The older I get, the more the weeks feel like they're flying by me. This week was another successful week in my membership community, where I explained to the community members how you can create a grant writing skill with Claude that interviews you for your ideas and then helps you build the structure for the actual grant. It was a great session, but as I'm running these sessions and office hours every week, I'm feeling the drain of time from all the other things I do in public. Well, I guess also me not having my MacBook for half the week because I had to get the battery replaced didn't really help.
I’m as far away from hustle culture as you could get. But student requests, grant coordination, customer emails, building things, it all feels like it swallows your day whole. I still ask myself sometimes how all of these online creators are creating so much content without ever burning out. Or maybe they’ve all just burned out and they just never admitted it in public and then just hired a team? And I’ve optimized my systems with productivity setups to the teeth.
Either way, as I’m inching towards the end of my sabbatical, I am thinking deeply about how I can optimize my systems and create things that won’t burn me out as I’m going back to a full teaching load. I think a large part of this is the AI agent army that expects me at work every day. I’m typing so many different requests across Claude Codex, Hermes, Notion AI, Antigravity and others, that it feels like speeding up. However, it also means I’m juggling 10,000 tasks at once. My brain isn’t ready. I might forget a task that I started in the morning and only pick it up later in the day. And then as you’re changing computers or setting up your computer anew (like I just did), it all feels like your memory is scattered and fragmented across many different sessions. The soup can be hard to warm up. And I’m feeling the struggle to reconstruct what it is that I need in the moment more than ever.
I’m still deep in building the early version of my membership right now, and it has me thinking hard about this exact topic: which parts of my own process are worth showing in public, and which parts I’ve been treating as overhead. And also the core question: Is it even worth for me to keep building this membership or should I pursue other venues?
Your rigour is the product
In 2020, OpenAI’s head of research quit his job. His next action could be interpreted as a disadvantage. Dario Amodei left the company with several senior colleagues, including his sister Daniela, who led safety and policy. They walked out over a disagreement about the shipping speed of the AI. They thought the company was shipping product faster than its safety work could keep up.
Their actions at the time looked like a disadvantage.
They incorporated Anthropic as a Public Benefit Corporation. Simply put, this is a for-profit company that writes its mission into its legal charter. So, the board can choose the mission over quarterly profits. They did not rely solely on human labels. Most founders treat this structure as a cost they want to avoid. Anthropic treated it as the product.
They trained their model, Claude, using a set of rules they named a constitution. They did this to avoid leaning only on humans labeling good and bad answers.Anthropic shipped Claude, built on Constitutional AI, in March 2023. Then, in September 2023, they published a Responsible Scaling Policy. This was a public document that outlined the conditions for refusing to train or deploy a model. The framework is based on biosafety levels used in labs for dangerous pathogens. It has graduated tiers that get stricter as the danger increases. They funded mechanistic interpretability tools — diagnostic probes and visualizations that inspect model internals so teams can spot deceptive behaviours before deployment. He framed his wager as a race to the top: set public safety standards and force competitors to meet them.
I won’t bore you with the full funding‑round details. Every founder who has been told depth doesn’t sell should be bothered by the short version. March 2025 — investors valued Anthropic at $61.5B, early 2026—$350B valuation. Amazon and Google were investing tens of billions jointly. They were also preparing to go public. In the months following the scaling policy, OpenAI and Google DeepMind released their own versions. Anthropic says the policy caused this change. I’d say, more carefully, that it stopped being the weird one.
Safety was not the only reason this worked. It helped substantially that Amazon and Google were hunting for an OpenAI alternative to fund. The timing of the language-model wave was pure luck. Plenty of rigorous labs have faded into obscurity. Depth alone is not enough.
Put rigour on the front door.
Anthropic took the most rigorous, least glamorous thing it did and put it at the front door. Rather than narrowing a niche, this approach is differentiating the wheat from the chaff. Niching asks how small you can cut your market until you are the only one left. Differentiating identifies the specific people who need a skill only you provide. Research-focused founders should apply the discipline they already use instead of overlooking it. The way you care about your method. Or your discipline to not over-claim results. All the things you consider essential for good research.
When you start, you might treat that discipline as overhead. But your market treats it as scarce.
I read AI labs’ safety claims carefully, because I study deception by generative models. So take this as a lesson in positioning and nothing more. I made the opposite mistake myself for years. I started by targeting PhD students because it seemed the natural choice. I narrowed the market to my obvious audience. Differentiating worked better. I kept the same level of rigour but focused on a smaller group who benefited most, and then I explained, plainly, why that rigour mattered.
Make sure you get it on the public record before someone with half your depth and a louder feed defines your category for you.
You win the next decade by putting your research on the public record now; customers, recruits and design partners will find you. The technical founder people already trust.
Everyone else calls it overhead, you call it rigour.
Bonus
The full issue in The Write Insight includes the interactive Front Door Audit scorecard (12 statements measuring how legible your rigour is), a 4-phase legibility checklist, and 6 curated resources including the Constitutional AI paper and Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy.
