True North: Burn the tokens, and the Wabi Sabi of it all
Signal
No matter how big you are, it's day zero. At Upfront Summit, Handshake's Garrett Lord talked about how he went founder-mode in December 2024. In months, he scaled Handshake AI from zero to the high hundreds millions, surpassing the original Handshake business. Handshake AI is on track to hit $1B+ ARR this year. True has believed in Garrett, Scott, and Ben from day one.
Burn the tokens. Two camps: invest in AI skills vs. throw tokens at the problem. But the real split is architectrual — expensive reasoning tokens that do the thinking, and cheap commodity tokens you burn through without blinking.
$200–$300/dev/day in token spend. If your team is hitting this, they're drinking radioactive Gatorade. It's a signal of both ambition and architecture.
“Your token spend is your team's VO2 max — it's the clearest proxy for how much leverage your engineers actually have.”
— Sam Ramji, Sailplane (True portfolio company)
The Wabi Sabi of it all. When everything is AI-generated, the human stuff will shine even brighter. We will seek out Wabi Sabi. Can you find the human typos throughout this newsletter?
True Founders Building
Currently managing 1000+ companies autnomously and fundraising on its own.
One-shots full native apps for iPhone, iPad, Watch, TV, and Vision Pro — no Xcode required. Hit #1 on Product Hunt.
Justin and team built a 3-person software factory where no humans write or review code.
“Those of us building software factories must practice a deliberate naivete: finding and removing the habits, conventions, and constraints of Software 1.0.”
Open Tabs
Ben Thompson × John Collison on the Cheeky Pint
Are public markets wrong about SaaS being dead?
Stratechery
AI is now a competitive game where players are deftly navigating model access, fine-tuning, and agent orchestration to win.
TikTok
Agent-O-Rama and What “Agent-Native” Really Means
The Rama model maps well to what agents need — declarative intent plus a runtime that handles the messy distributed stuff.
GitHub