Many frontier lab employees, especially at Anthropic, are out of touch and this will impact their forecasting and/or descriptions of current AI events.
then that rogue deployment could be sitting there and sort of hitch a ride on the intelligence explosion. So new models are being trained every few weeks um and when a model comes off the presses, the rogue agents could try to bring that model into the swarm.
So, we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery?
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.
then you also remember that you've hired some very highly paid and talented employees. And are you saying they can't get the tools that they need? That you're spending $100,000 a week. If you wait a week to get a power supply half off, you have certainly dwarfed any possible benefit from getting it.
I think you need to ask the uh, the sort of converse of that, uh, what if you succeed? And you know, you raise money and you've customers and you've employees and a whole thing. Like are you going to be are you going to enjoy that? Are you going to want to work on that for 10 years, for 17 years, for 30 years?
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
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.
And I think that is actually super important. Um the only thing you need to do is ride the models. And that means use them for whatever it is that you do.
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.
There’s this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave. Most games fall off the back of the wave. They don’t catch the wave. No one plays it or plays it for two weeks.
just think about a company with a thousand employees and 400 million in revenue or whatever. And um if they see a product that's, you know, $2 a month or even $100 a month, their thought is like, well, that can't be good enough. They're not mature enough. It's not going to do enough.
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
Olga Ravn's The Employees (trans. by Martin Aitken) that takes the form of employee interview transcripts on a spaceship that has encountered bizarre alien life.
Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.
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.
Code and data is hard, but ideas is easy. Silicon Valley operates on the way that top employees get bought out by other companies for a pay raise, and a large reason why these companies do this is to bring ideas with them.
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.
At current deployment rates it will take Waymo about 20 years with ZERO fatalities to show they are net as safe as average human driver fatality rates (including the old cars, impaired drivers, etc. in that comparison baseline).
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 might not seem so, but I think I’m more humble than a lot of physicists. I’m not sure that we’re ever going to get to that bottom level, but I do think we’re going to keep penetrating different layers and get further.
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.
Not only is Tina Fey a very funny writer, it's fascinating to have the opportunity to climb inside the head of a successful female leader. Reading the internal drama within Tina's head as she thought about whether she wanted a second child while considering how it would affect the 100+ employees that worked for her on 30 Rock was priceless. As a manager, it gives me an understanding and level of empathy I wouldn't have had otherwise.
If you're curious how Google built it's culture and the processes thanks to their extremely data & engineering driven nature, this is a great book. What held it back was being ~100 pages too long and Bock didn't always understand where what they did only fit at a $100Bn+, mega-profitable company. Still, the insights on the studies on their 50,000+ employees is well worth the read since so few of us can get similar statistical significance to apply to our teams.
Selling is hard. Building a repeatable model with a team that you attempt to rapidly scale is even harder. Fortunately, Mark Roberge, who was one of the very first employees at HubSpot shares the processes and frameworks he used to build a sales machine. If you like the principles behind Lean Startups, then his data- and experiment-driven approach to sales will be very appealing.
Sales isn't easy to learn, especially when you have beginners luck and then hit a wall. This book, from the Sandler Sales Method, gives a good overview of the approach, and why it can be easier to sell when you first start, than once you get into it.
Holy shit what a ride! Absolutely amazing story of perseverance and leadership, a must read. Whatever struggles you think you are going through simply cannot compare.
At first glance the Fastball struck me as a humble offering, but it quickly grew on me. Mostly after I started to carry and use it. I wasn't immediately impressed when I pulled the Fastball from it's box, and as a collectible I'd probably pass. But as a user piece I can easily recommend it.
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