Founder Perspective - Reading the Water

Reading the Water

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Founder Perspective

First-person accounts from founders on building, operating, and learning in the field.

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What I Wish I'd Known Before Building Nightwatch

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What I Learned Building Solo AI Tools: On Limits and Leverage

Solo founders building AI tools hit limits that are structural, not effort-related. Working harder doesn't fix them. Three limits and three leverage points — the ones that actually matter.

Three wooden chess pieces arranged on muted gray surface with shallow depth of field, representing agents and participants.

The AI Panel That Changed How I Think About Agents (Seattle Tech Week)

I expected the usual conversation about model selection and prompt engineering. What I got was a room full of builders talking almost exclusively about failure modes and environment design.

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Nightwatch: What I Built When I Needed Someone to Work While I Sleep

I had a list of monitoring and research tasks that never got done. Not because they weren't important — because they required sitting at a computer. So I gave a machine the keys.

Surreal scene: glowing AGI brain emits art, music, code; cracked gavel on broken IP law book. Text: Authorship Void, Inventorship Fiction, Incentive Collapse, Training Data Ratchet.

Who Owns What AGI Creates? Nobody. That's the Problem.

Creatorship of AGI David Pedersen / NW AGI Group April 2026 Abstract Roman Yampolskiy's 2022 paper "Unownability of AGI" identified multiple structural barriers to AGI ownership — principally unpredictability, unexplainability, and uncontrollability, alongside self-modification, ease of theft, and contested AI rights — concluding that AGI, as a class

Stop tinkering & start building. Discover 10 hard-won lessons from 3 years of surviving the AIPocalypse. Learn to build systems that guide AI, outmaneuver the loops, and level up your tools.

From AI Tinkerer to Tool Builder: Three Years of Surviving the AIPocalypse

Three years ago, I made a decision that would reshape everything: if I was going to survive the coming AIPocalypse, I would need to control the AI, or the AI would control me. It started at Seattle's AI Tinkerers meetups—rooms full of engineers, entrepreneurs, and curious minds

Founder Perspective

The Woman Who Taught Me to Think Like an Entrepreneur

Sixteen years ago, I was the new guy at Whitepages, trying to figure out search marketing in a city where I barely knew anyone. That's when I discovered the Seattle search community—a scrappy group of SEM specialists who met monthly to share war stories about Google'

Founder Perspective

I Built a Psychology-Based Copy Analyzer. Here’s What 200+ Real B2B Messages Taught Me.

For the past year, I've been building COS — a tool that uses Big Five personality psychology to analyze B2B communications. Not grammar. Not readability. Personality coverage. The premise is simple: every piece of copy you write passes through an invisible psychological filter in your reader's brain.