💡 Founder's Formula: A Glow-Up, a Trip to China, and the Best Dinner Party in SF

From Indian Street Food to AI downgrades — this week’s recs, obsessions, and travel plans.

Hey Sutoscientists,

This week’s been a bit of a glow-up. After shaking off a lingering cold (and feeling like a semi-functional human again), I hit “book” on a month-long trip to China — my biggest travel plan of the year so far and something I’m wildly excited about.

I also officially onboarded a new assistant, which has already made my workdays smoother and my brain quieter — shout-out to Olivia for being amazing at helping me tame the operational madness!

Between client calls, final edits on memoirs, and dreaming about dumplings in Shanghai, I’ve been diving into a mix of very San Francisco dinner parties, fresh-squeezed obsessions, and an alarming number of YouTube rabbit holes.

This week’s finds are eclectic in the best way — from techy tricks to curated events to my favorite anti-germ juice.

Let’s get into it —

🌁 Dispatches from the Bay

San Francisco-specific recs and events.

• My absolute new favorite restaurant in SF is Jalebi Street, which specializes in Indian Street Food. It’s new-ish and I’ve never had so many of the great dishes here. It’s veggie friendly (I think most of the dishes if not all are vegetarian) and some of the most unique Indian food in the city.

⚡️ Founder’s Finds

Links to make your richer, smarter, and more organized as a Creator CEO.

• As a weekend coding project, I’m vibe coding a Freelance Writer Speedrun video game! Full thread here with my progress. I’m using ChatGPT + GDevelop to start — will let you know how it goes :)

• I’m obsessed with this article about how Substack is an anti-Gatekeeper heaven. The backlash against gatekeepers is a major theme in my upcoming book, Write for Money & Power (out this January — huge thanks to those of you who’ve already pre-ordered!). It’s exciting to see platforms like Substack — the very one this newsletter is built on — truly empowering writers and creators to own their distribution. More of this, please.

• AI tool of the week: ChatGPT 4o. If you’ve been online at all lately, you’ve probably seen ChatGPT 5 getting dragged — and honestly, for good reason. Especially if you’re a writer, 5 just doesn’t hold up for writing or editing work. The good news? You can still switch back to 4o under the “legacy models” panel in the desktop app. Highly recommend making the swap.