# Thoughts

> Ideas on AI, business, and what comes next.

- [Your AI Sends Your Confidential Files to Anthropic. What Will You Tell Your Investors?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/your-ai-sends-your-files-to-anthropic) - Christian Genco, 2026-10-02. When Claude reads your files, the full text goes to Anthropic's computers. Here is what Anthropic's contract promises, what its strongest privacy setting does not cover, and what it costs to run AI on your own equipment.
- [How do web apps work?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/how-web-apps-work) - Christian Genco, 2026-09-05. A web app is text, code, and a database talking to each other. This is a hands-on walkthrough: edit real HTML, real Ruby, and a real database table right on this page, and watch how a request actually gets built.
- [The Four Kinds of AI Value Creation](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/four-kinds-of-ai-value-creation) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-08-17. Two questions sort every AI initiative: did the spend exist before, and is AI the engineer or the employee?
- [How to Optimize Your Site for LLMs](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/optimize-your-site-for-llms) (coming soon) - Christian Genco, 2026-04-20. Your website was built for humans and Googlebot. Agents are the new visitors. Here's how to make your site legible to the LLMs that are increasingly reading it on your customers' behalf.
- [The Cloud AI Dependency Trap](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/cloud-ai-dependency-trap) - Ricky Bureau & Christian Genco, 2026-04-07. Every company building on OpenAI or Anthropic is making an implicit bet: that these providers will remain stable, affordable, transparent, and available. The evidence says otherwise.
- [The $6,000 AI Server That Embarrasses $120,000 GPU Rigs](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/mac-studio-best-deal-in-ai) - Christian Genco, 2026-04-02. A dollar-for-dollar breakdown of AI memory pricing, what models you can actually run at each tier, and why the Mac Studio is the most underpriced hardware in AI.
- [AI Automation Consulting: How We Deliver 6 Months of Work in 2 Weeks](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/ai-automation-consulting-6-months-in-2-weeks) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau & Christian Genco, 2026-04-01. The strategy brain and the hacker brain, working together with AI leverage. Here's how we actually do it.
- [AI Business Process Automation: Where to Start](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/ai-business-process-automation-where-to-start) (coming soon) - Christian Genco, 2026-04-01. A technical walkthrough of identifying high-ROI automation targets and building AI systems that actually work in production.
- [AI Due Diligence for Private Equity: What to Look For](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/ai-due-diligence-for-private-equity) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-04-01. A framework for evaluating AI readiness during due diligence — and how to price the AI opportunity into your investment thesis.
- [AI Readiness Assessment: A Framework for Mid-Market Companies](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/ai-readiness-assessment-framework) (coming soon) - Christian Genco, 2026-04-01. A practical framework for evaluating where AI can drive the most value in your business — and where you're not ready yet.
- [The AI Transformation Roadmap for PE-Backed Companies](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/ai-transformation-roadmap-for-pe) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-04-01. A step-by-step playbook for PE operating teams to deploy AI across portfolio companies — from diagnostic to full implementation.
- [Measuring AI ROI: The Math PE Firms Actually Care About](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/measuring-ai-roi-for-pe) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-04-01. Forget vague promises about 'efficiency.' Here's how to calculate the real EBITDA impact of AI initiatives.
- [How We Built a Real Estate Intelligence Platform in 2 Weeks](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/real-estate-intelligence-platform-in-2-weeks) (coming soon) - Christian Genco, 2026-04-01. Every business in the US, Google review sentiment, demographic trends, automated investment memos — built by two people in two weeks.
- [The 3 AI Quick Wins Every PE-Backed CEO Should Deploy This Quarter](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/three-ai-quick-wins-for-pe-ceos) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-04-01. Three concrete AI implementations you can ship this quarter that will show up in your next board deck.
- [Why Two People + AI > A 50-Person Consulting Team](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/two-people-plus-ai-vs-fifty-person-team) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau & Christian Genco, 2026-04-01. The economics of AI-native consulting: how infinite leverage changes who can deliver enterprise-grade work.
- [What AI Strategy Consulting Actually Looks Like in 2026](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/what-ai-strategy-consulting-looks-like-in-2026) (coming soon) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-04-01. The old consulting model is broken. Here's what AI strategy work looks like when you strip out the bloat.
- [You Don't Need to Pay Frontier Labs a Dollar: Why Most PE Value Creation Can Run on Open-Source AI](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/open-source-ai-for-pe) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-03-26. The benchmarks, the economics, and the case studies all point to the same conclusion: open-source models can handle the vast majority of what PE portfolio companies need AI to do. Here's the data.
- [What is a large language model?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/what-is-a-large-language-model) - Christian Genco, 2026-03-20. The technology behind ChatGPT and Claude, explained by building one up from the simplest possible version.
- [The SaaS Market Is Pricing In Its Own Disruption](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/saas-market-pricing-in-disruption) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-03-19. EV/Revenue multiples across 40 major software companies are diverging dramatically. The pattern reveals which moats AI will erode — and which ones it won't.
- [AI Unlocks Impossible Analysis](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/ai-unlocks-impossible-analysis) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-03-17. I used AI to analyze every chord and melody in Weezer's discography. Here's what it taught me about business intelligence.
- [What is AI?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/what-is-ai) - Christian Genco, 2026-03-15. A plain-English explanation for people who run companies, not computer science departments.
- [I Built a Better Dashboard Than Strava in 10 Minutes — Without Writing a Single Line of Code](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/better-dashboard-than-strava-in-10-minutes) - Ricky Bureau, 2026-03-11. I exported 7 years of Apple Health data, dropped it into Claude, and got interactive dashboards that outperform what any fitness app gives me. Here's what that means for SaaS, data portability, and the future of software.
- [What is a computer?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/what-is-a-computer) - Christian Genco, 2026-03-11. You use one every day but probably can't explain how it works. Here's why understanding the basics changes how you think about AI.
- [First principles for the AI era](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/first-principles-for-the-ai-era) (coming soon) - GXB, 2026-03-01. Every process in your company was designed around human limitations. Time to start over.
- [Is SaaS Dead?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/is-saas-dead) (coming soon) - GXB, 2026-03-01. No, but it's dying and nobody knows how quickly.
- [The next abstraction](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/the-next-abstraction) (coming soon) - Christian Genco, 2026-03-01. Every major leap in computing came from hiding complexity behind a simpler interface — from punchcards to programming languages to GUIs to the cloud. AI is just the latest layer. The winners will be the ones who see what comes after it.
- [Why are people buying Mac Minis?](https://gxb.vc/thoughts/why-are-people-buying-mac-minis) (coming soon) - GXB, 2026-03-01. The $600 computer that's replacing $200K employees. What this means for headcount planning.