Notes from Coworking Fridays

While software engineers debate the next breakthrough in large language models, Lars Henrik is automating chemistry labs in Sweden. His dark labs - laboratories where robots design and run experiments with no human oversight - point to a different kind of AI revolution. One where the constraint isn't intelligence, but infrastructure. The Lab That Doesn't Need Lights A dark lab gets its name from a simple fact: when no humans need to work inside, you can turn off the lights. R

This is season 2 of Demo Day, which we run once a month. Michael takes the first slot I kicked off the second round of The Stage at SQ Collective . I shared upfront that I made little progress on Kai since my last demo. For those who are new, I vibe-coded Kai , an AI community manager, and Rex , a back-end automation system. They are both meant to augment the very traditional business of SQ Collective using AI. Both of them work, and I thought they were brilliant ideas. But n

During SQ Collective's Stage session this week, which is a part of our co-working Friday: "The bad news is no one knows about their pricing. The good news is there's a way to think about it." Mohammed Sebti , former Simon-Kucher consultant turned startup mentor, dropped truth bombs at our recent Stage session on Pricing Strategy . Here's the reality for most of us building products: We guess. We look at a competitor, undercut them by 10%, and pray. Or we take our costs, add a

On The Stage this week, Henry from Smithery  said something that broke the whole conversation open: "We have a bit of a Claude Paradox. You have models that have big brains but no arms and legs." They can write a sonnet, but they can't check your calendar. They can solve math problems, but they can't ping your team on Slack. That’s where the Model Context Protocol (MCP)  comes in. And if you’re a builder, this is the part where you stop treating AI like a chatbot and start tr