🏠 CEOs should not be nice

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GM! It’s Brett again. This is the paradox of startups every founder needs to know: many of the most successful companies started out as absolutely terrible ideas from inexperienced people.

The most elite investors know this, which is why many have been accused of being as sycophantic as ChatGPT in this South Park clip.

The truth is, the market knows better than any person when it comes to business.

So the trick is to ignore the haters & surround yourself with “yes” people that push you forward, while also listening to customers and market signals and adapting quickly to their feedback.

Anyway let’s get to it.

🚀 PLAYBOOK: Get your pre-call brief, on autopilot

Here’s a simple but powerful automation you can build in under 10 minutes using n8n:

Trigger on Cal

• Add a LinkedIn URL field on your booking form (optional is fine).

• Set a webhook on new booking.

• Pull a test payload to map attendee name, email, time, notes.

Log to CRM (Airtable or yours)

• Add/update a Contact and Appointment record for each booking.

• Use the Cal booking ID to keep everything linked correctly.

• Keep fields like meeting type, source, and owner for later.

Enrich the Lead (LinkedIn / Clay / Bright Data)

• If LinkedIn URL exists → scrape headline, role, company, and 5–10 recent posts.

• No URL? Fallback to company site/about. You can also plug in a tool like Clay to pull extra firmographic data (funding, tech stack, team size, etc.).

• Store enrichment on a Lead Enrichment table/section.

Generate a Meeting Brief (LLM)

• Feed booking + enrichment to the AI node.

• Add your own context: who you are, what your company does, your outlook for these kinds of meetings.

• Ask for:

  • TL;DR on the person/company

  • Recent topics they care about

  • Draft agenda + meeting goal

  • 5 tailored openers + 6 discovery Qs

  • Likely objections + short rebuttals

  • Links (profile, site, CRM record), etc.

Send the Brief to Yourself (Gmail)

• Email the brief to the meeting host/you.

• Body: the one-pager brief; attach raw enrichment if useful.

Write Back to CRM

• Save the generated brief to the appointment record.

• Add a flag so your team can filter upcoming calls with prep.

Review & Go

• Skim your inbox before the call, get instant context, and walk in sharp.

• At scale, this saves hours of pre-call research and Googling.

That’s it: trigger → log → enrich → brief → send → write-back. You can expand later with Slack DMs, high-priority branches, or deeper Clay enrichments.

Reference template: step-by-step workflow here.

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🚫 CEOs Should Not Be Nice

I learned this lesson the hard way at my last company.

I was nice. Too nice.
I gave positive feedback to everyone. Second, third, fourth chances. Smiled through bad performance. Tried to “keep morale up.”

And exactly as Marc Andreessen says, our standards slipped.
Disorganization. Confusion. Resentment. Bad user experience. Bad everything.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: being “nice” as a CEO doesn’t make employees happy. It makes them miserable. There was a study that showed employees are happiest when they have the hardest managers and most unhappy when their managers are pushovers.

Steve Jobs is the perfect example. He was a jerk. He yelled. He pushed. He wasn’t the easiest guy to work for, but he was the best guy to work for. Apple wouldn’t have built what it did if he was just “nice.”

And you know why, because Jobs set the bar sky-high and never let anyone get away with “good enough.”

That’s what being a jerk actually means:

• Holding people accountable.

• Firing immediately if they fail.

• Using emotion to drive outcomes.

• Saying exactly what’s on your mind.

It’s not cruelty for its own sake. It’s love for the craft. Passion for the product. Caring enough to demand the best.

When I started my new company, I made a decision: I won’t be “nice” anymore. I’ll be fair. I’ll be clear. I’ll hold the line.

Because you can build a mediocre company with unhappy employees being nice. But if you want to build something great, with happy employees who look back and say “that was the best work of my life”, you can’t be nice.

The job isn’t to be liked. The job is to build something worth the pain.

🧠 ON MY MIND

🛠️ Shram.ai is your AI to-do list that writes itself!

📌 Modelbusters
a16z breaks down modelbusters: companies that blow past every financial model by reinventing markets, unlocking hidden TAM, and compounding faster than anyone expects. A no-BS blueprint for spotting and building the next generation of AI winners.

🏃‍♀️ What breaking the 4-min mile taught us about the limits of conventional thinking
It showed that seemingly impossible barriers are often mental, and shattering them can inspire others to rethink their limits

❓ Which VCs Open Cold Emails?

👾 Convolutional Network Demo from 1989
This is a demo of "LeNet 1", the first convolutional network that could recognize handwritten digits with good speed and accuracy.

😳 How Luis von Ahn made Duolingo so addictive (The $10B app formula)

😳 How this 25yo built a $675M legal AI startup (with no legal experience)

👀 The Right Kind of Stubborn (Paul Graham)

💯 The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps (a16z)

😬 RAG is Dead, Context Engineering is King
What actually matters in vector databases in 2025, why “modern search for AI” is different, and how to ship systems that don’t rot as context grows.

🎯 THE 80 / 20

Simple tricks to get a ton of value with minimal effort for work and life.

ChatGPT = Your CXOs
Spin up separate chats titled “CTO,” “CMO,” “CFO,” “Exec Coach.” Then talk to each one like they are that person.

Pre-Meeting Reset (2 minutes)
Before every call, jot down: “What outcome do I want?” & “What’s my one key point?”
That 120-second prep makes you sharper than 90% of people walking in cold.

Only Handle It Once
If something takes <5 minutes, don’t save it. Don’t star it. Don’t “get back to it later.” Just do it. Your future self will thank you.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

• Google Translate takes on Duolingo with new language learning capabilities.

• Microsoft’s complicated partnership with OpenAI is adding a new twist as it releases AI models that will compete with GPT-5, and all the rest.

• Anthropic’s new report says ‘Vibe-hacking’ is now a top AI threat.

• Anthropic launches a Claude AI agent that lives in Chrome.

• Google Gemini’s AI image model gets a ‘bananas’ upgrade.

• xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI for colluding.

• Media companies will get paid out of a $42.5M pool when their articles are used by Perplexity.

• Framer raised $100M Series D at a $2B valuation.

• Rillet raised $70M Series B from a16z and ICONIQ.

• AI stethoscope can detect major heart conditions in 15 seconds.

• World’s first 1-step method that turns plastic into fuel at 95% efficiency

😂 FROM THE FEED

🤝 COMMUNITY POLL

Last week’s poll:

Meetings eat the calendar. How do you actually win back hours each week?

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Move all updates async (Loom/Notion/Slack)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Enforce 15-min meeting cap
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Hire an EA to run scheduling + follow-ups
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Cancel recurring meetings until proven essential
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Something else (Please comment)

Homescreen is a collaboration between Micro and Launch House Ventures

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LHV is a community-driven, early-stage venture fund backing ambitious founders at the earliest stages.

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