So,

the internet calls me

one of the most AI psychotic people

online.

So, it's only right that I start my talk

with a story about one of the most

canceled men in history.

His name

was Baruch Spinoza. And in case the

philosophy elective wasn't your thing,

here are the highlights you need to

know.

In 1929, a New York rabbi challenged

Einstein by telegram.

"Do you believe in God? Answer in 50

words."

Einstein answered in 25.

"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals

himself in the lawful harmony of the

world, not in a God who concerns himself

with the fate and doings of mankind."

The most famous scientist alive asked

the biggest question there is,

pointed at Spinoza.

But here's what Baruch Spinoza's own

community did to him.

Amsterdam, July 27th, 1656.

Spinoza is 23 years old, a member of a

tight-knit Sephardic Jewish community.

He stands in a synagogue while the

elders ex- communicate him with the most

violent curse their community ever

produced.

"Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he

by night. Cursed be he when he lies

down, and cursed be he when he rises up.

Nobody may speak to him.

Nobody may trade with him.

Nobody may come within four cubits of

him.

Nobody may read anything he writes.

And this ban, uniquely among the roughly

40 bans Spinoza's community issued that

century, has no repentance clause.

It has never been lifted. It technically

is still in force today.

Spinoza was 23. His crime was evil

opinions, expressing forbidden thoughts.

His punishment was complete deletion

from the community.

Before his community cursed him, they

tried to buy him a thousand guilders a

year, serious money. All he had to do

was show up at synagogue once in a while

and keep his mouth shut.

Hear that in founder terms. They've

offered him a salary to stop building.

He said no, not for 10,000, he said. He

wanted truth, not comfort.

Shortly before his excommunication,

a fanatic came at him with a knife.

The blade tore through his cloak and

missed him. He kept that cloak, scar

unmended, for the rest of his life.

He wanted to remember what ideas cost.

So, what does the most canceled man of

the 17th century do next?

He grinds lenses.

By day, he makes optical instruments,

tools that let human beings see further

than their eyes allow.

He makes them so well that the best

scientists in Europe seek them out. And

by night,

he writes a book so dangerous he cannot

publish it while he is alive.

When he dies at 44, lungs full of glass

dust from making other people's lenses,

the manuscript is locked in his writing

desk. His dying instruction,

ship the desk by canal barge to his

publisher in Amsterdam.

That manuscript became his posthumous

works, which attracted immediate

attention across Europe and inspired

some of the most important philosophers

of the Enlightenment.

What does Spinoza have to do with

startups, you might ask? Well,

here is a man canceled by everyone he

knew, offered a salary to stop,

nearly killed for shipping,

and his response was to build precision

tools by day and write the most

dangerous book in Europe by night,

alone, with no permission from anybody.

If you're going to start a startup, you

could do well to learn from Spinoza.

He had a name for the engine that kept

him going.

Conatus.

It means your striving, the drive in

every living thing to keep going and to

increase its power to act. Not your

resume, not your title, not your job,

the striving itself.

This talk is about the tools that

amplify it.

So, what did he actually say that was

worth deleting a man over? The gist of

the heresy was that God is not a king on

a throne. God is spread through

everything that exists.

God or nature, he wrote.

400 years later, we are making a similar

mistake about intelligence.

Everyone is waiting for AGI as a

singular event, a god in a data center,

some announcement, some threshold, some

day when the sky changes color.

So, now I'll say a version of Spinoza's

heresy, updated 400 years later.

Everyone is watching the sky,

and the thing they're watching for is

already in the room. It doesn't look

like a god. It looks like

infrastructure, a terminal window, a

folder of markdown files, a job that

finishes while you sleep. Spread through

everything, which is exactly where

Sminoza told you to look. AGI isn't

arriving as an event, it's arriving

diffused as your agent running on your

context, doing your work.

I call it personal AGI, not artificial

general intelligence for everyone all at

once, general intelligence for one

person, you.

This was a dream of a great many people.

Vannevar Bush called it the Memex, a

machine that would be an extension of

yourself and your brain.

And I want to be precise about what I

mean because the words personal AI has

already been captured by marketing

departments. I do not mean a chatbot you

pay $20 a month to. I do not mean a

slightly better autocomplete. I do not

mean an assistant that knows your

calendar and nothing else.

That's just a subscription you rent.

It's a corporate AGI you don't own. It

resets when you close the tab. It knows

what everyone else already knows, and

when the company behind it pivots, your

so-called assistant gets a lobotomy on

someone else's schedule.

Personal AGI is a different animal.

An agent that runs on your

infrastructure, reads from a memory you

own, executes procedures you wrote, and

compounds. The corporate AGI you don't

own

gets better only when the company ships

something. Your personal AGI gets better

every single day you use it because

every day it knows more of your life.

One of these is a product you consume.

The other is an asset you build. Almost

nobody in the world has the second thing

yet, and everyone in this arena could

have it by Monday.

And I believe intelligence, intelligence

of this kind, should be owned, owned by

you, not rented.

If you go forth and build this for

yourself, 2034

doesn't have to be like 1984.

You might ask why this personal AGI is

happening only now. Well, I think it's

because of what agents can do, and

nowhere is it more obvious than in

coding agents. In 2013, I was a YC

partner building Bookface, our internal

social network at night. I shipped maybe

14 useful lines of code a day, which if

you know the literature on programmer

productivity is

dead on median. That was me at full

effort. This year I run YC full-time,

same brain, same hours, plus a 5:00 kid

pickup. I did the math on my output, and

I'm at about 400x what I did in 2013.

Now, before the skeptic in row three uh

deflates that number for me, let me

deflate that for myself. You don't trust

the raw lines of code, fine. Apply the

most pathological verbosity penalty you

can stomach, and assume the agent writes

bloated code. Assume half of it is

scaffolding.

Assume I'm flattering myself, which is

always a live possibility.

It's still 8x at the absolute floor, and

10 times that in the middle of the

range. The number is large no matter how

you torture it.

Now, this is just code, and if you're at

the beginning of your career, you're in

luck. This applies to design.

This applies to product management. This

applies to growth. This applies to every

part of what you might want to do. The

multiplier for coding is not just for

coding. It's for every piece of

knowledge work.

And it's not just me. At YC, we get to

watch this at portfolio scale. A year

and a half ago, in the winter 25 batch,

a quarter of the companies had codebases

that were 95% AI generated. Those

companies use AI agents for everything

now, not just code. And that batch is on

track to becoming one of the fastest

growing, most profitable batches in the

history of YC.

Now, I know what a correlation is, so

let me say it carefully. I cannot prove

that the AI generated code and

everything else caused the growth, but

what I can tell you is that the fastest

growing founders we fund are not

treating AI as autocomplete. They are

treating it

as a workforce.

There are 2X people and there are 100X

people who are using the same cloud,

same weights, same context window size,

same API, but the leverage is not in the

weights. It's in what context you give

it, how relevant it is, and does it

happen at the right step.

We'll come back to this.

Now, Spinoza has a definition I think

about every single week. In Ethics, he

defines joy as the feeling of your power

of acting increasing, which is why the

first time an agent does a week of your

work in an afternoon, it doesn't feel

like a convenience, it feels like joy.

And that's not me being poetic. That's

the technical term. Your power of acting

increased. Your conatus just got bigger.

He defined the opposite too, by the way,

sadness, the feeling of your power of

acting decreasing. If your Sunday nights

have a specific heaviness,

like your ability to influence the world

is receding, that you feel like you're

quiet quitting, then this is what you

feel. And hold that thought because

we're coming back to this in the second

half of this talk.

And it gets political.

So, here's the equation for the next

decade of your life, a frontier model

which is rented and a commodity,

and getting cheaper by the quarter,

plus your context, which is owned by you

and unique. No and ideally nobody else

on this earth has it. Plus a harness

that wires them together. That harness

might be open claw, Hermes agent, Claude

coder, or codex. Add that up, and that

gives you an agent that acts like a very

fast version of you.

Model quality is rented, but your brain

is owned, ideally by you.

Marshall McLuhan said that technology is

an extension of man. Steve Jobs called a

computer a bicycle for the mind. And if

you have what I'm describing here, then

you have a self-driving rocket.

Paul Graham taught every founder in this

building two things: make something

people want, and do things that don't

scale. Both still govern everything.

What's new is the multiplier on the

second one. Agents are how one founder

now does unscalable things at scale. The

advice didn't change, but the physics of

all startups and of what you can do did.

Spin lenses

instruments that let people see past the

limits of their eyes.

I want to spend the next 15 minutes

showing you what grinding lenses for the

mind looks like. This is the machinery I

actually run my life on, and every

concept travels to whatever stack you

use.

Let's start with working memory, because

it explains everything. You and I, as

human beings, hold about seven things in

our head at once. Seven plus or minus

two. It's the most famous paper in

cognitive psychology.

It's why local phone numbers are seven

digits, and why you forget the eighth

item on a grocery list.

That is the entire working memory of a

human being. And every institution

humanity has ever built, every

checklist, every org chart, every filing

cabinet, every stand-up meeting is a

prosthetic for that limit.

An AI agent, though, holds a million

tokens. That's about 1,000 pages. Three

Harry Potter books sitting open on its

head all at once.

And it can find a needle

in any of them and synthesize across all

three in seconds. Three Harry Potter

books versus seven digits.

You could argue that's not quite AGI

yet, but it is already a different

operating regime. And almost everyone on

Earth is still running their life on an

org chart and a way of doing things

designed for the seven-digit brain.

Run that number in the other direction.

1,000 pages is a lot,

but it is also very little.

Your life is not three books. Your life

is a library. Every email you ever sent,

every meeting, every decision, and every

reason behind it. Every conversation

with every person you know.

The question that determines whether

your agent

is a genius or a goldfish is this. Who

decides or what decides which three

books are open on the desk?

And that's what a brain is. That's what

G brain is meant to be. The library plus

the librarian.

I've been building G brain in the open.

My personal open claw has a

Karpathy-style knowledge wiki with about

220,000

markdown pages.

25 years of my life diarized. Every

email, every meeting, my notes, my

photos, my drafts, the things I got

wrong.

Compiled mostly by agents, curated by

agents, searched for by agents. But I

never re-ask a question I already

answered. And

the lived experience in the system is

the point. A founder emails me about a

crisis. Before I finish reading the

email, my agent has already pulled every

prior conversation I've had with that

founder.

Three portfolio companies that hit the

same wall and what actually worked for

them.

When my agent does anything, it does

knowing everything I know and that's the

difference between an assistant and a

colleague.

Let me walk you through an actual day

because that matters more than an

architecture diagram.

While I slept last night, my agent

processed my inbox. Not sorted it,

processed it. It knows which emails are

from founders in trouble,

which are from people trying to sell me

something and which are from the 17

mailing list I never quite unsubscribed

from. The ones that matter are triaged

with context pulled from the library,

who this person is, my whole history

with them, what they're really asking

under what they wrote and what that

might mean for me. I wake up to a

briefing, not a pile of emails.

Before every meeting, a prep doc, who

I'm meeting, what we said last time,

what changed since and what I should

ask. Research I was curious about at

midnight is finished by morning and when

something interesting happens in the

world, my agent has usually read it,

cross-referenced against what I care

about and filed it before I've had

coffee.

On top of this library sits my agent

coding framework, G stack, 123,000 stars

now which put it in the top 100 open

source projects in the history of GitHub

and

what's actually in the punchline of this

whole architecture? It's mostly skill

files.

Plus a browser that the agents can

drive, pages of English and a way to act

on the world. Markdown, not magic. Fat

skills, thin harness.

Let me show you what a skill file is

because I keep saying this phrase and I

want you to see how unmagical it is.

Here's a real one, lightly redacted. It

says

when a meeting recording lands from

CircleBack, transcribe it with speaker

labels, pull out the commitment made,

who made it and the deadline.

Cross-check every person named against

the library and link their pages. File

the summary here, full transcript there.

If anything contradicts something we

already believe, flag it. Don't

overwrite it. That's it.

That's a skill. It's a page of English.

A smart intern, anyone really who could

read, could follow it. And that's the

test actually. If a smart intern could

follow it, an agent can run it.

Which means uh actually a kind of

profound thing. I know I caught a lot of

flak for talking about this, but I think

it's more true than ever, especially

now. Markdown is actually code. If you

can write clear instructions in English,

you're a programmer. The compiler is a

language model. And that's why it's not

just for engineers anymore. At YC, our

media people, event staff, finance team,

people who never open a terminal in

their lives, are building skill files

and schedule jobs. One of our finance

folks compiled um about a hundred Excel

workbooks into a single app she built

with an internal agent. She is not a

programmer. She is a manager of agents

now. Everyone is about to be.

The most important question to ask here

is, where is the computation happening?

And there are exactly two answers, and

confusing them causes every agent

failure I've ever seen.

Some computation belongs in latent

space.

Taste, judgment, reading what a human

actually wants from a vague request.

That lives in the model, and you steer

it with a markdown file.

And then some computation belongs in

deterministic space. The arithmetic, the

SQL query.

Uh

for instance, the seating chart for what

sessions you're going to go to today for

your breakouts.

Uh all of that needs to be stored in a

SQL database used

by the markdown files.

Being smart about this goes a long way.

Ask an agent or human to seat five

people around a a

that's easy, do it in latent space. Ask

it to make custom schedules for 6,000

people in an arena,

like we just did for you, and your

latent space agent needs to write some

code to keep track of it. Your

experience at this conference had to be

markdown files calling code in exactly

this way.

And you couldn't do it without the code.

The model fails where we fail. The fix

is having the model compute the way

humans compute.

The latent and the deterministic

markdown files calling databases and

scripts. Simple,

but it's what everything is actually

built on. And I'll give you one more

receipt, my favorite one because you're

sitting inside it right now.

Five days ago, I decided this talk

needed Spinoza, one of my favorite

philosophers, especially because of how

canceled he got.

So, my agent went and acquired three of

the best biographies about the man,

books by Nadler, Goldstein, and Stewart,

about 1,500 pages.

It read all three. It built me a

synthesis, a dated chronology of his

life, every place the three biographers

disagree with each other, and the best

verbatim quotes with chapter citations.

And because it knows what I need, the 10

most tellable moments of his life ranked

with delivery notes. The knife attack,

the bribe, the desk. Every beat of our

opening that might have given you some

chills 20 minutes ago came out of that

overnight run. 1,500 pages became a

stage-ready story that I could edit. I

call it a compendium skill, and I use it

daily. It's a personal skill that is a

mega mega version of deep research, only

deeper than anything the corporate AI

products will give you.

The spine of this talk you're watching

was inspired by the machine we're

describing now.

And if you're wondering where my mine

actually started, it was not 220,000

pages. It was a folder. It was a few

markdown files about the companies I was

working with and the people I kept

emailing.

And the library got big the same way

anything gets big, a little every day

compounding with agents doing the

filing.

Nobody builds the warehouse first. First

you build one shelf.

When you sit down with an agent tonight,

you're not coding.

You're mad- managing

a workforce made of markdown. A skill

file is an employee. It has one

capability, one job written down clearly

enough that someone new could execute

it.

A resolver is an org chart. A task comes

in and it decides which markdown file or

who handles it.

Which means that before you ever

incorporate anything, before you have a

co-founder or a logo or a deck, you can

already be running an organization. An

organization of one plus your agents.

You are the founder and the entire

management layer of you incorporated and

the head count under you is now whatever

you decide it is.

This already produces companies that

break the old math. Emergent out of our

summer 24 batch went

from public launch to nine figures of

revenue in eight months.

When they crossed $15 million in

annualized revenue, they were 15 people.

Retail winter 24 hit 60 million

annualized with about 40. That revenue

per person did not exist before, not in

software, not in oil, not in railroads.

And these aren't freaks of nature.

They're the first companies built

natively on the new physics and every

one of them started as one or two people

wired the way I just described.

Now, picture our batch room in the dog

patch, hundreds of founders every single

day, each one of them doing what used to

be

a person's entire year of work.

That is not the future, that is the bar

right now with this batch. If you're not

doing it, your competitor is and they

will eat your lunch politely and thank

you for it. It also changes what

software even is. Software doesn't have

to be precious anymore. You can build

exactly the tool you need for the

audience of one in a weekend. The old

advice was scratch your own itch and

hope it's a market. The new version is

much better. Scratch your own itch

because scratching itches is nearly free

and some of your tools for one will turn

out to be entire companies. You'll know

because other people start begging for

them.

And one honest caveat before the how-to

because you catch me out in any way, a

brain nobody curates is a garbage dump

with great search. Retrieval will

surface a stale fact with total

confidence. A bad skill file encodes a

bad process forever. So, the primitive

is memory plus hygiene, provenance on

every fact, contradiction contradiction

checks when new information collides

with old, and a librarian whose actual

job is pruning. Treat the brain like

production infrastructure and it

compounds. Treat it like a dumping

ground and you get a very confident

agent that is wrong in ways nobody can

trace.

Everything so far is philosophy and

receipts. So, let's get into some

how-to. If you do what I describe in the

next 6 minutes, you'll be ahead of 99%

of people who watched this talk and just

nodded. Step one tonight, pick a harness

and run an agent on your own machine. I

use open claw and Hermes agent with G

brain. A hosted version of this is at

gbrain.io.

It's free. G brain itself is free and

open source. I always recommend the

Ferrari, but I'll be honest, the Honda

is really good, too. Codex, Cloud Code,

whatever. Any of them will do 99% of

this and the upside of not Ferrari is

that

it will also get you to your destination

with a little less of less getting out

to fix it on the side of the road. The

concepts are the point, not any given

repo or product. The intelligence is on

tap and there are many paths.

Step two, this weekend start your

library. Not a grand archive. One folder

of markdown files, export your notes,

export your email if you can. Write one

page about each project you you're

working on each person you work with.

And on those pages write the things you

actually know, what you're building

together, what they care about, what you

owe them, what they said last time. That

stuff no model on the earth no model on

earth has because it only exists in your

head. And your head, as we established,

only holds seven things. The first time

an agent answers a question using your

context instead of the internet's,

you'll feel the click and you won't go

back. You're all sitting on You are all

sitting on five, 10 years of your own

history in one inbox or another. That's

your moat just lying there, unindexed,

doing nothing. The only gate between you

and this entire architecture is probably

24 hours.

Step three, write your first skill file.

Picking it is easy.

You know, what's the task you do every

single week that you hate the most?

Might be expense reports, meeting notes,

the weekly status update, competitor

research. Explain it to your agent. What

do you want to do? In plain English, the

way you'd explain it to a smart friend

on their first day of a job. And then

let it get it wrong.

If it gets it wrong, correct it. Every

rule, every exception, every oh and

also, put it in there and it'll fix it.

That page is now an employee, run it.

Step four,

wire it up to be a recurring job. Maybe

it's the job you just created in step

three. Every morning at 7:00, do this.

Every Friday, summarize that. The first

time you wake up to work that finished

while you you slept, something shifts in

your head permanently. That's the day

that

the day stops being the unit of work for

you.

It becomes what you can imagine, and it

should be driven by what your goals are

and what you want to create in the

world.

Step five, this is the discipline that

separates the compounders from the

dabblers. Never do one-off work. Most

people run one operation with one agent

and then throw the context away. They

close the window, that's it.

Don't. At the end of every task, ask the

agent

to skillify what it did.

Skillify is a special skill you can find

in G brain. You can

point it at that repo and say, "Extract

skillify. Learn how to do it." Turn it

into a markdown file you can use and

reuse forever. I'll say it the way I say

it at YC. If you have to ask for

something twice, you failed.

The person who captures what they learn

gets smarter every single day. The

person who wakes up every morning with

amnesia,

well, that that's a waste of your time,

and it sort of doesn't matter how good

the model gets

if you can't turn it into real memory.

Do those five things, and I can tell you

what your next 90 days look like. Week

one, honestly, it's a toy.

The library is thin. The skills are

clumsy. You're fixing more than you're

saving.

Week four, the flywheel catches. The

agent starts answering with your

context. The morning job produces

something you actually read, and you

write your third and fourth skill

because the first two worked. Week 12,

you have a library that answers before

you finish asking. A dozen skill files

running the parts of your week you used

to dread, and one or two tools that

other people keep asking to borrow.

Which in this room is called a startup.

The curve is the same curve as any

compounding thing you've ever seen.

Flat, flat, flat, then not.

Most people who try this will quit this

in week two.

Which is precisely why the ones who

don't feel like they're cheating

by week 12.

Now, I need to tell you the part that

isn't fun. Because everything I taught

you just cuts both ways.

I told you Spinoza's definition of

sadness earlier, the feeling of your

power acting power of acting

decreasing. And I said it gets

political. This is where.

A skill file is not a document. It's a

piece of your cognition, how you do the

thing, extracted from your head, written

down, and executable. Every skill you

teach an agent is you externalized.

And the exact same file is two opposite

futures, depending on one variable, who

controls it.

Take a fictional example of a support

engineer. Let's call her Maya. Over two

years, Maya teaches her agents 40

skills.

How to triage a P0 at 2:00 in the

morning, how to de-escalate the customer

who's about to churn, how to write a

postmortem that actually prevents the

next incident. 40 files. That's her

judgment, the thing that took her two

years to build, sitting on a disk.

Version one, those files live in Maya's

repo. She changes jobs, they go with

her. Day one at a new company, she's

operating with years of compounded

judgment on tap. Every year she works,

she compounds. That's ownership. And if

she wanted to start a company that does

this, it's her expertise, and it turns

out she can. Entire startups these days

will be markdown files.

Version two,

those files live in the company's repo

under the company's IT policy. Maya

leaves with nothing. The company keeps

running her judgment without her. 40

files executing forever and her name

isn't even in the commit history. She

didn't have a career, she had an

extraction.

Same files, same Maya, one variable.

So this is the doctrine and I want you

to be able to repeat it tomorrow. I

believe skill files are yours. Own your

skills because

if you don't, your job becomes a skill

file.

And this happened before.

Craftsmen own their tools. That's what

made them free. The factory broke that.

The loom belonged to the mill. The

knowledge workers assumed we were safe

because our tools lived in our heads

where nobody could confiscate them.

Skill files end that. For the first time

in history, your cognition can be

extracted, stored, versioned and owned.

The only question is

by whom? Remember Do you remember the

thousand guilders? That offer never went

away. It got rebranded. Every

comfortable arrangement where your

judgment compounds in someone else's

repo is a thousand guilders a year to

show up, keep quiet and stop building

your own thing.

And that's why you should start a

startup because this is how

you can actually make those skill files

work for you.

Spinoza faced the upgraded version two

in 1673.

Heidelberg offered the cursed heretic a

full professorship.

Salary, legitimacy, a chair

and {quote} freedom of philoso- -phizing

provided he not disturb the established

religion.

His answer was, "I do not know what the

limits of that freedom of philosophizing

might have to be."

He read the terms of service and he

declined the acquisition. He had a

phrase for what he was protecting, under

your own power as opposed to under

someone else's. Your power of acting

exists either way. The political

question in 1673 and in 2026 is who

commands it. Personal AI is about

controlling your own cognitive abilities

and protecting yourself.

That's the whole thesis of this talk in

one sentence. Personal AGI is how you

stay under your own power in the age of

agents. So, keep your brain and your

skills in a repo you control from day

one before any platform or any acquirer

has an opinion about it.

When Spinoza died, they inventoried the

room. Two pairs of pants, seven shirts,

a lens lathe,

160 books,

and the Ethics locked in a desk. He

owned almost nothing, and nobody ever

controlled his skill files.

The desk drawer was his repo.

Own yours

like he owned his.

Now, three objections, and I can hear

them from up here, so let's just do

them. Objection one, the models are

improving so fast that all this harness

stuff will be obsolete. Just wait for

the next release. This is the better

bitter lesson crowd, and I love them,

but notice what actually happens in

every model release. The better the

models get, the more the differentiator

moves to context. When everyone's engine

is a thousand horsepower, the race is

won on the driver and the map. The

weights are everyone's. The library is

yours. At least I hope it is.

A better model makes your library worth

more because a smarter reader extracts

more from the same books. I'm rooting

for the labs as hard as anyone in this

building,

but every release they ship is a free

upgrade to a workforce I already own,

and a workforce I want you to own.

Objection two, is this just rag? Sure,

and Postgres is just B-trees. Retrieval

is the primitive, not the product. The

hard part is everything around it. What

gets written down in the first place,

how it gets enriched and linked, what

gets promoted to hot memory versus filed

as cold cold reference, who arbitrates

when two facts disagree. Retrieval is

easy. Being worth retrieving from is the

product.

Objection three, and it's the one that

deserves the most respect. You put your

entire life in one system, your email,

your meetings, your kids schedules. What

happens when it leaks? My answer is the

same answer as the whole talk. That's

exactly why

it has to be yours.

My brain runs on my own infra, in my own

repo, under my own keys. Compare that to

the default, which is not privacy. The

default is your life is already

scattered across 10 clouds owned by

companies whose incentives are not

yours, searchable by everyone except

you. I didn't create the risk by

consolidating my context. I took custody

of it. Custody is the security model,

and if you don't trust yourself to hold

the keys, I promise you the answer isn't

trusting someone else's terms of service

more.

So, why did I open source all of it? The

harness, the brain architecture, the

skills, the whole personal operating

system. People ask me this because they

seem like they they they think there

must be a catch. Well, the answer is

because I can. Because being at YC for

me means I don't have to monetize my own

infrastructure.

But, because I can is also the answer to

the wrong question. The real question is

why anyone should. And the answer is

that I believe tools of the powerful

should be given away. Every era has a

private technology of leverage, a thing

the powerful have and everyone else

doesn't. For a long time, it was

literacy. Then, it was capital. Right

now, today, it's this, the harness, the

library, the workforce made of markdown.

The people who have it are quietly

operating at at different scale than the

people who don't. And the gap is

widening every month. And that's what

this whole conference is about, to give

you the power

to be able to do it for yourself.

When something like that, that powerful

stays private, you get a priesthood.

When it gets given away,

you get a renaissance.

I know which one I want to live in.

Which means I get to do the things that

I actually believe in. And I'll give it

to you as a creed, because it's the

closest thing I have to one.

Say the things other people won't. Fund

the people other people won't. Build the

buildings other people won't. Write and

give away the code that other people

won't. Leave behind the institutions

that other people won't.

And when you build in the open, you

should know what's coming, because

Spinoza's story has one more chapter.

November, 1676, Gottfried Leibniz,

the most glittering genius in Europe,

silk stockings, a calculating machine in

his luggage, travels to The Hague to

spend three days in an attic with the

most hated man on the continent.

And then he spends the next 40 years

lying about it. Publicly, the visit was

a few hours in passing. Privately, his

notes are crammed with obsessive

commentary on Spinoza.

I live a small version of this weekly. I

say agents write most of my code now,

and the dunks arrive by lunch. Then I

look at what the loudest dunkers are

actually shipping, and it's agents all

the way down. So, learn the pattern now,

because building in public guarantees

you'll meet it. First, they quote tweet

you. Then they get clone you.

The dunks are just the adoption curve

announcing itself.

And I want to show you what this

architecture looks like when it's

pointed at the only thing that really

matters.

I have a friend whose son has a rare

form of epilepsy.

No lab, no grant, no permission. He just

went, and you can just do things. He

built a repo of 80,000 markdown files. A

brain

for one small boy.

And pushed himself to the absolute edge

of what humanity knows about his son's

exact condition.

Every specialist visit, every paper,

every seizure log, every drug

interaction, indexed and cross-linked

and ready. So that when a new doctor has

an idea, he knows in minutes whether

it's already been tried. A father, a

laptop, and a library. That

is personal AGI. Not a benchmark, not a

demo. The entire architecture I've

described tonight, the library, the

librarian, the right three books open at

the right moment, aimed at the one thing

one man loves the most in the world.

Nobody was coming to build that for him.

So he built it.

And nobody is coming to build yours for

you.

That's the good news.

Everything you were told you needed, the

team, the funding, the permission, the

credential, was a workaround for the

fact that one person could hold seven

things in their head and work 16 hours a

day.

That fact just expired. You can fly now.

Not metaphorically,

mechanically.

Every problem where you thought, "I wish

I had this person.

I wish I could hire this person.

But I can't get them."

You can.

Every archive too big to read, every

data set too gnarly to clean, every

ocean

you were told not to boil.

We can boil the ocean now.

I have a sentence I live by and I want

to leave it with you.

It's all made up.

But you get to make it up.

Every institution in the world,

including the one that read a curse over

a 23-year-old in 1656,

was made up by people no smarter than

you. The difference between you and

every generation of founders before you

is that they had to recruit dozens of

believers before they could build

anything at all. You need a laptop

and a few years of your own history

you're already sitting on.

There are about

7,000 people at this whole event.

7,000 conatuses.

7,000 strivings. For most of history,

almost all of that striving never got an

audience. It died waiting for funding,

waiting for head count, waiting for

permission,

waiting for someone else to believe

first.

The machinery I showed you tonight is

the first technology I've ever seen that

lets the striving go straight to work.

One person, no intermediaries, no

permission. I genuinely do not think the

world understands yet what 7,000 people

with that kind of leverage

walk out of a building and do.

Spinoza closed the Ethics, the book that

had to be smuggled out in a desk, with

nine words. All things excellent are as

difficult as they are rare.

The difficulty

just collapsed. The rarity is now up to

you.

Go

and build.

Thank you.