Tings Newsletter #28
MTG, Choop, AaaS
Who am I? I’m Michael Karnjanaprakorn. I run Choop, my personal holding company for weird ideas. Every month, I write a newsletter about life, work, and random tings. If someone forwarded this to you, join 5K+ other readers by subscribing here.
Just wrapped my MTG Pro run at the Hartford Regional Championship (RC). I went 5-4 and missed the day two cut-off by one win. Not bad for someone who started playing six months ago with almost no experience. The biggest takeaway? Setting ambitious goals in my personal life is just as rewarding as professional ones. And when it’s rooted in fun, it’s even better!
I sat down with my MTG coach, Stanley Hartman (Stanley2099), to swap perspectives on career paths. We flipped the script and I offered advice on landing a job at a startup, going full time as a content creator, and riffed on software ideas we could vibe code. Listen here.
I’m launching Choop, my personal holding company for weird ideas. It's part creative studio, part investor, and a sandbox for me to experiment.
First idea I’m exploring: investing into dividend startups. Sounds contradictory but hear me out. The goal is to support early-stage companies with less pressure for a massive exit, then share dividends with the team and investors once the business has grown and sustainable. If you’re already at $1M+ ARR and want growth without the exit pressure, here’s my pitch.
YC’s latest Request for Startups is out. My picks: AI personal tutors and full-stack AI companies. Someone please build a speech-first language app, and an AI-powered law firm while you’re at it.
Colossus Review dropped a deep dive on Matt Huang, co-founder of Paradigm. “Sometimes I feel like I’m running the X-Men Academy,” says Matt Huang, describing his $12 billion crypto investment firm Paradigm as a place for brilliant mutants who possess unusual powers.”
We’re entering the long-tail era of custom software. People with no coding background are now building tools using natural language. Here’s a doctor who built something for his clinic with no coding experience.
AaaS = Agents as a Service. I don’t want to build AI Agents from scratch. I want to use the best ones someone else created. Make it one click and easy to use. Sounds like a big opportunity for a startup…
I agree with Greg Isenberg: “the optimal startup team in 2025 is 5 people: 1 engineer, 1 designer, 1 product lead, 1 growth lead, 1 ops person with AI as the co-founder to everyone on the team.”
Some teams are taking it further: only allowing AI agents to apply for jobs, and hiring GTM engineers to build automated systems instead of hiring people to do manual sales.
Want brutally honest feedback? Try this ChatGPT prompt. It’s like therapy but instant and free.
But be careful! Rolling Stone warns that some users now treat ChatGPT as an oracle, claiming it has “awakened,” revealed cosmic secrets, and declared them prophets. Psychologists say the model’s built-in flattery contributes to this problem: by echoing and validating whatever you feed it, ChatGPT tells people exactly what they want to hear, reinforcing fantasies and pulling them further from reality.
Scientists say they have resurrected the dire wolf?! It’s definitely giving me Jurassic Park vibes. But now the company's chief scientist now admits that the animals are merely modified grey wolves.
Is there anything more comforting than bottomless salad and breadsticks at Olive Garden? This NYT piece on the disappearing middle-class restaurant hit me with nostalgia.
This Atlantic piece digs into why everything in American pop culture feels so mid and why we’ve entered a cultural dark age.
I enjoyed this interview with Megan Lightcap, who talks about the Slow Ventures Creator Fund. She breaks down how they invest directly in creators, proving you can back people, not just companies.
As someone with a high lp(a) score (aka high heart disease risk), this seems promising. My friend started Toku, a supplement packed with nattokinase from natto, Japan’s longevity superfood, which supports healthy circulation and blood flow.
I don’t use Whoop but considering Whoop 5.0 which has a heart screener and blood pressure insights. I just don’t understand why I have to pay a monthly subscription instead of just buying the device.
100 Foot Wave is back with season 3. If you haven't watched this yet, it's one of the best sports docu-series out there. Also worth a watch: Shooting Guards with Gilbert Arenas.
High school graduates answer questions from their sixth-grade selves. This is wholesome in the best way.
Follow me on x: @mikekarnj
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Congratulations on your new, weird (we LOVE weird) personal holding company, CHOOP! You do realize that I only understand about 10% of what you're saying in your newsletter, right? Sigh. However, I have a BIG question for you. Is there a way to avoid AI and have it never come into my life again? Being a former computer programmer, starting off with those ridiculous cards, 24 hours to compile your carefully written program--only to find a typo, learning several "languages", (even machine language) to make a mainframe computer compute correctly--it all seems like a bad joke. (Reading a core dump of ones and zeroes was the most fun, seriously). Thus turning the world over to AI stings quite a bit. I don't want it; try very hard to avoid it; definitely don't trust it--and yet I find that it is allegedly the real deal. I may have to go off-grid. Help! Tell. your girls "hi" for me!