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18 September
16 September
15 September
14 September
13 September
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Their words
No software tells me quite as much about your org as the choice of video conferencing software. Meet vs Zoom vs Microsoft Teams vs Citrix vs Jitsi are all picked for very different reasons.
12 September
10 September
8 September
From one piece The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staff 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Marco Rubio is struggling to hire talented staff and is settling for loyalists who follow his instructions instead.Their words
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.
The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com
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Their words
In practice, Hochman's hire is another nauseating sign that the Trump administration is destroying the bureaucracy in favor of some corrupt, neo-royalist husk of an apparatus that mostly posts memes and occasionally deploys the 82nd Airborne to extract rents.
The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com
6 September
4 September
3 September
1 September
31 August
29 August
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Their words
I read every DM people send me, even if I don’t reply to all. I’m constantly learning about new ideas, ways to improve our product, where we’re falling short, who could join our company next, where to invest… very grateful for the @x platform.
18 August
12 August
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Their words
Models being stagnant in long-form, non-fiction writing should be alarming to those reliant on models autonomously solving grand, open science problems in the near future.
11 August
9 August
7 August
From one piece Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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Their words
It's like it's it's uncommon that these deep tech companies that fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because once you end up with this organization of hundreds of people and thousand hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical infrastructure, you haven't built the systems to manage that.
2 August
From one piece This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The engineer-designer-PM pod ratio was an HR artifact of scaling, not something anyone showed a product needed.Their words
somewhere along the line this kind of HR ratio of like a pod popped into being. You know, every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer or you add a PM, you add an EM
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korrents.com
A company should hire a product manager only against a specific need, never by default.Their words
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.
31 July
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Their words
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.
26 July
From one piece Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
whatever it takes to fit the car to you whatever it takes to fit the organization to you, that's what you got to do. And the next CEO, whatever the personality is, they can figure it out.
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Their words
one of the most important things is systems understanding. Systems awareness, system design, system organization. Um, but systems thinking. And the reason for that is because most of the low-level things that that has to be done are going to be done agentically anyways.
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Their words
Turns out paralegals are growing like crazy. And the reason for that is because the backlog of lawsuits is really high, and now these law firms could get a lot more cases through. And in order to do so, you got to hire more people.
20 July
19 July
From one piece Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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Their words
Well, the talent density is the non-negotiable. Like you have to start with that. If you don't have that, you can't get to a place where you have confidence in decision-making at all levels of the organization, allowing people to take risks and innovate quickly.
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Their words
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.
15 July
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Their words
We can we can teach we can teach somebody, I think, to be a really good AI developer in a few months. You can build enough intuition where you are, you know, accelerated off the ground and you can go like keep growing there. It's really hard to teach someone a CS undergrad program in in 3 months.
12 July
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korrents.com
An organization that demands trust ends up with less of it than one that shows its work instead.Their words
Paradoxically, the organization that demands trust can get less of it, while the organization that shows their work - thereby not asking for trust - builds up more of it.
7 July
1 July
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Their words
So how you write code, how you manage projects, who you hire, how many people, what the org structure is is completely different in the three phases.
24 June
From one piece Tech interviews with NeetCode 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I'm not going to spend four interviews going through and asking somebody data structures and algorithm stuff. I just have them do work that might be similar to something I'd give them on the job or even just have a conversation with them. See how they think. Like can they think through trade-offs? I don't even care about what answer they give me to a problem. I care about like what's like why did they say that?
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
14 June
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Their words
it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit.
9 June
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Their words
And then for those of you who are skeptical about international organizations, here's one you've never heard of. The International Organization for Standardization then standardized these container sizes to fit one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea. And this just plummets transport costs.
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korrents.com
Someone who is not already product-first almost never becomes good at product afterwards.Their words
it probably took my whole career for me to fully understand how hard it is to hire someone who's not a product first individual and then get them to be good at it. I'm sure there there are examples, but it's got to be 5% or less of the use case.
4 June
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Their words
So, like with lawyers particularly, you need some entity to back up the product. You need kind of like an ownership of the product. You need somebody to be able to fire or or hire, like licensing issues. There's a lot of like sort of like regulatory layers that are like also going to be keeping even if there's no relational element human in the loop that have nothing to do with like the ability of the human to actually perform the service.
2 June
From one piece FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think that you owe it to in that moral contract to your good employees to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.
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Their words
it's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.
30 May
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korrents.com
A digital-service team embedded in an unchanged agency produces no lasting change once it moves on.Their words
A digital service team that works with an agency that continues to hire and manage for the same jobs they did last year, and structures the work in the same way it did last year, is just a tourist.
27 May
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Their words
But you if you also become an expert in a specific industry, that's like a deadly combo. Um if you are like just pick any industry, let's say let's say farming, let's say you understand that farming industry really well and you're also a decent software engineer, you're probably like the top 10 people in the world for that combination that the whole industry will want to hire.
21 May
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Their words
A pile of agents is not a company for the same reason a pile of smart people is not a company.
10 May
From one piece How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
as leaders we get so focused on value statement mission statements we forget the mission statement is not the mission. The map is not the territory. Mission is an emergent property of the living superorganism of the thing we're birthing.
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Their words
if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.
26 April
From one piece How to win when software is not a moat | Evan Spiegel (Snapchat CEO) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company. And that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning relationship between the two types of organizations.
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korrents.com
Large, structured organizations become risk-averse because everyone inside them is optimizing for the next promotion.Their words
as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, uh people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? Getting, you know, into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, uh they become a lot more risk-averse.
1 April
From one piece Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
when you have team A, team A will just want to hire more A level players and yeah, they just intolerant of anybody who's not performing,
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Their words
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
25 March
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Their words
And organizations have super high pain tolerance. But human-made enterprise codebases take years to get there. The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it. With agents and a team of 2 humans, you can get to that complexity within weeks.
20 March
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Their words
You're you're not a completely free agent and you can't actually like be part of that conversation in a fully autonomous um free way. Like if you're inside one of the frontier labs. Like there's some things that you can't say. Uh and conversely there are some things that the organization wants you to say.
24 January
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Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Muji storageTheir words
Muji storage for organization.
7 January
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary ProductsTheir words
The sequel to Inspired, this book explores what the best product companies have in common. “Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.”
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Product Management in PracticeTheir words
Real-world, practical advice for PMs. Focused on communication, organization, research, and execution.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your OrganizationTheir words
. Understanding how we grow and develop will help you become a better leader and a more empathetic colleague. More accessible than his academic work, this book also provides a framework for understanding underlying beliefs and motivations that might be holding you back.
6 December 2025
2 December 2025
27 November 2025
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korrents.com
Relying on AI to replace performance engineers reduces an organization's overall technical expertise over time.Their words
If a company spends less on performance engineers as it's considered AI'd, it will reduce the company's effective "performance IQ."
22 October 2025
16 October 2025
From one piece Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.
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Their words
the only thing that we know is that models will improve. Will it be incremental? Will it be exponential? I mean somewhere in between. Who knows? But uh what you have to believe is that you get better as models get better. Your organization gets better as models get better.
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Their words
Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah, mild to moderate, but like that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering go down.
5 October 2025
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Their words
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
30 September 2025
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Their words
Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?
21 September 2025
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Their words
I find that sometimes when you have like a designer or product manager and let's say I'm an engineer, then when I have a problem like, oh, I need to figure out the product definition, my default will be, well, I've got these people and that's kind of their job description, so I'm just going to delegate that to them.
1 September 2025
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Their words
While the same does not directly apply in other fields, working with others to produce the best results for everyone will be much better in the long-term than focusing solely on what Amazon needs right now.
4 August 2025
3 August 2025
25 June 2025
11 June 2025
9 June 2025
28 May 2025
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Their words
You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.
22 May 2025
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Their words
USAID is not, itself, a charity. It is an organization that funds other charities.
30 April 2025
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Their words
There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof? But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.
19 April 2025
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Their words
People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
3 February 2025
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Their words
But Google has never had that DNA of like, "This is a product we should sell." The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There's a lot of bureaucracy here.
19 January 2025
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korrents.com
Nobody should be hired as an advisor before being paid for a workshop on the actual problem and watched at work.Their words
I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing. See them in action.
7 January 2025
17 December 2024
From one piece “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
"Hire great people and get out of their way" is dangerous advice for anyone in a leadership role.Their words
Earlier this year I started writing a piece on why “hire great people and get out of their way” is such terrible, dangerous, counterproductive advice to give anyone in a leadership role.
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korrents.com
There is no such thing as the best people; you are trying to hire the right people for this team at this stage.Their words
Here’s one small mental hack that makes a world of difference: remember that you are trying to hire the right people to join your team/org/company. Not the “best” people. The right people.
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Their words
you want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. If they’re strong where you need them to be strong, it’s okay if they aren’t equally superpowered at everything — that’s why we build teams, to supplement and balance each other out.
16 December 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Making of a ManagerTheir words
A guide in going from being a first-time manager to becoming a senior manager in an organization. A refreshingly honest tone
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The GoalTheir words
Written in the '80s, yet a timeless novel on what management is about, may that be a manager of a team, an organization or an industrial plant.
1 September 2024
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Their words
Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
25 August 2024
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Their words
Indeed, it no longer feels amusing to see the Telegram organization urge people away from default-encrypted messengers, while refusing to implement essential features that would widely encrypt their own users’ messages.
Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com
21 May 2024
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Their words
If Waymo vehicles were constantly asking for remote guidance, Waymo might need to hire so many remote operators that it negates the cost savings that come from not needing a driver.
From one piece Stripe's monorepo developer environment 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Rapidly growing organizations need a developer environment that works well out of the box for new engineersTheir words
In a rapidly growing organization, it's much more important to have a developer environment that "just works" out of the gate, with minimal setup pain for new engineers.
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korrents.com
Per-engineer productivity inevitably declines somewhat as an organization and its codebase growTheir words
It is almost inevitable that per-engineer productivity drops to some extent as an organization and codebase grows, even though it's also nearly-impossible to quantify that effect.
5 January 2024
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Their words
If you aren’t making building the organization someone’s number one job, it won’t be anyone’s number one job, which means it probably won’t get done very well.
28 July 2023
27 May 2023
7 March 2023
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Their words
The proportion of profiteers seems highly correlated with the number of VERITAS plaques on campus and the high-mindedness of the organization's mission statement.
28 January 2022
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Their words
the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later.
22 September 2020
9 May 2020
5 May 2020
7 February 2020
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
Tools of TitansTheir words
I was disappointed. I love Tim’s work, but this didn’t deliver in the way his past books have. There’s zero thematic organization, so you can’t reference certain topics you want to learn more about except in a few cases. While this has some interesting pieces, I doubt I’ll refer back to it like I have with Workweek, Body, and Chef.
7 December 2018
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Lovedrcmnd.app
ScrivenerTheir words
I use Scrivener to draft my novels. Since these novels regularly go over 300 thousand words and take multiple years to write, Scrivener's organization capabilities have been really helpful. It also syncs seamlessly between all my devices.
17 June 2018
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korrents.com
A team that is falling behind can only be fixed by hiring more people; no amount of process or patience will move it.Their words
When falling behind, the system fix is to hire more people until the team moves into treading water.
7 March 2018
Nothing matches.
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