🏠 Why Marc Andreessen Gave Up Freedom for Structure

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GM! It’s Brett again. An AI startup just sent me this video their full-time filmmaker made. No branding. No product demo. Not even about AI. Just pure dadaist gold.

It got me thinking about what’s coming in startup video marketing:

1. Video will become a core competency, by Series A, teams will have full-time filmmakers.

2. Brand films will matter as much as product demos, and they’ll get very weird to stand out.

3. Founders will be the influencers, people connect with people, not faceless brands.

4. SF is turning into the mecca for commercial video, 1000s of startups, 1000s of videos.

Anyway, onto this week’s edition. I read your comments on the last edition of Homescreen and I’m making amends. Still experimenting, would love your feedback again.

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🚀 PLAYBOOK: Auto-Classify Emails and Draft Replies with AI

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

1. Trigger on Gmail

   • Set up a Gmail trigger for any kind of email.

   • Choose how often it pulls emails (e.g. every minute).

   • Fetch a test email to map data like sender, subject, and body.

2. Classify Emails

   • Use a text classifier to split emails into categories.

   • Like classify emails about pricing, AI info, or next steps.

   • Use ChatGPT to power the classification.

3. Label Important Emails

   • For leads, add a Gmail label (e.g. “Important”).

   • This keeps your inbox clean and prioritized.

4. Generate Draft Responses

   • Pass the email body into an LLM chain with a system prompt that defines:

     • Add in your writing style and make it sound like you.

     • Use FAQs (pricing, implementation time, etc.).

   • It will create a draft reply in your Gmail thread (not a random draft floating elsewhere).

5. Review & Send

   • Open Gmail, check the draft, and hit send.

   • At scale, this saves hours of reading + writing emails.

That’s it: classification → labeling → response drafting. You can expand later with more categories, high-priority branches, or even auto-scheduling calls.

Here’s a full step‑by‑step video tutorial.

🔦 SPOTLIGHT

Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Playbook (Then vs. Now)

Marc Andreessen’s 2007 blog post on productivity became cult-classic productivity porn. 13 years later, in 2020, he admitted he’d done a complete 180.

Here’s the before → after:

2007 Marc: Chaos = Freedom

Back then, Marc swore by not keeping a schedule.
His rule: No meetings. No appointments. No commitments.

• Want to code all day? Do it.

• Want to read all day? Do it.

• Want to procrastinate on one thing and accidentally get 10 other things done? Perfect.

He swore by:

• Three lists only: To-Do, Watch, Later.

• Index cards: Write 3–5 tasks before bed. Do just those the next day.

• The Anti-To-Do List: Write down everything you actually do, get the dopamine hit.

• Structured procrastination: Avoid the big scary task by crushing smaller tasks.

• Email twice a day, max: Outside those windows, keep the inbox closed and kill notifications so your brain stays in flow.

• Strategic incompetence: Be bad at things you don’t want to get asked to do.

His whole ethos: strip away structure → maximize flow → focus on what matters.

2020 Marc: Structure = Survival

Marc admits he lives by his calendar. Literally everything goes in there: sleep, free time, reading.

Why the flip?

• A16z = constant incoming chaos (founders, boards, deals, markets).

• The firm promises “first-class business in a first-class way.” That means no dropped balls.

• Respect = timely responses. Structure became non-negotiable.

His evolved playbook:

• Programmed days: Monday = partner marathons, Tue–Thu = boards/founders, Friday = wrap.

• Open space matters: No back-to-back 30-min blocks. Need slack to think + react.

• Delegation + DRIs: Every project has one person responsible. If it’s Marc → it’s on the calendar. If not → he just tracks.

• Six-month resets: When overloaded, he sits down, rewrites his personal plan, and raises the bar on what gets a “yes.”

• Process > outcome: VC takes 10 years to show results. Focus is on inputs, not scoreboard watching.

• Reading: Barbell style → either “up to the minute” (COVID science, new tech) or “timeless” (classic works). Skips the middle. Reads a dozen books at once, only finishing the most interesting.

Takeaway

2007 Marc chased freedom. 2020 Marc embraced structure.

🧠 ON MY MIND

💥 YC’s Sales Playbook for Founders

🔖 We must build AI for people; not to be a person (Mustafa Suleyman)

🕹️ GPT-5 prompting guide

‼️ 700+ expertly crafted prompts for your business (HubSpot)

😳 Tomasz Tunguz shares his terminal-based system for transforming podcasts into actionable insights and blog-worthy content

👀 What To Do More (And Less) Of - John Cutler

🫡 7 mental models Jeff Bezos uses to run Amazon

🛠️ Locofy turns your Figma designs into production-ready frontend code

⛓️‍💥 Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL
A way for LLMs to natively simulate multi-agent collaboration without heavy prompt engineering

🎯 THE 80 / 20

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

One-click calendar from email
Use email in an AI browser (e.g., Comet): type “Book this as a meeting and invite everyone in the thread.” It detects attendees, pulls the proposed time, adds a title/agenda, and sends the invite.

Investor “Warm Touch”
Once a quarter, send a short no-ask update to all investors who passed. 2–3 wins, 1 milestone ahead, done. Builds trust without begging.

The 3-browser system
Browser 1: pure work
Browser 2: research/learning/side project
Browser 3: personal life/entertainment
(Can even be different desktops or browser profiles)

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

• Apple is using Gemini for Siri!

• YouTube secretly used AI to edit people's videos.

• Elon says Grok 5 has a shot at being true AGI.

• You can now talk to Google Photos to make your edits.

• OpenAI chairman reveals AI erodes his identity as a programmer.

• Elon asked Zuck to join xAI bid to buy OpenAI.

• Artificial sweeteners could soon taste just like sugar.

• Your brain works overtime at night to burn fat and prevent sugar crashes.

• Raise: Garage, a YC-backed marketplace for firefighting and public safety equipment, raised $13.5M in a Series A round to expand its nationwide platform helping communities buy and sell mission-critical gear.

• 2 Harvard dropouts dropped “always-on” AI glasses that record every convo & whisper answers in your ear, basically infinite memory, zero privacy.

😂 FROM THE FEED

🤝 COMMUNITY POLL

Last week’s poll:

Which inbox monster do you start your day with?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Slack pings (~25%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Email pileup (~37.5%)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Calendar invites (~25%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Something else entirely (~12.5%)

Clearly, waking up to a hot stack of emails is the one.

Homescreen is a collaboration between Micro and Launch House Ventures

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.

REACH 40K+ FOUNDERS, INVESTORS & OPERATORS

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