What is Hand

AI has been absolutely magical. There have always been more things I wanted to make than I had time to attempt — until now. I have never felt more unleashed than I do today.

However, there is a lot of fear, confusion and uncertainty. Half of the conversations in San Francisco are about “p(doom)”. What happens when superintelligence starts to do even the small parts of what I do right now? Will I become unnecessary? What do I do? Is humanity unnecessary?

Well. I refuse to be a bystander. I am building the most important company I can think of right now. In Australia. (That’s right — to all of you folks saying “go to SF! Australian brain drain” — we’re building here.)

Hand is unapologetically pro-human and pro-AI. We believe abundant intelligence and computing should give people more agency: more ability to act on ideas, explore possibilities, and shape what happens next.

Authorship matters more than effort. AI can take initiative and work independently. You can dive into a detail, hand off the next, and change direction as your intention evolves.

We will ensure humanity remains the protagonist. Allow billions of people to explore billions of things. To create a better future.

If this resonates with you, come join me.

P.S. We’re hiring. See roles here.

What is a company?

Companies are ultimately tools for arbitraging supply and demand. They find a gap between what people want and what is available, then build a business around closing it.

That can take different forms:

• Creating supply in a market where demand exceeds what can be delivered.
• Generating demand by showing people something they didn’t know they wanted.
• Qualifying to serve markets where regulation, licensing or procurement limits who can supply.
• Making an existing product cheap enough for more people to afford.
• Connecting idle capacity with people who need it.
• Making something easier to access, trust or use.
• Combining existing products into something more useful.

Generational companies emerge when these gaps become enormous, often because a technological change expands what people want faster than existing systems can respond.

That is what is happening with computing. Better, cheaper intelligence makes dramatically more things worth doing. Each task may become cheaper, while the total amount people want to do keeps growing.

What does AI native mean?

Fundamentally, the way we build companies and teams has to look different. We have abundant intelligence today. It is way too slow not to use AI for most things, but we need intentionality behind the rest.

We need to be able to distinguish between problems we should throw tokens at or permanently automate, and those where our human ingenuity would be helpful.

Most code in the world is written by AI now. If you are writing code by hand, you will be absolutely outpaced and displaced. You have to move to a higher order.

The answer to most multi-answer problems is: let’s explore every option. Because it’s cheap.

We have 5 design options. Let’s build all of them and see.

We need to fundamentally build and think differently today. This is how this company will operate.

Maximal founding team ownership

I believe that if you want to build the best team, you need the right incentive structures. From day one, Hand probably has one of the largest employee share pools at the pre-seed stage in Australia’s history (potentially globally).

I want a real founding team, and I want the first 10, 20, 50 people on the team to have large chunks of the business and feel sufficiently motivated by our success.

Because I really believe 10x, 100x, 1000x humans are starting to emerge who can contribute more enterprise value than anyone else. So we need structures to support those humans and their value.

So if you’ve been a founder, or are one now, I believe we can go further together. Possibly further than you ever believed possible.

Software in 2030

This is my core bet.

People are worried that SaaS will become commoditised with AI. Honestly — it probably will be.

But there are spaces where this has been true for many, many years. Look at CPG (consumer packaged goods). Coffee is just coffee, water is just water, deodorant is deodorant. Sure, there is product differentiation — sometimes it’s for novelty and sometimes it’s for a specific ICP (ideal customer profile).

Look at Liquid Death. It’s water. In a can. And people love it because of the brand.

Look at Grüns. They differentiated with a unique form factor — greens as gummies. Great execution, but ultimately anyone could come in and do gummies (which many people are).

I believe this exact change will happen to software. Two things will matter:

• Brand & marketing → the way you attract and retain customers over a long period of time.
• Product differentiation → the way you mould your product to a specific ICP, or inject novelty or uniqueness into your product stack.

And yes, CPG brands also win on distribution. In software, the shelf is attention — and brand is how you earn it.

A few software companies already get this. Notion, Dia, Hey — these have been thought through from a branding perspective. I could totally use another document tool, but Notion just feels nicer. It’s what I have in my mind when I think of writing a document now.

But they’re the exception. The state of design & brand in SaaS is far behind that of CPG.

This is the future, and we’re building Hand with it in mind. Taste isn’t a nice-to-have here. Design and brand sit at the core of the company from day one, and everyone — engineers included — is expected to care about how things feel. We can be one of the first companies to really crush it using this formula.

Roles

Applications are becoming kinda dumb. You use AI to generate some crap, I use AI to review applications. We do some mass-scale outreach. Idk, maybe we can just be more human about the whole thing. So here’s the deal: I’d love to hear from you if you fit any of these roles, but I would love your help to self-select.

Write to talent@withhand.com

I read every email that isn’t slop.