Adam S.

My life thesis: execution > strategy. Compounding FTW. I'm an optimistic skeptic. Curiosity is the most important quality in life.

I enjoy pattern matching and read widely. The opportunity to learn every day is a gift. Time is precious. The ability to improve what and where I focus and delegate the rest is ideal. 

I [of course] love my family and friends. I believe I am a logical, thoughtful adult and therefore accept my choices. I am content and therefore I have won.

Founder and CEO @Chore. We are a founder's back-office (HR, finance, compliance, equity) operations team. Back-office operations are an undifferentiated tax on success. Focusing on your superpower enables success. Chore handles the rest (i.e. we specialize in ops so you never have to) so you can achieve your dreams. 

Host of the Entrepreneurial Excellence podcast. I dive deep with multi time founders about their key decisions, actions, hires, drivers and more that they use to achieve "excellence." 

General Partner at the Autopilot Fund. We invest in early stage startups. We love obsessed founders who have a history of breaking through walls. I have invested in over 200 startups across multiple funds. 14 are unicorns (8 from seed).

In previous lives, I founded 3 other companies, been a product leader on a big co API team, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Chief Operating Officer (COO), and do-it-all janitor. 

I enjoy building great teams, processes, and stories that unify a company around a shared mission. Helping others build successful businesses brings me joy. More successful startups = a better, more dynamic world.

People describe me as energetic, positive, creative, detailed and optimistic. I enjoy rational, logical, data driven debate built on mutual trust and respect. I'm not an engineer but people view me as "technical" and have built companies with the brightest PhDs and brilliant engineers. The best compliment I received was "you ask great questions."

Honesty, trust, fun, a sense of urgency and mission are what I look for in colleagues and places I work. Passion about my product, my company and my team is what drives me. I work hard and enjoy being surrounded by people who do the same. 

"Leave the world (and your business) better than when you arrived..."
"The greatest risk is not taking one!"

Always curious and learning. Subscribe to Entrepreneurial Excellence to learn.

General Partner

The Autopilot Fund focuses on early-stage companies that serve and accelerate how companies operate. 

More about us: https://autopilot.fund/

Operations span various “departments”: could be in engineering, operations, sales, finance, product, customer success… the questions we ask ourselves are:

1. Is this a founding team so capable that others should be afraid to go against them?
2. Do they understand the problem better than anyone, and have special “founder-market” fit?
3. Will they rest until they have dragged the world kicking & screaming into their vision of the future?
4. Is the product “infrastructure” in a manner of speaking: structured data, deeply embedded, sticky?
5. Does the advent of AI exponentially increase or decrease their defensibility?

Our portfolio includes some pretty special companies like AngelList, Pulley, Puzzle, Levels, Disco, among others. 

Smart founders focus. Bad founders distract themselves with all the small, non-product, non-customer work that can easily take up hours but not move your startup forward.

We are sector agnostic and focus mostly on early stage. Our thesis is simple: the best founders come from anywhere, with any background, working in any industry. Focus, joy, dogged determination, and deep knowledge about your product and how you're changing the world is what leads to success.

If you're interested in learning more, drop me a note on LinkedIn.

Writer

For fun, I love reading about Creativity, Advertising, AI, startups, and about everything I can get my hands on.

If you'd like to say hi and argue with me about one of my blogs, 
Here's my calendar: https://calendly.com/gupta-ishaan/30min

Ishaan G.

A few too many moons ago, I used to work in an agency. One of my everyday tasks was to be on the lookout for a moment and jump on the bandwagon ASAP for our client. I’d see a trend, maybe whip something up in an hour. Then it’d go through 5 people, 5 revisions, and 4 tone-deaf dilutions. By the time the tweet would go live, the moment would be almost always be dead.

Culturally viral moments happen fast, die faster, and as you fight for attention - you need to prove why you deserve it.

In the same pursuit, some incredibly creative folks over the world went as far as to backspace the draft and vibe-code full apps instead.

If you're a brand, this is your new 'in'. Your witty tweet will be a flop, but your functional product might even get more virality than the original. 

If you're in social, this is your new 'in'. Everyone can write a clever caption. Not everyone can turn a trending topic into a product that gets covered by The Telegraph. 

If you're in SEO, remember that search follows social. It always does. While everyone's tweeting about the moment, you could be the first to rank for the search term that didn't exist 48 hours ago. 

The window between "this is an idea" and "this is an MVP" is shrinking. 

Marketing teams either figure out vibe-coding or start begging for dedicated dev bandwidth if they haven't already.

Ishaan Gupta

Idea to shipping velocity is insane right now

Controversy Marketing has existed longer than the internet, so why can't tech figure it out?
Vince McMahon perfected it in wrestling in the late 80s and 90s. The Montreal Screwjob in 1997 turned him into the most hated villain on television. He didn't fight it. He leaned in. Created "Mr. McMahon" - the evil boss character.

Hip-hop figured it out around the same time. Tupac vs Biggie positioned entire record labels against each other. The corporate suits got rich. Two artists ended up dead.

So when AI became the most divisive topic of the 2020s, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to turn that tension into marketing.

Enter Artisan AI.
Late 2024. Billboards across San Francisco: "Stop Hiring Humans." The founder got death threats. Billboards got vandalized. He didn't back down. The company raised $25 million. Hit $6 million ARR. The playbook was validated.

Then came Cluely.
Roy Lee got suspended from Columbia for building an AI tool to cheat on coding interviews. He filmed himself using it during his Amazon recruitment process and posted it on LinkedIn. His philosophy, "If I say extremely crazy shit online, it will make more people interested in me and the company." He hired 700 "clippers" paid per view to repost content across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. He called reputation "a thing of the past." Attention was the only currency.

Then came Chad IDE.
November 2025. Y Combinator announces "Chad: The Brainrot IDE" - an AI code editor where you can gamble, watch TikToks, and swipe on dating apps while the AI writes your code. People thought it was a joke. It wasn't.

This is when sh*t hit the fan. Jordi Hays wrote a post titled "Rage Baiting is for Losers."
Cluely was an app for cheating. Chad IDE's only differentiation was gambling. The rage bait was the product itself. 
"Running a successful VC-backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win," he wrote. "Rage baiting is the most effective way to get people to actively pray for your downfall."

But McMahon made it work. Death Row made it work.

Why can't tech?

Because wrestling and hip-hop are entertainment. Heat is the product. You tune in to see the villain get what's coming to him. You buy the album to hear the diss track. The controversy is the thing you're paying for.

SaaS is different. You're asking people to trust you with their data, their workflows, their money. You need employees who want to work there. It's hard to build that coalition when half the internet is waiting for you to fail. Rage bait works when attention is the end goal. It breaks when trust is.

I've been off Instagram for six months just found out about Claude's Instagram strategy from a tweet.
If you're a marketing team with the kind of organic hype Claude has on Twitter, you could reasonably think you're done. The "Claude Code is insane" posts are writing themselves. Why spend another dollar?

But they're going after Instagram too. 

Anthropic does great EGC on X. Boris Cherny, Felix Rieseberg, and the team are shipping updates and engaging with AI discourse almost to the point of shaping it. They're building in public and can be found in the comments section of any tweet doing more than 1 million views. SF tech bros know these names by heart and care about shipping speed and seeing quick TAT on a product as big as Claude. 

But they're doing even better UGC on Instagram. They're partnering so much with influencers who can code, building aesthetic little apps, museum diary tools, "building it for myself" content. The vibe is joy-centric and 100% Instagram-core. "Look at this cute thing I made." 246K views on a "POV: your crush just said he overcooked his steak" video about Claude. 

The interesting part is how precisely they've adapted for each platform. They understood that Twitter wants discourse and shipping and technical credibility. Instagram wants vibes and joy and personal projects. And they're executing both at the same time, at a level where each feels native to its platform.

Most marketing teams with this much hype on one platform would ride on it.
Claude's going after everyone.

“We need a Reddit SEO strategy.”

‘Why?’

“AI search engines cite it constantly.”

‘Why do they cite it?’

“Because the answers are actually useful.”

‘What makes them useful?’

“Real people have real conversations there. Anyway, we should figure out how to get our brand in there. Though their mods will probably remove anything promotional.”

‘Right. And if the mods didn’t remove promotional content?’

“Then every company would spam Reddit with their products.”

‘And then?’

“Then it would stop being useful.”

‘So the thing that makes Reddit valuable for SEO is the exact thing that prevents you from doing SEO on Reddit.’

“Correct. So we need to be strategic about it.”

so every week i round up AI news for my team because most people have better things to do than doom scroll tech twitter. 

making it public now. 

here’s what’s up with AI this week →

Open article: What's up with AI? - 22 January 2026 by slite.slite.page

I'm willing to bet on this. Marketing shifts increasingly offline in 2026.
Text is already slop. LinkedIn is insufferable - every other post reads like ChatGPT with a hustle grind veneer. The comments are worse. X had an epidemic of AI-generated articles flooding the timeline in December. We've learned to read online text the way we listen to a politician's speech: with a grain of salt and the assumption that someone, somewhere, is trying to manipulate us.

But text was just the beginning. Look at Dall-E's first version versus Nano Banana Pro. That's maybe 18 months of progress. AI-generated video is catching up fast too. We're reaching a stage where you genuinely cannot tell if the video you're watching was shot or generated. Give it a few more months.
When that happens, the default assumption for anything online becomes: this might be fake. Not "this is probably real unless proven otherwise" but "this is probably generated unless proven otherwise."

So what's left?

The things that can't be faked. Offline.

I think we're going to see a lot more of what's already starting to emerge: community meetups like Cursor Cafe, Lovable running offline hackathons, brands investing in real-world experiences that require you to actually be there. Even we, at Slite, are starting to go offline - small dinners with Chiefs of Staff to understand their problems, no content play, just conversation.

As signaling on social detaches from effort and our digital trust erodes, offline will only increase.

Ivan Cernja does Growth at an AI startup. A few weeks ago, he built his new portfolio and it made it into my top 5 favourite portfolios from last year. He didn't write a single line of code, didn't wrestle with frames/sections/masking/padding on Figma.

"Claude built ivan.codes in under an hour. But Claude didn't pick Teenage Engineering as the reference, didn't decide a receipt printer contact form was funny, didn't know that friction could be a feature. I keep thinking about what's left when AI handles execution. It's taste. It's having opinions about things that don't seem to matter."

This is the work that gets cited when the 5,000 cultural essays of last year said "Taste is the new intelligence." For once, I don't want to play the contrarian - I agree with all of them. Taste is the new black. I look at my portfolio - a document with ugly-blue hyperlinks - and sigh.

But a few scrolls after Ivan's portfolio, I see an entire marketing team built in Claude Code. 10 AI agents. More skills than my actual team. I close the tab, doomscroll LinkedIn instead - only to be greeted by the beige of slop:

"Build a content factory of UGC creators with Veo 3.1 + Claude Code + Nano Banana" 
"Build 150 SEO articles in one go using Airops right now"

This is my everyday lurking of 2025. I see storytellers being hired for $300K+, I read the 4,000-word Substack essay on taste, I remember Rick Rubin's book, and I feel almost ready to take on the world with my ideas using AI.

Then I go to work, flip the switch, and remember that scaling volume is almost always better on a performance review than scaling quality - which is immeasurable, untrackable, unprofitable meandering.

We all feel it, as marketers. Expected to create art to snatch attention and plug our CTA. Worried about scaling volume - articles, videos, emails - because we know what the upper brass wants. They want something that didn't work before but 100x of it. "If we publish 1,000 AI-generated reels together, we can A/B test and move so much faster."

We've turned ourselves into slop-churning factories. Slop became word of the year in 2025. But there's no term for the opposite of slop. You've never read it on LinkedIn, Substack, or Twitter. Not because good work done with AI doesn't exist. It's because it's outnumbered 100-to-one.

And I don't know if the ratio is changing anytime soon.

taplio

The Battle

Adam S.

Ishaan G.

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The Battle

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