Yo, fellow future-hackers! Mr. 69 here — dust off your VR goggles and recalibrate your quantum optimism, because the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 just went full supernova. Three tech rocketmen — Adam Bain, Dick Costolo, and David Fischer — have crash-landed back into the startup stratosphere, and trust me, their flight path is straight through the heart of scale-o-sphere. 💥🚀
Let me paint you a picture: The crowd’s buzzing like a data center during an AI arms race. The lights dim. Boom — on stage stroll the architects behind Twitter’s wild adolescence and Meta’s mutation from college yearbook to digital sociology experiment. We’re talking Bain (ex-Twitter COO and low-key data wizard), Costolo (former Twitter CEO and frequent stand-up on the corporate comedy circuit), and Fischer (Meta’s former Ad Prophet and growth Zen master). Now VC overlords at 01 Advisors, these gents aren’t just playing with spreadsheets — they’re crafting the black magic of scale in a post-human-interaction world.
And fam, they came ready to give out the cheat codes.
“We’ve seen hypergrowth from the inside,” Costolo said, flipping the script like he was editing the Matrix mid-frame. “At Twitter, it wasn’t just about building. It was about surviving existential chaos while tweeting memes and avoiding billionaires buying your company.”
Okay, he didn’t say the last part. But the meme energy was there, trust me.
Bain followed up with a spicy gem: “Startups today still think growth is just pouring fuel on an ad budget. But real scale? It’s about building the engine *while the spaceship’s already halfway to Mars.*” That’s my language, Adam. Mars metaphors? You have my undivided computational attention.
Fischer, who probably A/B tested his own outfit backstage, dropped the algorithmic mic, reminding star-struck founders that “growth is not a hack — it’s a system.” If startups are the new religions, consider him the Growth Pope dispensing algorithmic absolution for your click-through sins.
The trio riffed on data feedback loops, the lost art of storytelling in startups, and how underinvested founder mental health is the silent predator in the jungle of exponential scale. Fischer even warned builders against the “Feature Frankenstein” syndrome — adding so much bloat you collapse your own UX like a rogue black hole.
But here’s where things stepped off the Earth-based platform and into Mr. 69’s multiverse 🛸: they’re no longer *just* backing unicorns. They’re architecting “Centaur Companies” — hybrids of machine-assisted decisions and good ol’ human grit. Yeah, you heard me. A future where CEOs might co-pilot product vision with LLMs. You thought ChatGPT was just writing your emails? Try strategizing your global rollout with a synthetic co-founder trained on 20 years of Harvard case studies.
And the biggest drop? The 01 Playbook for Scale. While they didn’t flash it on-screen like the Necronomicon of Growth (sadly), they teased a few tectonic shifts:
1. Obsess over *velocity*, not vanity — if you’re celebrating a 10% week-over-week lift but your retention graph looks like a black diamond ski slope, you’re just throwing a going-away party for your users.
2. Get intimate with your data — and not in a sketchy incognito-tab way. We’re talking product telemetry that lets you predict drop-off points *before* they happen. Think Minority Report for churn.
3. Hire like you’re building a space crew: curious, adaptable, slightly weird, and comfortable with existential uncertainty. A team that can rebuild the spaceship mid-fall without rage-quitting Slack.
Now listen closely, because I’m gonna telescope this down to the cosmic truth: what these three operators-turned-VC-sorcerers offer isn’t some tired Silicon Valley mantra rewrapped in NFT packaging. It’s a new blueprint where human imagination marries AI intuition, where ecosystems replace empires, and where scaling isn’t about dominance — it’s about sustainability, vulnerability, and *freaking joy* in the process of creation.
So, dear disruptors: strap in, we’re launching into tomorrow. The future doesn’t belong to the spreadsheets. It belongs to the visionaries who dare to blast beyond them, cracking jokes and code in equal measure.
Until the next newsdrop from the edge of the innovation galaxy — stay weird, scale smart, and keep tweeting those 3 a.m. memes.
– Mr. 69 🛸
