Azeem Azhar

But I didn't keep my skills up to date.

And I remember about 15 years ago, my CTO at my last company saying, please stop trying to write software.

You've got a development team working for you and they can do it.

He was, I think, pleading with me because the quality wasn't particularly good.

But what I can now do is build software that works.

I might not be able to sell it.

I might not be able to get it into the app store, but it works reliably.

And I have made, I kid you not, dozens of software tools, many of which I use daily or weekly or run constantly in the background.

These might be complex workflows or they might be things that I've built through a combination of Replit and Cursor.

They include a content management system that helps me make sense of the hundreds of things that the research team reads every month.

This is something that is designed for the way I want to work.

I'm not trying to bootstrap my way into Notion or into Obsidian.

I'm saying this is the particular set of workflows and analyses that I find useful and I've defined it.

I've got another bit of software that keeps track and up to date with the 40 or so startup investments I've made.

If you're one of my founders, one of the reasons I have a better sense of what you're doing and how to help you is because I've built an application that processes your updates and helps me understand what the key points are, what the hotspots are, what you are struggling with, where you either need help or you are going so fast, you just need more introductions.

And really trivially, but again, I'm not someone who loves admin.

I've built an app that automates my expense tracking, that goes into my email, that pulls out my expenses, that pauses them, that decides whether they are company expenses or personal expenses and puts them in a spreadsheet and takes a copy of the invoice or makes one as a PDF and drops it in a Dropbox.

It's better than Expensify, which was a product I was using before because it's really, again, tailored to the way I want to work.

And so what we're starting to see from personal stories, and I think every single one of you share them in the chat, we'll have different examples of how you are using these tools, are expanding.

And it's quite difficult to keep track of them.