Welcome to Slow Ventures’ Snailmail, where we slow down and share what’s been on our partners’ and founders’ minds this week.
TL;DR:
Others:
Events: Slow Security NYC (4/28) Featuring , Navigating Pre-Idea SF (5/14), How Creators Win The AI Era NYC (5/21)
We Taught Content Creators How To Code
Slow Creator Fund
Context:
This week, something happened in San Francisco that would have been impossible twelve months ago. A room full of creators — people who build audiences, not software — sat down with laptops, opened their terminals, and started building real web applications. Not mockups. Not wireframes.
Deployed, functional products with databases, authentication, and live URLs. Most of them had never written a line of code before this. All of them shipped something by the end of the day. From iPhone shortcuts that auto-share videos to their editor, to a talent agent sourcing tool, to an AI agent that curates product recommendations based on the creator's own taste and existing wardrobe — the range was wild.
Market Signal:
This is the "personal software" era that Sam have been talking about on More or Less — except it's not hypothetical anymore. It's happening in a conference room in SoMa with creators who sell salmon and build woodworking tools. The gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a product" just collapsed from months to hours. And the people crossing that gap aren't engineers. They're content creators with domain expertise and audiences that most startups would kill for.
That's not an accident. We think the most important software of the next decade won't be built by software engineers. It'll be built by people who actually understand the problems — creators, operators, domain experts — using AI as the translation layer between "I know exactly what this should do" and "it's live."
Takeaways:
The "non-technical founder" is a dead category. If you can describe what you want clearly, you can build it. The bootcamp proved this in real time with people who'd never opened a terminal before Tuesday morning.
Creator-as-founder is accelerating faster than anyone expected. When your audience IS your distribution and AI IS your engineering team, the traditional startup playbook — raise money, hire engineers, build for 18 months — starts looking like overhead.
We open-sourced the entire setup. The hackathon starter template — Next.js, authentication, database, deployment pipeline, Claude Code config — is public on GitHub right now. It's the same repo our creators used. Step-by-step guides for every prerequisite. Designed for people who have never touched a terminal.
Etiquette Finishing School: New York — Another Smashing Success
Team Slow
Context:
Last November's pilot at the Four Seasons was supposed to be a one-off — a half-joke that started at YC Demo Day. Instead it generated coverage from TechCrunch, Business Insider, the SF Standard, and international press in German, Italian, and French. It helped inspire what became Amazon's #1 Business Image and Etiquette book. And the waitlist for a second edition started filling before we'd even announced one.
This week, we brought it to Manhattan. NYC with an even better lineup that covered every blind spot the tech industry pretends doesn't exist:
Matt Mullenax & Matt Teri (Founders, Huron) on grooming and first impressions. People decide if they trust you before you open your mouth — and scent is the one signal they can't filter out. It bypasses conscious thought entirely. You don't choose to smell someone. It just happens, and the judgment forms before you even register it.
David Litwak (Maxwell Social) & Andrew Yeung (Next Wave NYC, ex-Google, Meta) on hosting events worth remembering — and why founders who build billion-dollar products still can't work a room
Amelia Miller (ex-VP, Insight Partners) on AI etiquette — why AI is designed to be agreeable, not honest, and how that's quietly eroding founder self-awareness
Kevin Colleran & Yoni Rechtman (Slow) + Aaron Harris (ex-YC Partner) + our surprise guest, Brian Kelly (The Points Guy) on fundraising etiquette — the investor psychology nobody teaches and the behavioral cues that separate founders who close rooms from those who clear them
Pilar Briton (Luxury lifestyle creator, ex-Cooley) & Geoffrey Chen (Caviar House & Prunier, Domaine Chanzy) — fine dining masterclass on caviar, alcohol, and the silent signals you send at the table before you say a word
Market Signal:
The demand curve on this keeps steepening. Oren John posted a video recap calling it "the taste economy" and noting that "tech men are increasingly getting left behind."
The audience is also broadening beyond tech — finance, media, and hospitality people showed up in New York, because it turns out nobody else is running this class for any industry.
The underlying thesis is simple and increasingly hard to argue with: the tech industry spent two decades selecting for technical ability and zero decades selecting for presence. That worked when code was the moat. AI just blew the moat up. When anyone can vibe code a product over a weekend, the differentiation shifts to the stuff that can't be automated — commanding a room, building trust across a dinner table, making someone want to follow you.
The founders who win the next decade won't just be the best builders. They'll be the ones who can do the thing AI can't: make a human believe.
The Only Four Jobs That Matter
Yoni Rechtman
The Market Signal:
The org chart is melting. The best AI-native companies aren’t hiring for classic roles; they want people who cross the old lines, who can use tools, think commercially, and focus on outcomes. Salespeople are building automations for themselves. Engineers are obsessed with customer value. The lines are gone.
The Four Jobs (Archetypes, Not Titles):
Product eng/vibe coder/PM/slop cannon: The high-velocity, high-tool-use generalist. Not confined to “product” or “eng.” Anyone can be commercial and product-minded now.
SREs/infra/security/systems: The people who stitch all the stuff together and keep it running. Every org will drown in output without them.
Adults: The grown-ups. The ones who say “hey, come on” before you drive off a cliff. Obvious in legal/finance, but every team needs at least one.
Hot people: The interface layer, internally and externally. The ones who make the org cohere and the product legible. There are many ways to be hot, and I won’t elaborate.
Key Takeaways:
These are working styles/archetypes, not job descriptions. If you’re asking “where does design fit,” you’re missing the point.
You probably can’t be all four. Maybe two, max. If you claim all four, you’re either lying or misunderstanding the assignment.
This quartet replaces the old product/design/eng triangle. It’s not about what you make; it’s about how you work.
The best teams will have slop cannons everywhere. “SREs” exist in every function—think QA in marketing, not just engineering.
In a world of internal decentralization and breakneck velocity, you need adults with judgment and intuition.
Hot people are non-negotiable. They make things attractive and the org pleasant. If you know, you know.
I’m not a doomer. Yes, big companies will get leaner, but there will be more companies, and “tech” is everywhere. If engineers seem to be disappearing, it’s only because the best ones are showing up everywhere else.
More Musing From The Team