At 15 I trained my first machine learning model and landed an internship at a U.S. company.
At 16 I launched my first startup and promptly ran it into the ground.
I learned more from that failure.

At 17 I launched Pleep, an AI sales rep that lets any business owner integrate AI into their sales workflow in under five minutes. Four months later I quit my job to work on it full time.

Why bother? I kept asking myself: Why isn t there an AI sales monopoly yet? My take: because most competitors deliver AI consultants that talk like robots and kill revenue.
We focused on building a real rep that:

• Doesn t ask you to prompt or pick an LLM you just tell us about your business and we do the rest.

• Talks like your top salesperson, not a bot.

• Books meetings and pushes data back into your CRM.

Every metric can be improved. Every screen can convert better. Every flow can be 5% more efficient.

But lately I ve been wondering, at what point does optimization start subtracting from the soul of a product?

When do smoother funnels make things feel flatter?

Some of my favorite products aren t perfect. They re a little weird. A little slow. A little human.

At 15 I trained my first machine learning model and landed an internship at a U.S. company.
At 16 I launched my first startup and promptly ran it into the ground.
I learned more from that failure.

At 17 I launched Pleep, an AI sales rep that lets any business owner integrate AI into their sales workflow in under five minutes. Four months later I quit my job to work on it full time.

Why bother? I kept asking myself: Why isn t there an AI sales monopoly yet? My take: because most competitors deliver AI consultants that talk like robots and kill revenue.
We focused on building a real rep that:

• Doesn t ask you to prompt or pick an LLM you just tell us about your business and we do the rest.

• Talks like your top salesperson, not a bot.

• Books meetings and pushes data back into your CRM.

Hey, guys!

Exciting news:

Hey everyone

We ve just shipped the biggest update since our initial release. The dashboard has been completely refreshed. It s faster, more stable, and comes with new features like Dashboard, Feed, and Mark as Read.

I don't know what it is, but I feel like everyone was fed up with these courses a year ago (I have to admit that I was also thinking about creating one, but at this time, everyone was profiled as a "marketing guru").

When I thought it was over... ONE BIG SURPRISE... it is not, and some guys on X (called App Mafia) dropped one worth $997.

I wrote last week about how we re building Ting on two axes: one to get attention, the other to build the product.

On attention, we re doing pretty well in 3-weeks:

• 1k on the waitlist.

• 200 people have joined meetings booked by Ting already.

• 375 invites sent out so far...

I spend a lot more time on PH at the moment to see what indepedent makers are spending their time on. I've noticed some patterns and also want to share a little bit about my journey at South Park Commons. Most startup stories begin at zero when there s already a team, an idea, maybe even a prototype. But at South Park Commons (SPC), the philosophy is different: people gather in the -1 to 0 stage. That liminal space where you don t yet know what you re building or even if you should build at all. It s a place for exploration, experimentation, and being brutally honest about what s working and what s not.

A hallmark of SPC is how often industry leaders drop by to share what they ve learned in the wild. Recently, I was in a small chat with Tyler Payne former Google and LinkedIn AI lead, startup builder, who has spent the last decade helping teams actually ship real-world ML systems. We're always talking about what's being launched at SPC.

According to Neil Patel's data about influencer marketing, newsletter/email is the most effective channel when it comes to ROI (attached infographics; source)

But not so many influencers own newsletters; in most cases, only social media channels.

UTCP is a plug-in protocol that lets apps call tools the same way, whether they re HTTP APIs, CLIs, or other transports. Version 1.0.0 brings a lean core, protocol plugins, and a cleaner config so teams can scale tool usage without wrestling with glue code.

Hey PH

I spent last month testing some assumptions like: founders want to meet others in-person. These assumptions failed as it's not as simple as that. There are some intricacies.

Well, I think will come back to the original asusmption that sort of worked. People liked being on the map, sharing their profile, and getting discovered.

ICYMI: OpenAI posted a cryptic tweet yesterday, announcing a livestream for today at 10am PT. The cryptic part? They swapped the S for a 5 , which, of course, set off a wave of GPT-5 speculation. But this is OpenAI, and at this point, GPT-5 rumors feel like a monthly tradition.

What do you think it is?

Lately there s been a growing wave of skepticism around VCs, Y Combinator, and accelerators in general. And to be fair: I get it.

We now live in an age where almost everything you need to learn can be found online. The gatekeepers are fewer, the knowledge is everywhere, and solo builders have never been more empowered.