Derek Andersen

The Divot introduction credits pattern recognition with taking Greg Isenberg from founder to trusted advisor. It says he has met with some of the biggest and best companies in the world and has helped them on their strategies around AI. Today he leads Late Checkout, a portfolio of AI-native businesses powered by agents and internet communities.

Idea Browser, Greg's Letter, and the Startup Idea podcast are where those ideas go out. Through them he has shared over 2,000 startup ideas and built an audience of millions of followers. The introduction places this conversation in July 2026, with Greg Isenberg.

Greg Isenberg calls it the ACP framework: audience, community, product. Step one is to figure out the niche. Step two is the framework. He says a business in the AI age should follow it. Every business he starts begins as an audience. It starts as an X account, an Instagram account, or a TikTok account, and it starts audience first.

The first 90 days are a goal: find the format that gets that niche to follow him. He gives the reason in the same stretch. In the AI age, when you can build anything, distribution is the part he names. The account comes before the product, because every business he opens starts there.

Greg Isenberg says we are entering what he calls the age of the multi-preneur. A multi-preneur is someone who owns multiple businesses and multiple lines of revenue. For creators, he says the multi-preneur still has one product, one service, or one business unit that drives the lion's share of revenue.

He also says they are going to have multiple businesses. If agents can run those businesses, and the owner can create a high-margin business with a whole system around it, he calls that setup pretty cool. Multiple lines of revenue, one of them carrying the lion's share, and agents on the rest, is the age he is naming.

Greg Isenberg says the builder-distributor combo is probably the most lethal type of person in the AI age. Anyone can build. He starts to say you need to speak English, then he corrects it: you can speak any language and prompt to build. The way to compete is to understand distribution quite well.

Scroll-stopping Instagram posts and videos are one path. Kling, a video model, is another, used for commercials that then connect to Meta ads. The builder-distributor understands distribution, how to capture attention, and how to convert that attention into revenue. The same person understands how to drive value from the product side. The product has to be good, and the bar for good products is in

Greg Isenberg says he probably measures life by what family says about him. The words he hopes God says are you did a good job. He states the family standard with that doubt still attached, and he states fatherhood outright. A last dying thought, in his words, will not be wonder what Sand Hill Road thought of him in a pitch.

He is a father now. The child is a year and a half old, and another one is due in a month. He says being a dad completely changes how you think. The sentence about what the children think, what the partner thinks, and what the family thinks is a different voice, and that voice says the care becomes so important.

The reply from that other voice is that agents will be ru

On Divot, a study says the vast majority of people do not live within their means. A large percentage of really wealthy people still do not live within the incredible life they created, because they are always trying to get more and always trying to go for more. Derek Andersen lives in Northern California and says what is enough, and what is right for him, is a question only he can answer.

He used to rent down the street from Mark Zuckerberg, who owns like eight homes there. Every day the drive home went past the house, where a security guard would be. They live on the same street, both sleep on a bed, and both breathe the same air. The drive still left open whether the rented life is enoug

On Divot, the venture-backed model works for less than 1% of all companies that are created. Investors back only a small percentage of the companies they look at, and only a small percentage of the companies they back actually work and return the money. Investors know the pattern, and the whole model is baked into the pattern, so the vast majority of anything anyone is building should not use the venture-backed model.

The path narrows at each step. Investors look at companies and back a small percentage of them. Only a small percentage of the backed companies work and return the money, which leaves a very, very small group of people. The venture-backed model only works for a tiny fraction o

Quebec is one of the places where people drink the most Pepsi on the planet. Quebecers drink Pepsi instead of Coke because marketing in the local language resonates with them.

On the show, a boring business keeps an opening when it stays in one geography. Competition might be heavy in South Florida, the Bay Area, and New York. Canada and other geographies still leave room to take a concept and localize the language. Someone from Quebec points to research on Pepsi and Coke, and marketing in the local language is what resonates with people there.

Localizing the language is what lets a boring business land in a geography like Quebec with less of the competition found in South Florida, the Bay

On the show, work splits into regular work and creative work. Regular work such as SEO is probably 12 to 18 months away from running on its own. Creative work still needs a person whenever creativity is part of the task, even at 1%.

People used to hire SEO agencies to do SEO. The work meant creating blog posts, optimizing the blog posts, and doing a set of tasks that were pretty binary, because the results meant a site went up in Google, went down in Google, or stayed the same. Regular work of that kind is probably 12 to 18 months away from being pretty autonomous and doing its own thing. Creative tasks like tweets, video content, branding, and copywriting keep a creative element. When crea

On Divot, a morning spent with Grok 4.5 produced an AI co-founder that built a startup overnight for the equivalent of $2 an hour.

The builder had dismissed Grok and treated the market as an open AI, anthropic, Google world. After playing with Grok 4.5, the model was connected to a Hermes agent and given to a personal assistant running 24/7. The assignment was one startup idea: build features, optimize based on analytics, do SEO, and keep running while the builder slept. By morning the output looked capable and good. Sitting on the 38th floor and looking at the ocean, the builder had a working AI co-founder, paid about $2 an hour, super intelligent, and creating a startup during the hangout

Should you drink your own pee? How does pooping work? When is a good time to give up on your startup? What advice to give as a mentor? What does coffee have to do with strong opinions on the internet? All of that, in this episode of Smash Notes.

What if you are stuck in the desert. Is it okay to drink your own pee? Speaking of drinks. <a href='https://smashnotes.com/p/this-is-your-life-in-silicon-valley/e/do-you-prefer-starbucks-blue-bottle-or-philz-guests-philz-coffee-ceo-jacob-jaber-techcrunch-reporter-kate-clark/s/what-does-philz-coffee-ceo-jacob-j

Entrepreneurial career is a 20 or 30 year journey. Whether this week is good or bad, it will not matter in the long run. As failures pile up with few successes, you got to think about what you are going to do in a longer scale and be aware of how you are treating people. Stay in the middle of knowing how it ebbs and flows and realize your progress and growth. ~ Derek.

The journey is the destination. You are always going to have questions and challenges. Remind yourself that your experience is what’s important, and find that appreciation in the experience. Also, do not take all advice at face value, but place it in context of where you are and where the one giving you the advice is at. Liste

After interviewing countless number of influential people, you realize they are humans similar to just about anyone you know. Despite being incredibly successful, billionaires and people featured on covers of magazines, a lot of these people are still thoughtful, kind, and generous.

In childhood, David could not find a group to identify with, so he turned toward video games to find a community. Slowly but surely, he continued to build and connect online, and eventually found people doing similar work. David started a group where people could learn about "community building" as a business. The group started to grow and eventually became a business in itself.

When people started to tell Derek they had heard about Startup Grind, he did not believe them. It was not yet a huge overwhelming success, but they had finally built something that people wanted, and it was satisfying.

Because Derek had been through the "valley of death," where he'd failed over and over again, nothing mattered anymore except for his customers satisfaction. He focused on that and took joy in little moments, like when he got to hire an employee to take some stress off his shoulders.

Everybody gets a shot on goal, do not give up.

At one point, Derek Anders raised $250,000 for an iPad game, which launched and nobody bought it. He put $250,000 consulting dollars into a social networking product that did not go anywhere. For a while, he could not find a technical co-founder to work with. He did not stop.

It’s not all perfect, but once you create momentum, good things happen to you. Figure out how to survive, stick it out, and you will get your chance. You have to make it work with what you got.

Early adopters of a company will stick around and be involved because they believe in the business and community is a tool that can keep people engaged in those early and tough times. Consistent communication with the customers allows the company to learn on how the product can improve. Eventually you can get to the point where the product starts to sell itself with the power of its people.

The quality of your business will be formed based on the foundation that you build the business on. If you culture does not value the voice of your customers, that would build a foundation that becomes part of the values. So if you start with a fundamental belief and investment in your community, you can create a strong foundation of a feature for your business.

Founders need to be thinking on not just how to build a successful business, but how to make a successful community where people feel connected, aligned with the mission, and feel safe. Every company is a community with the intention of growing and driving a profit. Common values, interests, goals, missions are what makes a community, and a community is the future of how businesses will be built.

In a community-driven company, the brand would drive the vision, but the community would come together to collaborate on the product development. If you give your community an opportunity to contribute to your mission and your objective, you can scale up with an incredible pace.

You are better off not hiring your friends, but if you have to, it is important to discuss the worst case scenarios and to figure out how you would either avoid them, or work through them. Derek and David knew each other for a long time and had a lot of mutual respect, and even then, they had to answer a lot of questions, including what it would look like if one of them quit or was fired.