Riding the Exponential Curve

By Tom Nault, CEO, Hudson Cloud

I deleted two programs this week. More will follow.

One was Calendly, a program that allowed people to schedule time with me on their own. Over time, I became overwhelmed by people who had no problem burning up my time trying to sell me something or to "pick my brain." I can’t afford to have it picked all the time. It was taking far more time to just politely say no than to not have it at all. Gone.

The other was Reclaim.ai, a program intended to block out time for me. That too did absolutely nothing but get in the way. I also locked down most of my LinkedIn profile, a place I consider to be the playground for the chronically unemployed. There is no question, LinkedIn has wasted far more of my time than it ever helped me move anything forward. I've recharacterized what I do and reduced most of my profile to cut the number of sales hits I receive in a day.

So why this sudden interest in streamlining?

For most of my professional career running companies, I've always managed to remain ahead of the technology curve. In fact, doing so gave us an advantage over our competitors. I'm often asked how to best compete, and remaining ahead of technology is a piece of the puzzle I always share. When a company is in trouble, often a big contributor is an outdated technology "stack" as some like to call it. It's tech jargon for technology resources you use. The challenge is that people get comfortable and they don't want to be uncomfortable. This is in part why the education industry has fallen so far behind. Educators are comfortable right where they are. Change primarily comes from technology by force.

I was thinking about how hard we work at Hudson Cloud to not just learn what's new but to also use, adopt, discard, learn, explore and so on as new technologies show up. Way too many solutions have no real net benefit. As my role grows at Hudson Cloud, I have less time for other things. While I love writing and consider it my break, LLMs are getting so good, who knows how long before this too becomes obsolete. It won't be long.

My Time Shift

My time is now spent, along with all others in the company, on the rapid learning and adoption of new LLMs. We move extremely fast with each new version, and if one falls behind, we quickly drop it and move on to something else. I've moved from ChatGPT, to Perplexity, to Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then Grok, with some time on Copilot and Gemini, then back to ChatGPT, then back to Claude, and now I'm using Grok 4.2 in parallel. I'm not devoting 100% of my time to any, but one always remains around 70% and the others around 30% of my LLM time. I'm a very heavy user and I'd guess that I'm using an LLM for about 80% of my working day. All other tasks are a much smaller percent of my day than ever before.

This is dramatically accelerating Hudson Cloud, and within each LLM, there remains a configuration and learning curve. We adopted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 company-wide in less than a week over GPT-5.2. We didn't have a meeting about it, we just started using it and everything else fell by the wayside. I'm taking issue with some aspects of the technology now, and I may switch if someone properly solves their memory problem without giving up privacy.

Stepping back a bit, while I started using ChatGPT every day less than two months after launch in 2022, my day is now all about LLMs and other technologies and applications I once used daily are becoming nothing but background noise. It's really a whole new way of working and here is the most important part of all this. It's not a linear transition, it's exponential, and that's a hard concept to grasp. I was watching even Elon Musk have trouble predicting his work milestones at Grok in the next few months, and if anyone should know it's him.

We're having the time of our lives at Hudson Cloud because of all of this, but our big challenge, and one that is causing a shift in priorities, is that we're determined to ride and enjoy this wave. We're like kids talking about it and we're completely immersed in where it's taking us and the value we bring to our customers. I'm now completing the work of at least five people in a day and I can do it alone. I have a lot more coming up.