We're All Making This Up

The Whiplash of Building in 2025

Who doesn't love the holidays? Time with family, twinkling lights, and festive events. But you know what really tests that holiday spirit? Traffic. Especially when it's caused by AI.

My family almost missed Lightscape at the SF Botanical Gardens because Waymo's entire fleet decided to collectively forget how to handle a power outage. Turns out, when the grid goes down, individual human drivers figure it out. When it happens to every Waymo simultaneously? Mass confusion.

Talk about an apt metaphor for technology at the end of 2025: so much promise, yet barely mature enough to actually work reliably.

The Breakneck Pace (and Nobody's Map)

In case you haven't been to San Francisco lately, AI is everywhere. Walk down Market Street and you'll see billboard after billboard for AI companies you've never heard of. Boom? Bubble? Hype? Everything Everywhere All At Once?

Some companies are printing money—Nvidia's market cap is now larger than most countries' GDP. Others are burning through hundreds of millions trying to figure out what sticks. Pundits are screaming from both sides of the boom/bust divide.

Me? I'm a firm believer we're in inning 2 of a 9-inning game.

But here's the thing: nobody actually knows what's coming next. Not even AI legend Andrej Karpathy, who candidly admits the gap between where we are and where we need to be is "absolutely massive." If the people building this technology are making educated guesses in real-time, that tells you something important: we're all figuring this out together.

And that Waymo outage? Perfect reminder of exactly where we are.

Incredible but Brittle

Just as a power outage can strand an entire robotaxi fleet, much of what's being built today operates at the intersection of magical and fragile.

Notice the AWS outages this year? Or the ChatGPT service disruptions? These aren't bugs, but rather features of frontier technology. Extraordinary systems built on foundations we're still reinforcing.

Magic that works 99% of the time is incredible. It's also painful when we start relying on it and it fails spectacularly the other 1%. The challenge isn't avoiding brittleness, it's learning which 1% actually matters and engineering around it.

Every company building today is discovering their version of the "power outage moment." The question isn't if it'll happen, but how quickly you learn from it. The answer? Move fast, get your hands dirty, iterate ruthlessly, and build for the long game while enjoying the chaos of right now.

The Only Real Path Forward

People often ask: what's it like being a startup founder in 2025?

Honest answer? Both incredibly exciting and low-key terrifying.

Like Andrej said: when you pop your head up for air, it's far too easy to realize you're behind. New LLM models drop weekly. Tools evolve overnight. Entire categories emerge and disappear in months. The whiplash is real.

But here's what I know after being in the grind of building Attrove: the only move is to keep moving. Try new things. Break them. Learn publicly. Talk to the brightest people you can find—and this year, I've been fortunate to connect with legendary investors, fellow founders, and operators who genuinely love this moment we're living through.

The energy in the Bay Area (and beyond) is palpable. Not hype energy, builder energy. People rolling up their sleeves and making things that didn't exist six months ago.

Excitement Over Anxiety

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of change. As Heraclitus said over 2,500 years ago: "The only constant in life is change."

But building during an inflection point is a privilege. We're not optimizing for local maxima—we're climbing an entirely new mountain. The terrain is uncertain. The weather changes hourly. And honestly? That's the fun part.

Will 2026 be the year of AI agents? A return to in-person experiences? The AI apocalypse? Your guess is as good as mine.

My only advice: get out there and build. Try things. Experience the changes firsthand. Form your own opinions instead of inheriting someone else's. That's the real advantage of being alive during times like these: the ability to engage directly with transformation and bend it toward something meaningful.

So here's to power outages, brittle systems, traffic delays caused by confused robotaxis, and the incredible things we'll build anyway.

See you in 2026.