Build your AI stack
Pick the tools worth paying for and the prompts worth reusing.
3 steps to get you moving, each with a resource worth your time and more waiting underneath
Think of this as a friendly starting line, not the last word. Each step gives you the gist, then a resource worth your time from founders who've actually done it. There's always more underneath, more questions and more resources, whenever you feel like digging in.
-
1
Building Your AI StackChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Grok, how do founders actually choose?
The gist Founders who use AI daily have stopped asking "which one is best" and instead match the tool to the task: Claude tends to win for writing, coding and thinking through strategy; ChatGPT is the best all-rounder with the strongest voice mode and app ecosystem; Gemini shines for research, live web answers and anything inside Google Workspace; Grok is mainly useful for real-time news and what's happening on X. The practical move is to pick one $20 daily driver, then run your actual work (an investor email, a landing page, a market question) through two or three of them for a week and keep whichever output you'd actually ship.
ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: The Best AI for Each Use Case in 2025 Peter Yang (Creator Economy) A product leader runs the same real tasks (coding, writing, research, images) through all three models side by side, so you see exactly where each wins instead of taking benchmark claims on faith. -
2
PromptingWhy do some people get 10x better results from the same AI tools?
The gist Because the output you get depends as much on how you ask as on the model itself, an MIT study found that roughly half the quality gains from a better AI model came from users learning to communicate with it, not from the model. Power users treat AI like a smart new hire: they give it background, examples, and clear success criteria, then iterate on the answer instead of accepting the first draft. The good news is this is a learnable communication habit, not a technical skill.
Study: Generative AI results depend on user prompts as much as models MIT Sloan (Ideas Made to Matter) Hard evidence that half the 'better AI' effect is the user's prompting skill, the clearest answer to why identical tools produce wildly different results. -
3
AI as a Thinking PartnerHow do founders use AI for strategy, decisions, and brutal feedback?
The gist Founders treat AI less like a search engine and more like a smart colleague they can think out loud with: they paste in their strategy doc, pricing plan, or investor update and ask it to poke holes, list risks, and argue the other side before they commit. Because the default behavior of ChatGPT or Claude is to be agreeable, the trick is explicitly asking for criticism ('challenge my assumptions', 'tell me why this fails') and giving it real context about your business. Used this way, AI becomes a cheap, always-available second opinion that sharpens decisions instead of just producing text.
AI as Your New Strategic Thought Partner, Jeremy Utley (Stanford) Jeremy Utley on Proof of Work: Applied AI Case Studies Stanford's Utley shows why treating AI as a teammate, not a tool, changes the quality of strategic thinking you get out of it.
