shai
@shaiunterslak
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I build products — prev. built Dado (acquired). Born in Cape Town.
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2017
My girlfriend quit her big 4 accounting job last month w no plan or experience building a business. Last night she sold 28 Sudoku books / journals while we were asleep . So proud, damn🥹
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The most unhinged thing I’ve started doing in 2024 is going for morning walks with coffee - but just taking my coffee mug out of the house. Not a travel mug, just a straight up mug. It’s the most high status and low status thing you could possibly do.
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You don’t need to make $120k/y to move to San Francisco. Here’s how to keep your spending under $2k/m . (if you’re bootstrapping a company / figuring shit out). - lock in a room for under $900/m. This is where most people fuck up. 90% of the options you see will be $1500-$2500,.
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That YC video of Sam Altman re-pitching people’s startups is one of the best pieces of content they’ve made.
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Update — she’s going to hit 100 orders today. This is insane 🤯.
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Fuck AI agents. I just want reliable workflows that do what they're meant to do. These 3 little squares just saved me 10+ hours/week. @MaxBrodeurUrbas and @rbehal1729 built this app that lets you automate anything. This flow takes my Shopify orders and enriches the customer
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We're back in the era of tech where founders of $100m startups screen share their terminal. Love it
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Product managers / “non-technical” people who have mastered AI code gen are about to have the comeback of the century. If you so much as look at a PM wrong, they will one-shot your AI app in a weekend and do it better.
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Elon should be embarrassed that you have to learn a new language to search for Tweets. I just made Twitter search 100X more usable. Describe what you're looking for in natural language and get an advanced search query in seconds. You know how Twitter has advanced search
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@megmake She’s asleep rn and has no idea this is doing numbers . Can we help her wake up to some sales so she knows she made the right call? 🥹 .
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Fuck it. Becoming a tiktokker this month. Already made 4 vids yesterday and today, one has to go viral this week or my team will make me write code again. lfggg
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Someone needs to add a leaderboard for all WeWorks to compete against each other for occupancy after 6pm. Why am I the only mf locking in rn
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NEVER ask a woman her age. a man how much he earns. an sf tech bro if he's wearing a Compass, a Tab or a Friend AI wearable.
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Excited to announce that Compass has been acquired by Humane!. Unfortunately I didn’t read the paperwork properly, and it turns out I am now personally liable to return $100m to investors?. Anyways. We’re hiring.
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27th of Jan 2023. This photo was taken in Cape Town right after I quit my job and sold all of my stuff to move to the U.S. The only thing I kept was that memory foam pillow I’m sitting on + some clothes. Had to return the laptop to my job on the way to the airport lol. I
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@theSamParr Just hired a developer from Nigeria (I’m in South Africa). Seriously underrated place to find tech talent.
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Last month I airdropped my 500 page visa petition to @0xSigil after chatting with him for less than an hour. It had all of my personal information in it lol. My salary, passport, everything. bro could have stolen my identity EASILY. Instead -- he made a directory of O-1 Visa
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Okay which one of our investors leaked our July update to our competitors? 😤. 📈📈📈
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I spent $15k and 6 months fumbling my way through the O-1 visa process. It sucked. But I got it! . I’m organizing a video call with me + some friends who have either gotten the visa or are in the process of getting it. We’ll answer questions (all off the record) about our.
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This is before night & weekends s5 has even started. wyt it's going to be like next week. cc. @_nightsweekends @_buildspace
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I’m an immigrant founder and have to leave the country if our startup fails. My co-founder helped organize one of the largest LAN parties in the world as a teenager. There is literally no point in competing with us.
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When someone is having a stroke, they lose 2 million brain cells a minute. This means that if a stroke lasts for more than 3 minutes, they’re at risk of starting an AI wearable startup.
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Founders are struggling. Seeing and talking with 400+ builders this weekend highlighted this. Literally every person I spoke to used the word “pain” or “suffering”. We all love it and choose it, but plz hug your founder friends bc this shit is hard.
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What would you ask if you could chat with your entire digital footprint? . Every Tinder swipe, Spotify listen, every text you've sent. Join the waitlist / dm me for a demo👇. The Everything Bagel lets you embed your exported data and interact with it. Spin-up agents that have
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Important to try hard and fail — stop pretending you don’t want stuff. Get crushed after trying your best — it’s the only way to live.
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I’m in sf so fun isn’t always a priority / people don’t go out much here. But every once in a while . I take off my iPhone case + screen protector. and go a full day with just the iPhone fully exposed . And it is fucking exhilarating.
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People think you need to be a prodigy to get an O1 visa. I was shocked that all you really need is a smart lawyer, ~$15k and some time :). Doing a call with some folks who are exploring getting their O1 tomorrow at 9:30am PST, had to do 2 sessions bc of timezones, so we have.
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June 2023 I had never written a single line of mobile app code. It's Jan 2025 and I just made my first $1k from an iOS app :') . ty cursor <3
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I’d launch ChatGPT wrapped but most of y’all already raised a $3m pre-seed to do that.
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Insane that nobody in sf told me they sell beer on the ferry. $6 for an hour long sunset cruise w beer? . Sf is not dead, losers.
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Arrived super sick in Cape Town this week (🤘). ~$35: world class doctor visit .~ $12: antibiotics .(No insurance) . And this is my friends apartment that costs less than $1000/m :). Anyone wanna move California here plz?
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It’s gonna be a good year.
Some people want. Fame. Money . Success. Good health . I just want. A John Cena follow.
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If you need a room for 2 months in sf and wanna live with deranged founders / engineers in a kinda shitty part of the city, dm me.
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Had a call the other day that infuriated me . (nearly had to hang up). The guy on the call had just spoken to a founder who got their O-1 visa (has a PHD, patents, etc.) and that founder told him that he probably wouldn't qualify. Btw, there are 8 criteria for the O-1, you only.
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250k+ people saw the demo of our ai wearable project last week. The press and vcs are in our dms - but we just wanted to build. So we shipped a web demo that you can try rn without having to set up any hardware. If you're curious - go see if we can find your socials from a single
Thousands of people asked us to opensource Whomane - an AI wearable with a camera. We will be sued but today we are publishing all the code, schema, and designs. Also added a case and created a live demo you can try NOW with just one click
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You wake up to this email from your fav 10X engineer . 'Letter of resignation'. fuck. - What would you pay them to stay?.- What technologies have they been exploring in their free time, how can you make that a part of their work?.- What team could you move them to that they
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If you're at s4 IRL come find me for a demo of Everything Bagel. Cc. @_buildspace @_nightsweekends
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Got my first app micro-acquisition offer 🥳. It’s small but means a lot because . 1. I had never built a mobile app until last year (this was app #6). 2. I’m saving for a green card and this gets me like 25% of the way there. BUT. The app is organically growing and generating.
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Over the next 6 weeks tech twitter is gonna be reminded of two things:. - how much progress you can make on an idea if you pick one thing and stay consistent.- how cracked the buildspace team is at creating missionaries / raving fans. Cc. @_nightsweekends @_buildspace.
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Fuck it. I'm trying @Replit today. never met a single user IRL. last time i tried it was like 3 years ago. who uses this thing and for what?.
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Excited to announce that Dado (the company me and @xtyrrell_com started) is joining @Yoco_ZA. Looking forward to building tech to enable the next 1 million African entrepreneurs to get paid and thrive. Details here:
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Our grandparents fought wars on the battlefield. Now we just ship competitive AI wearables on the timeline.
Today I saw the launch of another "open-source" AI wearable that has not published anything just to charge you 5x the cost. At @MistralAI x @cerebral_valley hackathon in @SHACK15sf we built FRIEND - an AI Wearable that:.- Works 24+ hours on a single charge.- Costs ~$20.-
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so fucking good to be back in a city where people work on public holidays
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People think this is fake. Here are my receipts (from my Compass,
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Never hire someone who dries their hands with one of these. No sense of urgency. 45s of shareholder value lit on fire.
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If you’re not American this video should make you sweat. Even I was panicked — . I have a lease, a team, a company and two pot plants in San Francisco. I really don’t want to get deported. Luckily they took one look at my O-1 visa and let me in. Even cracked some jokes about AI
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Just saw two guys at the WeWork finish reading founder mode, chest bump each other (without a word spoken), and jump straight back into Cursor. Is this a top signal.
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@amit_ajwani If you’re looking for shit, I’ll gladly show u around my neighborhood where I live for $875/m :).
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Got asked if I was famous in my visa interview today lmao. Clearly she didn’t see the tweet that blew up yesterday. Some folks aren’t even in the stands of the arena . (O-1 visa will officially be in my passport next week🎉).
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Everyone who has immigrated to the US has a moment that they finally realized it was possible. I was outside a club and my friend Mike was like. You should move to the US and start a company. My plan at the time was europe I think. That conversation is what got me looking into.
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This is what $8.19 gets you in Cape Town btw :). … and it’s summer here rn
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our moat is that instead of texting VCs, our founding team text our customers 24 hours a day
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Tim Cook hates my guts because I just created a way to buy a Vision Pro for $500. There's a catch, so make sure to read this whole thing (or you can just spend the $3500 lol, up to you). Tell me ur approximate address, I'll find 1-6 others in a 5 mile radius and throw you in a
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The last thing you see before an open source project surpasses you in MRR
@vigneshwer_ram @hackwithzach @Fateen_Anam @shaiunterslak @huzaifaxahmad @ustelbay More pictures of the device!
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Our lil app on the a16z consumer market map 🖤.
In honor of Valentine's Day, @a16z consumer is dropping a market map on AI x social 💗 . We don't think tech has to make us feel more alone. In fact, it can help spark and foster new relationships, and help users build existing ones. What we're excited about 👇
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I'm so fucking cooked. Tried to go cold turkey and kill my phone addiction; two dealbreakers so far:. 1. I don't know where anything is without Google Maps. I had to ask gf to draw this map so I could get like 1 mile away, a walk I've done like 5 times. 2. Need a phone to unlock
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Lmao and some people still think proximity / location doesn’t matter when building a startup.
a very good day for page street. - Exa announces series A.- SF Compute announces seed .- Brev acquired by Nvidia . All the same house!.
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You either die an AI companion founder, or live long enough to see yourself become an AI wearable founder.
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That video of Sam Altman giving Canny and others startup advice is one of the best pieces of content he has made.
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We just unf*cked the internet. Upload any video file, and instantly remove all inappropriate audio content. This is NOT a find and replace for swear words, this uses a video understanding model to detect inappropriate content (using @twelve_labs ofc). Example in the thread:
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I post a lot of dumb stuff on this app . Jokes, memes. Straight up lies even. But this is not one of those times. There is a *cracked* engineer on the loose. He wants to build. He has built companies before. He wants to write code at a gen AI startup (remotely, from Cape.
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did a demo of what Zach and I are building on Monday night. presented alongside @character_ai, @pika_labs, @riffusionai, @convaitech . consumer is so back.
@character_ai @sethforsgren @shaiunterslak, founder of Everything Bagel, a chatbot that spans your entire digital/app footprint. (4/7)
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Touched some sand today. Crazy that humans made iPhones from this stuff
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@davidcoffeeboy You can build a startup anywhere, but you’re more likely to succeed if you build it nearby smart & ambitious people. Way easier to meet those people here.
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🚨 Demo time! When I met @hackwithzach a few months ago he was curious about and experimenting with his personal data. He asked me a super interesting question: what would you ask if you could chat with your entire digital footprint?. Over the next few months we're going to
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I’m a simple man. Fred again releases a new album. I reactivate my gym membership.
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Pretty crazy that most future billion dollar companies will find their first few customers during nights & weekends🤯
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My favorite vid so far but it’s bombing. Need a better hook, what should I dooo . @wordisbonz
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I don’t think people in places like Europe and South Africa have fully understood how high the expectations are for work ethic, turn around time, etc. in the US. This would be wild anywhere else, but if you’re a young hungry designer you’ll work 20 hour days over a weekend to.
Need a mobile designer for a project with a fast turnaround (48 hours). 6 simple screens. DM me with your portfolio & rates :).
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New investment thesis just dropped. Write checks into everyone in this picture 👇.
It was so cool to build this with @hackwithzach @huzaifaxahmad @ustelbay @Fateen_Anam @shaiunterslak . Best team ever ❤️❤️❤️
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1.1m+ impressions in a week 🤯. - Went viral on TikTok Wednesday .- Went viral on TikTok Thursday .- Went viral on X Friday. Where should I post next?
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Be a good person.Work w good people.Hang w good people.Date good people. No exceptions.
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Born to do wheelies on a bmx on marina blvd, forced to write code in fort mason center.
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Don’t get me wrong. My girlfriend is American. But you shouldn’t have to marry an American to get a green card ❌. Luckily you don’t have to lol. You can just get an EB-1A (and all the benefits of a green card) in 6-9 months. I’m about to go from an O1-A visa to green card
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