Bragging about cheating on time

This is my newsletter where I share cool stuff people do on the internet.

You might remember me from my CatGPT 🐈‍⬛ project. I created it in a single day to show that people can make fun stuff with AI, and millions of people loved it!! 😻

Last week we bragged about people that bent technology to their will.

This week we take on cheaters! 😈

And I’ll try to make an argument for why cheating time isn’t so bad…

Forbes just came out with their 2026 list of the 20 companies most likely to be worth a billion-dollars, and almost every single one of them is building AI. I’ll dig into 4 that aren’t just using AI, but seemingly using it as a cheat code.

Let’s get into today’s bragging!

Adam

PS — Did someone forward you this email? Join the crew here. Reply and tell me what you’re building, I read every single email.

Matthew de Jonge started Fortell to give his grandparents super-powered ears after watching them lose their hearing and withdraw from the world.

He started it in early 2021 and built a device that uses AI to isolate and clarify speech in ways traditional hearing aids don’t, and when they launched it in December last year, they sold out almost immediately!

A problem most people write off as “just getting older” sparked one of the most in-demand pieces of hardware in the country right now.

It’s a bit scary that language models are so powerful that they literally can hear for us. But in comparison with any pre-AI hearing aids, the application of AI here seems ridiculously unfair.

Cheating sound waves and using AI to fill in the gaps for the human ear is next level tech. Check Matthew and Fortell out! 🦻

Melisa Tokmak started Netic so the person fixing your pipes could text you back faster than your doctor does, after she spent days trying to book an appointment in sweltering heat.

She started it in 2024, and now her company’s AI agents for service businesses answers every call and text instantly, books appointments, and figures out what’s broken before a technician shows up.

There’s something funny about the most powerful technology of our lifetime being aimed at fixing clogged toilets faster. 🚽

Next to a business that doesn’t answer when that toilet is clogged, though, it’s clearly an unfair advantage I can support!!

You’re awesome Melisa! 👏🪠

Tess van Stekelenburg spent three years looking for a biodefense team to invest in and never found one…

So she and Kathleen McMahon stopped waiting and built Valthos themselves 👯‍♀️

Their AI works out what a new mutation does the second it shows up, natural or engineered, and turns that into a threat profile before it gets out of hand.

It’s a little unnerving that AI got good enough at biology to create the next threat as easily as the cure for it... 👀

But I’d say things in the biotech space cut wildly in our favor, because we’re, like, wayyy smarter than a virus, and a virus definitely can’t ask chat to protect it.

Seriously, cheating evolution is looking a lot like using AI working to protect us humans from more things we can’t see.

Keep keeping us all healthy Kathleen, Tess, and Valthos! 🧬

Kevin Caldwell and Erik Woods built Ossium Health on a strange question: what if a marrow donor didn’t have to be alive?

The old way is a registry hunt for a living, willing, matching stranger, months of waiting, while cancer doesn’t.

Ossium banks marrow from deceased organ donors, and can make the marrow available in days.

In February that saved Noah Britt, 14. His first transplant, from a living donor, failed, and the registry had no one else.

After working with Ossium, he’s in remission, planning his freshman year. He’s the first kid in the world treated this way 🤯

Marrow frozen for years, thawed, and placed into a child is a wild way to use new tech to do things different than anyone could before. I like the idea of the best way of cheating the donor waitlist being to have a totally cleared list in the first place.

Kevin, Erik, and Ossium… nicely done! 🦴

Last week’s stories were all about catching AI doing something it shouldn’t.

This week’s are about people who looked at tech and saw a shortcut to something that actually needed fixing.

Some people see using tech, and more recently using AI, as cheating, as taking shortcuts, etc. In some cases that might be a bad thing. But I think we can all agree that using technology as a shortcut to a cure for illnesses, or cheating on the “traditional” ways and finally making hearing loss something tech can fix for humans, is a good thing.

Technology has always been a super tricky topic all-around, but we’re here, now, living with futuristic tech!! How special, how weird… But guess what? I’ll be here trying to understand it all, and helping us humans find things to be proud of ourselves for.

Because all you humans find ways to make magical things, and that’s worth bragging about. 🧡