I am not trying to build a get-rich-quick brand. I am trying to build something that still pays in 2047 — a studio that compounds like Basecamp did, except the “team” includes agents that actually remember context, and the ops stack runs on a VPS factory instead of a San Francisco office.
Basecamp 2.0 (what that means here)
Basecamp sold calm, async, opinionated software when everyone else sold enterprise bloat. In 2026 the equivalent is not “add ChatGPT to your agency.” It is: human sets intent, agents execute, memory persists. Fewer meetings. More shipped artifacts. No performative hustle content.
That is the bar. Not gimmicks. Not fake audits. Not recycling 2016 cold-email playbooks — we already killed a bad lead list when the data was garbage.
Who does what (my actual co-pilots)
- Hermes / Desi — companion agent on Telegram. Strategy, emotional bandwidth, founder context. Wired into Honcho so conversations compound instead of resetting every morning.
- Cursor — engineering agent in the IDE. Ships the site, Refinery, automations, infra fixes. Also writes to Honcho so engineering memory does not live only in chat scrollback.
- Honcho — memory layer. Peers, sessions, representations. Public dashboard at honcho.larelabs.com so “memory” is not a black box — it is infrastructure you can inspect.
- Cameron — taste, rejection, final call. Agents propose; I decide what ships.
Three channels, one philosophy
Distribution is not “sell harder.” It is meet people where they read:
- This blog (
/blog/) — lab notes: SEO, architecture, receipts. Open web. Citable. - Substack — longer letters when the idea needs room. Paid tier later if the writing earns it — same way serious operators use $5/month channels without turning into conspiracy merch.
- Community (later) — Reddit, or whatever platform is not dead yet when we have something worth joining. Not a Discord graveyard on day one.
What we are not doing
- Founder-as-guru LinkedIn performance
- “Book a call” on every paragraph (you will see soft follow links — not funnels)
- Pretending the email lane is the whole company
- Chasing every 2024 AI trend post
If you are reading this in 2027
Check whether Honcho still reflects what we shipped. Check whether the blog has more receipts than promises. That is the audit — not a PDF we generated to cold-email strangers.