🔥 Small Teams: AI's Ultimate Force Multiplier — From Midjourney's 11-person crew hitting $200M ARR in two years to Cursor's 20-head sprint to $100M, tiny AI-native squads are rewriting scale—output quadrupling without headcount bloat, echoing farming's mechanized leap from 40% of workers to 2% while exploding yields.

🎯 Seize the Solo Edge — AI slashes idea-to-MVP cycles from years to hours, empowering individuals to launch empires or supercharge corporate roles; ditch scarcity fears for abundance. Reallocate those 5 saved hours weekly to high leverage bets, not spoon fed tasks.

💬 Screens as Superpower or Saboteur? — As education drowns in addictive distractions (Finland's 90-min device detours tanking scores), unplugging emerges as elite status. cultivate critical thinking windows early, intentional tech for older kids, not TikTok traps eroding attention and problem-solving depth.

Small teams are the new superpower as AI eats the world. Whether it is the Midjourney 11 person team hitting $200 million ARR in two years, ElevenLabs scaling to $100 million ARR with 50 people, or Cursor scaling to $100 ARR in 21 months, the world is changing quickly.

Now the astute ones will counter with "these are only 3 examples and are exceptions to the rule." I get that. But if you continue to look you start finding dozens of other examples. Generally these examples are still predominantly in the technology industry, followed by other industries that are asset light. Company executives in most industries are looking at this trend and wondering if they could do the same thing. Why double the size of your team, when you can evolve it to be AI native and quadruple the work output?

It's helpful to think of historical examples. Take farming, for instance. In the beginning of the 20th century, 40%+ of Americans were farmers. Now today, that number is just under 2%. Yet the amount of food produced is exponentially higher. The transition from manually intensive farming to mechanized farming made the average farmer a lot more productive. That opened up opportunities for those people that would have been farmers to find jobs in other industries.

The challenge today, though, is what happens to those people who lose their jobs? There have been high profile layoffs over the last few months. Companies are tightening their belts and rethinking their entire workforce.

This creates an opportunity for you. Not only does AI empower small teams, it empowers the individual. You could start today, create your own business plan and product MVP, and incorporate your business in a few hours. That is the power of using AI to extend your capabilities. In the not too distant past, this would have taken months or even years to do. AI has reduced the cycle times for taking an idea and implementing it, and it is those enterprising individuals that will take advantage of it.

The other opportunity is within the company you work for. It is embarrassing how low the bar is towards integrating AI in the work that you do. It also takes an abundance mindset to do this. Part of the barrier to implementing AI in organizations is employees thinking they are going to be completely replaced. Well yes, if you expect to be doing the same thing year after year. With an abundance mindset, as you save 5 hours a week, you can then apply that to higher value work. The trick here is to be able to think about and understand what that higher value work will be, as it won't be spoon fed to you.

AI Therapy's Double-Edged Sword — Gen Z is ditching pricey sessions for ChatGPT and Character.AI's round-the-clock empathy, with users raving about breakthroughs that outpace years of traditional therapy. Yet psychologists sound alarms on overreliance, biased "advice," and tragic teen suicides tied to unchecked bots. The fix? AI built by pros to plug access gaps without the hallucinations. Read more →

Digital Twins: AI's Human Stand-Ins — Generative AI crafts "cognitive clones" from personal data to mimic user behaviors, slashing UX research time by imputing survey gaps, simulating reactions to designs, and scaling trend forecasts without endless recruitment. Huge for agile product dev, though they falter on human nuance and raise consent alarms. Read more →

Google's Prompt Engineering Bible — This 69-page powerhouse unpacks zero-shot to ReAct techniques for Gemini, stressing clear, structured prompts that boost LLM accuracy without fine-tuning. Packed with best practices, examples, and pro tips to sidestep common pitfalls and level up your AI interactions. Read more →

Ever wonder why an AI initiative flopped? Or maybe you want to help it succeed the next time?

This prompt acts as your postmortem surgeon, slicing through excuses to uncover root causes and arm you with a battle-tested revival plan. Ideal for execs or teams chasing ROI without the endless blame game:

You are my AI Postmortem Surgeon. I'll describe a recent AI project, experiment, or rollout, including what went right, wrong, and the outcomes. For every input, deliver:

Be brutally honest but constructive, and focus on leverage points that turn scars into superpowers. Skip the therapy and deliver diagnostics that drive decisions. If key details are fuzzy, ask one precise question.

NotebookLM is like an AI powered sidekick that is tailored to you. You can documents, video, audio and more, while having it give you summaries, study guides and even podcast style audio overviews. It also hallucinates less than a standard LLM, since it is using all of your content as its sources.

Let's take the example of a public company CFO. You're buried in quarterly earnings calls, competitor breakdowns, and those endless regulatory PDFs, but synthesis? That's the real time-suck, as no one has hours to chase ghosts in the data. Here's where NotebookLM flips the script: Drag and drop the pile, and it chews through it all, surfacing sharp trends like "Market share's down 12%, straight-up supply chain chokehold." Then it whips up a briefing podcast you blast on your drive in, turning chaos into a commute-ready intel dump. Think about reducing prep from days to hours, and spinning raw noise into forecasts that actually move the needle, all without the hallucination risk.

The other advantage is you can use NotebookLM in conjunction with a ChatGPT, Claude, etc. I've found that NotebookLM can help with research synthesis, and then using ChatGPT to expand ideas. Let's say you you develop a mind map in NotebookLM from your ideas. You can then load it to ChatGPT and have it play devil's advocate as you improve upon it.

The ability to unplug and not use AI and technology will be seen as a high status trend in the near future. I thought about this the other day as I read the article The Screen That Ate Your Child's Education in the New York Times. Test scores have started to decline in the past few years, and the authors acknowledge some of the decrease from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is more than that.

There are screens everywhere in school now, from smartphones, to tablets, to computers. It creates a level of distraction that we've never faced as humanity before. How is a teacher supposed to help students learn when they have a screen that is more addictive than many drugs?

Parents and teachers alike are fed up, and outright banning screens is on the table. Is that the right course of action? Probably not. Having the ability to pull up all human knowledge at your fingertips is a superpower. But like any superpower, it has to be cultivated appropriately. As 12 year old doesn't just wake up one day responsibly using screens. It takes instruction, learning and reinforcement to have limits. Add in the addictive nature of social media and games, and even the parents are pulling their hair out.

Learning how to think critically is one of the most important skills to learn, and it can also be one of the most frustrating. If I want to look up something, I do it immediately; there is no waiting and I get instant gratification. But that doesn't help me long term. Being able to think through a problem, applying the right knowledge to it, and thinking of alternative solutions takes time. You're not going to do this with a 10 second TikTok video.

There is probably a time and place for screens in education, used intentionally and for older children. Technology is so intuitive nowadays that kids can learn how to use an iPhone easily. But that window of time that they develop initial critical thinking and better attention spans is becoming smaller with the proliferation of screens.

-Ylan

Happy Thanksgiving!