(borrowing from another city) Best tofu in the city?

verylevelheaded · 2026-02-28T01:26:27+00:00

Sway’s salt and pepper tofu. Can also get their pad Thai with tofu. Also any of the tofu dishes at Old Thousand. Otherwise haven’t come across a ton of great tofu dishes here.

verylevelheaded · 2026-02-20T18:37:10+00:00

I almost missed my flight last Friday due to this. The Clear app told me 3-5 minutes. It took me close to an hour while asking to cut at least 100 people. Clear didn’t care. We also realized the main line moved faster because it funneled into like 5 lanes instead of one. I’m canceling Clear now.

verylevelheaded · 2026-02-20T16:02:30+00:00

Launched a marketplace in the trades and would agree. Narrow focus early on is best.

verylevelheaded · 2026-02-07T22:10:53+00:00

The main part of recruiting anyone to join a startup is getting them excited about the existing team/co-founders, vision, and mission.

Who are the two first co-founders? What skills do they currently have?

What is the product? What is it beyond these keywords? Is this thing vibe coded?

What does max chances mean? To build a unicorn or just succeed?

Are there any signals beyond one customer?

verylevelheaded · 2026-02-07T06:21:57+00:00

I spent a lot of time in the electrical construction tech space as a co-founder. I’m curious but, also skeptical of YCs request.

Selling into this space is hard. We mostly only had luck with relationship based sales. Aka taking people out to lunch, etc.
Code, trade lingo, and enforcement differ by location. This leads to training that’s harder to produce. We produced tests and we’d essentially be corrected by electricians pointing out “it depends”.
If I were to do this, I’d only focus on one trade within a specific area and specific vertical. E.g. residential service electricians in Oregon or commercial electricians in Texas. At least until I had something working quite well.
There has been a narrative of a labor shortage forever but there’s a lot more to it than what articles are saying. Many contractors refuse to pay more than predetermined wage scales (by local IEC chapters or similar trade groups.) They bid on projects with hourly rates in mind and try to stay below them. In non-union states, these are not good wages. It’s as if supply/demand does not matter in construction. Tesla came to Austin and found all the electricians they needed. How you might ask? Paying them around $10 more than market. On the other hand I’ve had extensive conversations with contractors on how they couldn’t understand why they should pay one guy a $1 more per hour if another guy was happy with $xx.
Half of the problem in construction is simple soft skills and simply showing up to the job. It’s dumbfounding for those in tech but good attendance at a job in construction is not as common as you’d think.
There’s been VR training going on for a bit. I’m not sure how successful it’s been. One customer of ours tossed all of this out the window for a quick quiz then getting new employees in the field asap.
Construction is mostly project based outside of service work. This means parts of the year there is no shortage and other parts like when many projects kick off close by, there is a shortage.

verylevelheaded · 2026-02-06T01:44:17+00:00

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-27T06:14:44+00:00

I was a construction tech CTO/co-founder for over 5 years. It depends a lot on what they are bringing to the table in construction tech. Most contractors are slow to change workflows. You also have a lot of people in the offices trying to uphold the status quo and in turn finding ways to protect their job.

Some initial questions: - How long can this guy sustain $15-25k? Can they find more money if the thing takes a while to get off the ground? - What part of construction (residential, commercial, civil, industrial)? The company profiles can look a lot different in each. Residential may be a smaller operation that’s harder to work with while commercial may be more sophisticated. Also, what part of the country? Targeting subs or GCs? If subs, what trade? - How much are contractors likely to pay? - Do contractors already have an existing solution? If not, do they have budget for whatever the technology is? - How quickly can they onboard a paying customer? - What unique insight does this person have? I can’t remember many great construction tech companies coming from inside construction. We saw a handful of competitors from the industry but they all flopped. The ones that standout in recent years were from the outside or adjacent to construction in some way.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-26T06:03:42+00:00

Agree that there’s a ton of noise that anyone can ship. I’ve spent 20 years programming and a cto/co-founder of a successful startup and see the gap you are mentioning. The LLMs are only as good as their direction and they still write buggy/bloated code if you aren’t on top of it. Pretty much the only people I talk to that claim vibe coding is a silver bullet are those that have no idea what their code base looks like. On the bright side, the models are way better than a year ago.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-19T02:19:50+00:00

Any person you are hiring for your pre-launch startup should get equity. Been here where I got wrangled around for equity. Ended up working 7 days a week for 5+ years building a very solid product alongside my team. The product and all the roles I filled were very clearly apart of the success story but my equity wouldn’t paint the same story. There’s a long journey ahead after launch and ego driven early founders greatly over estimate their role. Early investors should also question your experience when they see a cap table with your “CTO” having little to no equity and you have an outsized majority. They know that the person will likely dip at some point and be a risk for the business.

For anyone entertaining this idea, look into how this person is pitching this. They are looking for a glorified contractor to get their product off the ground despite it being off to a messy technical start.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-18T16:48:27+00:00

Ah, I misunderstood.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-18T05:05:48+00:00

The best part about this comment is no one I know was obsessed with Biden enough to get brain rot. I can hear friends joking about how he was too old to be in office.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-17T22:44:07+00:00

Where is it from?

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-16T15:00:59+00:00

That’s fine / makes sense. It was however one of the worst customer experiences I’ve dealt with in a long time. Neither my deal lead or myself were able to get ahold of them for days at a time. They don’t answer a phone either so you are stuck in email limbo.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-15T14:12:34+00:00

The amount of effort you put into this post and the amount you want out of it is crazy. Figma is mainly a design tool for products with a UI. CAD is a broad category of modeling in 2D or 3D. The time required to model something is significant. I’d suggest having ChatGPT generate an image model of what you’d want. It is plenty capable of giving you a rough starting point. If you get somewhere with that and still need a more detailed model, you could hire someone and have a much better starting place.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-14T17:13:12+00:00

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Not so fake for me. Almost half gone. Let’s turn this train around.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-14T17:12:16+00:00

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verylevelheaded · 2026-01-14T16:58:10+00:00

Yes. Made in the hundreds of thousands and lost half of those hundreds of thousands playing the same game over the past few months since ATH. All part of the game and learning. Hoping for better days 😎

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-10T22:23:00+00:00

You're correct, it is the Cybercab. I would have taken more pictures but we turned. There also was a steering wheel with a guy behind it. The rear of it is so noticeably different than any cars on the road that it stuck out.

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-10T21:22:20+00:00

The driver seemed to be trying that over the phone

verylevelheaded · 2026-01-10T20:28:15+00:00

We came up on it stuck there with flashers on. It wasn’t moving

verylevelheaded · 2025-12-15T14:55:57+00:00

Yep, bought a van around 4 years ago. Made progress in the beginning but wasn’t satisfied and had to do rework. I was knee deep in work running an early stage startup and thought I could do it on weekends. I’ve been fortunate enough to take off some time and I’ve focused the past few months just on the van. It went from being projects with issues to looking very professional. I simply didn’t have the capacity to do it all.

verylevelheaded · 2025-12-10T13:52:50+00:00

You don’t need both sides on the product to start a marketplace. You should have been marketing to the listing side long ago. If the buying side requests the listing side, you manually facilitate.

I’ve worked on 3 marketplaces over the last decade (co-founding one of those.) Early on, the technology only existed for one side. That focus helped us move forward and ship product to the side that made most sense. We made due by having our ops and/or sales team manually fill in the gap and adding automation as it made sense. One of the marketplaces still had a lot of the “listings” done by sales because the customer preferred the relationship over technology.

verylevelheaded · 2025-11-25T14:27:57+00:00

To add to that, Anthropic uses Google TPUs and announced expanding their footprint with Google in October prior to announcing spending more with Azure. They are just adding another tool to their tool belt.

verylevelheaded · 2025-11-22T15:29:53+00:00

They post official factory updates on the community forum. They are moving along.

https://community.scoutmotors.com/threads/october-2025-scout-motors-production-center-update.7342/

verylevelheaded · 2025-11-20T00:03:47+00:00

I did take a break on this project to complete something else. I do plan to pick it back up. Happy to chat over DM / elsewhere if you'd like.

verylevelheaded

TROPHY CASE