Recommendation · MoneyWhen search complaints arise, respond by proposing to benchmark it rather than arguing: collect questions and find the best documents by hand, including ones that looked helpful but weren't. About 200 examples took less than a week and was very helpful despite not being fun or glamorous. The key search metric is precision at 10: of the top 10 results, how many are the right documents.
AI Engineer · How Bridgewater Turned 100 Million Documents Into an Edge - Sam Green & Aaron Linsky, Bridgewater
Method · MoneyKumar describes a process Contour used successfully over the past few months: run live A/B tests for research workflows. Track a single analyst's workflow on one specific name across a three-month earnings cycle (one earnings report to the next) with no AI tools, documenting the data sources the analyst finds and the conclusions they reach. Then run the same research process again with the PM involved and AI tools introduced one by one, comparing outputs against the documented baseline. When evaluating the results, ask whether the analyst would have come to the same type of conclusion with or without the AI tools.
Method, not a verified protocol.
AI Engineer · Proving Alpha: How a Hedge Fund Measures AI's ROI - Hari Kumar, Contour Asset Management
Method · MoneyContour developed metrics for analyst productivity: insights generated by an analyst per day, time spent on each name, and the eventual P&L outcomes from each decision. They also track cost per useful insight — a metric Contour came up with — to understand where ideas eventually land, which ones were interesting, and which tools were used to come up with them. Kumar emphasizes that understanding where analyst time goes is really valuable when measuring ROI of AI and tech spend.
Method, not a verified protocol.
AI Engineer · Proving Alpha: How a Hedge Fund Measures AI's ROI - Hari Kumar, Contour Asset Management
Recommendation · MoneyFigure out who your avatar is — ideally a market that is growing, in pain, has a problem to solve, can afford your stuff, and is easy to find.
Alex Hormozi · How I Would Build a Personal Brand in 2027 (If I Had to Start Over)
Recommendation · MoneySet a public goal with a date and announce it to the world — a shot across the bow — to incite energy and alignment within your team; the public goal cannot be cancelled.
Also discussed by Armand Farrokh on 30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales (unclassified source — not counted until classified). Not counted as independent sources.
Alex Hormozi · How I Would Build a Personal Brand in 2027 (If I Had to Start Over)
Recommendation · MoneyOnce you know who your audience is, figure out what they like and associate your brand through it: content about the thing they like, products they like (free and paid), and appearing next to the people they like.
Alex Hormozi · How I Would Build a Personal Brand in 2027 (If I Had to Start Over)
Recommendation · MoneyFarza recommends working backwards from the launch of whatever you're working on: decide the launch video and copy before building the feature.
Y Combinator · This Is How You Should Actually Make Launch Videos
Recommendation · MoneyJarmak recommends that after deploying changes you have measurement systems in place to capture all relevant data in the actual environment the system is deployed in, otherwise you cannot validate the changes.
AI Engineer · Don't Trust Your AI Agents. Test Them Like a Scientist — Stephanie Jarmak, Omni Analytics
Recommendation · MoneyJarmak recommends decoupling what an agent or other system flags from actually enforcing that gate within the code itself and how it is escalated to a human.
AI Engineer · Don't Trust Your AI Agents. Test Them Like a Scientist — Stephanie Jarmak, Omni Analytics
Recommendation · MoneyJarmak recommends setting up internal benchmarks within the organization that reflect actual workloads as closely as possible and running an iterative flywheel process to hill-climb toward optimal configurations.
AI Engineer · Don't Trust Your AI Agents. Test Them Like a Scientist — Stephanie Jarmak, Omni Analytics
Recommendation · MoneyJarmak recommends coming up with explicit boundaries for when it is safe for the agent to deploy autonomously versus when it should stop and escalate to a human, to avoid unsafe autonomous deployment.
AI Engineer · Don't Trust Your AI Agents. Test Them Like a Scientist — Stephanie Jarmak, Omni Analytics
Recommendation · MoneyThe host recommends that founders should talk to their users, and suggests asking them 'What do you think of this website?' to get feedback.
Y Combinator · How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs
Recommendation · MoneyThe host recommends testing your landing page copy by asking 'Do I even know what the product does?' after reading it — if not, rewrite it.
Y Combinator · How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs
Recommendation · MoneyThe host recommends showing the user the solutions to their problem on the landing page rather than segments you target.
Y Combinator · How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs
Recommendation · MoneyBuild agents into your application by putting a ceiling on their permissions, so they operate using an agent token with scoped access instead of taking the user's token or an API key. The three takeaways are: you can let agents into your application with an AuthMD file, connect them to a customer using the user claim flow in AuthMD or the IDJAG identity assertion, and limit agent actions by enforcing permissions and revocation.
AI Engineer · How to Let AI Agents Sign Up for Your App Safely — Isabelle Williams, WorkOS
Recommendation · MoneyWhen a user invokes an agent, the application's back end should issue agent tokens. Do not just hand an agent the user's token (e.g., Jordan's user token). The reasons are: (1) auditing and attribution, (2) revocation — the user should be able to revoke the agent, and the application should be able to revoke the agent without impacting the user's session and access, and (3) limiting what the agent can do by limiting the scopes in the token. Using scoped agent tokens enables three guarantees: you can audit the agent, revoke it, and limit its permissions.
Commercial context: The creator describes this as their own product.
AI Engineer · How to Let AI Agents Sign Up for Your App Safely — Isabelle Williams, WorkOS
Recommendation · MoneyA key challenge is capturing the vocabulary: you have numerical values, categorical values, and information like zip codes, raising the question of whether to encode each zip code as a token. Push significant effort into understanding the vocabulary you need and the vocabulary you want to scale. If your vocabulary is far too big at training time, it becomes messy to train such a model. Invest effort in deciding which information to encode in a token (value-to-token mapping). A too-huge vocabulary makes training a tabular foundation model messy, so significant effort is needed deciding which values to encode as tokens.
AI Engineer · A Bank Trained Its Own Foundation Model to Catch Fraud — Freddy Lecue, Wells Fargo
Recommendation · MoneyWhen a call ends awkwardly with just 'thanks for the time,' respond with: 'This is a great use of time. Thanks again for spending all this with us. I've got a couple of ideas. Based on what you shared, there's a couple of different things we can do to help you. I'd love to give you a tour of our technology... and talk about how this can specifically apply to the things you shared with me today. How does that sound?' Don't give a demo or a 98-slide PowerPoint deck — offer a 'tour of our technology' instead. Make every demo bespoke to what the prospect shared: 'I'm not going to give this same canned crap that I've given 19 times today. I'm going to give you something that's bespoke because I actually listen.'
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #619: Active Listening to Loosen up Your Discovery Calls and First Dates | Sam McKenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyInstead of 'What brought you here today?', open discovery calls with a broad, open-ended question — e.g., 'I could tell you a million things about my company, but I'd love to hear from you first: your team, your challenges, the overall landscape.' This 'cracks their head open': the buyer explains why they showed up in a super professional way rather than narrowly adhering to what the contact form said. Don't fixate on the contact form — acknowledge it, then redirect to broader questions and get to the specific topic later.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #619: Active Listening to Loosen up Your Discovery Calls and First Dates | Sam McKenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
Recommendation · MoneyAfter securing the next meeting, ask: 'Who else would benefit from this in your organization? Do you have peers on other teams or in other lines of business — or pending you seeing this and it being successful, anybody else that you think would need to see this before deciding if we want to move forward?' Framing the ask around who would benefit is less salesy and more customer-centric, making prospects more likely to name two or three people. Expect some prospects to refuse ('I'm the ruler of all things. And you have to go through me first') — it's not a silver bullet, there are no silver bullets in sales, but it's a great start.
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales · #619: Active Listening to Loosen up Your Discovery Calls and First Dates | Sam McKenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
