Hi {{first_name | Investor Club Member}},

I was reading an article recently about Block (the company behind Square and Cash App) and it really caught my attention.

Block was founded by Jack Dorsey, the same entrepreneur who started Twitter.

A few weeks ago, Dorsey made a decision that shocked a lot of people in the tech industry.

He laid off over 4,000 employees — roughly 40% of the company’s entire workforce. The company went from more than 10,000 people to under 6,000 almost overnight.

What’s interesting is Block wasn’t struggling.

Revenue was growing.
The company was profitable.
Cash App continued to expand.

This wasn’t a cost-cutting move.

Dorsey said the reason was simple: AI tools were allowing much smaller teams to do the same amount of work — sometimes even more.

In his words, the tools they were building internally meant that a significantly smaller team could “do more and do it better.”

Think about that for a second.

A major public technology company just removed nearly half its workforce not because the business was failing — but because AI had changed the economics of building software.

And when I read that, it made me pause.

Because I’m starting to see the same thing happen in real life.

At RYSE, we needed an internal inventory management tool.

Specifically, something that could:

If you’ve ever been through an audit, you’ll know exactly why that audit trail matters.

So I started asking around to see what it would take to build.

The quote I received was about $30,000 and roughly three months of development time.

Instead, I decided to try something.

I opened Claude A.I and started prompting.

By the end of the day, I had built the entire system myself.

And honestly… it looks incredible.

Not like some clunky internal spreadsheet tool.

It looks like a beautiful, polished piece of software — the kind of interface you’d expect from an expensive enterprise product.

It tracks FIFO cost layers, calculates inventory margins, logs every adjustment with a historical audit trail, and gives us a clean dashboard to manage operations.

The whole thing was built in a single day.

That moment really stuck with me.

Because it made something very clear.

A huge category of software tools is about to disappear.

I had lunch recently with one of our lawyers.

He told me something that stuck with me.

He ran a little experiment inside his firm.

He gave junior lawyers a legal case to analyze and asked them to prepare research and recommendations over two weeks.

Then he ran the same case through an AI system.

The AI produced better analysis and recommendations in minutes.

As a result, he had to make a difficult decision and let several junior lawyers go.

That conversation stayed with me.

We’re entering a moment where one person with AI can suddenly do the work of many.

It’s a strange time.

But also a fascinating one.

All of this made me start thinking about something.

If software becomes easier and easier to create…

For startups, where does the real competitive advantage live?

I keep coming back to the same answer.

Hardware.

People still need physical products.

And building hardware is hard.

You need:

And if you add patents, you create real protection.

You can’t spin up a global manufacturing operation with a few AI prompts.

This is exactly why I’m excited about what we’re building at RYSE.

We build physical smart home devices.

Products that require engineering, manufacturing, logistics, and retail distribution.

Software still plays a role.

But the real advantage comes from the combination of:

That’s the moat.

And in a world where software becomes easier and easier to generate, I think companies that build real physical products will have an even stronger advantage.

Anyway, just some thoughts I’ve been reflecting on lately.

We’re living through a really interesting moment in technology.

More soon.