🏠 Nathan Barry on how AI changed the way he creates

GM! It’s Brett. Competition is no longer optional. Thousands apply to the same jobs. Hundreds of founders pitch the same VCs. Standing out by going deeper worked once. I’m not sure it does anymore.

Marc Andreessen has a sharp take here: in the age of AI, he’s betting on people who go broad.

That’s been my entire career. I’ve never been a designer, marketer, or coder - but I do all of these things. And that’s where leverage lives.

One of the most interesting “quiet shifts” I’ve seen in creator workflows lately came from Nathan Barry.

Not hype. Not tools-for-the-sake-of-tools. Just how AI actually shows up in daily work.

Here’s how his creator workflow has changed because of AI:

The pattern here is important: AI isn’t replacing creativity. It’s removing friction between thinking and shipping.

The main reason most founders fail isn’t capital, competition, or timing.

It’s much simpler, they don’t work hard enough.

Everyone loves to quote Elon’s advice - “you need to work super hard” - but almost no one actually understands what hard means.

Hard doesn’t mean answering emails late.
Hard doesn’t mean a busy calendar.
Hard doesn’t mean posting about hustle on X.

Hard means doing the thing you could avoid… every single day… without negotiating with yourself.

The founders who are guaranteed to fail are the ones who spend more energy justifying why they shouldn’t work than actually working.
The “but there are successful people with work-life balance” crowd.
The optimization-before-traction crowd.
The boundary-setting-before-anything-exists crowd.

No, you don’t need to sleep on the office floor or live an extreme lifestyle. That’s not the point.

The point is being willing to do whatever it takes when it matters.

And here’s the part people miss: you have to love it.

I probably worked ~90 hours last week. But it didn’t feel like sacrifice. I would’ve done it even if I didn’t have to. Because it was fun. Because I was obsessed. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about the problems.

Call it toxic workaholism, or introverted obsession with gadgets and AI tools or whatever you want - it works.

The real irony is that founders who force themselves to work that hard on things they don’t enjoy also fail - just slower - because burnout eventually wins.

Hard work isn’t the goal.

Enjoying the work so much that “hard” stops mattering is.

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 right.

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~60%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~40%)

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”