. We think there’s a realignment of market. In layoffs, there was a lot of layoffs that were warranted. Big tech, in particular, had actually hoarded a lot of engineering capacity over the last decade or so. There’s a little bit of a realignment that needed to happen in any case. When everyone’s saying, “Well, AI is compressing everything,” well, it’s compressing right now, but we don’t think actually it’s going to compress over time. You’ll still need engineering and science talent to come on board for you to be able to scale up. It’s not like AI is going to take care of everything and teams are going to be five people for companies that are worth a trillion dollars. That’s not happening. Today’s thesis, I think a little bit of this doomsday scenario needs to be seen with a more nuanced lens. I think that’s how we’re framing today’s episode, that there’s a bit of a nuance, there are some extremes happening. We’re going to talk about those extremes, but ultimately, it’s not quite as simple as saying that the tech middle class is disappearing in early jobs are going to be a thing of the past.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, what you started with is true. I mean, that 50 million ARR company, just five people. At a bigger scale, that’s exactly the matrix for Anthropic. They have reached a stage where they are at a range of 12 million ARR per staff per employee. It’s metrics that are definitely never seen before. I don’t think any company raised to this level. Best in class, best run companies, one, two million per employees. I mean, that was your target if you can make it. We are definitely in a different game. But I think what matters at the end of the day, and that’s what we’re arguing, is that you have to see the big pictures. Yes, some positions might disappear inside some companies, but some other positions will be created in other companies. Usually, what people do is keep talking about the jobs who disappear and not looking at the bigger picture of jobs that are being created as well. What is true, and I think you alluded to that, is that the big tech the past 10, 15 years had some strategy of hoarding talent in a war where having the best talented people will make the difference in numbers, will make the difference between winning or losing. The Google of the world, the Microsoft of the world, the Amazon of the world, they were hoarding talent. They would try to make sure that they might not have such needs in talented number of people. But if they have the talent, it means their competitors didn’t have the talent. It means that the startup trying to reach scale couldn’t pay the giant salaries that the Google of the world were paying. There was definitely some hoarding. But it went so far in the 2020, 2021, that I think since then there has been a coming back to normal. There is also now in 2026, the recognition that it’s not true anymore. Yes, talent can be very valuable, but there is now a bigger and bigger gap between the extremely talented versus the rest that are merely talented because of AI. AI is able to replace at scale your software engineers, your software managers. I would say it’s quite new. I don’t think it was true a year ago. We’re really talking about a recent dramatic change in what can be achieved thanks to AI. We can see most of the big AI companies are moving to coding. It was started by Anthropic as a trend, OpenAI has followed through. Obviously, the Cursor of the world existed before, but they were not as successful. All the Chinese open-source models are moving very fast to coding optimization the past few weeks. It’s quite an incredible change. I think there is that dramatic change, recognition that coding can be done differently. As a result, we are going to see change in the distribution of jobs. I think it will start from the top because we see the news of the big Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others who used to hold talented software developers to a change in realization that no, we actually need to invest in AI. We need to invest in compute because compute is going to do the job of most of these people. Therefore, we can’t pay for both at the same time, even us with all our money, we cannot. Wall Street is not going to let us do that. They start by removing a lot of position. I think we see that accelerating, quite frankly. We have only seen the beginning, but in the next 2 years, we see a dramatic shift. But I think my position, I guess yours, and you know as well, is that there will be a lot more opportunities created as well, probably by also entities.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The Great Unbundling Yeah, there will be more opportunities created. The hoarding is just taken also a little bit of a different view. To your point, there’s hoarding of resources, compute, et cetera. But there’s also hoarding of top talent. We are seeing people getting paid, packages all in that could run up to 100 million, in some cases even over 100 million over several years. This is unheard of. I mean, an officer of Meta would make, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 million a year. It’s like now there are people that are on the top end of AI researchers that are getting paid around that amount just to join some of these companies. There’s a little bit of a different hoarding. It’s very selective hoarding of certain talent. We’ve seen some acqui-hires. We’ve talked about it in previous episodes that are just literally about getting one or two people specifically to come on board. Alexander Wang, again, going to Meta to lead their intelligence labs there. I feel, I don’t know what you feel, but I feel this is a transition moment where there is overpaying for certain talent on the top of the market. At some point, this will stabilize. You can’t keep paying people 100 million over 4 years or something like that across the board. To your point, a lot of this is actually going to scale up quickly also on the AI side. There’s a little bit of a different hoarding happening on the top end, not just the resources, but also of people, which seems to give further this notion of barbell, that there’s two extremes, the haves and have-nots, the super-duper talented people that get paid a ton of money, tens of millions of dollars a year at the very least. Then the emptying of the middle where there’s a ton of tech layoffs going on in some ways, the belly, as they would call it, is being expelled. The middle market, the managers are being fired because there’s nothing to manage. There’s a lot of positions going away. In some cases, you might keep some of the more junior talent, but with a little bit of experience. But even the talent coming out of colleges is not getting hired either. It’s a little bit of a weird thing where there’s hoarding at the top, there’s an emptying of the belly, the middle, and then the early, early, early is also not getting recruited. It’s like what gives? How is this going to look in the future? I agree fully with you, Bertrand, that there’s a migration of this talent, not only to other companies, but also to other jobs. There will be new jobs that will emerge out of this. The DevOps, dev tools market didn’t exist until maybe 20 years ago at scale, and it got created. In some ways, we’re seeing there will be new markets, there will be new roles and new jobs that will be created around engineering teams going forward. We can’t anticipate all of them. But basically, the emptying of the belly is true as it’s happening right now. The low hiring on the early and the top end, getting tons of money. We think this is a transition to something else. There’s the hoarding of engineering in general is coming to an end at momentum. Now it’s time to rightsize teams, to get the right at the table, et cetera, and start figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve already had some horror stories coming out even from Amazon where they were breaking systems with their use of AI tools, and I’m sure it’s happening across the board. I’m on a board of a company and been tremendously affected by Meta and its algorithms, where basically because of advertising, there have been people served with ads for this specific company where the ad doesn’t match the company, so basic stuff like that. It’s been actually very, very difficult because in some ways, the company goes back to Meta. It’s like, “Hey, dudes, you guys are serving ads that are not even our ads with our copyright and stuff. How does this work?” They’re like, “Oh, it’s AI.” It’s like, “Well, it’s AI but can you give me my money back?” They’re like, “No, we won’t give you money back.” This creates huge issues for companies, for example, that are very dependent on advertising, which obviously there’s a lot of industries that are. They’re actually in production systems at scale. Meta is, I think now, the largest digital advertising in the world. I think they outgrew Google in one of the last quarters. Basically, this has a tremendous effect that systems that are in production at scale are getting inputs and changes driven by AI tooling, and somehow nobody can say what the hell is happening. Again, there will be a reckoning, there will be a redistribution, there will be a rightsizing of teams and an adequacy of teams going forward. I personally think this is a transition period.   Bertrand Schmitt I think we are moving from hoarding or software engineering to hoarding the top of the top scientists in AI and hoarding of GPUs, GPUs/data center. For me, it was quite interesting to see the deal of Cursor with xAI, where basically they couldn’t get access to computing resources to run their model. But xAI had, I forgot the exact numbers, but close to half a million GPUs that no one, I mean, “no one was using” because their services are not so successful yet in terms of AI chatbot and the like. Basically, suddenly they are like, “You know what? We control access to resource.” But the new resource is, again, a mix of extremely talented AI engineering or AI scientists versus GPUs/data center. There is this race of controlling boss and everything else is going to be collateral damage. Some examples, I think, are quite interesting. You talk about some example of Amazon, even some production issues. I remember reading a quick post-mortem of one of the issues, and the conclusion was it was AI, definitely part of the issue. But the other part of the issue was AI used by junior engineers. For me, it’s interesting. It shows that actually junior plus AI is actually a danger zone. That’s why many companies are going to be way more careful. “Why do we need the junior people if they are just playing with fire?” I think we go back to that situation of barbell, as you call it. The top talents are extremely valuable because they know how a production system works. They are here to develop better AI systems. But the junior guys playing with fires, yeah, maybe it’s cute in startups, but in a big time production environment, a different story.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro There will be a barbell with top-end talent super-mega paid and then mid-level talent that is individual contributors still doing a lot of great work, et cetera. Along the way, a lot of emptying of entry, a lot of emptying of the middle. Where does the talent go? The Three (?) Destinations I think we could say there’s three destinations for this talent. Maybe there’s four, maybe there’s more. Three that we can immediately identify. One is the AI native startup piece, where we have smaller teams that potentially get to a lot of revenue or top line over time, and where the Series Seed is the primary round, where we’re seeing Series Seed being raised of tens of millions of dollars, actually even hundreds of millions of dollars in Series Seed. In some ways, the stars there can get incredible compensations in terms of stock. They will stay for private and selling in secondaries later down the road because there’s so much capital at the table. Actually, in some ways, salaries are very high as well in some of these companies. It’s not like you’re trading off anything. You can get paid a lot of money. If your company at Series Seed for 10 or 15 employees has raised 50-$100 million, you can pay great salaries. In some ways, this is the extreme destination. The AI native startups that can make it is the extreme destination. Now, there aren’t a ton of AI native startups that can raise 50-100 million to 400 million in Series Seed, just to be clear. There’s a handful of hot deals in that space, but that’s one clear destination for top-end talent going through that. In that market, I think that’s one of the destinations. The second one is more what we would call the human-verified premium. It’s more of a play of companies that has still the need of human in the loop, either in terms of development, also in terms of activity, either because go-to markets are very intensive, and so therefore you need to have sales forces, partnership teams, et cetera. Or on the engineering side, it needs to have a lot of customization, integration. Companies are not just going to the, “Oh, you can come in and just apply your AI tooling and somehow magically the systems all work.” there needs to be quite a lot of and work and high touch work in getting stuff done. A significant part of that market, I’m not sure, is super VC investible. Maybe it’s a hybrid of private equity in VC, more PE style in many cases. It’s a PE-hold, sell to someone else market. As we’ve discussed in a previous episode on the SaaS-apocalypse, that hasn’t quite worked out for PEs. Question marks on how that human-verified premium market is going to evolve. But obviously, there’s a lot of work still to be done there, even on the engineering and science side. That’s the second potential destination. Then the third more aggressive destination is the reindustrialized middle companies that have a lot of specificity in going after small and medium businesses, local or regional affectations like ERPs or CRMs for specific markets, et cetera. Those are the three natural destinations. I would add the fourth, which is big tech. I mean, big tech doesn’t magically disappear, and I don’t think it fits neatly into any of these three markets. In some ways, big tech is now looking at the extreme for top talent a little bit like the AI native startup because they can pay. They can pay the 100 million every four years, et cetera. I do think it will typify taxonomically into a fourth type emerging, where, as we discussed, you’ll have top-end individual contributor talent. You’ll have the absolute top-end of the market because they can get paid. Then you’ll start having the emergence of earlier talent that is highly capable, et cetera. That will go back to a bit of a normal distribution in terms of talent on big tech. For me, those are the four destinations that I would put at the table.   Bertrand Schmitt For me, big tech moving to big tech, I’m not sure if it’s really a destination. I mean, yes, in some ways it’s a reshuffle between the big tech companies. They are definitely all fighting in some ways for some of the same people. I can see that dramatic shift where big tech has to remove a lot of positions in order to replace by AI. Again, I think at this stage, it’s mostly driven by AI coding. We are still at the beginning because this is brand-new phenomenon that AI coding is so successful at its task. I don’t think it was true even 6 months ago. Some companies, take Anthropic, take OpenAI, are definitely there or close to be there in terms of no more writing of a single line of code by a human, zero. This is, again, 6, 12 months ago. Not true. But now it’s true in a few top companies. Take OpenClaw as well, most successful GitHub project of all time, not a single line written by its author. It would have been impossible. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of line of code in a few months. It’s impossible to achieve that manually. If you look at the other big tech companies, the Google of the world, the Meta of the world, the Microsoft of the world, they are absolutely not there yet. They are going to be there because they have no choice. It’s you either go fast there or you die. You are not going to be able to survive competitors that are shipping 10, 50, 100 times faster than you are shipping. It’s a life and death situation. All the big tech companies are going to move, and mark my word, in the next 2 years from 10, 20% of AI-written code to 100%. During that transition, the next 2 years max, if you don’t do it in 2 years, you are going to die. Your stock price is going to crash. Then, of course, you will have to make changes. You will have to invest more in GPUs. You will have to invest less in your standard typical software engineer employees. Like you, I’m very optimistic that there are new buckets. AI-native startups definitely will be there. It will be transformational. Human-verified premium, very interesting category. In a way, it will be businesses that are inevitably less scalable through AI, and there is definitely a spot from there. I think the biggest would be the reindustrialized middle SMBs. Most of S&P 500 type of business are going to dramatically offer new software opportunities, new opportunity story to talented software employees because they will need to implement AI in everything they do. They will do it. They will need people who have software engineering knowledge in order to implement these systems. For them, what’s changing dramatically really is that thanks to much cheaper cost as thanks to AI coding, a lot of software projects that they couldn’t afford to do, that they couldn’t imagine doing by themselves, they are able to do it. They will invest in a lot more software capabilities than ever before. That will be a big game changer. And software, very tuned to their business model. There might be less buying of your traditional off-the-shelf SAF software and a lot more investment in a highly custom software by their own team, assisted with AI. I think that would be the part that is most transformed by all of this in a positive way.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Alternative Cap Tables, Alternative Compensation Models This will lead to a very fundamental shift, right back to the broken contract. What does the new contract look like? It looks like alternative cap tables depending on which bucket are you transitioning into. If you’re going into your AI-native bucket, and you’re a top-end talent, you’re like, “Dude, I’m worth 100 million over 4 years, so just compensate me accordingly with a mix of options in the company plus my salary.” If you’re top 1%, you can probably get away with salaries that you’d get anyway at mid-level from 300K, 400K and above, and you can get actually a lot of options already in the company. A lot of this is happening right now. There’s a premium for AI, we know that. There’s a premium for AI at the top end of AI researching, in particular on companies that are doing hardcore research on staff AI engineers, so companies that require actual AI engineering. There is a premium that is significant. It could be as high as 18% over non-AI peers, and it widens actually with seniority, shockingly enough. This is more of an average than anything else. Now, for me, and it’s for debate, but the perspective is this extreme comp will need to compress at some point. There will still be the haves and have-nots paid much better than the have-nots, so to speak, but there will be a compression. The variance can’t be the variance we’re seeing today for absolute top-end talent. That said, there will be variants. We know that big tech for over a decade, decade and a half, for example, in the Bay Area, has been paying a lot of money for director and above levels that used to be the VPs, so a million, a million and a half a year, all in compensations. It’s not unheard of that this will actually increase after this stage. That said, I do think that the compensation extreme that we’re in will get diluted down the middle. It will actually come down at some point. It’s part of where we are today. As we know, it is still a bubble.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s an interesting point. I think it’s possible. At the same time, that compression coming 2, 3, 5 years. At the same time, we have examples where there is no such compression. Take the top sports players in the world, golfing, basketball, NBA players. There has not really been any compression at all. For me, it’s interesting. If you look at the big tech companies, each being one of this top NBA team, why would such compression happen? As long as they are competing against each other and generating plenty of cash, I think there will be some fair question. We will see. I don’t have a strong opinion, but for me, it’s not a total given.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, the shocking thing is the faster AI becomes better, the more that compression will happen, because at some point, it’s like, why do you need the top talent as well? I don’t know. It feels like you’re trying to evolve a system that’s there to replace you. It’s like, “Okay, I’m getting paid 100 million over the next 4 years”, and then you develop something that’s so good that replaces you. Thank you. That’s cool.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s a total possibility, yes, because we are in that very unusual market where the game is to only replace yourself and people like yourself. At some point, it is a possibility, I guess this one. Right now, we’re talking about replacing your “average software talent”. In 2 years, could we absolutely replace the absolute best top experts in the world? Probably. I think it’s just that at some point we’ll be reaching the stage where we strictly have no control anymore on our AI systems because no human is able to challenge and understand what’s produced. It’s not just a question of scale anymore. We’re talking about a gap in IQ, basically.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Exactly. It will happen at some point in history. We don’t know exactly when. For the second bucket, the human-verified premium bucket, it’s difficult to see how an HVAC company or an HVAC roll-up of scale or a regional health care platform or high touch go-to-market, B2B, SaaS play, et cetera, for a vertical will compete. At the same end, they have to compete and they will compete. There will be more and more jobs, we believe, for engineering talent in these companies. They’ll have to be more and more AI-enabled themselves. The cash salaries will have to be competitive within the local markets, not necessarily with Silicon Valley. There will be potentially profit sharing and revenue sharing and actual dividends played at the table. The model there on the cap table needs to change a little bit, needs to be probably propped up more on salary and on some way of doing profit sharing or actually having dividends paid to employees and figuring out employee to equity in a more aggressive manner. This is the market that probably was already very attacked, so to speak, or let’s say, occupied by private equity firms. There are still obviously part of that model that would work well. There needs to be a fundamental shift, certainly on the quantum of salary compensation, dividend compensation, profit sharing, and all of that. Then last but not the least, obviously, we had the bucket around basically the reindustrialization of the middle, so everything else, which will take most of the belly that we were talking about. This is probably a poor analogy, the belly fat. It’s not belly fat, it’s people that were doing their jobs that now are getting disrupted. In some ways, that bucket will absorb a lot of that belly, will absorb a lot of talent. The small and medium businesses that Bertrand was saying will need to crucially become more AI, software-enabled by themselves, even with some core stuff and underpinnings that actually might not even require AI in terms of infrastructure platforms. There, you need to get properly paid. Again, how many people do you need in your engineering team if you’re a small business? Probably not a lot. It’s maybe you need one or two people and that’s it. They’ll need to be very nicely paid because they’re running the stuff in the rails. This is probably a market that over time, as AI gets more and more competent, will also be disrupted, but let’s not talk about the disruption to the disruption because otherwise, we’ll stay here the whole day, but certainly a market that has a lot of potential to shift and to absorb a lot of the moments that we’re seeing in terms of layoffs happening in the US in particular.   Bertrand Schmitt This category was a category that historically could not compete with Silicon Valley salaries, could not attract the most talented engineers. It’s not a category that didn’t want to bring these people on board. It’s a category that just couldn’t afford to bring this talent on board, typically. I think it would be a dramatic shift for them when suddenly there are opportunities to hire these people. There is an opportunity to hire them at maybe more reasonable prices from this company’s perspective. You talk about small companies, the great thing is that there are millions of small companies at some point. I think things could be truly transformational. Of course, some of these engineers, software engineers, might decide to become entrepreneurs on their own. Solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, build their own, easier to build their own product to market so to serve other companies. I think there will be quite dramatic changes because not all companies will be disrupted by AI as much, but not every company will benefit from improving processes, improving software through AI. At least early on, you will need this human touch to make it work inside a business. Interestingly enough, I was hearing that some companies like IBM were hiring more younger people to do the work of going to the client, understand their needs, propose implementation plans. That forward deployed engineer, those positions, I think there will be more and more available.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Investor Landscape Fragmentation What happens to investor into the landscape? We already had an episode, the previous one, Episode 76, where we talked quite a lot about the big capital reset on the private equity and private reset, including venture capital. Just maybe to summarize, how does it align with the buckets that we’ve just been discussing? I think the AI-native bucket clearly is going to be the key bucket. There, we’re going to see two movements. One movement, which is the mega funds, as we discussed in the last episode, are no longer just VC funds. They’re really mostly multi-asset private equity funds, maybe even private equity hedge funds in some cases. Those funds will be all over the high-growth AI-native companies and will be pouring money into companies that are scaling really, really quickly. The early stage, so to speak, VCs, the actual VCs that will stay in the market will be the guys probably identifying the next big wave of AI-native companies. We’ve discussed that as well in the last episode, some research that we did at Chamaeleon that I shared in episode 76. We’ll see that as emerging. What happens to the second bucket, the bucket around human premium, human in the loop? Likely we’ll have more and more private equity capital going into it and the large-scale VC guys, the Thrives of the world, they’ve just announced Thrive Holdings, and others going after those markets as well. It’s trying to converge into the private equity market, which aligns with the point we made in the previous episode that the VC mega funds are no longer VC, that they are private equity, multi-asset class. They’re going after a bunch of things. There’s a conversion happening from VC into private equity. It was going to happen anyway because the private equity guys were coming into VC as well and the hedge funds were coming to VC as well. There’s a convergence in the middle of very, very large funds and large assets under management happening to go after some of these opportunities, certainly in Bucket B. Then this Bucket C, so to speak, the bucket of reindustrialization, as Bertrand was saying, very well, likely will be self-funded for a significant period of time. Will self-fund with their own cash flow. Doesn’t need to have a ton of capital intensity. Maybe you need one or two engineers to do stuff, but that’s it. You don’t need tons of capital. You didn’t need in the past, you won’t need it today. Not sure there’s going to be a fundamental shift to that market.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I certainly, overall, agree with you. That last pocket, probably little change to the capital and capital structure. Again, I see that as the biggest opportunity for a lot of people who might be less needed by big tech and also top tech companies. What is sure for the first category, the high native startups? I would say more overall in the VC ecosystem, there is no space left for SaaS anymore. I think SaaS, as we used to know it, is dead in some ways in the sense that new pure SaaS software startup are definitely out. Existing ones that are critical to run your infrastructure, the Salesforce of the world, I think they’re in a decent spot. Actually, interestingly, they changed their pricing model to now sell to AI agents, not just per seat. There is a change in pricing there. But this day and age of funding a pure SaaS software startup through VC money, no way. VC money going to AI-native startups, AI-focused startups, to biotech, to deep tech, to defense tech, yes. SaaS as a fundable category early on, I think it’s over.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I’m a bit more nuanced as we shared in The SaaS Apocalypse episode. We can call it whatever we call. It’s applied AI is the new SaaS thing. Horizontal applied AI is the new horizontal SaaS or vertical applied AI is the new vertical SaaS. I agree in common with your point that very specific point solutions around SaaS will be disrupted by nature with all the easy stuff you can do today with AI. It will take a while. This is not something that’s going to happen this year. It’s going to happen over the next years. Maybe interesting to also talk about the exit markets. I think the IPO market, as we’ve also discussed in the past, there is, in my view, going to be a reopening of the IPO market, I think this year, probably later in the year, third or fourth quarter. The median time to IPO actually is going to be really weird because there’s going to be potentially some companies in the current landscape, bubble or no bubble, that are going to IPO, the OpenAIs of the world, Anthropics of the world, et cetera. There will be more and more aggression, I think, on M&A. Big tech has already shown it, that they want to buy into markets. Large non-tech companies have also started doing acquisitions in space. To prop up their IT teams, their engineering teams with this world that we’ve also discussed in previous episodes that I’m going to own my own engineering stack for now. As we see, that normally doesn’t withstand the test of time. At some point it will get unbundled and served by someone else. Then finally, the secondary market is very hot right now. Obviously, there’s heavy discounting on some areas, high premiums on others. The exit market, strangely enough, is going to be propped up, in my opinion, over the next year to 2 years, dramatically. Then we’ll see if there’s a big reckoning around the bubble that we are clearly in or not, if it’s a soft landing or hard landing. Definitely, there’s going to be a lot of exit paths over the next year to 2 years.   Bertrand Schmitt Concerning the “bubble”, I have two perspectives on this. One is it’s a bubble in the sense that money is going to a lot of players and some players are going to blow it up. There will be a concentration of players at the end, like it usually happens. If you look at, for instance, long time ago, the railway revolution, there was that intense influx of capital. At the end of the day, there was a dramatic change in transportation in the US and a complete railway system put in place. Yes, some investors lost money, some companies went bankrupt, but the transformation was fully real. There were a lot of top leaders at the end of this revolution. The change after that only happened, we guess, post-World War II, with the construction of the highway system and the rise of airlines and plane transportation overall. Here I feel it’s similar in the sense that, yes, there is a lot of money going in. Some players are going to blow it. They will misuse the money in different ways, but that’s part of dynamic allocation of capital. Of course, you make mistakes. That’s what happens. At the same time, I feel it’s a similar level in the sense of this is a dramatic change in the US infrastructure. This buildup of AI data centers filled with GPUs, integrated at scale with some of the best software in the world and running it, supported by a dramatic shift in energy infrastructure. This is for me similar to the Railroad Revolution. Some players might not own the data center they build because they didn’t manage well their debt, they didn’t manage to run proper software. You know what? They will get acquired by somebody else. I think we are at this level of fundamental transformation. The fact that in a matter of maybe 2 years, the move from 0% of code written by AI to 100 % written by AI is an insane dramatic shift. Just to be clear, when you move from manually coded to AI coded, we’re talking about a 100X difference in terms of speed at similar, if not better level of quality. The shift is dramatic, and on top of it, you don’t pay salaries anymore to achieve that. You pay CapEx, and with GPUs and OpEx with electricity. It’s a very big shift, positive shift in business model. New unions, no management over it, AI working 24/7. Personally, I think for me, bubble has a bad connotation in the sense of it was all for a waste. I don’t think it’s all for a waste. I think we are witnessing a dramatic revolution of our lifetimes, quite frankly, bigger than SaaS, bigger than mobile. From my perspective, it’s exciting times.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Operator Playbook and Predictions Let’s move to if you are this person, what would you do in the future? Let’s start with two extremes and go from there. One is you’re non-tech, so you’re not an engineer, et cetera. You’re trying to figure out, how do I scale my activity? Maybe physical labor is where I want to go. It’s not, “Go west” anymore. Definitely not necessarily go west. You should go to, I guess, the states that have no sales tax with very cheap energy because that’s where the data centers are being built if you want to be in that market. Obviously, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done: HVAC, electricity work, et cetera. Don’t go west. Go low sales taxes, low cost of energy. That’s likely where the data centers are being built. You probably can just follow. There’s, I’m sure, some way for you to follow where the data centers are being built, but that’s next, I think on that extreme of the table. The other extreme of the table, let’s say you are super ambitious, maybe you’re no longer an engineer, but you’re a product manager in your prompt engineering. You could do prompt engineering all day long. You’re 28, 29-year-old superstar. What do you go and do? Likely either you start your own thing, start your own company because you’re so good at prompt engineering, you probably can do a lot of the code yourself, particularly if you have an engineering background, or you go and join very early an AI-native startup that you think has the chance of going through the roof, and you take a pretty good salary early on, a ton of upside on the company because guess what? Companies like that need product managers. They need people to figure out UX, UI. It’s not going to be, at least for now, yet AI figuring that out for you. Those are two extremes, just to give two of the extremes, like engineering, product management persona, and physical labor at the other extreme, non-tech, et cetera.   Bertrand Schmitt In some ways, every software engineering job is going to become the equivalent of a software engineering manager or a product manager, because suddenly you don’t have to do the coding anymore. You’re managing AI that is coding for you. Either you start to have some manager hat, but we saw the humans, so it’s a very different type of manager, obviously, or you are going to be really an empowered product manager. You’re skipping the middleman. You’re skipping the traditional engineering organization because your engineering organization is AI running and doing the work for you. I still believe that it requires some serious skills. I don’t believe in the vibe coder type of value proposition. I don’t believe in the prompt engineer becoming suddenly super incredible, able to manage that. I still think it requires some serious chops to do the best from all of this and to do it in a safe and sane way. It’s very easy to have poor taste, make mistakes. I don’t know you, but keep reading these stories on the heads of companies who lost everything because of the AI agents. That deleted stuff in production, and they had no backups or the backups weren’t deleted as well. Crazy situation. You cannot run companies like this if you let your agents running wild. You could argue it’s the early days. I would argue it that that issues would be there for a while. You need to have some engineering discipline at core in the company running the business to make sure things don’t go sideways because it would be easy for things to go sideways.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I totally agree. If you’re thinking, Oh, should my kid go into science and engineering and computer science, et cetera? Absolutely, still, because of everything that Bertrand just said. You need to understand actually what code does and what technology does and what all of that does. That’s still a skill of the future. It’s not a skill of the past. In some ways, it’s still a skill of the future very much. Maybe let’s try two more extremes. Around the same level, the person that decided to do an AI native company bootstrapped initially, having difficulty raising a mega round, but could probably get away with raising a 2-3 million seed round, et cetera. Is that still viable? The answer is yes. There’s tremendous capital efficiency right now happening in the market still, 10 plus higher than if you were doing a SaaS company, and you were a founder in 2019 or something like that. That capital efficiency is going to reverberate. You can run a tighter team, smaller team. Actually, you don’t need that many salaries. If you’re a decent engineer as a founder or if you understand enough as a product manager to just generate that code, you can do a lot of stuff yourself, can bring in maybe one or two technical elements to the team early on as you would have done if you were bootstrapped anyway. There’s obviously a path for that. The other extreme is you’re in big tech, you’re level five, individual contributor, making a ton of money, or you were a manager, and you’re now out of a job, where do you go? You can go to a big company that is non-tech, S&P 500 company that’s non-tech, something like that. You join the company, you’ll probably get paid pretty well, maybe not as high as you were paid in big tech. There’s some stock at the table, but guess what? You’ll have probably more work-life balance than you ever did. That’s the trade-off. You’ll have a better job. On the upside, you can transform the company. You can help and be part of transforming a company from non-AI to AI-first or AI-enabled in the future, whatever BS that will look like in terms of the argumentation to the board. You can actually create tremendous productivity enhancements in a big non-tech company if you come with that background. Again, you’ll have certainly a better work-life balance, so not a bad deal, to be honest.   Bertrand Schmitt Also, to be clear, I talk a lot about AI coding because it’s truly transformational. You could argue that it’s going to be self-improving. We are in the situation of a self-improving AI that keeps improving itself thanks to automated coding. It’s a dramatic, virtuous loop. Obviously, AI is also going to improve everything else. It’s going to improve your marketing, it’s going to improve your search process, it’s going to improve your DNA. Improvements will be everywhere. It’s just that right now we are at a point in the quote-unquote revolution where there is one clear piece of the puzzle that is moving faster than the rest.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Bertrand, the senior executives at non-tech don’t know anything about that. It could be just a great prompt engineer. That’s the only job you do. “I’m the chief marketing officer. I have someone below me that’s doing the whole work.” Nobody knows. Nobody’s the wiser, I guess. I’m being facetious, but not fully.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. There would be a transition period where what you described happen. I want to say, going back to AI coding, I think that the part of AI that as of today has reached a stage of limited AGI. We have reached, from my perspective, a limited type of AGI for coding. If you take coding as a discipline today, I think we reach AGI. If you go beyond coding, that’s true. If we are talking about coding, leveraging the latest LLMs: OPUS 4.7, ChatGPT 5.5, combined with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode for harness, I think we’ve reached AGI in the context of coding. I’m not sure everyone fully realize that and the consequence of that. I think the rest is going to come as well. We are going to see that category by category, usually categories that are more scientific in nature, where you can replicate, where you can test easily, where you can create clear success. Metrics will be the “easiest” to follow in that direction of self-improvement. I just want to highlight that this part is truly transformational, the root cause of everything we’re talking about today. At the same time, it’s coming beyond coding.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think it is true. There are a couple of markets where that might not hold true, which is maybe the final path. If you’re thinking of starting your own business in plumbing and in HVAC maintenance and installation, this is a pretty good time for the reasons we already said before. There’s a lot of buildup of data centers and all that stuff, but also for other reasons, because it’s an activity that won’t be disrupted by AI yet. You need them embodied AI. You need physicality to AI to do stuff like actually fixing pipes.   Bertrand Schmitt Until Optimus replace you.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, but if we’re 3, 4 years out in terms of a lot of these optimizations that we’re talking about at the software layer, we’re 10 years plus out on embodied AI, right?   Bertrand Schmitt Oh, yeah, it’s 10 years.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll probably be optimistic as we speak. That’s a nice business. I’m thinking of starting to go into that market. If you guys are interested in listening to this, just reach out to me. What’s the angle? I think there’s a lot of stuff you can do in the buildup of some of these businesses, plumbing, HVAC, all sorts of maintenance. There are markets that are just totally messed up. Handyman market in the US is totally messed up. There’s a bunch of companies out there that try to go after it with marketplaces and stuff. I honestly just start something from scratch, a small business, and go from there.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. They’re an interesting middle. Think about accounting firms, consulting firms. I think they are not as easy to replace, but at the same time, there is no way on what they do is not going to be dramatically changed with AI. I don’t know if it’s 50, 80, 90% of the job, but this is changing quite dramatically, would be my expectation in the coming few years. Conclusion Thanks for listening episode 77 of Tech Deciphered about that great talent redistribution. As you heard it from us, we believe there is a dramatic change in play, enabled by AI coding, and that ultimately a lot of the big tech companies are changing their employee distribution, way more focused on the top talents and bringing more GPUs. As a result, we will see a change in their staffing. Some of this change will benefit AI-focused startups, but probably more likely will benefit the bigger SMBs, the S&P 500 companies of the world that will finally be able to bring inside and afford some of the talent that were in some ways trapped by the top 5, 10, 20 software companies of the world. Thank you, Nuno.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.From rebuilding Railway's network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway's founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.We go deep on Railway's infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.We discuss:* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale* The economics of Railway's own-metal data centers and three-month payback* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups* Central Station, Railway's internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents* Temporal's strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company buildingRailway:* Website: https://railway.com/* X: https://x.com/RailwayJake Cooper:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/* X: https://x.com/JustJakeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake's Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway's Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway's Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don't have a business card. We're not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.Jake [00:00:32]: They're cool. They're hip. The conductor thing is good. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it's super cringe and say, “You don't need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don't have a really good one.Jake [00:00:55]: We've got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don't know, what is Railway? Let's give people a crisp definition up front.Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you're off to the races.Swyx [00:01:22]: You've got a nice animation on the landing page.Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don't let me touch the design stuff anymore.Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New CloudSwyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I'm happy to talk about, pros and cons.Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.Swyx [00:02:51]: But let's do the Railway story.Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it's walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don't care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.Jake [00:03:17]: I don't have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That's what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.Swyx [00:03:52]: That's a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It's always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we're building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it'll be useful upstream, but it's deeply useful for us internally.Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic VersioningSwyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub's original sin is that it's almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you've lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I've either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven't. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don't take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.Jake [00:05:53]: It's okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there's so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business WorkSwyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you're on a rocket ship. You say, “Don't doubt your fight and don't quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it's about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how's it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don't necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don't fit our ICP anymore.Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That's a horrible business. I don't know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We've always wanted a super lean team. We're 35 people right now. It's very small.Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We're adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it's growing fast. We don't want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It's hard to build systems during expansion because you're adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It's become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it's important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it's either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It's kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.Agents as the New Interface to DeploymentSwyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?Jake [00:11:24]: We've prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we've deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn't matter whether this is dot-com or not because we're all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we'll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You're going to need to close that loop.Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn't work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn't matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it's going.Jake [00:12:45]: That's where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you're running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don't even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.Railway's Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and MetalSwyx [00:13:19]: Let's go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about how we don't really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you're going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you're running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That's all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we're adding a second one in Q3.Swyx [00:14:58]: What's it like? I've never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here's what it's going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That's all the pieces.Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.Swyx [00:15:39]: What's the math versus clouds doing it for you?Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.Jake [00:15:51]: It's nuts. That's four years of depreciated hardware. You're going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We're working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there's a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we've raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It's nuts how valuable hardware has become.Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That's a massive infrastructure build-out. You look at that and think it's crazy that they're spending way more than the Manhattan Project. But if every person is going to run dozens or hundreds of agents in parallel, you have no conceptual idea how much compute is required to make that experience happen, even if you're deeply efficient and sharing resources. And that doesn't even count inference.Swyx [00:17:22]: How do you plan the build-out? The growth chart is so vertical. Are you usually at 100% utilization as soon as racks are live? How far ahead are you planning?Jake [00:17:33]: We still maintain cloud presence for bursting. We work with AWS, GCP, and a few other clouds. We can rent, and then the moment we get space or power, we compact those workloads off the cloud. We started on the clouds, then built a system to migrate to our own metal. There's nothing that says you can't continually do that again, and that's exactly what we do. We never want to be compute constrained.Jake [00:18:09]: At the start of the year, we actually became compute constrained because one upstream provider wasn't able to give us quota at the rate we needed, and the hardware was slower. I spent a weekend rebuilding our entire network overlay so we could straddle five clouds: Oracle, AWS, ourselves, GCP, and one other one. We can do more than that now.Jake [00:18:38]: We got into a spot where we were trying to pack instances tight because we couldn't get enough compute. That led to a few reliability issues, which are now past us. I made a tweet pointing out that it's becoming harder and harder to acquire compute at the rate these models need to acquire compute. We got bit by it.Swyx [00:19:15]: How do you think about pricing knowing you might not have your own metal available at all times? Are you pricing assuming you need extra margin if you end up going into the cloud?Jake [00:19:26]: Because we've built out our metal data centers, our margins on metal are around 70%. We can deeply subsidize the cloud business if we want to scale at a reasonable rate. We have a few levers: metal, which makes the margins; cloud burst; debt to buy servers; and venture capital. It's an interesting operational problem: how much cash do we have, how much should we raise, how quickly can we deploy it, and can we scale revenue as quickly as we scale compute?Jake [00:20:05]: If we continue making it trivially easy for people to build and deploy, then the faster we close that loop and the more operationally excellent we are with capital, the faster the business can scale. It's almost a straight linear deployment rate.Financing Infrastructure: Hardware Debt, VC, and Operational LeverageSwyx [00:20:20]: I think infra startups raising debt is a tool people don't utilize enough or know enough about. What can you tell us about that? Is it secured against your CPUs?Jake [00:20:32]: It's secured against our hardware.Swyx [00:20:37]: What rates do you get? Who are the lenders?Jake [00:20:39]: We pay prime plus a spread, and we can refinance any of the debt as rates go down. The terms are pretty good. The unfortunate thing is that Twitter has no nuance, so people say, “Venture debt bad.” But as with all things, there are specific tools and areas where you can be deliberate instead of using one tool as a hammer. Venture capital is not the hammer for everything. You have to explore and figure out what works.Swyx [00:21:12]: VC is usually the most expensive financing you can get.Jake [00:21:15]: Yeah. I also think people think about VC incorrectly from a capital-raising perspective. Most people think, “How do I raise as much money as possible from whoever is probably the best I can get at that time?” That's close to right, but what we've tried to do is figure out what unfair advantage we can buy with that equity.Jake [00:21:34]: It's the most expensive equity you're going to give away at that point in time, assuming the company keeps getting better. How do you use it to work with someone stellar who complements you? In the seed stage, I had never started a company. Ray Tonsing had good advice, and I could text him all the time. He was really fast. Awesome.Jake [00:22:01]: Then with John and Erica at Unusual, they said, “You roughly know what you're doing building a product. We'll mostly leave you alone and be available for advice.” Amazing. Then we got to Series A and the business was an operational tire fire because we didn't know how to scale a business. Work with Erica, and Jordan is over at Redpoint, so bonus.Jake [00:22:28]: Now we've raised from TQ and FPV as we're moving into enterprises. Every step of the way, we've asked: who can we partner with at this specific time to unlock the next section of the journey? I don't know enterprise sales. As an engineer, I can eyeball what features we might need, and we have wonderful people internally who can help. But you want boardroom dynamics where everyone is aligned and asking, “How do we win this?” instead of bickering about strategy.Data Centers in Space and the Physics of ComputeSwyx [00:23:31]: You had a tweet about data centers in space. Why no data centers in space?Jake [00:23:37]: It's not “no data centers in space.” My hot take is that I think it is solvable. I've just never seen anybody solve it.Swyx [00:23:49]: You said, “How are you going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum?” You're making a physics claim.Jake [00:23:55]: I haven't seen anybody prove how you're going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means nobody has brought it up yet.Swyx [00:24:05]: Astrophage.Jake [00:24:06]: I don't know what that is.Swyx [00:24:07]: The Martian thing. Okay, you're very logical.Jake [00:24:09]: It could work. A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse. They say, “We're going to put data centers in space.” Okay, but how? “We have time to figure it out.” It's like in The Martian where they ask how they're going to intercept something and say, “We'll figure it out.”Swyx [00:24:36]: Making a bet on human invention is weird because you blind trust that it can be solved. But with physics, there are first-principles bounds you can put on it. Maybe not. Maybe you're asking to travel time or break a fundamental thermodynamic law.Jake [00:24:57]: I don't know how VCs do this either. How do you know what's not possible and a grift versus what's possible but sounds completely insane? “We're going to put data centers in space.” Coin flip as to which it is, and I guess you'll know in 10 years. That's one cycle.What Agents Need: Versioning, Observability, and 1,000x ScaleSwyx [00:25:23]: Moving back to agents. The branching, fast spin-up, and orchestration you do feels like pre-work that happened to be exactly what agents want. What do agents want differently than humans?Jake [00:25:37]: They want the ability to version things. It's not that different; it materializes slightly differently. Agents want a way to test changes incrementally. Engineers have feature flags. Is there a reason agents can't use feature flags? I don't think so.Jake [00:25:54]: They want version control. Can we use Git or not Git? That one is up in the air. I think something outside Git will emerge for how we version these things over time. They need observability. You need to query what happened, when it happened, which steps failed, traces, logs, metrics, and all the rest. They need network, compute, and storage. They need to write files, save files, iterate on files, and snapshot file systems.Jake [00:26:25]: A lot of what humans needed is in line with what agents need. Branching and forking are not different; we're just moving 1,000 times quicker. It can look like you need something massively different, but what you need is something massively better than what existed. You need orchestration massively better than Kubernetes. You need networking probably better than Envoy. It goes all the way down the stack.Jake [00:26:55]: If the workload profile doesn't change so much as it gets massively compressed because you need thousands of these things, what assumptions change? etcd is going to melt. You need to replace it with something. You can go all the way down the stack and say, “That part has to change, that part has to change, and that part has to change.”Jake [00:27:19]: The interesting thing about the super-exponential curve is that you have to build systems where you can rip out those parts at any time because a new bottleneck might emerge. You get good at parallel agents, and a different part of the system breaks. So it's similar to what humans needed, but at 1,000x scale.Jake [00:27:55]: How do you do code review in the age of agents?Swyx [00:28:00]: You throw more agents at it.Jake [00:28:01]: You don't. But then who reviews for CVEs and all these other things?Swyx [00:28:07]: More agents.Jake [00:28:08]: And that's how we hit the inference wall. You can continually throw agents at the problem, but I think there's a limit to the number of agents you can throw at a problem.CLI, Agent Handles, and Closing the LoopSwyx [00:28:24]: You already had a CLI before it was cool. How is the shape of what you're exposing changing, if at all?Jake [00:28:28]: CLIs have always been cool. The CLI changes because we think about how to give Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or any model a handhold.Jake [00:28:50]: A CLI is a single command: deploy, get logs, and so on. Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not annoying to agents. They're nice. If I handed you a CLI with 40 arguments and 600 flags, you'd think, “I'm never going to use all of this.” But if you hand it to an agent, it says, “This is excellent. I have so many handles to work with.”Jake [00:29:24]: If you're going to expose things to agents that way, you want as many handles as possible where they can get information, query dynamic information, and close the loop quickly. Most problems right now are about how to close the loop as quickly as possible. Where does the agent get stuck, and how can you remove that?Jake [00:29:49]: Telemetry is important. If you can tell where the agent gets stuck from the CLI and say, “12% of people deviate from the happy path because of this, and now I add this argument and drive it down to 2%,” you massively increase the rate of loop closure.Jake [00:30:03]: That's how we think about not just the CLI, but every point in the dashboard. It's a user journey: I hear about Railway. I get something deployed. I get my first green build or aha moment. I see an endpoint, logs, whatever. Then I iterate. The iteration loop is indefinite. The user wants to deploy a new thing, a Postgres instance, change code, and keep iterating.Jake [00:30:36]: If you focus on the iteration loops and what's blocking them from closing quickly, one thing we say internally is: you never want to be waiting on compute anymore. You always want to be waiting on intelligence. If you're waiting on compute, there's a bottleneck that needs to be destroyed because eventually that bottleneck becomes so large that another workflow emerges to change it.Jake [00:31:04]: We've built a product where you push code, build it, and so on. But I fundamentally believe the push-pull loop is going away. We'll get to a point where you make a small change in production, that change is versioned across your infrastructure, you're working alongside copy-on-write versions of your database and infrastructure, and then you merge it in and it's instantaneously live. That's the holy grail of loops. The push-pull-rebuild thing is a point of friction that we're removing entirely.Canvas as Output: Dashboards, Context Anchors, and HyperstructuresSwyx [00:31:43]: It's incredibly fast. If anyone hasn't tried it, that fast feedback is great. My hot take is that Railway was famous for its canvas, which visualizes your infrastructure and lets you manipulate it visually. But that was for humans. For the next phase of growth, Railway CLI is more important than canvas.Jake [00:32:05]: The canvas is funny because it's a mechanism to show changes over time. You're right that previously we used it a lot as an input. Moving forward, its goal is more like an output. You would go to the canvas, make changes, see them, and watch your infrastructure evolve. Now agents have access to the CLI and can make those changes. So the canvas becomes an output: what information does the human need at this moment to make suitable decisions about control requests? Do I approve this or not?Jake [00:32:57]: It also has to be an anchor for your context, a port in the storm. Think of it like layers in a file system. You start with a project, then drill down into services, then into a function or code, because you want to represent the entire thing not just in your head, but in the canvas. Other people can share that representation, think on the same wavelength, and move quickly.Jake [00:33:33]: A lot of organizations get in trouble as they scale because all the context lives in someone's head. “How does this microservice work?” “I have no idea; go ask this person.” Then you have whole categories of products built around context discovery. A lot of that melts away if you have a solid hierarchy and can infinitely nest services, code, context, and everything else all the way down. That's what lets you build these structures over time.Jake [00:34:18]: It's also what lets us build what I've called hyperstructures: things that are way bigger. You look at the Golden Gate Bridge and ask, “How did we build that?” There's a meme that we lost the technology. To some extent, yes, because the coordination that built those things evolved and changed. We lost some of the art of building structure as we jammed everything into Slack.Swyx [00:34:52]: But you jam everything in Discord.Jake [00:34:53]: Same point. It doesn't matter. It's message passing and interrupts, message passing and interrupts.Swyx [00:35:00]: So you're arguing there should be something better and more structured than Slack?Jake [00:35:04]: Yeah. For sure. I think Slack is awful, and Discord is awful too.Central Station: Context Routing, Support, and Incident ClustersSwyx [00:35:09]: This is the equivalent of my mom test. What have you done that has your solution to this?Jake [00:35:15]: Internally, we've built a tool called Central Station that aggregates all the context from our users. Every piece of feedback, every customer support item, everything gets aggregated into clusters. If an incident is brewing, we can determine how many users are affected and break off a discussion based on that.Jake [00:35:40]: That is more helpful than long-running channels where you're trying to decide which channel to put something in. If you can dynamically aggregate information and dynamically route it to the right person based on context, it works better. We know internally that these four people are close to networking. If we see a networking thing, we can drill it down to those four people. If it's with this part, we can look at the commits. This is no longer a manual process internally.Jake [00:36:13]: If you go to station or help.railway.com, that's why we built it. We wanted to scale with a massive amount of leverage by aggregating feedback.Swyx [00:36:27]: This is built in-house?Jake [00:36:28]: Yep.Swyx [00:36:29]: I remember helping out on this one with Angelo in 2023. You scale a lot with a very small team.Jake [00:36:38]: Yeah. We're about 10 times bigger now.Swyx [00:36:40]: You have your full developer code here? Very cool.Jake [00:36:44]: If you go to railway.com/stats, we expose this as a pub-sub-able thing. It's all real-time metrics. There's a way to get it as JSON somewhere if you care.Jake [00:37:01]: We're big on trying to build everything in public and talk about what we're working on. We've had issues in the past, and we'll say, “Here's how we're fixing these things.” We've gotten compliments and flak for incident reports. We're always trying to make them better and talk with people.Incidents, Disclosure, and Progressive RolloutsSwyx [00:37:20]: You had a big one recently. I liked that it was scoped to 3,000. You presumably used Central Station. Talk through what happened and how you address it internally as a team.Jake [00:37:38]: Internally, this one really sucked. It had to do with an upstream provider that didn't do the behavior it said it documented, which is unfortunate given they wrote the RFC for how the behavior should work. We rolled those things out, and Central Station caught it initially when a couple users said caches weren't invalidating. We turned it off immediately.Jake [00:38:03]: When you roll out to a large user base of three million people, you get a lot of disparate behaviors. We tested in staging and had tests, but we hit an edge case. We've hardened those systems, and now we can make that better. But it was a tough one.Swyx [00:38:39]: I always wonder how private disclosure is supposed to work if people find an issue. Are they supposed to contact you first? When you run a platform, these things will happen. What channels should people pursue to quietly resolve it before it becomes a bigger incident?Jake [00:38:59]: There's responsible disclosure. We err on the side of over-disclosing and letting you know something is wrong versus having your provider gaslight you. We've erred on sharing those things more publicly, even if they impact a small subset of users. That's a decision we've made internally. We have four values. One is honor. The honorable thing is to notify people to the widest degree at which they may have been affected or there was an issue, and then confront it head-on: why did it happen, what can we do better?Swyx [00:39:45]: Not the whole user base. That's because of incremental rollouts and other things?Jake [00:39:50]: Yeah. Progressive rollouts.Swyx [00:39:54]: That should be the norm at all large platforms.Jake [00:39:58]: It should. A variety of companies do this. There's the quote that Meta runs 10,000 different versions of Meta. To our earlier point about agents, they need the same thing. They need shadow traffic and all these other things. We've built so much ceremony around production being sacred that we need to make it trivially easy to test different behaviors in a safe environment. Then you can make mistakes in a safe environment.Safe AI SRE: Customer Agents, Forked Environments, and Production ParityAlessio [00:40:30]: Do you see a world where these things get automatically caught, not necessarily by your agent, but by your customer's agent? The cache invalidation issue seems easy to check if you know to look for it.Jake [00:40:44]: It's hard because to determine it, we almost need to hook into your observability infrastructure. That's why we have the template loop on the platform: so you can roll things out progressively. You can roll out to Johnny Vibe Coder initially, or push a shard that someone consumes at their own leisure. Or you can roll it out over weeks: 0.1% of people, 1% of people, early adopters, then all the way up. That's the non-deterministic version control we talked about earlier.Jake [00:41:30]: I believe that's where most things should go, because most companies end up building staged rollout systems in-house. It's the same thing built again and again at every company. There's a massive opportunity to consolidate developer debt.Alessio [00:41:45]: You should have a free tier. Model providers give free tokens if you let them use the data. You could give free compute if someone is the number-one shard that goes out and lets you plug into their observability.Jake [00:41:55]: We do that. That's why we talked about the impact on 3,000 people. We start with lower-impact people. Larger companies on the platform are last to receive those rollouts so they have a version of the platform that's deeply stable.Alessio [00:42:16]: I have three services, so I'm sure I get the first rollout. You can nuke my thing at any time. There are all these SRE agent companies. Observability people also want agents that fix upstream problems. You have your own agent in the canvas now. How do you see that playing out?Jake [00:42:39]: It's the stacking entropy problem. If you don't have primitives to make iteration in production safe, it becomes difficult. If you're an observability provider saying, “Here's the fix to this error,” assume 80% are good and make sense. But in the last 20% long tail of complex issues, if you let somebody stamp it, you create an opportunity for an incident.Jake [00:43:08]: That's why forked environments are important. People have staging, but it always drifts from production. You need primitives, workflows, and experience built first-party on the platform so you can fork any service at any point in time.Jake [00:43:33]: I think of the canvas as a sheet of transparency paper. The agent is a little guy you push up into the canvas. It should say, “I need to copy that service and that service so I can test these two things.” It gets a read-only copy of production. Anything that's PII gets marked as a transform when we clone the database, create a copy-on-write version, or read from it. Then the agent makes changes and asks, “Does this actually work?” as close to production as possible.Jake [00:44:22]: That's how close you have to be, or you get massive drift. The system becomes unstable. You see this with massive systems built on Docker for local, Kubernetes for production, and a specific thing for something else. That complexity slows developers and becomes unstable at scale, making it hard to iterate. We want to compress that way down and say, “As close to prod as possible is where we want to be.”From AISRE Skeptic to Agent BelieverSwyx [00:45:00]: I was texting Erica for questions, and she says you were originally not a believer in AISRE. Have you come around on it?Jake [00:45:10]: I flipped, but I'm still not a believer in AISRE if you don't have the primitives to make it safe. If you unleash AISRE on production infrastructure without safe primitives for copying volumes and making sure things are fine, it's going to nuke your production database. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm a big believer in making those loops safe.Jake [00:45:33]: I was a deep AI skeptic until 2023. In 2024, I thought, “Maybe I can roughly make this thing do it.” In 2025, I thought, “Now I can hold this.” Over winter break, everybody came back saying, “It's almost impossible to hold this.”Swyx [00:46:01]: Did you see this on the Claude docs? CloudBot? OpenCloud?Jake [00:46:06]: It's gotten to a point where it's harder to hold it wrong than to hold it right. There's a scene in Avengers where Vision picks up Thor's hammer and says it's terribly well-balanced. It self-balances and works well. I'm a deep believer at this point that this will be the dominant species: assembly, C, C++, JavaScript, words.Swyx [00:46:35]: It feels like a big jump.Jake [00:46:37]: It is. But it's not like you abandon CPU-based discrete logic and move straight to fuzzy logic. You need both. Your skills should call code or applications or some static structure. You can use skills to distill what the procedure should be or how the code should act.Jake [00:47:02]: I'm coming to a thesis: you need three points. You need a clear spec defining the system, the code, and the tests. When you say it out loud, if you've been in engineering long enough, you're like, “Of course. That's an RFC, tests, and code.” But they all matter. Having them together lets them reinforce each other: the spec and tests match, but the code doesn't, so reconcile it. Or the tests and code match but the spec doesn't, so reconcile that. That's the iteration loop.Jake [00:47:41]: That's why you're seeing people talk about software factories, docs, and reconciliation. Some of that is architectural astronomy if you don't implement it, but that loop is where most things will end up.Swyx [00:48:07]: For listeners, we've been talking about this on the pod for three years: the holy trinity of specs and tests. Itamar Friedman from Qodo is the reference if people want to look it up.Self-Modifying Infrastructure and the End of Push-Pull-RebuildSwyx [00:48:18]: One thing I want to mention on the OpenCloud idea is self-modification. I don't know how Railway would support it, but I have my OpenClaw, and I just tell it it has the Railway CLI and can do whatever. In theory, whatever capabilities or new infra it needs, it can call the Railway CLI, provision it, and add it to itself. The agent can modify its own infra.Jake [00:48:45]: It's nuts. I have a loop set up where you put the Railway CLI on top of something that runs on Railway. You're authenticated as whatever the current box is, and you can make any changes to it. Then you call Railway deploy, and it deploys itself.Jake [00:49:04]: It's like: “I need to spin up this instance of this environment. I already exist in this environment. Excellent, I have access to a Postgres instance now.” That's where we want to go with agentic, self-replicating infrastructure. That's your loop: iterate in production. You continue making changes. If it works, merge it upstream. If it doesn't, throw it away.Jake [00:49:37]: How do you make throwaway copies trivial to spin up and super cheap? The era of “I have an AWS instance with four vCPU and 16 gigs of RAM” is going to get destroyed. If you do that for agents, you need a thousand of those machines. It's prohibitively expensive compared with what we've spent a ton of time figuring out: the atomic unit of deploy, whether you call it isolates, sandboxes, or something else. Only pay for what you use, spin up instantaneously, and close the loop as quickly as possible.Jake [00:50:15]: If the system can self-replicate safely and say, “This is my environment, I'm making these changes,” it can come back with, “Does this look good? This is a new state of infrastructure given this prompt. I think I've solved it.” Then you go back and say, “Actually, it looks different.” It does the loop again. Then you say, “Cool. Apply.”Swyx [00:50:38]: That's retroactively obvious, which is the most useful kind. Any other comments on agent deployment on Railway?Jake [00:50:51]: It's getting better every day. I'm on X or Twitter. You can always yell at me about the parts not working as well as they should, because plenty of things should work way better.The New Serverless: Stateful, Long-Running, Pay-for-What-You-Use LinuxSwyx [00:51:04]: At this stage, when people want massively or embarrassingly parallel compute, they usually talk serverless. I feel like there's a new serverless compared to the previous five years of serverless. You're in that new bucket. Do you have comparisons or philosophical differences you want to call out?Jake [00:51:31]: It's somewhere in between. It's the ability to run stateful, long-running workflows or executions.Swyx [00:51:42]: Vercel has Fluid Compute, Cloudflare has some container thing, Google has App Runner and others.Jake [00:51:55]: That's where everything is roughly going, and it's why we've been working on this for six years. We believe users need access to a computer: a box that speaks Linux. They need to deploy what they want. Other systems change the surface area of what you can build. For us, users need a computer and need to deploy anything they truly want. That's why we've focused on the primitives: network, compute, storage. If we give you those and expose them so you can run things indefinitely, that's where we believe it's going.Jake [00:52:43]: Twitter has no nuance, so everyone says “servers” or “serverless.” It's always somewhere in the middle: I want to run it for a long time, but I don't want to provision the resource statically or pay for things I'm not using. That's been our thesis from day one: pay only for what you use, run it indefinitely, and it is full Linux.Swyx [00:53:12]: That's why I like the naming of Fluid. It's fluid. Flexible.Heroku, Focus, and Carrying the Torch Without Becoming the PastSwyx [00:53:18]: Another milestone is the Heroku official deprecation. You're one of the presumptive new Herokus. “New Heroku” has been a category for as long as I've been in developer tooling. It's finally happening. What was that like? Any behind-the-scenes of, “This is the moment”?Jake [00:53:42]: You have people where you're like, “You were running stuff on here? You, as this company?” It's crazy that names you would know are running on it and now coming to us saying, “We want to move a lot of this off.”Swyx [00:54:00]: Any behind-the-scenes on why Salesforce let Heroku stagnate?Jake [00:54:05]: I can only guess. It's hard when it's not your business. Salesforce's business is to build a great CRM. That's their focus. Then you acquire a compute business as an offshoot. A lot of early Meta people talk about focus. Boz has a write-up about how in the early days of Meta they had no money, so they were forced to focus. Then they turned on the money tree and had no reason not to split their focus.Jake [00:54:52]: But that dilutes your product. You get offshoots where you ask, “Is this the focus of the business?” If it's not core, it languishes. A lot of companies get in trouble when they split focus because they're fighting a multi-front war, not just externally but internally for alignment. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our purpose?Jake [00:55:24]: If you're Salesforce-built and mission-driven, you want to work on Salesforce. Heroku is off to the side. It's not core to the business. Getting resources, budget, focus, and alignment internally becomes hard. It was a matter of time.Swyx [00:56:06]: Kudos for them to call it out instead of leaving it unknown.Jake [00:56:12]: Their release was a little odd. They called it out, but they didn't say they were shutting it down. Behind the scenes, I think they issued messages to people saying they should close accounts and that they were going to deprecate and remove things over time.Jake [00:56:30]: It's crazy because some of my first deployment experiences were on Heroku. You start with dragging things into an FTP server, then you try to get a deploy working, and then it's Heroku. It was the on-ramp for us. But the wheel turns. New things emerge. We're happy to carry the torch for a lot of that. But we don't want to be the new Heroku. We want to be the way people build and deploy software, and ultimately the way people monetize software over time.Swyx [00:57:19]: It's still a big crown to be the new Heroku. There are 50 companies that fought for that.Jake [00:57:23]: Everybody is holding some portion of it. We're happy to support people and companies. The platform works differently. The game loop is similar, but we've been dogmatic about where these things are going: primitives, agents, fan-out. Some things fit; some workflows need to change. We have an approximation of Heroku pipelines with the environment system. It's exciting. We've got a ton of people we can support, and it's growing a lot.Temporal, Workflow Engines, and State MachinesSwyx [00:58:12]: I have one more technical question about Temporal. I've sold my shares. You're a power user and one of our earliest customers. I met you through Temporal. You built on Temporal. You have complaints. This may be the most neutral and informed conversation anyone will hear about Temporal without someone working at the company.Jake [00:58:39]: That's fair. I've used Temporal for almost 10 years because of Cadence at Uber.Swyx [00:58:52]: Give people a sense of what Cadence was at Uber.Jake [00:58:57]: Cadence was the precursor to Temporal. It powers trip actions, rides, when you rent a Jump bike or scooter or car. You're running workflows for a period of time and saying, “This ride will run indefinitely until it finishes.” You attach information: you paused in this zone, so add this charge to the bill. When you end the trip, the workflow is done. That experience was powered by Cadence at the time.Swyx [00:59:34]: I used to say it's like programming the entire user journey top-down as one function.Jake [00:59:39]: It's a powerful idea and important. It's also important for the next phase of the agentic journey. You want an agent to do a specific task, be complete or incomplete on that task, and move on to the next thing. You need a way to manage workflows dynamically.Jake [00:59:59]: Temporal was always great in theory, and great when you got it working the way you wanted in production. But it required you to model the entire journey in your head. If you didn't, you could cause issues where replaying the state of the workflow causes non-determinism.Swyx [01:00:25]: Because it works on deterministic workflow history.Jake [01:00:28]: Exactly. I describe it as a jet engine. If you know how to operate it and run it, it's great. But you can't hand it to people trying to build complicated things if they don't have the whole state in their head.Jake [01:00:48]: We run our whole deployment pipeline on top of it. That's a reasonably complicated workflow: pre-commit hooks, signaling, queuing, and all the rest. We ran into the same thing at Uber. As you express a large workflow, it gets more complicated, with more states in the state machine that you have to map back to the workflow.Swyx [01:01:15]: It's a lot of ifs.Jake [01:01:16]: Exactly. At Uber, we built a system for doing the state machine and testing it. We've started to build some of those things here because it's grown heavily. It's not quite love-hate. When it works well, it works super well. But if someone who doesn't have full context puts something into the system that invalidates state or causes non-determinism, or spins off a ton of activities, you have to keep track of underlying SRE knobs like activity slots. Those should scale with memory, vCPU, and so on. It becomes a bear to scale.Swyx [01:02:10]: You need a capable sysadmin running things behind the scenes. If you moved off, what would you do?Jake [01:02:19]: We'd build our own workflow engine. We have a few internally that we've worked on.Swyx [01:02:27]: This is one of those classes of things you typically wouldn't vibe code, but I'm wondering if you can.Jake [01:02:33]: I still don't think you should vibe code it. You still want to run decent tests to make sure it works.Swyx [01:02:39]: Timo didn't invent that from scratch either. There are libraries you can run. On top of that, it's just a state machine that you have to map out. Ultimately, you define the instructions you want and run them through a state machine.Jake [01:03:00]: It's very doable. Workflow stuff is interesting. Restate is doing neat stuff here.Swyx [01:03:10]: You're tied into JavaScript. Are you a JavaScript maxi?Jake [01:03:13]: Internally, we have TypeScript, Rust, and Go. We don't add more languages. Actually, we have a little C because we write BPF code and hooks. But those are the languages.Swyx [01:03:28]: Is this for sidecars?Jake [01:03:32]: No. It's for the networking stack, volumes, and things like that. We use TypeScript a lot because it powers the dashboard, but we're moving a lot of workflow stuff off the dashboard stack and into the infrastructure stack.Railpack, Nixpacks, and Content-Addressable FilesystemsSwyx [01:04:00]: Cool. Any other technical infrastructure stuff? Railpacks?Jake [01:04:07]: We built an engine for determining dependencies based on source code. It's called Railpack. We built the first version, Nixpacks, on top of Nix, and then we moved.Swyx [01:04:17]: People have been trying to get me to adopt Nix and NixOS for four years. Is it ever going to be a thing?Jake [01:04:23]: I don't know. We're excited about it, but it has pain points. Think of it as a stack of versioned binaries at specific slices in time. If you want version X and version Y, you bloat the package space, which blows up image size and makes real-world workloads difficult.Swyx [01:04:53]: But you content-address it and cache it. In theory, there are optimizations.Jake [01:05:00]: In theory, yes. But with a large enough user base and disparate enough machines, you run into a problem Meta described in the XFAAS paper, their internal serverless system. It becomes difficult at scale unless you break out specific runtimes.Jake [01:05:24]: We didn't want to do that because we wanted to truly allow you to deploy anything. That was our initial thing with Nix. But we've moved toward interesting work around content-addressable file systems that can lazy-load anything from any point and page it into memory.Swyx [01:05:48]: Amazing.Jake [01:05:49]: The future is very bright. It's crazy, and it's going to be nuts.Coding Agent Spend, Roadmaps, and Token ROISwyx [01:05:54]: Founder journey stuff?Alessio [01:05:56]: Your cloud usage: you tweeted you're going to spend $300K this month?Jake [01:06:01]: I think we got to $200K.Alessio [01:06:02]: Coding agents?Jake [01:06:03]: Yeah.Swyx [01:06:04]: Across the company?Alessio [01:06:05]: You only have 35 people, so I'm sure they're not all spending $10K a month. What's the distribution?Jake [01:06:10]: I think I'm at about $25K. We have power users all the way down. We came back from winter break, and I basically said, “If you're writing code by hand, you're doing this wrong.” The tools are good enough now that you can move extremely quickly. There are issues and pain points, but you should be reviewing the code you are writing instead of writing it by hand.Jake [01:06:40]: Architectural patterns matter more now than ever, but you shouldn't spend your time generating code you would write. If you know how to write it, ask the agent to write it and reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it yourself.Jake [01:06:58]: People misconstrue my propensity to push people toward agents as connected to our growth and some reliability bumps. They're not necessarily related. The tools are good enough to move extremely quickly and build things way larger than you could before.Jake [01:07:19]: To the earlier point about cooling data centers in space: I don't know. But with software, you can ask, “How would I build block storage from scratch? How would I do these things?” I have ideas because I have history and have read papers. Let me work them out and build massive test benches with thousands of tests, because those are now free to author. If you're not using AI systems to speed-run your roadmap and reconcile your existing system onto the future, you're missing a large point of what's happening.Alessio [01:08:12]: What's the path to spending $3 million a month? Is it bound by ideas and things customers can absorb?Jake [01:08:19]: For most companies, it's bound by deployment at this point. That's why we've seen a massive boom in users and companies, from Fortune 50s down, asking how to get developers to move faster. You'll probably hit your CFO before any technical limits because they'll look at the eye-watering amount of money spent on tokens. Inference costs have to come down, but we're inference constrained now. There will be price discovery around what makes sense for an org to adopt.Jake [01:09:06]: I think you'll end up with the F1 driver concept. If someone is really adept at these things, it makes sense to put them in a $3 million car. If they're not, it probably doesn't make sense. You'll take a few people and say, “You can drive the F1 car. We need to go in this direction. Figure out if it works and prototype it.”Jake [01:09:33]: We've done some of that and vastly accelerated our roadmap. We thought we'd ship something in a few years; now we can probably ship it in a few months because we validated it and don't have to build it incrementally. We can skip steps and move toward our vision.Alessio [01:09:58]: A lot of people are realizing the roadmap doesn't always have a business impact, so they say tokens are too expensive. But if your roadmap were built to make more money by the time you built it, you'd have token pricing for it, the same way you do with sales. You'd spend a billion dollars on sales if you knew you would get $2 billion of revenue.Jake [01:10:19]: Exactly. A naive way to measure this is the percentage of tokens that end up in production. If you can measure impact because those tokens end up in production, that's awesome. But the burden of proof will rise. Internally, we have a growing number of pull requests that haven't merged. The question becomes: how do you get this into production? It's about how quickly you can build and deploy software, which is exciting because that's our whole thing.The SDLC Shift: Prompt Requests, Feature Flags, and Safe RolloutsSwyx [01:10:56]: The SDLC is changing. One thesis is that the pull request is dying. It's going to be the prompt request. Beyond that, code review is also kind of dying if you have all the other systems in place. What else is changing about the SDLC?Jake [01:11:19]: The AISRE and the tools to make it happen. AISRE is pie-in-the-sky aspirational. What does it take to get an AISRE? What tools do you need to build?Swyx [01:11:32]: You should expose your tooling to customers at some point. The Central Station command center.Jake [01:11:39]: We have it for template maintainers. Template maintainers can deploy and maintain templates, and they get feedback. We're going to expose those things incrementally.Swyx [01:11:51]: Clustering around incidents. Everyone has a version of that, but I don't think anyone has solved it.Jake [01:11:56]: I won't say we've solved it internally, but it's gotten so good that we can see incidents forming pretty quickly. At some point, those will be things either someone else builds or we build. We've always built things purpose-built for us. If it makes sense to make it useful for users, monetize it, or turn that loop into a profit center instead of a cost center, we want to do that.Jake [01:12:28]: Pull request is definitely dying.Swyx [01:12:29]: Do you do first-party feature flagging and incremental rollout stuff?Jake [01:12:34]: We have a feature-flagging engine we built internally and will eventually roll out.Swyx [01:12:38]: I don't see it as a user. How come you didn't give us what you have?Jake [01:12:43]: We have to beta test it. We care a lot about the quality of the things. There's plenty we've used internally that doesn't make it all the way through the journey because it fails. It works for one service but not multiple services. We'd have to build it for multiple services and know that if we released it, we'd rebuild it again and again. Some things are worth that, but many inform the roadmap.Jake [01:13:18]: We don't want to dilute the experience by saying, “This works, but only for this service,” unless it's a core initiative. Over the next few months, we'll roll out things that work for a single service, then multiple services, then multiple services across the environment. You have to be deliberate. Otherwise you create broken disparate experiences and support load because people ask how to use the feature.Jake [01:13:52]: It's the earlier expansion and compaction pattern. You expand the company to get features, then compact and smooth them out so the experience is stellar. You told me in the hallway, “It's gotten so much better.” Internally we're saying, “This part really sucks. We need to make it significantly better.”Swyx [01:14:11]: I can attest to that over the last three years watching you build Railway. For listeners, feature flagging is a huge part of Uber culture. So much so that they have too many feature flags and another thing to remove feature flags. Facebook has Gatekeeper. Agents are going to need this. It's fundamental to incremental rollouts. OpenAI acquired Statsig. GPT-5 is routing and flagging through different models.Jake [01:14:56]: It's super important. If the software development lifecycle is going to change because we're doing things 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more concurrently, what becomes important at scale?Jake [01:15:16]: Before I started Railway, I built a feature-flagging product and tried to sell it. It was an easier version of LaunchDarkly. I ran into a problem: anyone small enough to adopt your technology doesn't care about feature flags, and anyone large enough to need feature flags needs so much scale that you have to build out all the infrastructure. I scrapped it.Jake [01:15:42]: But what is old is new again. Companies are trying to move quickly, but you can't YOLO a vibe-coded thing straight into production. You need to say, “Here's my blast radius, my impact, and I want to shadow it for these users.” Feature flags. You're going to need the tools larger companies built to maintain their structures. Everything gets compressed by 1,000x so everybody can build those structures quickly.Jake [01:16:07]: That's exactly where we are: compressing the software development lifecycle, then expanding it and adding more new things.Cattle, Pets, and Clonable InfrastructureSwyx [01:16:15]: Another term that comes to mind for newer developers is “cattle, not pets.” People treat production like a pet. It has a name. You baby it and keep it alive. With cattle, you can mass farm, roll out, portion parts out, and kill them.Jake [01:16:37]: I think that might change. You can move toward having pets as long as you have a cloning machine for your pets.Swyx [01:16:52]: Yeah.Jake [01:16:52]: If you can snapshot every single thing at every frame, it doesn't matter if something gets obliterated because you have a snapshot of it. The things we've built right now are designed to block changes from the hermetically sealed DevOps line. You have to write a Dockerfile because you nee

Why earning more money starts with healing your money story not pushing harder. In this episode, host Dielle Charon and money coach Gina Knox break down the mindset shifts that actually move business owners forward financially in 2026 including why panic kills sales, why "delusional" thinking might be your biggest asset, and why you don't actually need more money to feel financially safe. This is Part 3 of our 4-part series on fixing your sales and money in 2026. If you missed parts 1 and 2, go back and listen to those first — they set up the foundation for everything we cover here. 00:00 Intro + Small Business Money App update 01:23 Why money mindset is really about healing 02:35 Money story vs. money facts 06:00 The "I'm always winning" mindset shift 08:30 How Gina made $300K her quit-job year 10:10 "I'll cross that bridge when I get there" 11:10 The truth about "I need money NOW" 13:30 You don't actually need more money 14:00 The banquet table: every option on the table 17:30 How to actually work on money mindset 20:00 Radical responsibility (and why it's freeing) 22:40 Dielle's 100-point credit tank story 26:40 Sell even when your business isn't perfect 29:30 Why detachment makes you better at business 33:30 The June 1st Coach-a-thon + how to join Connect With Gina Knox:Instagram: instagram.com/ginaknox Email: info@ginaknox.com For the 23% is the women of color business and entrepreneurship podcast hosted by multi-million-dollar entrepreneur Dielle Charon. Each week you'll learn how to grow your sales, money, and freedom so we can increase the 23% of business owners who are women of color. Website: forthe23percent.com Instagram: @forthe23percent Membership: forthe23percent.com/membership

In this deeply honest conversation, Melissa sits down with entrepreneur, CPA, and author Mel Abraham to talk about the connection between grief, wealth, purpose, resilience, and the moments that actually define a meaningful life. What starts as a conversation about money quickly becomes something much deeper. Mel shares the life-changing moments that completely reshaped his perspective—from becoming a single father while $300,000 in debt… to surviving cancer… to rebuilding after losing millions in a Ponzi scheme. Together, Melissa and Mel unpack the emotional side of wealth, the grief hidden inside identity shifts, and why true richness has far more to do with moments than money. This episode is for anyone navigating loss, rebuilding after adversity, questioning the path they're on, or trying to create a life that feels aligned instead of performative. Topics Discussed: • Why most people don't actually have a “money problem” • The difference between leaving a legacy vs living one • Work-life harmony vs work-life balance • How grief reshapes identity and priorities • Why wealth creation is mostly behavioral • Healing through purpose after loss and adversity • Rebuilding after financial betrayal and hardship • The power of intentional living and choosing what matters HIGHLIGHTS: 00:00 – Why making more money alone will never create freedom 01:27 – Mel explains the “money machine” concept 02:16 – Entrepreneurs stuck on the treadmill of earning 03:51 – Becoming a single dad while $300K in debt 05:32 – The drawing from his son that changed everything 06:35 – Why work-life balance doesn't work long term 06:40 – The concept of work-life harmony 09:41 – “You don't want to leave a legacy. You want to live one.” 10:14 – What legacy actually means 11:16 – How intentional scheduling changed his relationship with his son 13:22 – Melissa shares her perspective on grief beyond death 14:38 – Identity loss, reinvention, and entrepreneurship 15:22 – Mel's cancer diagnosis and everything changing overnight 17:20 – The dangerous spiral of asking “Why me?” 17:44 – “What if cancer happened because of what you were meant to do?” 18:50 – How cancer led Mel to write his book and serve others 19:32 – Finding meaning inside devastating experiences 20:20 – Melissa shares the moment that transformed her grief into purpose 21:25 – Living with the fear of cancer recurrence 22:48 – Why moments matter more than certainty 23:00 – Losing his mother and the regret she carried 24:15 – Wealth vs richness in life 26:50 – Losing millions in a Ponzi scheme 28:18 – Ignoring intuition and emotional financial decisions 30:29 – The moment he realized his son was watching how he handled adversity 31:32 – Rebuilding after betrayal and financial devastation 32:47 – Melissa reflects on how children become mirrors and teachers 35:02 – Every hardship becomes a choice point 36:24 – Focusing only on what you can control 39:18 – The biggest mistakes people make financially 40:13 – Why “money problems” are actually behavioral problems 41:33 – Why no amount is too small to start building wealth 42:42 – The power of getting in the game financially 43:16 – Final reflections on empowerment, grief, and choice 44:07 – Where to connect with Mel Abraham If this conversation resonated with you, make sure to like, subscribe, and share it with someone who needs this reminder: You are not powerless. Your pain does not disqualify you from building a meaningful, rich, and intentional life.

Larry Wheels Wife Left His WEIRD Situationship & $300K Bentley | Aba Had A 3rd Woman Pregnant? by Greg Adams

In this episode, I sat down with Janae Young, founder and CEO of Young College Prep, who started her first business at just 15 years old, tutoring classmates out of her school library in Wilmington, North Carolina. By the time she graduated high school, she had a team of eight tutors. By the time she graduated from Stanford, she had hit $300K in annual revenue. And by 2025, she crossed her first million.But Janae's path was anything but linear. COVID wiped out the SAT/ACT prep market practically overnight, and her company went into negative profit. She was a freshman in college, going through a breakup, studying computer science remotely and somehow she held on. What she shares in this episode about staying stubborn in the quiet moments, investing $25K in herself as a 19-year-old college student, and pivoting her business model to serve parents instead of students is the kind of transparency you don't often hear.Janae also opens up about navigating the college admissions landscape in a post-affirmative action era, why she believes the college application process is a metaphor for life, and how she's helping students of color tell their stories powerfully. If you're an entrepreneur in a side hustle chapter or a parent thinking about your kid's future this one is for you.Main TakeawaysInvest in yourself before you feel ready: Janae wired $25K to a mastermind as a 19-year-old college student with almost nothing left in her account and that bet changed everything.Know who actually holds the decision and the wallet: When Janae shifted her focus from students to parents, her revenue took off.Real urgency comes from the problem, not just the deadline: Make your client deeply aware of what inaction is costing them for Janae's audience, that's potentially $100K+ in lost merit scholarships.Selling is just teaching: When you see yourself as an educator first, the "sleazy" feeling disappears and you become a genuine guide.Highlights Include(0:38) Janae started her tutoring business at 15 because she was too young to work at Chick-fil-A(3:26) Hiring and firing her first employee at 16 -- including a tutor who poached a client and cited contract law to get away with it(11:12) How COVID wiped out the SAT/ACT market overnight and sent her business into negative profit(22:43) Screen recording a webinar, then closing 4 out of 5 people at $500 the very next night(27:28) Wiring $25K to a mastermind at 19 -- and the phone call her mom got from the bank(31:21) Why shifting her target from students to parents changed her revenue trajectory(36:27) How she structured her Stanford schedule to be a student Mon-Wed and a CEO Thu-Fri(39:30) Breaking down her two offers: Ivy League Score ($2,500) and Ivy League Acceptance ($12K)(51:00) Her organic and paid marketing mix: podcast, ads, and live and evergreen webinar funnels(1:03:46) Her response to the affirmative action ruling and how she helps students of color own their storyLinks Mentioned in This EpisodeYoung College Prep website: janaetutoring.comStacey Boehman -- 2K for 2K program: staceyboehman.com/2kfor2kDielle Charon -- Six Figure Liberation mastermind (formerly called Sales Queen): diellecharon.comClaire Pelitro (Claire Pels) -- Get Paid Marketing: clairepells.comAmy Porterfield -- amyporterfield.comBrooke Castillo -- The Life Coach School: thelifecoachschool.comWatch & ListenListen to the Side Hustle Pro podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you stream podcasts. Watch full video episodes on the Side Hustle Pro YouTube channel.Social MediaInstagram: @JanaeTutoringFacebook: @JanaeTutoringPodcast: The Get Accepted Podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.