Building @SearchlandHQ
Leeds, United Kingdom
Joined January 2011
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Leeds is probably the most unlucky city in Western Europe
🎭 European City of Culture funding? Sorry we're leaving the EU.
🚄HS2? Sorry we spent too much in the chilterns.
🛫New Airport terminal? Sorry that's not climate friendly, but London Airport expansions are fine.
(1/X)
Max Rostron retweeted
As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:
This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term
Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries
Google’s response?
Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for
A few examples to illustrate:
For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model
I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid
This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much
However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding
It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem
Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision
Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting
This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed
But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”
The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off
So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam
This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)
This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes
Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day
And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off
Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target
These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow
Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs
Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future
This is now no longer the case
At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose
Q2 was an amazing quarter, with our AI investments redefining what’s possible across every part of our business.
Alphabet revenue grew 24% YoY and Google Cloud accelerated to 82% growth. We saw exciting momentum across the board from Search to YouTube to the Gemini app (which reached 950M monthly active users). Our model APIs are processing 22B tokens/min (up from 16B+ last quarter) driven by our workhorse Flash models. We’re also seeing great adoption of Gemini Enterprise, used by 90% of the Fortune 100, as well as strong demand for our security solutions.
Outstanding results and momentum, and such an exciting moment—thanks to all of our partners and employees around the world! 🙌 About to hop on the call!
Max Rostron retweeted
Mutti costs £1.60. But 65% of sales in UK are on discount – "Drive & Trial" a tactic used by premium brands to persuade shoppers to trade up.
Shoppers are trading down from eating out. And splashing out on "affordable luxury" at home. Hence Mutti, Bold Bean, Ortiz all 📈
🧵5/6
Max Rostron retweeted
Claude in excel has really took away a lot of the magic of work. Am I a lot faster? Yes.
Part of enjoyed the math / logic of building something in excel. Sort of feels like taking a sudoku book and just flipping to back to the answer key.
Max Rostron retweeted
Obvs lots of drivers of this including cost of living. But working from home clearly a driver by removing the friction that gets you out of the house to begin with & instead having easy access to on demand entertainment. Result much smaller life bubbles.
nitter.gq/jameslynch32/status/21…
Max Rostron retweeted
Interesting YouGov poll carried out in 2025: 53% of people in Cornwall feel a very strong attachment to their region, compared with 15% in Bedfordshire.
Kent has the strongest county identity in the South East- 29%.
yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54…
Max Rostron retweeted
So now we've got some clarity via the local newspaper, this announcement is actually cancellation of the through station and a public admission that the design of the station is now being delayed by years.
We're in a worse position now than we were in 2022. Appalling.
Today I am announcing a new railway station at Bradford Interchange.
We are delivering Northern Powerhouse Rail, working in lock-step with local leaders like @MayorOfWY.
We will create a turn-up-and-go train service for the great cities of the north.🚉
theguardian.com/business/202…
Max Rostron retweeted
My strongest “vibes not evidence” belief is that remote work is a cancer that’s making (most) people miserable even though it seems better in the short term.
Max Rostron retweeted
A delightful modern addition to our country. The victorians would be proud
This week we'd like to share these fantastic photos of our Colne Valley Viaduct 📷👇.
The viaduct is the longest railway bridge in the UK and one of the most significant structures on the HS2 route. Stretching 2.1 miles (3.4 km), it will carry the railway across the Colne Valley Regional Park, connecting London and the Midlands while carefully navigating one of the country’s most environmentally sensitive landscapes.
Images courtesy of Grimshaw/Hufton+Crow
Max Rostron retweeted
Yes, I have so much time now
I honestly feel like we're entering a new time of leisure where people are just talking to their agents to steer the direction of our work, while they work in the background 24/7
Like @felixrieseberg did while building his new homepage literally on a bike ride while talking to Claude on iOS
I already kinda did this with scheduled cron jobs for years, my sites were almost fully automated, but I still had to add features or fix bugs sometimes, but now for a year or more that part is also fully automated by AI
So then we just have so much leisure time suddenly available, that we can spend time with the ppl we love, do more fun things, play games, work on our health/fitness, be outside more, etc.
Some of that freed up time now goes into new projects, but there's a certain level of creative expression for me where it's sufficient and I am starting more and more to see I am spending that way from a computer screen too, and prefer it that way
Maybe this is the new time where we can finally live not work, as it was predicted 96 years ago by Keynes. That prediction never really came to fruition though because the automation that was invented just moved the work up to higher level (like from making actual things to financial, managerial, administrative, etc.) and people chose to just consume more, so they had to work more again!
But maybe now is different though, it definitely feels different to me
Anyone else find themselves with much more time between prompts now that @claudeai Opus and Sonnet cook for much longer on their own?
@levelsio @jackfriks @marclou
Max Rostron retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Max Rostron retweeted
Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts:
"It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I'll never get to do it.
The people in their fifties and sixties, they're lucky. I'm even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that's still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me.
It's very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won't get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that's actually heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two's time.
It's like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don't need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown."
Max Rostron retweeted
I think what is happening to software engineers will happen to the rest of the economy.
The demand for juniors collapsed.
The demand for middleweights dropped slightly.
The demand for seniors increased slightly.
The nature of the job has transformed but the job somehow still exists.
It's become more about ideas, intent, energy and focus - with execution being mostly automated.
The cost of software will drop but demand will explode.
It's like how accountancy was automated with calculators, then spreadsheets, then accounting software, then interconnected + open banking accounting software.. yet we still have accountants, and getting an accountant is cheap now.
Everyone will have a lawyer - because a lawyer can serve hundreds of clients, and it costs almost nothing.
These collapses in cost unlock margins elsewhere - everything knocking on to everything else.
It's not as simple as jobs just evaporating.
I do think the city of Leeds has done as much growing as it really can do without a huge external economic and infrastructure injection.
Although, with the macro picture looking as it is, I doubt that will come anytime soon. Therefore, condemning many of these sites for years.