Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as surprising as the New Yorker’s massive investigation into Sam Altman 🕵️
In today’s edition:
💡 The untapped talent network for Fortune 500 companies
🛠 Using AI to find and build your own automations
🔋 From burnout to 500,000 users in under two years + more
🔍 OpenAI vision, Google launch, Marc Andreessen + more
🍻 A product for the aspiring chefs out there
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Ferndesk: This week we've partnered with Ferndesk to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Check out Ferndesk here
Register for our Masterclass this Wednesday (it’ll be epic)
Shoutout to last week’s winner Mark Elmore.
Good luck!
🧠 EIR Marketplace for Founders
Venture between ventures
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Companies love hiring ex-founders. That’s because all businesses know they need entrepreneurial thinking. But there’s a problem…hiring ex-founders isn’t easy. The culture change is brutal, equity and pay expectations can be way off. Despite this though there are tens of thousands of ex-founders sitting in a very specific purgatory: too successful to take a normal job, not ready to start something new, and looking to figure out their next move. That’s where EIR (entrepreneur-in-residence) roles come in. Why not create EIR project for these founders inside big companies? Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A structured marketplace that places ex-founders inside Fortune 500 companies as short-term Entrepreneurs in Residence
🛠️ Product:
Founders join and get matched to corporate innovation projects based on sector fit, stage experience, and availability, with placements ranging from 3-6 months at $5-$25k/month.
The corporate gets a vetted founder assigned to a specific internal innovation project with clear milestones, a structured sprint framework, and a dedicated operating layer (milestone tracking, stakeholder updates, IP documentation) that makes the engagement feel less like consulting and more like running an internal startup.
Every placement generates outcome data - which project types succeed, which corporate structures kill good ideas, which founder profiles work in which industries - building a proprietary benchmarking product that gets sold back to corporates over time.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: 20% placement fee on contract value (~$30k per placement at $150k average)
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by McKinsey, Accenture, LinkedIn, or a major executive search firm looking to own the founder career layer. Target exit at 8-12x ARR.
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🤖 Most "Solo Founders" Are Still Doing the Work of 5 People
Running a business alone doesn't have to mean running yourself into the ground. The founders clearing $1M+ solo aren't working harder - they've just built smarter AI systems than everyone else.
This Wednesday, Wilson Wilson (founder of Ferndesk) is breaking it all down live:
How he built and scaled a $1M+ business with no full-time team
The exact AI automations he uses to run his operations daily
A live demo of Ferndesk - the tool at the center of it all
Free to attend. 45 minutes. Zero fluff.
🤖 Using AI to Find and Build Your Own Automations
The Context: Most founders want to be more AI-native but never get around to auditing their own workflows. Here's how to use Cowork to do it for you - automatically surfacing repeatable tasks across your tools every Monday and turning them into reusable Claude skills.
Step-by-step:
Connect your tools to Claude - Linear, Notion, Slack, Gmail, and any recent Cowork sessions. This gives Claude visibility across everywhere your work actually happens. (Settings → Connections → Add Integration)
Every Monday morning, paste this prompt into Cowork. It runs a structured audit across all your connected tools from the past 7 days, looking for tasks you did more than once or anything that took over 15 minutes and followed a clear pattern.
Cowork surfaces a ranked list of up to 5 "Skill Candidates" - pulled directly from your real workflows, ranked by time-saving potential and how easy they'd be to automate. Things like "weekly sponsor outreach email" or "turning a tweet thread into a newsletter section."
Review the list, click "Generate Skill" on your top pick, and Cowork drafts a Claude skill file that codifies exactly how you complete that task - tone, format, and context included. Add it to your skill library and Claude will handle it your way from that point on.
📊 Are You Burning Too Much to Grow Too Little?
Most founders have a gut feel for their burn rate. Very few know how it actually compares to other VC-backed startups at the same stage. That gap is costing them.
Pilot analyzed 1,000 VC-backed startups so you don't have to guess:
Median burn-to-growth ratios have dropped by half as founders got leaner
Median time to profitability is 4.2 years - and 1 in 5 startups is already there
Startups with the best margins tended to hire more, not less
You can benchmark your own performance against the full dataset in 5 questions.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: These guys went from burnout to 500,000 users in under two years. Here's the story.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Capital as a Service (CaaS) (as pioneered by Chamath) is ripe for a comeback in 2026. Watch this space.
💬 Prompt Drop: This article clearly explains Karpathy's second brain (and shows you how to build your own without writing code)
🆓 Founder Resource: This founder just hit $1.5M ARR with GojiberryAI and shared a cheat sheet for exactly how they did it.
💵 Founder Deal: Get Intercom + Fin for free if you're a startup for 12 months.
🔍 Founder Finds
🧠 OpenAI just released their vision for reorganizing society around superintelligence including taxes on automated labor and a public wealth fund.
🗣️ Google just quietly launched an AI dictation app that works offline. Nice.
🤖 Marc Andreessen says AGI is already here. Not coming. Here. Whether you agree or not, when a16z says it publicly, the market listens.
🎯 Tai Lopez (yes the “here in my garage guy”) just gave a surprisingly good take on how to find billion-dollar ideas in the AI age. Simple, but effective.
💰 Three investors bought 30 kids' YouTube channels, built them up, and sold to Blackstone for $3B. Epic story.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Oven Camera
Do you find cooking a challenge? Ever incinerated your dinner because you were too busy doomscrolling?
Introducing OvenEye™, a smart camera that mounts inside your oven, monitors your food in real time, and sends you an alert the exact moment it's cooked. No timers, no guessing, no calling the fire brigade.
OvenEye™ - Roast in peace.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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