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Lenny Rachitsky
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From the outside, Cursor shouldn't have worked. They compete against the most well-funded and fastest-growing companies of all time, and *sit on top* of those same competitors to power their product. WAT. I asked @romanugarte_ (employee #15 at @cursor_ai) how Cursor pulled it off. Roman's answer: They didn't focus on moats. They obsessed over building something useful today. 👇
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17 September
British comics writer and novelist (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Gun Machine). Keeps a public daily notebook logging what he reads, watches and listens to.
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Here's my conversation with Andrew Scull, all about psychiatry, its long history from Freud/Jung to today, including asylums, icepick lobotomies, electroshock therapy, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some horrific treatments that were considered mainstream where doctors injected patients with malaria, induced insulin comas, and pulled out their teeth, all in the name of curing madness. There are a lot of lessons to learn from history here. One of the most important for me is just how incredibly complex the human mind is, and how hard the task is of understanding & treating the nearly inf… Psychotherapy Related
16 September
Writer and programmer; co-founder of the software studio Postlight and author of the Bloomberg Businessweek essay What Is Code?
R train late night trifecta: guy going home with a double bass, guy on here with a whole CitiBike, and someone pulled the emergency brake. Related
15 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
12 September
Front-end developer and writer; co-founder of CodePen, founder of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast.
Mastodon Underdesk Treadmill I pulled the trigger on an underdesk treadmill. Basic research suggested GoPlus is a decent one. I was hoping it would be $300-400 USD.... chriscoyier.net
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Bluesky Underdesk Treadmill I pulled the trigger on an underdesk treadmill. Basic research suggested GoPlus is a decent one. I was hoping it would be $300-400 USD. Turns out this one is just... chriscoyier.net
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11 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
10 September
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
9 September
Writer of Lenny's Newsletter and host of Lenny's Podcast, covering product, growth and career in tech. Previously a product lead at Airbnb. Also an angel investor and advisor.
Love this framework from @romanugarte_: Instead of working backwards from "Our product now has..." Optimize for "Our product can now..." Quoting @lennysan Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch. Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it laun… Related
I asked Grok Bot product lead @romanugarte_ why they built a new stand-alone app vs. building it into Cursor "It was not obvious at all. We saw what some of our competitors doing this, adding new tabs for each new form factor. People can feel that this was not a single, consistent vision of the way that work should work. It's kind of a shipping your org chart style thing that users are reacting negatively to. And so we decided, let's just start completely from scratch." Quoting @lennysan Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch. Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it laun… Related
8 September
Writer of Lenny's Newsletter and host of Lenny's Podcast, covering product, growth and career in tech. Previously a product lead at Airbnb. Also an angel investor and advisor.
My biggest takeaways from Grok @Bot product lead @RomanUgarte_: 1. Two key early product decisions made Grok Bot the success it has become. First, everything runs in the cloud. This means bots can be kicked off from a phone and run while the user sleeps. Second, each bot has access to its own computer. This allows it to operate on tools that have no API because they can simply use the computer the way a human would. 2. “Unshipping” is a big opportunity in product right now. One of the most counterintuitive things the Grok Bot team did in the weeks between internal beta and public launch was r… Quoting @lennysan Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch. Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it laun… the cloud Related
Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch. Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done. Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story: 🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor 🔸 T… Related
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
new summation pod with @asenkut, founder of Felicis and Google's first product manager, who was early in Shopify, Canva, Notion, and Adyen. we get into why the best companies come from the places nobody's looking, why moats are dead AND alive, and how a company now gets to a billion in a year. youtube.com
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4 September
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
What do we do if moats are getting shallower? How should tech companies respond? moats are getting shallower. Used to be that you would build software and you build these really deep moats around it, make it very hard for customers to switch. but AI is increasing the power of the customer, making customers much more powerful because they can easily switch from one to the other. so how should you react if you're a tech company? If you think of the moats analogy, there are two types of ways of aligning your army: - You could be aligning your army to DEFEND, in which case you're building moats,… JavaScript Related
3 September
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
As much as I try to avoid app / hype hopping now… @bot is truly exceptional. Remarkable what @SpaceXAI pulled off here. Related
1 September
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
31 August
Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.
If a business has earned returns on capital substantially exceeding the opportunity cost of capital for a period of years(eg, > 5 years), it has a moat. The test is math based. An assertion that NVIDIA, TSMC other businesses don't have a moat and that moats can't be created in the future makes me giggle. morganstanley.com
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19 August
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
The next issue of Bits about Money is going to be about screening providers, including some scintillating minutiae pulled out of the marketing collateral. Related
Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.
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One of the things I found most exciting in the last couple of years was seeing as model qualities gotten better and and harnesses and tools have gotten better, how many people um that were directors or VPs or SVPs or any of these levels were actually rolling up their sleeves and trying things out.
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youtube.com
16 August
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
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First fantasy since LOTR that pulled me in mercilessly.
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rakhim.org
8 July
Novelist and writer on craft; wrote The War of Art, Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance.
19 June
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
European Delusions & Danish Drones Europe is finally waking up from many decades of naive pacifism. While the continent is loath to give America credit, this is largely where it's due, as Trump has pulled back on blanket security guarantees. Well, that a…
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28 May
Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.
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I pulled out my W.Steps Prime telescoping ladder test sample today, and realized that I've grown to really like it.
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toolguyd.com
7 April
Author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts and of Bittersweet; writes The Quiet Life newsletter.
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This book is so full of wisdom and insight. I pulled down my copy just now and it's filled with underlines and margin notes.
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susancain.substack.com
3 April
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
16 March
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
The equity risk premium (ERP) is an essential ingredient in hurdle rates in corporate finance, discount rates in valuation and expected returns in financial planning. In 2009, I pulled together everything I know about the ERP, in a paper that I have updated every year since. My 2026 update is now available to download and it is written for practitioners. papers.ssrn.com
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2 August 2024
Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.
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