🏠 Marc Andreessen says AI is the world’s best coach, but...

GM! It’s Brett. Before we get into today’s piece, just wanted to wish you a Happy New Year.

Hoping 2026 is full of great work, progress, and wins that actually matter.

Marc said it recently and it sounds obvious, but almost no one actually does it: if you prompt AI the right way, it becomes the world’s best coach, advisor, and thinking partner.

That framing matters.

A founder friend once told me, “I talk to ChatGPT more than my cofounders.”
At first it sounded ridiculous. Then it started to make sense.

Most founders don’t lack tools, they lack someone to think with. Someone who can look at a messy situation, absorb context, and push back without ego or fatigue.

That’s when I started treating ChatGPT less like a tool and more like the cofounders I don’t have.

I set up separate ChatGPT projects for a CTO, CMO, CFO, and an executive coach.

I give them real inputs - strategy docs, drafts, numbers, constraints. Then ask them to critique, not comply. What’s missing. What’s weak. What assumptions are wrong. What the best-in-the-world version of this would look like.

The shift was simple but important. Instead of asking AI to do things, I started asking it to challenge things.

As Marc says, the most powerful prompts aren’t tactical, they’re reflective.
Questions like: What would a great operator do differently here?
Or: If I had to achieve the same result with one-tenth the resources, what would change?

Marc also points out a meta-prompt almost no one uses: What questions should I be asking right now?

That’s where AI stops being a tool and starts becoming leverage. Not because it replaces people, but because it upgrades how you think when you’re building alone.

This is the best advice in business but most people hear that and think it’s super easy, but it’s not. The hard part is the love, not the number.

Early on, you’ll get plenty of encouragement. Friends saying “looks great.” Family sharing your launch post. Peers being polite. Analysts nodding along.

None of that counts.

Love is different.

Love is when someone tweets about your product without tagging you, a customer introduces you to three other customers, when someone asks how they can invest before you’ve even thought about fundraising, when you stop explaining what you do because people already know, etc.

That kind of love only shows up when what you’re building actually matters to someone’s life or work. When it saves them time. Makes them money. Reduces stress. Gives them leverage.

This is why chasing vanity metrics early is such a trap. You can get thousands of users who mildly like you and still be nowhere. Or you can have 27 people who would be genuinely upset if your product disappeared - and be very close to something real.

Those first 100 people don’t come from growth hacks, they come from obsession, talking to users, fixing unsexy problems and showing up again and again.

In 1999, the S&P 500 peaked. Then it took 14 years to gradually recover by 2013.

Today? Goldman Sachs sounds crazy forecasting 3% returns for 2024 to 2034.

But we’re currently seeing the highest price for the S&P 500 compared to earnings since the dot-com boom.

So, maybe that’s why they’re not alone; Vanguard projects about 5%.

In fact, now just about everything seems priced near all time highs. Equities, gold, crypto, etc.

But billionaires have long diversified a slice of their portfolios with one asset class that is poised to rebound.

It’s post war and contemporary art.

Sounds crazy, but over 70,000 investors have followed suit since 2019—with Masterworks.

You can invest in shares of artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

24 exits later, results speak for themselves: net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.*

My subscribers can skip the waitlist.

Skip waitlist

_{*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.}

Last week’s poll: If you guessed AI-generated… you were wrong.

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~52%)

🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~48%)

Here’s the original.

Micro is a CRM that doesn’t feel like homework and an email client that knows what matters. Simply put, it’s an all-in-one productivity tool that organizes itself so you don’t have to.

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

If you’re building tools that help founders, investors and other professionals who want to be 100x more productive with 100x less work, and you’re interested in advertising with us, send an email over to [email protected] with the subject “Homescreen Ads”