DoubleM Systems: Startup Services and Software
Computer Guy

Sunset at DoubleM Systems (DBLM.com), Del Mar, California
Friday, June 20, 2025
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
AI as Executive Coach
Of course it was going to happen...
Sam Parr has had some serious success in the startup world, and in recognition that an executive coach would help him along the eay, he built his own executive coach using AI. Check it out, here.
That sounded interesting to me, seeing as I've been advising startup founder/CEOs for the last 25 years, and using AI for the last several years. What could go wrong, right?
The first stop on the journey is, as you might have guessed, is to ask AI. Duh.
Here's how I started: https://chatgpt.com/share/681b8309-7908-8005-9beb-357b7e1eba27
I'm not suggesting that using AI as your personal executive coach is going to work well in every case, and I'm sure there will continue to be hallucinations, but it may give you some interesting and possibly even useful insights. It will almost certainly help you prepare for meeting with a real human executive coach.
Try it out; let me know how it goes!
Friday, April 18, 2025
Pin Boy: A tale of value added service
Remembering my days in the pit...
Thursday, February 6, 2025
Clarity of Vision +
“The trick to being a great founder… is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you’ve seen before and solve it very quickly.
When Sam Altman was CEO of Y Combinator, they were looking at 20,000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order, Sam believes the following qualities matter most:
1. Clarity of vision. “Can the founder explain what they do and why? If the founder can’t explain it clearly to us, then (a) they’re not going to be able to recruit, hire, sell, talk to the press; and (b) it means they’re not the kind of person who is a really clear thinker in general and that’s so important to a business.”
2. Determination & Passion. “There are founders who don’t take no for an answer and bend the world to their will and those are the ones we want to fund. Then there are founders that every time they run across a small impediment just turn around. Unfortunately you run into so many impediments every day that if you’re the kind of person who just turns around, that’s really a problem. You also have to really believe that what you’re doing is important. The best companies are always mission-oriented.”
3. Raw intelligence.
4. The ability to get things done quickly. “It’s not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but it’s not a bad first approximation. Being quick, decisive, and getting things done quickly—if you look at our data, that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders. And other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail are often missing this one trait.”
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFqJAkzoY4O/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
On the Non-physicality of Software
This is a relic from the times when software had a physical form, you could hold it in your hand.
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Shortcut to Success in Life and Business
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Learn from Your Mistakes or Other People's Mistakes?
It's good to learn from your mistakes.
It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.
Your mistakes aren’t the best teacher—just the most expensive.
You can start at the bottom of the mountain and make every mistake from scratch on the way to the top, or you can take a sherpa with you and master the best of what other people have already figured out.
The successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on first hand pain.
Don’t try to figure everything out on your own. Hire advisors who’ve been there before and can offer insights you wouldn’t get otherwise. Test advisors before committing—do a workshop to see how they add value before making a long-term hire. And always be evaluating if they’re still contributing.