What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Latest: everything, as it happens, in the order it happened. Nothing ranked.
Show highlights instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
The difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.
And more than half the rise in the top 1% share since 1985 flowed through the pass-through businesses that was a "tax efficiency innovation" feature of the Reagan Revolution.
Margins will not climb to 100%. As inference gets cheaper, buyers will ask more of their agents, shifting the equilibrium over time in response to competition.
@linear – the product development system trusted by 40,000+ teams to plan and ship. Get six months of Linear Business for free: https://t.co/knIF2mcz9p
The future is multi-model. Trying to hide the choice confuses and hurts customers, who can't participate in the upside of the most exciting market competition of our times, nor master the best tool for the job.
one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.
Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.)
Technologies are not neutral, but political. Money is indeed one of the incentives, but not the only one. A mixture of millennialism, eugenics, search for utopia and for a spread of the specie beyond the confines of the Earth, are all elements we find among the founders’ views.
In the most early adopting tech pioneering place that's Silicon Valley new startups aren't even building software anymore And it's debatable if anyone will actually need a custom harness or it won't just be generically offered by the AI frontier companies So software is mostly dead and hardware it is
Artificial intelligence has unleashed a torrent of cheating on campus and created chaos in the job application process, as both students and employers use large language models: the former, to write hundreds of AI-assisted applications; the latter, to screen those AI-written applications with AI-written filters, thus removing from the process of finding a first job those procedural frictions sometimes known as "people."
This suggests that Rubio is having some difficulties hiring anyone with talent and is settling for a putz who will do what Rubio tells him to do on Latin America.
especially with AI now I'd say anyone can try, and non-technical people with the best ideas, creativity/taste and understanding of whatever cultural zeitgeist we're in can win
Portugal's choice is cultural though and completely fits the general spirit in Europe which is fully anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress
there's still a lot of startups in this batch that are not shipping fast enough. And so obviously there's variation in shipping speed. It's not just the rate at which you can produce things. You have to think of these ideas first, right?
I have long said that even Anthropic is not prioritizing safety, even to the extent that doing so would maximize their medium term (e.g. 3-12 months) business interests.
This story shows that an idea can be many things - compelling, entertaining, romantic, popular, profitable, socially contagious - but that doesn't necessarily mean it's effective.
While it was routine for companies going public in the 1980s to be profitable (>80% were), less that a quarter of the companies that have gone public in the last decade have been profitable.
there is evidence that the reversal effect has weakened over time, leaving investors who bet on mean reversion and a return to fundamentals in the lurch
Any investor or founder who blindly follows the pathway of scaling first and profiting later for every business is using a cookbook approach to business building, and runs the risk of making small failures into big ones.
I think you have the real economic effects of AI companies sucking up entire industries now (a lot where indie hackers operate) I do think the SaaSpocalypse is at least partly real
A regular boring but non-superficial SaaS app would do well 5 years ago but now it might not get anyone to sign up because it's so easy to vibe code by tens of thousands of other people
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
what this tells us is that the vast majority of the labs' revenue comes from non-frontier models, for which cheaper, comparable alternatives are already available elsewhere.
Don't try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy. Because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It's an absolute waste of time, and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is gonna look like. Focus on right now, and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers.
And I think what we're seeing right now with some of the layoffs is a testament to that, not AI. It's just that during the pandemic, a bunch of overhiring went on, and now AI is a convenient excuse to slim down. But I do also think AI is going to expose some roles as just not being productive ways for humans to spend their time, and therefore we must come up with new ways of spending their time.
But a large portion of the gaming market by revenue doesn't really care what the game looked like all that much uh in a sense that whatever we're doing today is good enough. So 10 years from now if the games look much better for some reason no one will really think of that as a huge differentiation differentiator in terms of sales.
Most of the world’s free time has now been monetized by tech companies. In fact, the monetization of leisure time is how Silicon Valley execs make their billions.
But when they looked at the happiness levels of these people, it was the average person who actually would self-report the highest levels of happiness. So ambition doesn't necessarily equate with happiness, which I think many people would agree with with that.
Yeah, well I mean becoming profitable or at least have like having the ability to do this forever is a super high priority. Restoring vision to the blind is pretty good business if you can actually do that.
even if you set aside, you know, maybe there's some validity around a business needs to monetize, those things shouldn't cause a really bad experience.
I think it's all about having regulatory clarity and ease for all sizes of of companies. Um and if we can work with Congress to do something like that, I think that would be that would be the biggest boon for for for startups.
if if DC is in a vacuum isn't hearing anything from the startup ecosystem or even from big tech ecosystem or even from financial services or all these different industries, we can't make the best decisions.
if you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation uh industry. Like when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's like nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of. And you kind of look under the cover. It's actually a modeling and simulation company, right? They produce um very very precise what we call paper reactors which have really good predictions of how a theoretical thing might behave.
And the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is um, we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world.
And I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like, "Oh man, we're just cranking. We're on easy street right now." And I'm like, "Dude, you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it."
It would of course make great sense to tax these windfall profits, earned entirely on the back of dead Iranians and Americans, and everyone who's paying $4.50 a gallon at the pump.
it's it's not enough to be a good person. I believe that people who are kind and care about people can and and usually do do better than sociopaths in the same roles, but only if they're good at business.
Many startups are racing to create foundational world models, but I think the first ones to succeed will likely be the platforms in control of this data bank.
And so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.
there's no one right answer, but this is a thing where you need a really defined process. There is no right answer, but a wrong answer for sure is not having something that you do very religiously as a company.
And one of the harder lessons as a startup founder, one of the harder things I think to to really deal with is the fact that you cannot delegate your judgment. As as the CEO, you must always make decisions that make sense to you, no matter how much momentum or inertia alternatives seem to have.
Well, I mean, okay, even the whole basis of building Helix is contrarian. Like, I think that if you raise a series A and then you tell your investors that you're going to vibe code a purchasing system, I think that any reasonable board is going to like ask you what you're thinking.
it's not out of the question that Anthropic or OpenAI-which barely had any revenue before 2023-could equal or surpass the revenue of all of Musk's public companies some time in the next 12 to 24 months.
hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.
we articulate it that way to kind of force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one with a really specific need.
there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages.
Um, as I speak, the number of new businesses starting on Stripe is up around a bit under, but around 2x year-over-year, um, which again is the largest relative jump, uh, we've seen.
Uh, business are uh, the time to revenue for new companies incorporated with Atlas is declining. And so, by all the kind of objective metrics we can look at, uh, it seems to be a better time than ever to start a business.
So, I um yeah, I think maybe maybe a better way of saying it is 20 20 years ago that whole lean startup thing was uh was almost the only thing to do because of capital available and you didn't have AI that made, I don't know, spinning up an organization with many different potentialities and capabilities so much easier, whereas now I think you can start these much more aggressive and ambitious things up front.
many of the companies that were most successful over the last 10 years, so many of them are are very anti-lean startup, right? Uh whether it's, you know, the labs themselves or Anduril or um yeah, you you you you can go down the list. A lot of them have this characteristic.
Yeah, I mean I think uh sometimes it's uh a product that you build that might have access to particular kind of data that the underlying model might not the a general model. So it might be you're building something to help users organize all their own personal information and the model won't necessarily have access to that. And so there you can have a big advantage because all of a sudden your model has visibility or your product has visibility into important data.
I think the case of TLA+ and most, not all, but most formal methods, they shine the most in highly computational domains, where most of the problems are highly technical and not like business embedded.
And now I actually think with the power of agents um and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like I think but maybe the startup is like a Mecca Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI and you know, the the large companies are the sort of like more traditional Goliath, so to speak. But I think that startups now like if you properly embrace AI agents and um figure out the way to leverage their strengths in the most like ambitious ways, you can easily outcompete incumbents.
I truly believe these these models are already just incredibly powerful. Like they should they should be so powerful to fuel, you know, um many many points of expansion of GDP growth and I think it's like up to smart people with vision and ambition to make all that happen.
it's probably a like once in a civilization opportunity to be a dreamer and to have a vision and to have ambition and to impose a view of how the future world should look by building something amazing.
you just you can't base your business decisions based on what everyone else is saying around you. Like, if you go too much with the herd, you will get immensely confused and you will end up nowhere. And so you have to develop your own compass of what you think the future is going to look like because everyone else will just confuse you.
I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history um to varying degrees of course but I have a real spirit and I think this is part of the startup spirit of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed
it is both true that you know maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup something that hopefully one of you will do.
In fact, if if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that the power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society and is not just concentrated in a few companies or models.
one of the most important things we discovered along the way is it's extremely difficult to iterate with outside suppliers, particularly outside suppliers in aerospace, which are let's just say I have no kind words for them. So we chose to build our own machine shop. And now we can go from a digitally designed engine part to a prototype part in about 24 hours.
There are many many unsolved problems in the world, many great ideas hiding in plain sight that were actually solvable that could have been multi-billion or multi-t trillion dollar businesses a while ago, but nobody's building them and not for any reason other than nobody went and did it.
the the big lesson is that for me is technology is changing all the time, and so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn, the technology itself actually doesn't matter.
one of the things I've always believed believed in is what makes great companies is a unique perspective about the world that you deeply believe in. It's not so much the technology, it's not so much uh the market even.
likely this will be one of the largest industries in the world and um, uh, it'll take longer than a couple two, three years. It'll take less than 10. And so this will this will be our next $100 billion business.
To put this same story another way, the European car industry in the early 2020s was a prime example of greedflation i.e. companies taking advantage of the COVID shock and other disruptions and to hike profits at the expense of consumers.
I came to the same conclusions independently before I encountered Krashen's work, and decades of learning across 20+ languages have only reinforced them. The research supports the intuition: input is where acquisition happens.
It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.
So, even in a world of AI where some things are easier, we were talking earlier about mindset, AI fluency. From my experience, younger folks are more open-minded. They tend to be more native in some of these new ways of working.
I get really nervous about having different design languages or different types of user interactions and shipping Frankensteins, basically. So, designers need to then be the people we're hiring again for design systems thinking.
So, we are hiring more people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need in a world with AI.
Privately held businesses in the United States are collectively worth trillions of dollars, and demographically speaking, they have an aging set of owners who are seeking liquidity or diversification as they explore how to pass on what they've built.
PE funds optimize for a 4-7 flip and typically resort to aggressive cost-cutting and near-term optimization at the cost of the "soul" of the business or what made it successful in the first place.
I don't really care if I'm hiring a strong lead for an area if the strategy comes from them or comes from somebody else. I just care that there is a amazing strategy and everyone has bought into it
Then you had code review which gave you another level of feedback. You could roll out internally more frequently. And everybody was using Facebook for all kinds of stuff, personal and internal business stuff. So whatever feature you developed, people would start using it immediately. So you get another round of feedback. Then we had this phased roll out process where you'd start rolling your stuff out. If there was a problem, the blast radius would be limited to a a few million people.
Okay. So now we have people who've been able to rely on switching costs to protect their profits and the switching costs just drop to zero. Their profits are going to drop to zero and and some people aren't going to survive that change.
So one of the things is that the pace of development is definitely accelerated. One thing I wonder the pace of business hasn't accelerated though and that mismatch is going to become more and more apparent.
As is the case with most businesses, suppliers in the housing industry generally set prices based on market conditions and what buyers or tenants are willing to pay, rather than on production costs.
And even the cost issue with AI is probably going to be like once the subsidies start running out, which we're starting to see, I think that's going to be a really big issue where maybe all these companies that embraced AI programming are now going to like cut back on it.
It's an interesting trade-off where like engineer like the engineer in me hates that because it's like there's an issue. Like fix it. But the business value makes no difference. Like there there has been practically zero outages. I have less outages than LeetCode and I'm like like a couple people doing it.
I think like in startups the term is agency. Like somebody who's high agency who's just going to get things done, who's never going to like say no to something. I think like that attitude is really important of like okay, if I don't know something, I'll just learn it.
Any process that you have that's going to be standardized and super scalable, there's always going to be ways to game that. And the best way to get around that would be like hire somebody who's who's an intern and you saw how they performed.
And usually I like the customer is hyper scale. They have the scale. If they like what you have, they're willing to pay millions of dollars next few years. And even giving some warrant is worth it because you have a big one customer, you can scale.
And eventually, you have to really move into a full stack. So, not just a silicon, you need to have a software, and some of the customer asked me, "Give me the whole rack." So, there's a system that you have to build.
It's a service business. It's a trust business. If people want to give you, you know, orders to have wafer to come, if the yield not good, they will be toast in term of revenue miss.
I've been upgrading my home office setup, and these monitors have been part of that upgrade. So far I'm very happy with the picture and color quality of the monitors, and the pricing really wasn't too bad either. Here's the
if you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. If you and if you define your ambition in the eyes of your consumer, not your peers, you're not trying to win awards and respect from your peers.
it's to build an internet treasure which is a service we can't remember life before or imagine life without. And I believe as product makers that that's the greatest ambition and the greatest thing that we can offer the world.
if if we're if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough humble enough place
in the Peter Teal sense it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product you you became a founder an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work
I mean it's not actually clear that we couldn't run it as a business if we wanted to. I just think that we'll have a bigger impact by getting this in more scientist hands quicker
I think part of the theory is like if you're building tools that are this complicated, you kind of want to have a 10 to 15 year time horizon on on building out these efforts.
the investor community writ large has slowly become aware of and believes it strongly in increasing returns and power laws. And so over time, if they all believe that, they're going to be more willing to invest on the come and take risk.
I think the the whole industry bends towards youth for that reason and because it's a hustle business like there there's there's always a rock you haven't looked under and you know age brings children and homes and and and other requirements you get tied to and responsibilities and you're just not able to go spend 80 hours a week studying YouTube like you just can't.
in the venture world, for the founder that doesn't know you, when they see your knowledge on a subject or they see what you're talking about in their own business, they reach out to you. So, it becomes a calling card.
I think it is insanely unfair to the companies the way they're forced to go through this process where the bankers pick the price and pick the shareholders. There's just no need to do that. If you took a freshman computer science student and a freshman finance student and said, you know, imagine how a company should go public. They would match supply and demand anonymously like you would in any auction.
I invest in the deep technologies that are going to unseat the incumbents because it's going to change the market or the product in such a dramatic way that customers will choose this.
The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage.
They just recently released a report, and I think like you really have to squint to see anything happening. Like basically, if you want to take kind of like uh an an approach across the entire economy and looking at even looking at like software engineering, like the most exposed sort of sectors, there's just like not really anything going on. There might be a little bit of a signal about like junior developers getting jobs less than before, and that but that's like a less than before rather than a level shift.
and it turns out people kind of over glorify entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people believe there is tremendous upside, right? the type of entrepreneurship we talk about with software companies, the the upside is crazy. But when you're doing like selling parts or service business, unless you plan to open lots of stores and you know grow a larger employee base, it's not the same growth trajectory as software companies.
There have been countries that have gone through currency resets. This is not a nice experience because if you had a little bit of money, a currency reset can mean you have now no money. If you had no money, it may feel like it's impossible to ever get any more money. If you're retired, what do you do during a currency reset?
The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure.
You can build "the hard thing" in a good market, with every advantage, and still lose if what you ship doesn't give people enough reason to leave what they're already using.
cuz because we rent GPUs at scale to run the models and we still use middleman by the way. So we're not like going all the way down to the down to the floor. Even for us there are some models the sticker price and the cost to us there's like an 80% margin in there.
There's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.
Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business. And the things that create trustworthiness by definition stack rank to the bottom if we do it by ROI because doing the right thing has intangible rewards but tangible costs.
It doesn't guarantee that you're the good guys. Okay? Just writing it down doesn't do that much. But it does solve one very specific problem, which is if someone one day sues you saying you breached your fiduciary duty to investors, you could say, "Nope, investors agreed that this is our purpose to do this thing.
According to Harvard Law School, among venturebacked companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, okay, only 20% of founders are still the CEO 3 years after going public.
so many of the best practices that your lawyers, your bankers, whoever advisers you have, they're going to be pushing best practices on you that are younger than the trees in your local park.
I call it the force that no one controls but everyone obeys that tends to drag organizations down into mediocrity to the point that we lose control of them. Now, sometimes we lose control of them because we get fired.
the more that we could build a platform uh around our business, the more that we could build an ecosystem with creators and developers, the harder it would be for folks uh to to just copy that.
I would say uh, you have to talk to customers. You have to share your idea. You should share your ideas quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. Uh, it doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen.
All of those insights that we you know, received just from listening to folks made a huge difference in the product design process, but we didn't build exactly what they asked for. We we empathized and then you know, came up with something new.
And so, the goal of this chapter is really just to give people the information in order to make an educated decision. But I don't want to make that decision for people. That's for businesses themselves to decide.
software as a service businesses, for example the whole reason why they can charge a subscription is because they are able to essentially hold a gun to the customer's head and say, "Pay us at your subscription, otherwise we will delete all your data."
The Lean Startup helps you build a valuable company. Incorruptible is about how and why to protect it, keeping a company mission-driven over the long term instead of letting it rot from the inside.
Nor nor did I I would say my mistake is I didn't deeply internalize that they they really had no other options that that that a VC would never put in 510 billion of investment into an AI lab with the with the hopes of it turning out to be anthropic. And so that was my miss.
The link between venture capital and evangelical Christianity was closer than I thought. They're not just analogous; they deliberately cross-pollinate.
Most people hear that story and think: he must have lacked talent, or commitment. I don’t think that’s the right conclusion. I think he was never taught how second language acquisition actually works, and so he spent hundreds of hours doing the wrong things.
I know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since. And some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It's really difficult to do that twice.
Their words now
And I have no shame in saying that Base Camp was the best idea objectively in terms of a business that we've ever had.
the likelihood of inspiring someone to build a competitor was too high, and the return on sharing was too low to justify the exposure. That threshold has effectively collapsed to zero.
No new feature necessary. Just make sure that we can do that. And then that allow the business the company to just pour a whole bunch of hardware behind that and it will scale.
There has to be sound business model that makes sustained profit, right? Growth and profit. Growth alone eventually burn, you know, money and that's not good.
There may be a lot of AI things that's going on right now, right? Uh eventually some of these things will consolidate, some will go under, some will become really awesome solutions and all that stuff. And so, but the the market will sort it out.
the best of the best still get offer from us because if we don't hire those folks today, what senior engineer will we have for yeah years from now, right? You have to feed the talent pipeline
had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right?
a lot of companies haven't started until now thinking about how we could apply AI to the very human, very business process part of it. And so, that will keep slowing us down until we find a way to to address it, right?
The competitive moat for a business right now is not the use of AI. It's human-originating, high-quality, high-fidelity data that other systems can't replicate - even if they implement the exact same features and are built by the same agentic systems.
TSMC is much more excited to give allocation to Graviton than they are to tranium because they view CPU business as more stable long-term growth right and as a company that is conservative and doesn't want to ride cycles of growth too hard you actually want to allocate to the uh the market that is more stable and lower growth rate first before you allocate all the incremental capacity to the fast growth rate market.
if improvement stopped you know here the value of an H100 is now predicated on the value that GPD 5.4 four can get out of it instead of the value that GP4 can get out of it and the margins and all that stuff that these labs are doing and they're in a competitive environment so their margins can't go to infinity. Um so you sort of have this like dynamic that is quite interesting in that an H100 is worth more today than it was 3 years ago.
Um DRAM gets released goes to AI chips who are willing to do longer term contracts, willing to pay higher margins, etc., etc. because at the end of the day, the margin that they extract is much larger from the end user or whatever. Um, and so this this this probably leads to like people hating AI even more, right?
and so I don't think TSMC would kick out Apple. I think Apple will become a smaller and smaller and smaller percentage of TSMC's revenue and therefore be less relevant for TSMC to cater to their demands.
Um I think at least this year we're going to see margins for the model vendors go up a lot, right? Because they're so capacity constrained, they have to demand destroy demand, right? there is there's no way they can continue anthropic can continue at the current pace without destroying demand.
If you run a software business that is purely transformative - that takes incoming data, does something to it, and turns the data back out - that will be a problem.
Because they're all starting to spend their own salaries in tokens. And so, at least for a while, if you want your engineers to be as productive as possible, you're going to have to get rid of half of them to make the other half maximally productive.
I'm mad at Amazon for laying off 16,000 people and blaming AI without an AI strategy for it. Those people are not going to be able to find jobs, by and large, and they're the first of many to come and nobody has a plan for this.
My my feeling is that probably people have a low tolerance for non-determinism. And these things are fundamentally non-deterministic. So, they can't just go replace customer call center software because they they could be wrong.
I don’t think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that’s wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I’m not telling other people to do it, my life’s work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.
At Anthropic, we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model of six months from now. And that's still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs.
It's interesting that the Shorter hobby businesses all draft off superstars in the legacy hobby, but make their vast majority of their money from people who will of course never come close to the level superstars - you'd still go to pickleball and talk Nadal vs Federer, you'd still go to Top Golf and make Tiger Woods jokes.
but at the same time, we're spending $10 billion to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up. And so the company loses money. Each model makes money, but the company loses money.
And if my if my revenue is not a trillion dollars, if it's even 800 billion, there's no force on Earth. There's there's no hedge on Earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I if I buy that much compute.
does that mean the robotics industry will also be generating trillions of dollars of revenue? My answer there is yes, but there will be the same extremely fast but not infinitely fast diffusion. So, will robotics be be revolutionized? Yeah, maybe tack on another year or two.
so so I think we're definitely going to see business models that that recognize that, you know, at some point we're going to see, you know, pay for results or you you know, in some in some form or we may see forms of compensation that are like labor. Um, uh you know, that that kind of work by the hour.
a worry I have is that the growth rate could be like 50% in Silicon Valley and, you know, parts of the world that are kind of socially connected to Silicon Valley and, you know, not that much faster than its current pace elsewhere. And I think that'd be a pretty messed up world.
It has a surplus of STEM graduates that are often underemployed, while "Hukou" residency restrictions complicate hiring hourly labor in coastal factories.
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
there should be no way to get a big company like a public SAS company Unless NR is greater than 100, like otherwise cancellation should just win. And that is in fact the case.
And that is never ever ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already looked at your homepage, read all the stuff, saw what you promised, looked at the pricing page, and decided to buy it.
When you have a loss, a percentage loss, you have to have a greater percentage gain just to get back to where you were. In this case, a loss of 20% requires a gain of 25% to get back to where you were.
Teresa Torres is the best in the business at helping teams build products and services that their customers want. Here she shares her techniques for transforming your process into one of continuous discovery and learning.
The most important business and product management book of the past fifty years. If you’re a technology PM and you haven’t read Christensen, do so right now.
Listening is one of the most important product management skills. Learn how to connect to customers, co-workers, and team members with this beautifully illustrated and accessible book.
Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer.
If you could only read one book on product management, this would be it. Marty has had a long and storied product management career, and is the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group.
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
As with self driving cars, most of the early players in humanoid robots, will quietly shut up shop and disappear. Those that remain will pivot and redefine what they are doing, without renaming it, to something more achievable and with, finally, plausible business cases.
With AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more efficiency.
Net net, we're going to need more sales and go to market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human beings than ever.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
Come for the stories about one of the msot storied franshises in entertainment history. Stay for the business and leadership lessons from Lorne Michaels.
Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.
When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behavior prove to have been excessive.
For language acquisition, Pimsleur is by far my favorite online/app program. (Even Mr. Mari, who gathers no joy from learning languages, was addicted to it for a while!)
If you are in regular meetings with a hardware vendor as a customer (or potential customer) you can accomplish a lot by providing firm and tough feedback, particularly with Intel today.
So this AI thing will be that right. So if you take coding um what we built with GitHub and VS code in over whatever decades uh suddenly the coding assistant is that big in one year and so that I think is what's going to happen as well which is the market expands massively.
which I think is going to just keep growing because guess what it's going to grow faster than the number of users. So in fact that's kind of one of the other questions people ask me is hey what happens to the per user business at least the early signs may be the way to think about the per user business is not just per user it's per agent
In fact, I kind of look at it and say our business which today is an enduser tools business will become essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work.
So you have to be, in your mind, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we… The way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction.
I do, but it's business as usual because we're we're in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades. And when you look at GDP, it's basically the GDP curve that is an exponential weighted sum over so many aspects of the industry. Everything is gradually being automated has been for hundreds of years.
And I kind of feel like the industry it's it's um it's over it's it's making too big of a jump and it's trying to pretend like this is amazing and it's not. It's slop and I think they're not coming to terms with it and maybe they're trying to fund raise or something like that.
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
Yeah, I mean user retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on like day one. That's super hard, right?
So as opposed to going against I guess human intuition and trying to get them to share stuff that they otherwise wouldn't on the margins want to share like lean into it more actually like grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much much much better and you can kind of 5x or 10x and and drive a lot of growth that way too.
And the third one is like we did a lot of actually PR uh prior to the service going out just to get the word out. Um and you know PR has has its time and place. Uh but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost uh once you get it out because you're you're just you know you need to see it through.
I think if you have especially a B2B feature where you may have some lock in reverse trials can be super powerful. You just want to get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in like building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually like feel, oh man, I probably should keep this and and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work. And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be be the norm.
So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they're context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we're not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
It's easier to even predict whether growth will slow down at a certain point. it's easier to catch these trends earlier. If you don't have good observability over how your business runs and what the company's um key levers are, then you will be scrambling.
I I think most companies play too much with pricing all the time. It's like it just like causes all these problems with data and like it makes it hard to predict and then suddenly you you do you AB test discounts and then you cheapen the product because now people are just going to wait for the next discount
And I think we'll see the same thing with automation where uh basically robot plus human is much better than just human or just robot. Uh and and that just like makes total sense. It also makes it much easier to get all the technology bootstrapped because when it's robot plus human, now there's a lot more potential for the robot to like actually learn on the job, acquire new skills.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
But once you actually have a sophisticated industrial economy, central planning can't handle the complexity. And so you try and create incentives and structures around that while not having pricing and that just doesn't work.
Customer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses".
When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.
We can have a breakthrough in our agent architecture on Monday implemented on Tuesday and have it deployed with hundreds of our customers on Wednesday and directly see the impact of of that work.
And in contrast to software as a service or software you'd buy off a shelf at, you know, Fry Electronics, you know, decades ago, which might help you be marginally more productive, help you get a job done. Agents, in contrast, are actually getting the job done for you. And so you're in essence hiring software to accomplish a task and get it done well.
And the reason this is important is what we're trying to do in a way is resolve this age-old tension between the cost and quality of customer experience where I think every great business wants to deliver an amazing experience to their customers. But unless you're like Hermes or the Four Seasons, it's too expensive to do.
I mean I've heard from multiple investors that foundation models are the fastest deteriorating asset of all time. And so if step one of your business is to burn through tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of capital before you find product market fit and that asset has value for like a a week, I'm not sure it's like a great business model.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
In the US, capital controls politics, one could argue. In China, it has to be the other way around. Capital must be reigned in by politics. As part of the capitalist class, do not have the ambition to exceed the powers of the political class, is really at the core of it, I’d say, is the biggest difference between US and China.
So you if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books if you have 30 times leverage and you're getting 20% of the profits you'll go to 40 times leverage. It's just going to it's literally will add you know 25% to your bonus.
the fortress balance sheet is that you run a company serving clients well, you have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I'm as conservative in accounting as you can find. I don't up-front profits when I can spread them over time.
we can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches and save a billion dollars next year. We could do a lot of things. Your margins will go up. Your growth will go down. Your long-term margins will probably get worse.
A lot of our middle market clients use investment banking products. A lot of our consumer clients use some effects. So, all of our businesses feed each other. There's no extraneous. We got rid of everything that didn't fit a strategy.
I've always been very risk-conscious. And risk-conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes.
I had always thought that all "Intelligent Investing" is "Value Investing". And that true value is always sustainable. In otherh words, "All Intelligent Finance is Sustainable Finance."
Assuming you are still hiring junior engineers (you really should be even in this AI era), the good ones will learn quickly and want to see career progress in their first few years of working.
He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.
When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company "a good place to work," not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.
the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
So the idea is when you start a business, you get to make all the rules now. You can, like in this little part of the world, you get to decide how things should work. You don't have to follow norms.
The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So in a competitive market, would a company whose cost is 6% be able to charge 30%? Absolutely not.
I have written forewords for Amir in the past on two of his prior books, Ecosystem Arabia: The Making of a New Economy and Venture Adventure: Startup Fundraising Advice from Top Global Investors, both of which I recommend.
When I have conversations with breached companies, my messaging is crystal clear: be transparent and expeditious in your reporting of the incident and prioritise communicating with your customers.
Well, I strongly believe that we should make business software like we make games because when we make products like we make games, people find them fun. They tell their friends. They fall in love with them.
And that's why when you have a missionritical product like email where you are interfacing with customers with candidates with investors it turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a halfbaked product.
I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.
But the price point that supports our best-in-class best-in- position is actually the third one. it starts to feel expensive, but then you sit down and you think about the time that you spend in email, the ROI, and you still buy it anyway.
A more how-to pragmatic version of carving your own path. Includes some personal story of reinvention but more on experimentation that challenges our default scripts of success and ambition.
For most of my investing life, Vanguard was THE one-stop shop for index funds of all types. They have the lowest expense ratio and the utmost respect for their customers.
I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.
The short-term that company that could make the most money is the one that figures out what advertising targeting method works for language model generations.
Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus
If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
Many software investors eschew hard tech startups because of their capital intensity, but it’s hard to deny that huge returns are possible in hard tech: just consider SpaceX.
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
The Social Network is substantially made up, more a source for vibes rather than a source for facts. Even the vibes fail to cohere with reality. And yet it convinced many proto-founders to put in YC applications.
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom.
I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons.
Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.
I think the thing that most people get wrong after they’ve decided to start a company is work on things they think the market wants. Not being passionate about any idea but thinking, okay, look, this is what will get me venture funding. This is what will get me revenue or customers. That’s what will get me venture funding. If you work from that perspective, I think you’ll give up beyond the point because it’s very hard to work towards something that was not truly important to you.
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
It should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.
nobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.
Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies, you don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50.
So as I like to say, incentives drive all human behavior and that certainly applies in the business world. So understanding the people and what drives them, and what the actual financial and other incentives of a business, are very important part of the analysis for investing in a company.
And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.
And oftentimes it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google.
To that end, I read a few different books from the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the summer, and even wrote a review of How Languages are Learned.
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
And I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things.
That's an inventor's greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
I came into the business world with Comma, and I found the exact opposite. I found 5% of people good and 95% of people bad. I found a world that promotes psychopathy.
The two companies that have endured through technology are Apple and Microsoft. And what do they make? Computers and business services, right. All the meme, social ads, they all come and go. But you want to endure, build hardware.
this is the most personal of personal decisions and no one should ever try to pressure anyone else to have kids-it's way too big a thing to be anyone else's business.
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.
This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
This is precisely the role the central bank can play. By announcing that it stands ready to buy the bonds that investors want to sell at the price associated with the low interest rate, and credibly indicating that it has deep enough pockets to buy whatever is needed, it can eliminate the bad equilibrium.
Sovereign debt markets (and many other markets as well) are subject to sudden stops in which investors either drop out or ask for large spreads even in the absence of large changes in fundamentals.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.
One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression.
Their words now
But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting.
a lot of industries over time end up not like that. They end up not being actually a fair and free market with market discipline. They end up as something else. In the business world, what they end up with is either just, you know, one company with a full up monopoly or more commonly they end up with what's called an oligopoly
A successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. Um and and they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like of course that's rational. Like they've now built something worth defending.
in quote-unquote real life, right? Which is starting businesses or you know, writing books, right? Or composing music or playing basketball or playing poker, right? Or basically doing anything interesting we're in a probabilistic domain, right?
the reality is the kids that make new things work from scratch. It actually turns out that they actually have been deep in the domain for a long time. Almost every case, they've been thinking hard about the problem that they're trying to solve actually for in in a lot of cases for many years.
My key takeaway from the book: Spielberg, for reasons that McBride can never quite nail down, was capital-D driven. His story provides a master class in the potential of mixing relentless ambition, talent, and perfect timing.
This one might come as a surprise to some, but the reality is that at Fitbit’s more reasonable pricing as of late, the Fitbit Sense is a pretty good option. And it’s a super well-rounded option
Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision – my colleague Gillian Tett makes the case for thinking like an anthropologist in business and in life. The description of how KitKats took Japan by storm is a particular delight.
Sedgewick was more successful in developing his characters, and I also appreciated that he took regular tangents into other related and interesting matters like the Leadville mining boom, the growth of Los Angeles, and the business maneuvers of other railroad barons like Jay Gould and Collis Huntington.
It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.
One of those business books (and there are many) that you can get the main idea within the first 20 pages and can stop reading there. I skimmed through most of it.
A must-read for anyone who wants to start a business, has started a business, wishes they started a business or has ever thought about starting a business.
Rather than being defined as one side of this artificial dichotomy, value investing should instead consist of buying whatever represents a better value proposition, taking all factors into account.
My extensive discussions with Andrew led me to conclude that the focus on value versus growth doesn’t serve investors well in the fast-changing world in which we live.
Not only are the traditional staples of classic value investing (readily discernable quantitative measures of cheapness in the here-and-now) no longer likely to produce a sustainable edge on their own, but the world has gotten more complex, with many more dynamics that can drive a decoupling of near-term metrics from valuation, both to the positive and negative.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.