Essays
Featured
You're Vibe Coding Wrong
Mohamed Elseidy
·Jul 10
Most developers use Tier 1 for UX & rapid prototyping, Tier 2 for daily development, and Tier 3 for complex engineering challenges. The best strategy is to combine them when needed rather than trying to force one tool to do everything. Here's what each tier actually delivers and when you should use them
18 Months Until Autonomous AI
Mohamed Elseidy
·Mar 27
The autonomous AI revolution isn't science fiction anymore, it's here now. Founders who start acquainting themselves and adopting these workflows, will have a lot of competitive advantage moving forward.
How AI Has Changed Startups Forever
Qiao Wang
·Feb 20
When ChatGPT first came out three years ago, I wrote a wrapper to help myself prioritize emails and messages. My coding skills were rusty, so I used ChatGPT itself as a coding copilot. I instantly felt the magic. It took me maybe half a day to finish the project, while it would normally take me a few days in the pre-AI era.
2024 Crypto Startup Trends Report
Qiao Wang
·Oct 21, 2024
In this report, we provide trends observed in our application data and insights as to what they indicate for the broader startup ecosystem.
20 Lessons for Crypto Founders
Imran Khan
·Oct 18, 2024
I recently gave a keynote at Solana Breakpoint with the goal to pack as much actionable information for crypto founders into the time I had as possible. It was pretty well received so figured I’d take some time to elaborate a bit and give people a quick place to find each piece of advice.
Degens Are Pioneers
Qiao Wang
·Dec 12, 2023
A few months ago I came to a hilarious realization: “speculation” is the most contrarian idea among crypto VCs yet the most consensus idea among crypto users.
What Does It Take to be a Good Crypto Founder?
Qiao Wang
·Nov 14, 2023
I get this question a lot from founders and VCs: “what selection criteria do you use when screening teams for AllianceDAO?” So I decided to put my thoughts in writing.
Do Things That Don’t Scale: Crypto Edition
Qiao Wang
·Oct 27, 2023
Exactly 10 years ago Paul Graham wrote an essay titled “Do Things That Don’t Scale”. In my opinion, that was the single most important piece of content YC has put out for the startup community.
Hard Pivot from Crypto
Qiao Wang
·Oct 24, 2023
Since the beginning of the year I’ve worked closely with at least 5–10 startups that pivoted away from crypto.
The Magic behind AllianceDAO
Qiao Wang
·Oct 19, 2023
A few months ago at one of the dinners with ALL11 founders I had an epiphany. I realized why so many of our alumni raved about us. So I gave this talk during that dinner.
Four Reasons Why Crypto Startups Fail
Qiao Wang
·May 25, 2023
Two years ago I wrote about Common Pitfalls for Web3 Founders. As far as I know, this was the single most widely shared essay I’ve written for early-stage crypto founders.
Most Recent
You're Vibe Coding Wrong
Mohamed Elseidy
·Jul 10
Most developers use Tier 1 for UX & rapid prototyping, Tier 2 for daily development, and Tier 3 for complex engineering challenges. The best strategy is to combine them when needed rather than trying to force one tool to do everything. Here's what each tier actually delivers and when you should use them
Your Moat Isn't Your AI Prompt. It's Your Evaluations
Mohamed Elseidy
·Jun 17
Anyone can copy a prompt, but they can't replicate the months of iterative learning, the domain knowledge and the edge cases discovered through real user interactions, and the systematic evaluation framework that guided every prompt tweaking decision.
Shopping is Dead, AI is Taking Over
Mohamed Elseidy
·May 28
Major payment networks are building the infrastructure while AI platforms began to deploy; for startups, this opens opportunities in vertical specialization and merchant tools; and SEO will evolve into AEO as businesses adapt to optimize for AI agents rather than human shoppers.
Single-Agent vs. Multi-Agent
Mohamed Elseidy
·May 5
o3 vs Manus Soon after the recent release of Manus AI and my article about it, we've witnessed a Cambrian explosion of AI Agents. The agent ecosystem has expanded rapidly with numerous frameworks designed specifically for building autonomous agents. Examples include Google's Agent SDK and the A2A protocol, OpenAI Agents SDK. We have also seen new models come out like o3, which resolves multimodal prompts with impressive speed, accuracy, and a wide breadth of capabilities, clearly distinguishing itself from previous models.
AI's USB-C Standard: Understanding MCP
Mohamed Elseidy
·Apr 16
MCP is defined as an open protocol that standardizes how applications communicate and provide context to LLMs. One analogy that I really liked is that “MCPs for AI applications are like USB-C for hardware”; that is standardized, plug-and-playable, versatile, and transformative.