I did office hours today with a founder who had so many different things to figure out that we walked for 5 miles. (These were mostly the good kind of problem. He's in the early stage, where problems ≈ deciding what to do in what order.)
one of the things that made Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, was how in command he was of the facts - yes, even those sprinkled with reality distortion dust! - on stage.
A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn't prove that choice is an illusion.
One of the distinctive things about YC as compared to later stage investors is that you have to be prepared to give advice about practically everything.
It's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
But they're the person that's on the hook for understanding, for gating, for making sure that someone is deciding what ships, what's blocked, what do we defer. And so, I think that that is something that engineers are going to continue to be valuable for.
buuuut my roadmap is’nt ten times shorter. and I’m definitely not ten times better at deciding what is worth building. teams haven’t started casually shipping a year of product work every month. you can look around and and it’s hard to say what software has gotten meaningfully better in the last year.
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.
there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages.
In other words, the absence of calcium is not the same as the absence of disease—it may simply mean the disease hasn’t reached the stage CAC is designed to detect.
Um but I I would also caution that the general models are definitely getting better at a broader and broader range of things. So you have to figure out, you know, is that thing you're working on, is that going to be a durable thing or do you think the models uh at the forefront are going to get better at that in the next six months or 12 months or is it something they're not going to be able to do for a couple years or three years? And you know, you you want to weigh that as you're as you're deciding what to work on.
And so we've done this study where you have to, instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it. And so now you're engaging with the environment, you're going to go look for it and be like, gosh, it's been there the whole time. have walked by it so many times have never noticed it. And I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it.
So my role and arguably that of like other mathematicians might actually just shift subtly into that curation direction of what ideas are are worth displaying.
And what I learned from the puppet days, every presentation is an interview. I don't think a lot of people think about it that way cuz people are looking at you on stage and they get to see what you're about.
the joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.
I- i- like, we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me, but I wanna build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate.
And so that's the last thing which was very surprising to me which is that like we already reversibly cry preserve tissue including human tissue including whole body human tissue at that very very small like you know in a couple hundred cells stage
We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.
Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.
we often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide
With AI, breakout times could conceivably be very short - it could be hours, minutes, or even seconds for some very specific but important change to occur.
The high value human tasks, like understanding the client's true pain points and deciding on priorities and trade-offs, would be easier with a smaller, proactive team.
A short but 'pathless' journey through stepping off the conventional path a year after graduating, daring to ask the questions that linger below the surface. A big inspiration for deciding to write my book!
Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.
Once, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services.
if you believe we're in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we've been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term.
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.
What amazes me about these interactions is not just that Claude could help me solve the problems, but how it walked me through the process, explaining each step.
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders.
It seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive.
While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.
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.
if you often need to get everyone in the same room to discuss and decide on something, you probably have too many people discussing and deciding things.
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