Joe's Journey - Email #2

Greetings!

In ~1 month of "retirement" hundreds of you have responded to and signed up for "Joe's Journey" and I've had the good fortune to connect and reconnect with over 25 of you in the last month. So thank you! Let's continue this ride…

🤔 The Race to Replace

I'm noticing a trend in AI that I'm calling "the race to replace" which is essentially a groundswell shift of builders and innovators simply taking outdated businesses and softwares and rebuilding them with AI - current companies that can't or won't adapt will erode and/or die in the coming years. Are these new companies/tools the next unicorns or are we entering a more nuanced age of hyper-personalized, small scale software meant to solve specific use cases? Likely a mix of both as the cost to develop software plummets.

🛠️ Building with AI

Here's a good example a friend told me about: Clay.earth. I was describing an MVP CRM that I built in about 3 hours. Yep, just 3 hours and say goodbye to Pipedrive, Hubspot, and Salesforce….semi-kidding but seriously, I built a CRM for myself and don't need any of those softwares now. Mine is simple with almost no features, but I have what I need and can save $$ along the way.

🕵️‍♂️ Meet Agent Joe

Speaking of building prototypes…meet "Agent Joe" my virtual cartoon avatar. You can interact with "me" at joeholberg.com/build as well as check out the step-by-step instructions on how I built it and trained it based on my book, Rogue Finances. Agent Joe is primitive, but seeing the tech in its infancy gives me optimism about what agents will do as they mature and become more useful/sophisticated.

March/April 2025 Summary

🤔 Thinking

Harsh Patel (a fellow builder/AI explorer) and I met up in the middle of rural Illinois and got an A-frame Airbnb for a few days to literally "frame-AI" thoughts (#punalert). Among other thoughts, we concluded:

1. There is a need for massive amounts of energy infrastructure and supply (erring towards as much green/renewable energy as possible).
2. Nuclear energy is under-utilized in the US.
3. Energy independence, security and decreased cost will be critical factors in the age of AI.
4. The US has a viable path forward to diversifying its energy mix and looks promising if we can untangle ourselves from burdensome energy and utilities regulation.
5. AI relies on hoards of compute and the big players (Mag 7, for example) are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this by buying and building compute resources.
6. Knowing the value accretion will be scooped up in a "bar-bell" fashion with companies getting further ahead before raising funding (angel, VC, etc) and that big players will scoop them up earlier to capture up-side, it paints a relatively bearish or increasingly difficult investing scene for angels, VCs, and PEs yet an optimistic one for startups/builders.

The impact may shift in investors' favor if companies stave off acquisition in favor of the public markets, but given the external macroeconomic factors (beyond headline tariffs this past week), the IPO market has looked relatively soft and may continue to be.

This seems to imply that big tech is potentially undervalued as they continue the march of dominance in owning the compute resources of the future. This will surely come off as a hot-take given the blistering growth of Mag 7 in 2023 and 2024 (when Microsoft was the most valuable company in the world at $2T I thought it was undervalued. Went to $3T+). The reasoning continues down several other dimensions including a macroeconomic route, but I'll forgo that analysis for the sake of brevity. LMK what you think of this logical analysis and what you're observing out there as well.

📚 Reading

I read "Build" by Tony Fadell and just am half way through "Abundance" by Ezra Klein. Both of which are compelling. I'm not really a "pop-business" book reader (think Malcolm Gladwell), but Tony's "Build" struck a practical yet inspirational tone. More thoughts on Abundance once finished. Full list of reading here.

✍️ Writing

I have started to reach out to literary agents and wish there were more in Chicago! Alas, most are in NYC and LA. The book proposal continues to evolve and I'm optimistic about the progress I'm making.

🛠️ Building

See above as well, but to recap:

• Try out Agent Joe and let me know what you think!
• Built my own custom CRM in ~3 hours which required me to set up an online database using supabase (SUPA easy!) and integrate Google OAuth.

For perspective on how amazing this basic feature set is, it would have cost me ~$15,000 - $25,000 to contract a dev shop and/or to hire engineers to get a project like this off the ground. Today it costs 3 hour's time and about $40/mo for small-scale SaaS solutions (ex: ChatGPT and some other low-cost tools).

The site evolves, check back for updates anytime: joeholberg.com

Turns out a lot can happen in a month when you recapture all of your time! We're well in to April and I'll be back with more. Cheers!

Best,
Joe