🏠 Reid Hoffman’s AI, non-AI & hardware productivity stack

GM! It’s Brett. If you’re thinking about starting a company, you need to watch this clip from Elon.

He nails the part nobody prepares you for: you spend most of your time focused on what’s going wrong, and half the time you can’t tell if you’re doing anything right at all.

What he doesn’t say is the real twist - the highest highs usually show up hours or days after the lowest lows.

If you’re built for that emotional whiplash, startups might actually be for you.

Reid just shared his full productivity setup, and it’s a clear look at how high-output people actually work day to day.

His AI stack:
Reid runs a personal “AI swarm” - a workflow that routes every query across multiple models (ChatGPT variants, Claude, Replit’s coding models) and picks the best one for the task.

It’s basically an internal meta-agent that self-optimizes. He uses ChatGPT voice mode daily for learning and dictation, and coding models to spin up prototypes fast. This is the future: multi-model orchestration instead of single-model dependency.

His non-AI stack:
Even one of the most AI-native founders alive still uses Evernote and OneNote. Why? Context anchoring. Evernote for long, narrative meeting notes. OneNote for structured, project-based work.

The lesson: tools don’t need to be “new”; they need to match the mental mode of the task.

His hardware stack:
Dual monitors at home for parallel thinking. Multiple laptops on the road to recreate that environment.

If you want the full breakdown, check out Reid’s original post here.

The week of December 15th sees nearly DOUBLE the average number of funding rounds close because VCs want to wrap things up so they can head out for the holidays.

But this isn’t really about December. It hints at a classic fundraising strategy that closes the biggest rounds even in slower weeks: CREATE URGENCY.

VCs like to drag their feet - they’re biased to waiting and collecting more data on you. In the worst fundraises I ran, I had VCs literally drag out conversations months only to ghost me entirely. Only a few gave me a lukewarm yes or no.

This is death for startups.

The way to avoid it is to create urgency.

Few ways to do that -

Human-like voice agents are moving from pilot to production. In Deepgram’s 2025 State of Voice AI Report, created with Opus Research, we surveyed 400 senior leaders across North America - many from $100M+ enterprises - to map what’s real and what’s next.

The data is clear:

See where you stand against your peers, learn what separates leaders from laggards, and get practical guidance for deploying human-like agents in 2025.

Download the Report

There’s no hack better than this right now 😅

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

🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~36%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Nope (~64%)

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”