Summer Vacation Time
The Weekend Leverage, August 10
This business is the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing I worry about when I go to sleep. It has been a sprint for four months, and to keep up this kind of creative pace, I, like every other person, need a break. August is always a slow month in tech, and this week was no exception, so it is the perfect time for me to go sit under a palm tree, read a book about hiking, and prepare before the fall madness. There will be no deep dives this week, and no Sunday digest on August 24. After that, I’ll be back, refreshed and more opinionated and loquacious than ever.
Thanks again for your understanding. A creator business is not suited for vacations and I’m still figuring out how to do it—let me know if you don’t like this and have a suggestion on how to make it better for you. (Maybe a guest post next time?)
Last thing: I’m looking for a tutor who knows the history of education. We’ll put together a study guide and I’ll bug you with follow-up questions each week. Could be an adjunct professor, think-tank analyst, PhD candidate—open to others too. Pays $75/hour.
Shoot me an email at evan@gettheleverage.com
MY RESEARCH
Founders can aim higher with AI. As longtime readers know, I’ve spent months picking apart chatbots. From their monetization potential to their philosophical implications, it has been a topic I’ve returned to over and over again. I am in awe of their potential. They can finally be the machine that makes us not merely more efficient, but elevated. However, to achieve that potential, founders need to build different types of companies. They need to aim not just to have 100 times the financial outcomes, but 100 times the social ones, too.
What is Framer betting on? AI tends to smush together the parts of a company that were previously separate divisions. Design can write code. Engineers can create sales copy. This is exciting, but also, scary. It can disrupt existing companies if they don’t change. Framer (sponsor) is betting that they can combine the entire web page creation experience, from ideation to analytics, in one platform. It's a bold bet but so far, it is one that is paying off. Almost all my designer friends rave about the product.
TASTEMAKER
What I’m reading on my break:
ESSAYS
The Future of Media Is a Bank: Author Daisy Alioto is the founder of media company Dirt, a publication that is too cool for me to understand, but I enjoy trying anyway. She has a new theory on how the future of media lies in AI-powered agents and spontaneous micropayments, turning attention into a stablecoin-backed status economy where payment is both consumption and social signaling. Hopefully she is wrong because I have no idea how to write emails that would succeed in that environment.
Prophet Arena: A Live Benchmark for Predictive Intelligence: Most AI benchmarks are like open-book exams on stuff that already happened—fine for parroting answers, useless for showing foresight. Prophet Arena flips that, forcing models into the churn of live, unresolved events and asking them to bet—probabilistically, nervously, like humans in markets—on what happens next. And that’s interesting because if intelligence means anything, it’s not recall but foresight—seeing patterns in the noise now and projecting them into tomorrow’s fog.
Class Dismissed: Joe Liemandt is simultaneously a billionaire and an elementary school principal. He is the primary backer of Alpha School—a series of charter schools that use a combination of remote tutors, AI, and custom software to cut kids' academics down to only two hours a day. The rest of the day? Well, that’s up to them. I already read this profile, but it was so good that I want to read it again. I also chatted with Joe for about an hour this week and found him energetic, focused, passionate, and more than a smidge convincing.
BOOKS
Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard: This book explores the story of Abraham and Isaac to argue that true faith requires a “leap” beyond ethics and rationality into a paradoxical trust in God that looks like madness to the outside world. I have found that all the good things in my life have come from choices that look like madness to others.
Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person by George Ainslie. Experimental evidence shows that people often develop a short-term preference for the closer, less rewarding option over a more distant, but better one. This book helps understand why it happens so I can perform better analysis on companies that sell these short-term fixes.
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane. I’ve already started this one, but it is prose so beautiful that it makes me want to shout at my fingers, “TYPE BETTER.” Macfarlane explores Britain and Ireland asking whether there are any truly wild places left in either country. Seriously just beautiful stuff, all that writing should be.
Sponsorships
We are now accepting sponsors for the fall. If you are interested in reaching my audience of 36K+ founders, investors, and senior tech executives, send me an email at team@gettheleverage.com.