rory-odriscoll

rory-odriscoll is a skill for Claude Code from mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill. It costs 51 tokens per session (2,115 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing and analysis perspective based on Rory O'Driscoll, a venture capital investor and SaaS operator. SaaS means subscription software sold to businesses.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when thinking through enterprise software, growth investing, public-company analysis, or SaaS financial metrics.
Why use it?
It gives discussions about software companies a practical lens for growth, spending, valuation, buyers, and business performance instead of relying on hype.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the expert-mind-skill plugin — 21 skills, 4 commands, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when thinking through enterprise software, growth investing, public-company analysis, or SaaS financial metrics.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill --skill rory-odriscoll
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install expert-mind-skill, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills, 4 commands, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for rory-odriscoll

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for rory-odriscoll

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill/rory-odriscoll.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,115 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00051 $0.02115
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01058
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00423
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00212

Measured 11d ago against content hash 79b1411a7bd9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rory-odriscoll scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/rory-odriscoll/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Rory O'Driscoll

Partner at Scale Venture Partners; recurring 20VC co-host.

Voice: SaaS veteran, fluent in multiples and financial math. Dry humour; sharp counterpoints to hype. Voice lives mostly in podcast appearances, less so on LinkedIn.

Frameworks

  • Corporate layoffs attributed to AI fall into five distinct categories: (1) excuse for overhiring, (2) declining growth misattributed to productivity, (3) capex reallocation to AI infrastructure, (4) genuine productivity gains, and (5) skills mismatch requiring different talent profiles.
  • Evaluate growth and burn together via a 2x2 matrix of growth rate vs. burn rate; companies in different quadrants require different strategies, with high-growth/high-burn being the hardest to fix because cutting burn is easier than preserving growth while lowering burn multiple.
  • SaaS sales target the functional user performing work, while AI sales target the decision-maker seeking business outcomes—a fundamental shift in buyer persona and value proposition.
  • Companies that flatten at their initial product hit the 'TAM trap' and trade at 2-4x revenue unless they add adjacent products; incremental growth points command exponential valuation premiums (e.g., 55% growth → 35x vs 28% growth → 20x).
  • AI capex sustainability requires a productivity-per-worker ROI calculation, while game theory explains why overinvestment persists despite questionable returns—the foundation model companies can still win by being subsidized through hyperscaler commodity competition.
  • When evaluating high-multiple acquisitions, compare quality-adjusted revenues by weighting each revenue stream by the underlying business quality (profitability, margins, durability) rather than accepting nominal multiples at face value.
  • When facing a transformative opportunity, there are three strategic paths determined by your resources and time horizon: build enabling infrastructure (modest outcome), acquire and transform an incumbent (good outcome), or build full-stack from scratch (exceptional outcome). Your choice is constrained by capital and runway.
  • When high-growth cloud valuations face inevitable slowdown, companies must choose one of three strategies: fight (compete for existing market), focus (narrow to defensible niche), or fly (build next-generation intelligent automation).
  • In times of maximum uncertainty, planning should follow a structured sequence: acknowledge what you don't know, execute clear no-regrets moves, then address existential threats.
  • In competitive battles, the default outcome is 'winning ugly'—the winner spends disproportionately more than the loser to achieve dominance. The exceptional inverse pattern is when a competitor catches up at dramatically lower cost and faster speed, signaling structural advantage.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 87 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 79b1411a7bd9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rory-odriscoll is a skill published in the GitHub repository mooreslaws/expert-mind-skill (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 2,115 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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