Rob Archibald

Nvidia just agreed to pay $12.9 billion for a company that gives its core product away for free. yes for free! That sentence should stop you. I've spent ~4 years mentoring founders, and almost every one of them arrives believing the same thing....value comes from what you can protect. -Lock the model. -Gate the API. -Guard the IP. -Extract. Hugging Face is the most expensive counterargument in tech history! Look at the arc. 2016: a chatbot company. An AI Tamagotchi, essentially. It wasn't working. Then a co-founder spends a weekend porting a Google model to PyTorch and drops it on GitHub. -No pricing page. -No gate. -The repo explodes. They abandon the plan and follow the signal. 2019 — $15M Series A 2021 — $40M Series B 2022 — $100M at $2B 2023 — $235M at $4.5B, with Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Nvidia on the cap table 2026 — NVIDIA buys the whole thing for $12.9B. Roughly 3x the valuation in three years. Now notice what Nvidia actually purchased. -Not compute. Nvidia *is* compute. -Not models — Nvidia has published over 500 of its own on the platform. It bought 18 million developers, 3 million models & 200,000 companies who arrive there by habit. And Jensen Huang immediately committed to keeping it open, publicly stating Nvidia compute will not be required to build or deploy there. Read that again. The buyer's first promise was not to close it! Because the moment it closes, the asset evaporates. -The value was never in the code. -It was in the gravity. That's the lesson I keep coming back to. -Capital can buy infrastructure. -Capital can buy talent. -Capital cannot buy the position of being the place everyone already goes. That has to be grown, in public, usually by giving away the thing everyone tells you to charge for. Openness isn't generosity. It's the fastest known distribution strategy ..... and distribution is what gets bought at a premium. So to the young committed founders I work with> Your round size is a receipt, not an achievement. Nobody writes a $13B cheque for your Series C. Stop asking what you can defend. Start asking how many people can use what you built without asking your permission. -An idea you protect moves at the speed of your team. -An idea you release moves at the speed of the world. The capital found Hugging Face four times over. It found them because 18 million people got there first! #OpenSource #AI #StartupLessons #Founders #Nvidia

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If you think calling a product a "GPT wrapper" is throwing shade, you just don't get it. Here's why: Anthropic has a 40-page prompt for Claude Code. Yet the biggest problem developers face? Getting it to follow instructions in their claude.md file. Think about that. Anthropic—with all their expertise—can't get reliable instruction-following. Building products that leverage commercial LLMs is incredibly hard. Getting it right is even harder. Anyone who tells you they built a working product "using AI in 5 days" is flat out lying. #PromptEngineering #ContextEngineering #LLMDevelopment #AIProducts #BuildingWithAI #AIEngineering

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For many years at Canvas Medical we resisted the “headless EMR” label ⛔ It implied a back-end data architecture and developer tools (correct, we do have those) without a front-end interface (WRONG — Canvas is also the certified EMR front end for our customers). Turns out we fought the good fight and won it at a perfect time. The market has woken up to the need for a programmable UI, not a headless EMR. Ours is built with our server-side SDK, accessible to end users to customize and extend with AI-assisted coding. No developer needed. ✅ It’s only because we stuck to our guns, refusing to sell a product without our certified EMR front-end, that we're in this position to win. And now, I can’t see a world where the EMR GUI as we know it survives. The destination is an entirely new paradigm for interaction between the clinician, the patient, their data, and the steps to provide and document care. We will use natural language (voice, written text, inline commands) to prompt, instruct, and monitor agents taking action on your behalf. Examples: 🧠 Behavioral health — a psychiatrist wraps up a telehealth visit and agents schedule the GAD-7 follow-ups at 2 and 6 weeks, submit the prior auth for CBT, and e-prescribe buspirone 10mg twice daily. 💊 Chronic care management — clinician dictates “Refill the metformin, schedule a follow-up in 3 months, and flag if their A1C is overdue” and three workflows are executed. ⚖️ Weight management — a care team lead says “show me every patient outside of their target weight” and an agent evaluates smart scale data, trends results against patient-reported and physician-documented targets, builds a custom visual dashboard on the fly, and automates follow-up tasks for the patient. There will be a tremendous shift in expectations and capabilities in healthcare UX over the next 12-18 months, and our team is ready for it.

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A team member messaged me after a 4-hour call fixing dev issues. "I can't believe you were on that call." We have 100+ people at Genflow. I run a $100M agency. And I was right there debugging code with the team. It hit me how wrong most people get leadership. Everyone thinks being CEO means strategy sessions and vision boards. Wrong. Being CEO means being the captain who's still on the field. You show people how it's done by doing it alongside them. Not above them. The idea that you'll build a business and just work on "high-level stuff" while everyone else executes? That's not how you scale. You scale by staying close to the work. Understanding the actual problems. Building alongside your team. After 9 years of doing this, I've learned: The best CEOs aren't in corner offices. They're in the trenches when things break. They know the product inside out. They can still do the work if needed. Your team doesn't follow titles. They follow leaders who roll up their sleeves. What kind of leader are you trying to be?

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Several people know about this problem but nobody talks about how to solve it. I was asked one time to help fix this issue at a company. The fix lies in breaking the work down to a few critical steps. First, never just hand off work in its entirety and expect you'll get anything you can use. Regardless of how good or bad the team is, always ask, always, the offshore team to pseudo code their approach. They should explain which files they'll touch, which systems they'll touch, integrations, which areas or layers of the application, etc. I call this the first pass. Why is this important? This tells me they're thinking about the problem right and if there are any gaps in their understanding, or any pieces they're missing. After that, they'll do a second pass. That is stubbing out which functions or code will need to be added or modified, maybe even making the functions and service calls work but with mock data. This is the "prove it to me" moment. This second pass also helps me as a dev manager gauge how fast or slow the offshore team is working, giving me indications too if they're stuck somewhere. Only after this second pass, do I actually turn them loose to go execute and "deliver" the solution. Only now, because I did some diligence on my managerial end, I've got greater confidence that what I'll get will be something on par with what I'm expecting and can use. This partnership and collaborative arrangement also fosters trust and over time the offshore team will learn how your organization operates, critical thinking, and that nothing should ever be done in a vacuum or cowboy way. For more helpful tips like this, follow me. I'm paying it forward in 2026 and will be sharing gems most people aren't talk about with a focus on the solutions, not just problems.

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