Cofounder @ Morning Brew / Host @ Founder's Journal

Alex Lieberman

I’m saying fuck it. 

There’s not enough time to scale my recruiting team so I’m making everyone on earth a recruiter.

I have to hire 120+ people at Tenex by year-end.
- 70 AI engineers
- 35 AI strategists 
- 15 other roles

If you have a strong network, what I’m  offering you the opportunity to make $100,000 as a side hustle.

If:
- You refer a candidate (form below)
- Candidate applies for role
- We hire them
- They stay 90 days

We pay you $10,000…per hire.

I want to make this huge. 

Plans for the future: Referrer website with any info you need about Tenex/our roles. Leaderboard of our referrers. Top referrer gets sent on a baller vacation. 

Time to roll out the red carpet. 

All the info you need below…

Cofounder @ Morning Brew, Tenex, and storyarb

This guy made 40 Facebook ads, 100 landing pages, booked himself on 4 podcasts, and wrote 3 guest blog posts. In a single day. 

People called him a fraud. There was literally a Polymarket bet on whether he's a con artist. 

So i asked him to prove it to me. And he did. 

Here's Cody Schneider's actual system for AI-enabled paid marketing:

1) He uses Perplexity to search Reddit for his ICP's actual pain points in their own words. Not what he thinks they care about, what they've literally said online.

2) He feeds those pain points into Claude, which generates 40 ad variations, titles, supporting copy, and the actual creative using React components exported as PNGs via a library called HTML-to-canvas.

3) He tests all 40 variations in a CPC campaign on Meta. $100 over 3 days. Cheapest cost-per-click wins.

4) Winners get matched landing pages. He uses an open-source CMS called Strapi connected to Claude Code via API, so he bulk-generates a landing page for every winning ad angle. Same headline on the ad and the page = higher conversion.

5) Once he finds a winning concept, he scales it — AI avatar UGC via HeyGen, upgraded with V3, and only brings in a human creator if the AI version plateaus.

The whole thing runs on Claude Code + APIs + a .env file with all his keys.

No engineering team. Just him on multiple desktops with multiple Claude agents running simultaneously.

His best line: "you're not just hiring me anymore. you're hiring me and the 30 agents behind me and all the personal software i've built."

Jack Dorsey announced that Blocks (owner of Square, Cash App, etc) would be firing 40% of the company’s 10,000 employees because of…AI.

The largest % layoff of a S&P 500 company ever.
People freaked out.
The company’s stock jumped 20%.
People freaked out more.

Here’s my hopefully balanced but constructive take on the whole thing:

1) Jack has consistently been ahead of his time and I believe he is early this time, too. What he’s doing is the canary in the coal mine for so many other businesses.

2) We’re going to see various flavors of AI-related layoffs accelerating. the “using ai as a scapegoat to fire underperformers” flavor. the “our business is failing we need to cut costs” flavor. the “let’s pair 10x employees with ai” flavor.

3) A move like this will only work for certain companies right now. Flat structure, meritocratic reward system, high agency employees.

4) Trying this at non-high performance companies will lead to what I like to call “the boomerang”. Company lays off a lot of people to be replaced with AI. Talent density isn’t high enough. The weight of bureaucracy is strong. Output/customer satisfaction dips. Company reverses course (cough IBM).

5) The markets rewarded Blocks for the announcement and people are freaking out. The stock performing isn’t a harbinger of knowledge work’s demise. It’s simply the reaction to a company lowering its expenses 40% in a day.

6) Does this worry me? No more than any intellectually honest person worries about the impact of AI. Will this technology create structural impacts so certain areas of digital work? Yes. Will it also create new anticipated and unanticipated employment opportunities for humans? Also yes.

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If you're worried you're behind on AI transformation...you probably are.

I have studied 100+ companies AI-readiness & every company can be mapped to one of these 9 levels:

Level 1 (Awareness): 
- leadership recognizes AI as strategically important, but it has not yet changed how the company operates.

Level 2 (Shadow AI): 
- employees independently use AI tools to improve their own productivity, but usage is informal, inconsistent, and largely ungoverned.

Level 3 (Tool Standardization): 
- the company formally approves and deploys AI tools through IT and security, reducing risk but not yet transforming workflows.

Level 4 (Workflow Integration): 
- ai becomes embedded within defined processes and operating workflows, improving consistency and measurable output.

Level 5  (Business-Aware Systems):
- ai systems are grounded in internal data and company-specific definitions, enabling context-aware analysis and decision support.

Level 6  (Supervised Autonomy): 
- ai systems begin executing tasks within guardrails and human oversight, shifting people from doing the work to supervising it.

Level 7 (Role-Based AI Teammates): 
- ai collaborators are aligned to functional roles, and roles are redesigned assuming AI participation in daily operations.

Level 8 (Unified Intelligence Platform):
- the organization operates from a shared intelligence layer that provides a consistent, company-wide source of truth.

Level 9 (Adaptive Organization):
- the company continuously adjusts decisions and operations through closed-loop AI feedback systems, with humans guiding strategic intent.

I thought AEO (read: SEO for LLMs) was a hunk of bullsh*t. 

And then i spoke to Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot, who knocked the skepticism out of me. 

His first jab: In one year, they grew AI search traffic by 15x. It went from rounding error to real line item on the P&L.

His second jab: AI search conversion rates are 5x higher than Google search. On some queries, 13x higher.

His hook: 60% of AI citations don't come from the top 20 Google results. The companies dominating Google aren't automatically winning in AI search, which creates a huge advantage for early adopters. 

He then took me through his process for crushing AEO & seeing results in days, not months (like SEO): 

1) Grade: your current AEO presence across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini with a tool like Hubspot's AEO grader. 

2) Restructure: your content into chunked, answer-first pages with natural language headers. 
- one consolidated page, not 8-10 interlinked pages
- lead with natural language questions like "What is X?"
- 1-2 paragraph sections, not 1,000 word sections
- table of contents on a single page

3) Separate: Mentions from citations and optimize differently for each
- Mention = when AI references your brand or product in its answer but doesn't link to you
- Citation = when an AI references you AND links to your page

4) Open up: your information — ungate content, build Reddit presence, make pricing public
- Optimize for entity understanding: how well do AI models understand what your company does, based on every signal from Reddit to review sites, awards lists to help docs

5) Tool up: with AEO-specific software to track prompts and share of voice
- Check out Xfunnel or Limey[.]ai

6) Rethink attribution: measure source of customers, not source of traffic. 
- Metrics that matter: share of voice, citation count, sentiment, mention frequency, source of customers not traffic

Check out our full convo about AEO below 👇

I've been asking $100m+ company execs one question: 

"What is the #1 thing slowing/stopping your company's AI transformation?" 

A non-exhaustive list of responses: 

1) Data quality and connectivity of systems. Plus systems that play nice with AI.
2) Lack of leadership buy-in and implementation
3) Data governance restrictions.
4) Willingness of staff to adopt AI.
5) Incurious culture. Lack of knowledge of the current state of AI
6) Tooling doesn't have API access; team is still learning how to use LLMs. 
7) Industry regulation/privacy. 
8) Data quality and lack of a comprehensive AI system across the full company. 
9) Unclear ownership across teams.
10) Time to actually build solutions. 
11) Mixed AI literacy levels across teams. 
12) No clear strategy / I'm starting the initiative from scratch. 
13) Quality output. 
14) Upskilling developers.
15) Silos. 
16) Data Security and Security Guideline unclear.
17) Lack of training.
18) Data quality is unclear across multi-product teams.
19) Time. 

What would your answer be to this question?

We truly have the most cracked AI engineers in the world. 

They are all VERY opinionated about their tech stacks, which change constantly.  

Here's the current stack for one of our engineers: 

1) Typescript - everything eventually becomes JavaScript, and you can basically build everything with typescript. Types are good for agents.
2) Ruby on Rails - RoR curious because it's very structured, which is really good for agents (David Heinemeier Hansson)
3) Ghostty - nice terminal, native pane splitting, big context copy and pasting (cc: Mitchell Hashimoto)
4) Cursor - agnostic harness to switch between models
5) Codex CLI - daily driver / the Mac app was cool for a week but CLI is more functional (cc: OpenAI) / pro: high quality code / con: trips over its own feet, too literal
6) Claude Code - use when need something to just happen. pro: will get you a result quick / con: sometimes it’s messy (cc: Anthropic)
7) Wispr Flow - work way faster yapping to text, especially when WFH
8) Raycast - better spotlight with clipboard history, snippets, custom scripts
9) OpenClaw - place to keep structured data, stay organized, handle certain tasks
10) Vercel - super smooth for hosting, prototypes, etc
11) Neon Postgres - really easy to integrate with a vercel project + preview deployments are great for agent to raise a PR & test in-browser

P.S. if you think you're a cracked AI engineer & want to surround yourself with the best & brightest, we're hiring at Tenex. 

P.P.S. the cracked engineer behind this stack is CJ Hess. he's absolutely worth a follow for the latest and greatest in ai engineering.

Colton Kaplan

Host of Change with Colton🎙 Podcast | Operations | Strategy | Lean Six Sigma | Supply Chain | Eliminating loneliness on the founder journey | Growing Founder Social Club Community

I am the founder of Founder Social Club, a community built to eliminate loneliness for founders by bringing them together with mentors, investors, and peers through intentional events, content, and conversation.

Over the past year, I have hosted 60 plus events and grown the community to over 26k founders, investors, and operators.

Founder Social Club is focused on signal over noise, real relationships, and creating environments where trust and long term thinking can compound.

I also host the Founder Social Club Podcast, where I sit down with founders and operators to talk candidly about product, growth, hiring, fundraising, failure, and what it actually takes to build.

My background spans operations, supply chain, and scaling teams at high velocity. I previously helped launch next generation automated fulfillment centers at Walmart eCommerce and have worked closely with cross functional teams to drive execution at scale.

Today, my focus is on building Founder Social Club into a multi city ecosystem across events, media, and membership while partnering with aligned sponsors and investors who care about founders and long term impact.

Always open to thoughtful conversations and partnerships.

In my free time, I enjoy reading, listening to podcasts, spending time with my wife, and playing with my Shih Tzu Mila.

Founder and Product Manager

• Developed UI/UX interface and integrated software automating and optimizing efficiency for the customer
• Created process flow and built product roadmap launching 5 products in six months increasing revenue by 50%
• Identified pain points of target market, conducted market research and launched MVP going from 0 to 1
• Implemented agile and scrum methodologies executing sprints resulting in 30% response rate for outreach
• Prioritizing tasks of managing CRM, sales cycle, product marketing, and product and business development
• Executed data-driven analysis of competitor landscape resulting in iterating pricing models and monetization strategies

Building a company in the United States often brings immigration decisions into company structure, fundraising timing, and hiring earlier than expected.

Next week we are hosting Startup Immigration Playbook with Manifest Law covering visa options founders and startup teams often work through:
O-1, H-1B, EB-1A, EB-2

Some are temporary work visas while others are permanent residency paths. We will walk through when each is typically used, common approval mistakes, and what founders should start preparing early based on traction. There will be time for live questions as well.

Useful for founders, future founders planning a move, and teams working with global cofounders or hires.

Founder Social Club

#ManifestLaw #foundervisas #o1 #h1b #eb1a #eb2 #startups #immigration

Podcast Host 🎙️| Founder Social Club | Eliminating loneliness for founders | VC Scout @ Headline

When the right people are in the room, good things tend to happen.

Tomorrow Founder Social Club is co-hosting the Tech Career Showcase in SF at SVB with manny duenas 🛳️ (Intern Ship), and Steph Minaya & Jhillika Kumar (Mentra)!

Here are the teams joining us:

Trillboards, CEO - Sneh Dhruv
Building interactive real-world advertising experiences that connect physical spaces with digital engagement.

Currently Hiring:
• Account Executive
• Software Engineering Intern
​
SUN (a16z Speedrun), Co-founder & CEO - Artin Bogdanov
AI-powered audio learning app. AI podcasts and book summaries from a single prompt.

Currently Hiring:
• Founding Full-Stack Mobile Engineer (Flutter/Dart)
• Founding Back-End Engineer (Python, AWS, Supabase, LLMs)
• Social Media Content Creator

JigsawStack - Founder - Yoeven D Khemlani
Developer platform helping teams integrate AI workflows and automation into real products faster.

Currently Hiring:
• Founding Growth
• GTM Engineer

Azentic AI - Pradeep Padala & Aashish Parikh
Building AI agents that automate sales execution across CRM, meetings, and workflows.

Currently Hiring:
• Software Engineer
• AI/ML Engineer

​FUSE HEALTH INC 
Currently Hiring:
• CTO / Founding Engineer

Mentra
A San Francisco–based neurodivergent hiring platform and network. Mentra is building a future where neurodivergent talent is valued, supported, and matched with workplaces that truly understand ND needs.

Hiring for Microsoft roles: 
• Data Center Technician
• Critical Data Technician

GitHired - Krishna Oza
Sourcing early engineers and builders for high signal startups working on frontier AI and developer tools.

​Currently Hiring For Roam, Caddy, and The Token Company

Roam – Applied AI lab building world models for real time 3D environments (SF)
• Member of Technical Staff — Agents & Diffusion
• Applied AI/ML Developer

​Caddy (YC F25) – Agentic productivity platform working directly with founders (NYC, in person)
• Software Engineer — Core Systems

The Token Company (YC W26) – ML lab focused on state of the art LLM input optimization (SF, pre seed)
• ML Engineer — Early Team

See you tomorrow.

Let’s get people hired 🚀

Excited to bring together founders and investors tomorrow in San Francisco for the Global Founder & Investor Summit.

Founder Social Club and Venture Bridge Hub are gathering ecosystem leaders from Africa, London, Europe, and Silicon Valley for an evening focused on cross-border connections, startup pitches, and real conversations.

Featured Speakers
• Marsha Wulff — Co-Founder LoftyInc Capital
 • David Hubert — VP of External Relations EuroCham - Association of American European Chambers of Commerce and Business Associations
 • Borja Palma Huarte — Business Development Manager @ London & Partners
 • Alfredo Coppola — Co-CEO @ US Market Access Center

Startup Judges
• Evan Buhler — Founder + General Partner @ Talok Capital
• Ulvi Rashid — Founding Partner @ Traction Fund
• Pasquale Zaccarella — Shareholder & Investor @ Eden ventures

Grateful to Daniel Fidanque and the team at Manifest Law for partnering on the event and supporting founders building across borders and to Bryan & Viet Andy Nguyen at SVB for hosting us.

Should be a great room of founders and investors building across borders.

Should be a great room.
See you tomorrow in San Francisco.

Founder Social Club is launching a new series called The Reserve on Wednesday 2/25!

Excited to partner with HubSpot (Mahir Kumar Singh) & Azentic AI (Pradeep Padala & Aashish Parikh), this is a small, curated room for 20–25 founders & investors.

The goal is simple: create a space where people can slow down and actually get to know the people in the room.

Every guest is intentionally selected so the conversations feel natural.

This first edition includes a margarita making class and live cooking demo. Shared experiences just make conversations easier.

For founders doing $500K+ ARR or $500K+ raised, and investors actively backing companies.

Approval required. Location shared after acceptance. 21+.

If this sounds like your kind of room, message me.

#FSC #HubspotForStartups #Azentic

Another fun week ahead at Founder Social Club.

Tomorrow we are hosting a Co-working & Lunch at SVB from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm. Come get work done, meet great people, and have real conversations.

Thank you Baargav Duggirala from Chargebee and Viet Andy Nguyen from SVB for partnering with us on this one.

Also, excited to co-host the Tech Career Showcase on Thursday 2/19 with my friends manny duenas 🛳️ from Intern Ship and Steph Minaya from Mentra.

We have strong talent across engineering, GTM, product, design, and other functions exploring their next role.

We have a few hiring table spots left for startups actively hiring full-time roles.
If you are hiring full time, DM me.

RSVP links in the comments.

#Startups #coworking #hiring #events #sf

Many SaaS founders hit a wall around $50k–$100k MRR.

Not because demand disappears, but because the systems that got you there stop working at the next stage.

Tomorrow Founder Social Club is hosting Breaking Through Your MRR Ceiling (Zoom) with Carlos Ignacio Sanabria from Designli.

He will break down:
• Why MRR plateaus are often structural signals, not market failure
 • How to make product value more visible without adding features
 • Expansion metrics that drive ARPU and retention
 • How founders expand their ICP without risky pivots
If you are building toward the next stage of growth, this should be a valuable session.

RSVP  👉 https://luma.com/myxywrhq

#FSC #MRR #ARR #growth

Excited to bring 4 more companies hiring!!! Join us later today at SVB.

Trainsit - The AI-first platform to allow businesses to optimize and convert their supply chain towards rail, the better option for the environment and wallet. 
• 2 Founding Engineers

SigIQ.ai - Democratizing Personalized 1:1 Learning for Everyone
• Senior Product Designer
• Senior Full Stack Engineer

NexDiscovery - Agentic AI that monitors enterprise data, uncovers hidden insights, and takes action before teams even know to ask.
• Founding Enterprise AE
• FDE / Solutions Architect
• Pilot Program Lead
• Chief of Staff
• Partner Channel Sales

​Regulis AI - Developing AI products for the transportation industry. 
• Software Engineer
• AI/ML Engineer

RSVP here: https://luma.com/s396by7m

If you’re a new grad or early career right now, you know jobs are hard to get.

That’s why I’m co hosting my third hiring experience with Colton Kaplan - Founder Social Club, Steph Minaya and Jhillika Kumar - Mentra to help people find opportunities. (Link to register in the comments)

This isn’t a traditional job fair.
Smaller room.
Founders introducing themselves.
Human conversations.

And I’ll say it clearly:

Startups are one of the most powerful pathways into a career right now.

When you join early, you get proximity, ownership, speed, and real reps.

Here are the teams pitching and hiring today:

🚀 Trillboards  
CEO: Sneh Dhruv 
Building interactive real-world advertising experiences that connect physical spaces with digital engagement.

Currently Hiring:
• Account Executive
• Software Engineering Intern

🎧 SUN (a16z Speedrun)

Co-founder & CEO: Artin Bogdanov
AI-powered audio learning app. AI podcasts and book summaries from a single prompt.

Currently Hiring:
• Founding Full-Stack Mobile Engineer (Flutter/Dart)
• Founding Back-End Engineer (Python, AWS, Supabase, LLMs)
• Social Media Content Creator

🧩 JigsawStack 

Founder: Yoeven D Khemlani
Developer platform helping teams integrate AI workflows and automation into real products faster.

Currently Hiring:
• Founding Growth
• GTM Engineer

🤖 Azentic AI

Pradeep Padala & Aashish Parikh  
Building AI agents that automate sales execution across CRM, meetings, and workflows.

Currently Hiring:
• Software Engineer
• AI/ML Engineer

🏥 FUSE HEALTH INC  
Currently Hiring:
• CTO / Founding Engineer

🧠 Mentra  
A San Francisco–based neurodivergent hiring platform and network building a future where neurodivergent talent is valued and supported.

Hiring for Microsoft roles:
• Data Center Technician
• Critical Data Technician

🔎 GitHired – Krishna Oza 
Sourcing early engineers and builders for high-signal startups working on frontier AI and developer tools.

Currently Hiring For Roam, Caddy, and The Token Company:

Roam – Applied AI lab building world models for real time 3D environments (SF)
• Member of Technical Staff — Agents & Diffusion
• Applied AI/ML Developer

​Caddy (YC F25) – Agentic productivity platform working directly with founders (NYC, in person)
• Software Engineer — Core Systems

The Token Company (YC W26) – ML lab focused on state of the art LLM input optimization (SF, pre seed)
• ML Engineer — Early Team

(See the rest of the companies hiring in the comments.)

Smaller sessions.
Deeper conversations.
Space to engage at your pace.

We’re creating human first hirng experiences.

Let’s get people hired 🚀

Join manny duenas 🛳️ and the Intern Ship talent network. Things are coming. 👀

#talentnetwork

I’m super happy to announce…



I’ve decided to launch the best talent community the world has ever seen!

Welcome to the 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤!

Join to get access to a hidden job market and more human first IRL hiring experiences.

This is personal for me.

When I started the Intern Ship, I was a University Recruiter at Intuit helping students land jobs there.

Which meant every time someone walked up to me at one of my Intern Ship events asking me to help them find a job - I had to tell them

“Oh sorry I can only hire for Intuit.” Which often times wasn’t even hiring yet.

That happened A LOT. It was literally one of the biggest reasons people kept coming to my events - they wanted to meet recruiters.

I heard them loud and clear. I just couldn’t do anything about it.

UNTIL I LEFT.

Now that I’m free from corporate and any conflicts of interest I’m locked in to helping my community find more opportunities.

Drop a 🛳️ in the comments, like and I'll send you the link to join.

Follow me so I can send you a DM!

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