Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence
YC's President and CEO on working memory, skill files, and why the intelligence you rent will never compound like the intelligence you own.
The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before.
At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains why we’re entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase your ability to build. He shares the tools and workflows he uses every day, why every founder should own their intelligence instead of renting it, and what it means to build under your own power.
Timestamps
00:07 — What Founders Can Learn From Spinoza
04:46 — Personal AGI Is Already Here
07:57 — Why AI Makes One Person More Powerful Than Ever
12:29 — Your Life Is a Library
15:15 — Inside My Personal AI System
17:06 — Markdown Is Code
18:20 — Latent Space vs. Deterministic Code
21:13 — Building a Company of One
24:16 — How to Build Your Own Personal AGI
27:58 — Why Most People Will Quit Too Soon
29:09 — Own Your Skills Before Someone Else Does
32:24 — Personal AGI Means Owning Your Intelligence
35:21 — Why I Open Sourced Everything
38:30 — A Personal AGI for One Small Boy
40:18 — It's All Made Up. You Get to Make It Up.
Transcript
The internet calls me one of the most AI psychotic people online. So it’s only right that I start my talk with a story about one of the most canceled men in history. His name was Baruch Spinoza. And in case the philosophy elective wasn’t your thing, here are the highlights you need to know.
In 1929, a New York rabbi challenged Einstein by telegram: Do you believe in God? Answer in 50 words. Einstein answered in 25: I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind. The most famous scientist alive asks the biggest question there is, pointed at Spinoza. But here’s what Baruch Spinoza’s own community did to him.
Amsterdam, July 27th, 1656. Spinoza is 23 years old, a member of a tight-knit Sephardic Jewish community. He stands in a synagogue while the elders excommunicate him with the most violent curse the community ever produced. “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down. And cursed be he when he rises up.” Nobody may speak to him. Nobody may trade with him. Nobody may come within four cubits of him. Nobody may read anything he writes. And this ban, uniquely among the roughly 40 bans Spinoza’s community issued that century, has no repentance clause. It has never been lifted. It technically is still in force today.
Spinoza was 23. His crime was evil opinions, expressing forbidden thoughts. His punishment was complete deletion from the community. Before his community cursed him, they tried to buy him—a thousand guilders a year, serious money. All he had to do was show up at synagogue once in a while and keep his mouth shut. Hear that in founder terms. They’ve offered him a salary to stop building. He said no, not for 10,000, he said. He wanted truth, not comfort. Shortly before his excommunication, a fanatic came at him with a knife. The blade tore through his cloak and missed him. He kept that cloak, scar unmended, for the rest of his life. He wanted to remember what ideas cost. So what does the most canceled man of the 17th century do next? He grinds lenses. By day, he makes optical instruments, tools that let human beings see further than their eyes allow.
He makes them so well that the best scientists in Europe seek them out. And by night, he writes a book so dangerous he cannot publish it while he is alive.
When he dies at 44, lungs full of glass dust from making other people’s lenses, the manuscript is locked in his writing desk. His dying instruction: ship the desk by canal barge to his publisher in Amsterdam. That manuscript became his posthumous works, which attracted immediate attention across Europe and inspired some of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment. “What does Spinoza have to do with startups?” you might ask. Well, here is a man canceled by everyone he knew, offered a salary to stop, nearly killed for shipping. And his response was to build precision tools by day and write the most dangerous book in Europe by night, alone, with no permission from anybody. If you’re going to start a startup, you could do well to learn from Spinoza. He had a name for the engine that kept him going—conatus. It means your striving. The drive in every living thing to keep going and to increase its power to act.
Not your resume, not your title, not your job, the striving itself. This talk is about the tools that amplify it. So what did he actually say that was worth deleting a man over? The gist of the heresy was that God is not a king on a throne. God is spread through everything that exists. God or nature, he wrote. Four hundred years later, we are making a similar mistake about intelligence. Everyone is waiting for AGI as a singular event. A God in a data center. Some announcement, some threshold, some day when the sky changes color. So now I’ll say a version of Spinoza’s heresy updated four hundred years later. Everyone is watching the sky and the thing they’re watching for is already in the room. It doesn’t look like a God. It looks like infrastructure, a terminal window, a folder of markdown files, a job that finishes while you sleep, spread through everything, which is exactly where Spinoza told you to look.
AGI isn’t arriving as an event. It’s arriving diffused as your agent running on your context doing your work. I call it personal AGI, not artificial general intelligence for everyone all at once. General intelligence for one person, you. This was a dream of a great many people. Vannevar Bush called it the Memex, a machine that would be an extension of yourself and your brain. And I want to be precise about what I mean because the words personal AI have already been captured by marketing departments. I do not mean a chatbot you pay $20 a month to. I do not mean a slightly better autocomplete. I do not mean an assistant that knows your calendar and nothing else. That’s just a subscription you rent. It’s a corporate AGI you don’t own. It resets when you close the tab. It knows what everyone else already knows. And when the company behind it pivots, your so-called assistant gets a lobotomy on someone else’s schedule.
Personal AGI is a different animal. An agent that runs on your infrastructure, reads from a memory you own, executes procedures you wrote, and compounds. The corporate AGI you don’t own gets better only when the company ships something. Your personal AGI gets better every single day you use it because every day it knows more of your life. One of these is a product you consume. The other is an asset you build. Almost nobody in the world has this second thing yet, and everyone in this arena could have it by Monday. And I believe intelligence—intelligence of this kind—should be owned by you, not rented. If you go forth and build this for yourself, 2034 doesn’t have to be like 1984.
You might ask why this personal AGI is happening only now. Well, I think it’s because of what agents can do, and nowhere is it more obvious than in coding agents. In 2013, I was a YC partner building Bookface, our internal social network, at night. I shipped maybe 14 useful lines of code a day, which, if you know the literature on programmer productivity, is dead-on median. That was me at full effort. This year I run YC full-time, same brain, same hours, plus a five o’clock kid pickup. I did the math on my output and I’m at about 400X what I did in 2013. Now, before the skeptic in row three deflates that number for me, let me deflate that for myself. You don’t trust the raw lines of code? Fine. Apply the most pathological verbosity penalty you can stomach and assume the agent writes bloated code.
Assume half of it is scaffolding. Assume I’m flattering myself, which is always a live possibility. It’s still 8X at the absolute floor and 10 times that in the middle of the range. The number is large no matter how you torture it. Now, this is just code. And if you’re at the beginning of your career, you’re in luck. This applies to design. This applies to product management. This applies to growth. This applies to every part of what you might want to do. The multiplier for coding is not just for coding. It’s for every piece of knowledge work. And it’s not just me. At YC, we get to watch this at portfolio scale. A year and a half ago, in the Winter ‘25 batch, a quarter of the companies had codebases that were 95% AI-generated. Those companies use AI agents for everything now, not just code. And that batch is on track to becoming one of the fastest growing, most profitable batches in the history of YC.
Now I know what a correlation is, so let me say it carefully. I cannot prove that the AI-generated code and everything else caused the growth, but what I can tell you is that the fastest growing founders we fund are not treating AI as autocomplete. They are treating it as a workforce. There are 2X people and there are 100X people who are using the same Claude, same weights, same context window size, same API, but the leverage is not in the weights. It’s in what context you give it, how relevant it is, and does it happen at the right step? We’ll come back to this.
Now, Spinoza has a definition I think about every single week. In Ethics, he defines joy as the feeling of your power of acting increasing, which is why the first time an agent does a week of your work in an afternoon, it doesn’t feel like a convenience.
It feels like joy. And that’s not me being poetic. That’s the technical term. Your power of acting increased. Your conatus just got bigger. He defined the opposite too, by the way—sadness, the feeling of your power of acting decreasing. If your Sunday nights have a specific heaviness, like your ability to influence the world is receding, that you feel like you’re quiet-quitting, then this is what you feel. And hold that thought because we’re coming back to this in the second half of this talk and it gets political.
So here’s the equation for the next decade of your life. A frontier model, which is rented and a commodity and getting cheaper by the quarter. Plus your context, which is owned by you and unique. And ideally nobody else on this earth has it. Plus a harness that wires them together. That harness might be OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Claude Code, or Codex.
Add that up, and that gives you an agent that acts like a very fast version of you. Model quality is rented, but your brain is owned—ideally by you. Marshall McLuhan said that technology is an extension of man. Steve Jobs called a computer a bicycle for the mind. And if you have what I’m describing here, then you have a self-driving rocket.
Paul Graham taught every founder in this building two things. Make something people want and do things that don’t scale. Both still govern everything. What’s new is the multiplier on the second one. Agents are how one founder now does unscalable things at scale. The advice didn’t change, but the physics of all startups and of what you can do did.
Spinoza ground lenses—tools to let people see past the limits of their eyes. I want to spend the next 15 minutes showing you what grinding lenses for the mind looks like. This is the machinery I actually run my life on, and every concept travels to whatever stack you use.
Let’s start with working memory because it explains everything. You and I, as human beings, hold about seven things in our head at once—seven plus or minus two. It’s the most famous paper in cognitive psychology. It’s why local phone numbers are seven digits and why you forget the eighth item on a grocery list. That is the entire working memory of a human being. And every institution humanity has ever built—every checklist, every org chart, every filing cabinet, every standup meeting—is a prosthetic for that limit. An AI agent, though, holds a million tokens. That’s about a thousand pages.
Three Harry Potter books sitting open on its head all at once. And it can find a needle in any of them and synthesize across all three in seconds. Three Harry Potter books versus seven digits. You could argue that’s not quite AGI yet, but it is already a different operating regime. And almost everyone on earth is still running their life on an org chart and a way of doing things designed for the seven-digit brain.
Run that number in the other direction. A thousand pages is a lot, but it is also very little. Your life is not three books. Your life is a library. Every email you ever sent, every meeting, every decision, and every reason behind it, every conversation with every person you know. The question that determines whether your agent is a genius or a goldfish is this: Who decides, or what decides, which three books are open on the desk? And that’s what a brain is. That’s what GBrain is meant to be. The library plus the librarian. I’ve been building GBrain in the open. My personal OpenClaw has a Karpathy-style knowledge wiki with about 220,000 markdown pages. Twenty-five years of my life diarized. Every email, every meeting, my notes, my photos, my drafts, the things I got wrong. Compiled mostly by agents, curated by agents, searched for by agents, but I never re-ask a question I already answered.
And the lived experience in the system is the point. A founder emails me about a crisis. Before I finish reading the email, my agent has already pulled every prior conversation I’ve had with that founder. Three portfolio companies that hit the same wall, and what actually worked for them? When my agent does anything, it does so knowing everything I know. And that’s the difference between an assistant and a colleague. Let me walk you through an actual day because that matters more than an architecture diagram. While I slept last night, my agent processed my inbox. Not sorted it—processed it. It knows which emails are from founders in trouble, which are from people trying to sell me something, and which are from the 17 mailing lists I never quite unsubscribe from. The ones that matter are triaged with context pulled from the library: who this person is, my whole history with them, what they’re really asking under what they wrote, and what that might mean for me.
I wake up to a briefing, not a pile of emails. Before every meeting, a prep doc: who I’m meeting, what we said last time, what changed since, and what I should ask. Research I was curious about at midnight is finished by morning. And when something interesting happens in the world, my agent has usually read it, cross-referenced it against what I care about, and filed it before I’ve had coffee. On top of this library sits my agentic coding framework, GStack—123,000 stars now—which puts it in the top hundred open source projects in the history of GitHub. And what’s actually in the punchline of this full architecture? It’s mostly skill files plus a browser that the agents can drive. Pages of English and a way to act on the world. Markdown, not magic. Fat skills, thin harness. Let me show you what a skill file is because I keep saying this phrase and I want you to see how unmagical it is.
Here’s a real one, lightly redacted. It says: when a meeting recording lands from Circleback, transcribe it with speaker labels. Pull out the commitment made, who made it, and the deadline. Cross-check every person named against the library and link their pages. File the summary here, full transcript there. If anything contradicts something we already believe, flag it. Don’t override it. That’s it. That’s a skill. It’s a page of English. A smart intern—anyone, really, who could read—could follow it. And that’s the test, actually. If a smart intern could follow it, an agent can run it. Which means actually a kind of profound thing. I know I caught a lot of flack for talking about this, but I think it’s more true than ever, especially now. Markdown is actually code. If you can write clear instructions in English, you’re a programmer. The compiler is a language model, and that’s why it’s not just for engineers anymore.
At YC, our media people, events staff, finance team—people who have never opened a terminal in their lives—are building skill files and scheduled jobs. One of our finance folks compiled about a hundred Excel workbooks into a single app she built with an internal agent. She’s not a programmer. She’s a manager of agents now. Everyone is about to be.
The most important question to ask here is: where is the computation happening? And there are exactly two answers, and confusing them causes every agent failure I’ve ever seen. Some computation belongs in latent space: taste, judgment, reading what a human actually wants from a vague request. That lives in the model, and you steer it with a markdown file. And then some computation belongs in deterministic space: the arithmetic, the SQL query. For instance, the seating chart for what sessions you’re going to go to today for your breakouts. All of that needs to be stored in a SQL database used by the markdown files. Being smart about this goes a long way. Ask an agent or human to seat five people around a table. That’s easy. Do it in latent space. Ask it to make custom schedules for 6,000 people in an arena like we just did for you, and your latent space agent needs to write some code to keep track of it.
Your experience at this conference had to be markdown files calling code in exactly this way. And you couldn’t do it without the code. The model fails where we fail. The fix is having the model compute the way humans compute: the latent and the deterministic, markdown files calling databases and scripts. Simple, but it’s what everything is actually built on. And I’ll give you one more receipt. My favorite one, because you’re sitting inside it right now. Five days ago, I decided this talk needed Spinoza, one of my favorite philosophers, especially because of how canceled he got. So my agent went and acquired three of the best biographies about the man—books by Nadler, Goldstein, and Stewart, about 1,500 pages. It read all three. It built me a synthesis, a dated chronology of his life, every place the three biographers disagree with each other, and the best verbatim quotes with chapter citations.
And because it knows what I need: the 10 most tellable moments of his life, ranked with delivery notes. The knife attack, the bribe, the desk. Every beat of our opening that might’ve given you some chills 20 minutes ago came out of that overnight run. 1,500 pages became a stage-ready story that I could edit. I call it a compendium skill, and I use it daily. It’s a personal skill that is a mega, mega version of deep research—only deeper than anything the corporate AI products will give you. The spine of this talk you’re watching was inspired by the machine we’re describing now. And if you’re wondering where mine actually started, it was not 220,000 pages. It was a folder. It was a few markdown files about the companies I was working with and the people I kept emailing. And the library got big the same way anything gets big.
A little every day compounding with agents doing the filing. Nobody builds the warehouse first. First, you build one shelf. When you sit down with an agent tonight, you’re not coding. You’re managing a workforce made of markdown. A skill file as an employee. It has one capability, one job written down clearly enough that someone new could execute it. A resolver is an org chart. A task comes in and it decides which markdown file or who handles it, which means that before you ever incorporate anything, before you have a co-founder or a logo or a deck, you can already be running an organization. An organization of one plus your agents. You are the founder and the entire management layer of you incorporated and the headcount under you is now whatever you decide it is. This already produces companies that break the old math. Emergent out of our Summer ‘24 batch went from public launch to nine figures of revenue in eight months.
When they crossed $15 million in annualized revenue, they were 15 people. Retell, Winter ‘24, hit $60 million annualized with about 40. That revenue per person did not exist before. Not in software, not in oil, not in railroads. And these aren’t freaks of nature. They’re the first companies built natively on the new physics, and every one of them started as one or two people wired the way I just described. Now picture our batch room in the Dogpatch, hundreds of founders every single day, each one of them doing what used to be a person’s entire year of work. That is not the future. That is the bar right now with this batch. If you’re not doing it, your competitor is, and they will eat your lunch politely and thank you for it. It also changes what software even is. Software doesn’t have to be precious anymore.
You can build exactly the tool you need for the audience of one in a weekend. The old advice was scratch your own itch and hope it’s a market. The new version is much better. Scratch your own itch because scratching itches is nearly free. And some of your tools for one will turn out to be entire companies. You’ll know because other people start begging for them. And one honest caveat before the how-to, because you catch me out in any way. A brain nobody curates is a garbage dump with great search. Retrieval will surface a stale fact with total confidence. A bad skill file encodes a bad process forever. So the primitive is memory plus hygiene. Provenance on every fact. Contradiction checks when new information collides with old. And a librarian whose actual job is pruning. Treat the brain like production infrastructure and it compounds. Treat it like a dumping ground, and you get a very confident agent that is wrong in ways nobody can trace.
Everything so far is philosophy and receipts. So let’s get into some how-to. If you do what I describe in the next six minutes, you’ll be ahead of 99% of people who watch this talk and just nodded. Step one tonight, pick a harness and run an agent on your own machine. I use OpenClaw and Hermes Agent with GBrain. A hosted version of this is at gbrain.io. It’s free. GBrain itself is free and open source. I always recommend the Ferrari, but I’ll be honest, the Honda is really good too. Codex, Claude Code, whatever. Any of them will do 99% of this. And the upside of not-Ferrari is that it will also get you to your destination with a little less getting out to fix it on the side of the road. The concepts are the point, not any given repo or product. The intelligence is on tap, and there are many paths.
Step two this weekend, start your library. Not a grand archive. One folder of markdown files, export your notes, export your email if you can. Write one page about each project you are working on and each person you work with. And on those pages, write the things you actually know, what you’re building together, what they care about, what you owe them, what they said last time. That’s stuff no model on earth has because it only exists in your head. And your head, as we established, only holds seven things. The first time an agent answers a question using your context instead of the internet’s, you’ll feel the click and you won’t go back. You are all sitting on five, ten years of your own history in one inbox or another. That’s your moat just lying there, un-indexed, doing nothing. The only gate between you and this entire architecture is probably 24 hours.
Step three, write your first skill file. Picking it is easy. What’s the task you do every single week that you hate the most? Might be expense reports, meeting notes, the weekly status update, competitor research. Explain it to your agent. What do you want to do? In plain English, the way you’d explain it to a smart friend on their first day of a job, and then let it get it wrong. If it gets it wrong, correct it. Every rule, every exception, every “oh, and also,” put it in there and it’ll fix it. That page is now an employee. Run it.
Step four, wire it up to be a recurring job. Maybe it’s the job you just created in step three. Every morning at seven, do this. Every Friday, summarize that. The first time you wake up to work that finished while you slept, something shifts in your head permanently.
That’s the day that the day stops being the unit of work for you. It becomes what you can imagine, and it should be driven by what your goals are and what you want to create in the world.
Step five, this is the discipline that separates the compounders from the dabblers. Never do one-off work. Most people run one operation with one agent and then throw the context away. They close the window. That’s it. Don’t. At the end of every task, ask the agent to skillify what it did. Skillify is a special skill you can find in GBrain. You can point it at that repo and say, extract Skillify, learn how to do it. Turn it into a markdown file you can use and reuse forever. I’ll say it the way I say it at YC. If you have to ask for something twice, you failed. The person who captures what they learn gets smarter every single day.
The person who wakes up every morning with amnesia—well, that’s a waste of your time and it doesn’t matter how good the model gets if you can’t turn it into real memory. Do those five things and I can tell you what your next 90 days look like. Week one, honestly, it’s a toy. The library’s thin. The skills are clumsy. You’re fixing more than you’re saving. Week four, the flywheel catches. The agent starts answering with your context. The morning job produces something you actually read, and you write your third and fourth skill because the first two worked. Week 12, you have a library that answers before you finish asking. A dozen skill files running the parts of your week you used to dread, and one or two tools that other people keep asking to borrow, which in this room is called a startup. The curve is the same curve as any compounding thing you’ve ever seen.
Flat, flat, flat, then not. Most people who try this will quit this in week two, which is precisely why the ones who don’t feel like they’re cheating by week 12.
Now, I need to tell you the part that isn’t fun because everything I taught you just cuts both ways. I told you Spinoza’s definition of sadness earlier—the feeling of your power of acting decreasing. And I said it gets political. This is where. A skill file is not a document. It’s a piece of your cognition, how you do the thing, extracted from your head, written down and executable. Every skill you teach an agent is you, externalized. And the exact same file is two opposite futures depending on one variable: who controls it. Take a fictional example of a support engineer. Let’s call her Maya. Over two years, Maya teaches her agents 40 skills. How to triage a P0 at two in the morning, how to deescalate the customer who’s about to churn, how to write a postmortem that actually prevents the next incident. Forty files.
That’s her judgment—the thing that took her two years to build—sitting on a disk. Version one. Those files live in Maya’s repo. She changes jobs, they go with her. Day one at a new company, she’s operating with years of compounded judgment on tap. Every year she works, she compounds. That’s ownership. And if she wanted to start a company that does this, it’s her expertise—and it turns out she can. Entire startups these days will be markdown files.
Version two. Those files live in the company’s repo under the company’s IT policy. Maya leaves with nothing. The company keeps running her judgment without her. Forty files executing forever and her name isn’t even in the commit history. She didn’t have a career. She had an extraction. Same files, same Maya, one variable. So this is the doctrine, and I want you to be able to repeat it tomorrow.
I believe skill files are yours. Own your skills because if you don’t, your job becomes a skill file.
And this happened before. Craftsmen owned their tools. That’s what made them free. The factory broke that. The loom belonged to the mill. The knowledge workers assumed we were safe because our tools lived in our heads where nobody could confiscate them. Skill files end that. For the first time in history, your cognition can be extracted, stored, versioned, and owned. The only question is, by whom? Do you remember the thousand guilders? That offer never went away. It got rebranded. Every comfortable arrangement where your judgment compounds in someone else’s repo is a thousand guilders a year to show up, keep quiet, and stop building your own thing. And that’s why you should start a startup, because this is how you can actually make those skill files work for you. Spinoza faced the upgraded version two in 1673. Heidelberg offered the cursed heretic a full professorship. Salary, legitimacy, a chair, and “Freedom of philosophizing, provided he not disturb the established religion.” His answer was, “I do not know what the limits of that freedom of philosophizing might have to be.” He read the terms of service and he declined the acquisition.
He had a phrase for what he was protecting—”under your own power,” as opposed to under someone else’s. Your power of acting exists either way. The political question in 1673 and in 2026 is who commands it? Personal AI is about controlling your own cognitive abilities and protecting yourself. That’s the whole thesis of this talk in one sentence. Personal AGI is how you stay under your own power in the age of agents. So keep your brain and your skills in a repo you control from day one before any platform or any acquirer has an opinion about it. When Spinoza died, they inventoried the room. Two pairs of pants, seven shirts, a lens lathe, 160 books, and the Ethics locked in a desk. He owned almost nothing and nobody ever controlled his skill files. The desk drawer was his repo. Own yours like he owned his.
Now, three objections, and I can hear them from up here, so let’s just do them. Objection one. The models are improving so fast that all this harness stuff will be obsolete. Just wait for the next release. This is the bitter lesson crowd and I love them, but notice what actually happens in every model release. The better the models get, the more the differentiator moves to context. When everyone’s engine is a thousand horsepower, the race is won on the driver and the map. The weights are everyone’s. The library is yours. At least I hope it is. A better model makes your library worth more because a smarter reader extracts more from the same books. I’m rooting for the labs as hard as anyone in this building, but every release they ship is a free upgrade to a workforce I already own and a workforce I want you to own.
Objection two. Is this just RAG? Sure. And Postgres is just B-trees. Retrieval is the primitive, not the product. The hard part is everything around it. What gets written down in the first place, how it gets enriched and linked, what gets promoted to hot memory versus filed as cold reference. Who arbitrates when two facts disagree? Retrieval is easy. Being worth retrieving from is the product.
Objection three. And it’s the one that deserves the most respect. You put your entire life in one system, your email, your meetings, your kids’ schedules. What happens when it leaks? My answer is the same answer as the whole talk. That’s exactly why it has to be yours. My brain runs on my own infra, in my own repo, under my own keys. Compare that to the default, which is not privacy. The default is your life is already scattered across 10 clouds owned by companies whose incentives are not yours, searchable by everyone except you.
I didn’t create the risk by consolidating my context. I took custody of it. Custody is the security model. And if you don’t trust yourself to hold the keys, I promise you the answer isn’t trusting someone else’s terms of service more.
So why did I open source all of it? The harness, the brain architecture, the skills, the whole personal operating system? People ask me this because they seem like they think there must be a catch. Well, the answer is because I can. Because being at YC for me means I don’t have to monetize my own infrastructure. But “because I can” is also the answer to the wrong question. The real question is why anyone should. And the answer is that I believe tools of the powerful should be given away. Every era has a private technology of leverage, a thing the powerful have, and everyone else doesn’t.
For a long time, it was literacy. Then it was capital. Right now, today, it’s this—the harness, the library, the workforce made of markdown. The people who have it are quietly operating at a different scale than the people who don’t. And the gap is widening every month. And that’s what this whole conference is about: to give you the power to be able to do it for yourself. When something that powerful stays private, you get a priesthood. When it gets given away, you get a renaissance. I know which one I want to live in, which means I get to do the thing that I actually believe in. And I’ll give it to you as a creed because it’s the closest thing I have to one. Say the things other people won’t. Fund the people other people won’t. Build the buildings other people won’t. Write and give away the code that other people won’t. Leave behind the institutions that other people won’t.
And when you build in the open, you should know what’s coming because Spinoza’s story has one more chapter. November 1676, Gottfried Leibniz, the most glittering genius in Europe—silk stockings, a calculating machine in his luggage—travels to The Hague to spend three days in an attic with the most hated man on the continent. And then he spends the next 40 years lying about it. Publicly, the visit was a few hours in passing. Privately, his notes are crammed with obsessive commentary on Spinoza. I live a small version of this weekly. I say agents write most of my code now and the dunks arrive by lunch. Then I look at what the loudest dunkers are actually shipping and it’s agents all the way down. So learn the pattern now because building in public guarantees you’ll need it. First, they quote tweet you, then they git-clone you. The dunks are just the adoption curve announcing itself. And I want to show you what this architecture looks like when it’s pointed at the only thing that really matters.
I have a friend whose son has a rare form of epilepsy. No lab, no grant, no permission. He just went and you can just do things. He built a repo of 80,000 markdown files, a brain for one small boy, and pushed himself to the absolute edge of what humanity knows about his son’s exact condition.
Every specialist visit, every paper, every seizure log, every drug interaction—indexed and cross-linked and ready so that when a new doctor has an idea, he knows in minutes whether it’s already been tried. A father, a laptop, and a library. That is personal AGI. Not a benchmark, not a demo. The entire architecture I’ve described tonight—the library, the librarian, the right three books open at the right moment, aimed at the one thing one man loves the most in the world. Nobody was coming to build that for him, so he built it. And nobody is coming to build yours for you. That’s the good news.
Everything you were told you needed—the team, the funding, the permission, the credential—was a workaround for the fact that one person could hold seven things in their head and work sixteen hours a day. That fact just expired. You can fly now, not metaphorically, mechanically. Every problem where you thought, I wish I had this person. I wish I could hire this person, but I can’t get them. You can. Every archive too big to read. Every dataset too gnarly to clean. Every ocean you were told not to boil. We can boil the ocean now.
I have a sentence I live by and I want to leave it with you. “It’s all made up, but you get to make it up.” Every institution in the world, including the one that read a curse over a 23-year-old in 1656, was made up by people no smarter than you. The difference between you and every generation of founders before you is that they had to recruit dozens of believers before they could build anything at all. You need a laptop and a few years of your own history you’re already sitting on. There are about 7,000 people at this whole event. 7,000 conatuses. 7,000 strivings. For most of history, almost all of that striving never got an audience. It died waiting for funding, waiting for headcount, waiting for permission, waiting for someone else to believe first. The machinery I showed you tonight is the first technology I’ve ever seen that lets the striving go straight to work.
One person, no intermediaries, no permission. I genuinely do not think the world understands yet what 7,000 people with that kind of leverage walk out of a building and do. Spinoza closed the Ethics, the book that had to be smuggled out in a desk, with nine words: All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. The difficulty just collapsed. The rarity is now up to you. Go and build. Thank you.