fast cars and slow cookers. mostly hanging out on Threäds now, so don’t expect me to see your stuff here.
🇺🇸
- Tweets 56,137
- Following 1,917
- Followers 25,928
- Likes 90,736
When I was a kid I used to open the fridge, find nothing I wanted, wander around the kitchen a bit, then repeat.
I feel like my life hasn't changed much, except now Twitter is my fridge.
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I don’t understand car racing as a sport, but if this were a league, I would buy the streaming package.
Dodgers won the World Series again
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Some kid puked in the row behind us on our last flight and everybody did their best to help the poor parents.
Most people are pretty allright.
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If Jack tricked Elon into buying the company for $44B with A16Z’s money and then tricks him into turning it onto a $400M asset sale so he can buy it outright, I will be very impressed.
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This is like bragging you’re in important negotiations when you’re standing on a bridge threatening to jump and are surrounded by 50 first responders trying to talk you down.
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God grant me the budget to buy the things I shouldn't build, the eng team to code the things I must, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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Interesting cognitive bias: All VCs think everyone investing earlier than themselves is a monkey throwing darts, & everyone after a banker.
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The case against private prisons in one tweet.
Private prison threatens to close unless state or federal officials fill up 300 more beds: santafenewmexican.com/news/l…
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I’m here for maga-sent-me-a-fucking-bomb Obama.
Former President Obama speaks in Milwaukee: "I'm hoping you think it's wrong to hear people spend years, months, vilifying people, questioning their patriotism, calling them enemies of the people. And then suddenly you're concerned about civility. Please." cnn.it/2Ps1BjK
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Touring first grade classrooms and I think I've found the content guidelines that will fix Twitter's abuse problem.
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When people say things like this, do they imagine that conservatives won’t trust the AI’s code snippets or recipe suggestions because it can’t think of anything nice to say about Donald Trump?
What is the cost of “damaged credibility” to the business beyond angry tweets?
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Silicon Valley, where we celebrate the 80 hour workweek & the four hour workweek, but consider everything in between a life of quiet desperation.
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Just spitballing here: what if we rebranded naps as sleep micro-dosing and marketed them as a productivity hack to SV over-achievers. 🤔
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I agree. The vast majority workers want to be effective and supported professionally in an ethical env.
This will be rough for people who want an activist job on a tech person’s salary, but life is about choices. If you want to get paid to be an activist, join a non-profit.
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Might this instead be framed as, should we elect more people to congress who know how to use computers, didn’t get rich buying homes, believe gays are ok and the planet is sick (not the other way around), etc?
I say, probably a good idea.
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Lord give me the confidence of a crypto analyst who called $50k BTC this year and is still offering predictions.
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Normal people: “This meeting should’ve been an email.” 😡
Lawyers: “This email should’ve been a meeting.” 😬
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One of the great paradoxes of Silicon Valley is that everyone seems to both hate meetings and also aspire to be VCs.
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Anti-tech mind rot is spending all day on your phone between zooms and Notion docs in your PJs because you WFH, then opening the Amazon packages you ordered at lunch, eating DoorDash while streaming Ted Lasso, and finally tweeting, “what do these assholes even do anyway?”
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Introducing the concept of OKRs to my kids. A big organizational goal this quarter is smoother bedtimes, so we’re aligning to this.
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What if I want to buy a robot that can also give me a hand job in the off season? Hashtag versatility.
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Elon going from being Tony Stark to being a middle-aged divorcé calling people cucks and then threatening to fight them on social media has to be one of the craziest pivots in tech history.
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The biggest 🤯 I experienced moving from programming to “business” was that lawyers are just programmers who write in the worst language conceivable, & deploy code to a high-latency probabilistic runtime.
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Founder: I am raising money, I will literally talk to anyone who isn’t definitely a serial killer. And in a month I may drop that constraint to keep this thing alive.
VC: Investing in startups is all about proprietary deal flow.
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I think what people don’t tend to grasp is how little money billionaires have in aggregate. There’s this idea that if we took their billions we’d all be doing great.
Bezos’ fortune took 25yrs to build & could run the federal government for 13 days.
He’s the richest one…of 500.
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Die a simple magical experience, or live long enough to A/B yourself into every UX dark pattern known to mankind.
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There’s no worse guy than do-you-know-what-my-time-is-worth guy. Change my mind.
My flight to Vancouver was cancelled and it cost me $10,000 to take the ferry instead.
Hold up… $10k for a 90 min ferry?! 🤯
Well, sort of.
To ferry from Victoria to Vancouver costs $160 and 3 hours 15 minutes of my time. ⛴️
To take a sea plane costs me $220 and 1 hour 15 minutes of my time. 🛩️
So I saved $60 by taking the ferry, right?
No.
I value my time at a minimum of $5,000 per hour.
Sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s not.
So an extra 2 hours of travel time actually costs me $10k…
I know some people will read this and think I’m an idiot.
But time is everything. You don’t get it back.
How much would you pay for more time at the end of your life?
I’d pay SO much more than $60 to get those 2 hours back…
I think about this with everything I do.
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YouTube including Wikipedia links, Facebook putting an asterisk next to propaganda, & related approaches focused on perceived neutrality feel a lot like Silicon Valley’s version of thoughts and prayers.
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They're really going all in on this global warming hoax.
#BestOf: China just switched on the world's largest floating solar power plant wef.ch/2rYE51T #climate
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Stripe is the Amazon of money. Watch the f out, money people.
News: @stripe quietly launches financing. Will compete with @shopify, @Square, @PayPal.
(via @stuart_abc)
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I have read the argument a lot in the last day that social media is the Public Square. No. The internet is the public square, and it is infinite.
Twitter is an Arby’s on the Square, and you’re inside yelling about their lack of vegan options being literal fascism.
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While the parents & grandparents debated something, the 5yo ran into the kitchen and asked Alexa.
The future is here, it’s just not evenly comprehended yet.
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Facebook is gonna turn this into an opportunity to strengthen the walls of its data silo, invite regulation that disadvantages new entrants, & avoid conversations about their propaganda amplification machine.
I don’t understand the take that this is bad for FB. This was a gift.
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Pocket is by far my most useful productivity app. Every day I literally save hours sending content there I'd otherwise read.
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The progression of tech skepticism:
2008: how will companies that don’t sell things ever make money?
2013: how will companies selling things at unbelievably low prices ever make money?
2018: how will companies selling things at reportedly healthy margins eventually make money? nitter.app/ryanfelton/status/1006…
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Startups are like ant farms. A lot of people think they’d be fun to have, but almost all are an unmitigated disaster. And the few people who make insanely cool ones are pretty dang weird.
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Bad org practices thrive because we cargo-cult people/processes from the most successful companies, which can afford to suck (thanks, high margins & network effects), as opposed to terrible businesses that kinda work bc of great people/processes.
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The most successful people I've met:
1. Read the classics
2. Exercise
3. Are humble
4. Have read every Walter Isaacson bio
5. Really identify with Taylor Swift
6. Were born with tails
7. Can breath underwater
8. Are reincarnations if Genghis Khan
9. Own time machines
The most successful people I've met:
1. Study daily
2. Eat well
3. Thrive on others
4. Are literal sharks in the ocean
5. Are one of 7 horcruxes
6. Replace their DNA w/ blockchain
7. Have eagles take them to Middle Earth
8. Own 2 dragons, 1 undead
9. Eat only the middle of Oreos
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My advice to people who hate tech people is that if you want new technology developed by people as awesome as you, simply stop complain and go develop it.
There’s no Central Committee that hands out these assignments.
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Web3 is a very dark view of the future web.
The web is an abundant, free & open information network nobody owns.
Its self-anointed successor is a pay-to-play network controlled by token shareholders enforcing artificial scarcity.
So I’m long the web of abundance. Early days.
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Haha the government is so stupid for not pivoting into a crypto hedge fund.
The @FBI sold the 144,336 bitcoins its confiscated from Silk Road for $48 million. They would now be worth $2.4 billion
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I first read this as “The Company” and was like, “weird office motivational poster, but OK.”
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2014: broad consensus that Clippy was the worst product ever.
2016: race to build Clippy 2.0 consumes hundreds of millions in VC.
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Selling Girl Scout cookies is basically kindergarten blood sport.
I do think it’s really good for kids though. It teaches them you never want to be in a low-margin commodity business.
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I do think someone could build a rad accelerator by buying land somewhere cheap & isolated, building some housing + work space, and giving teams 6-12 months housing/food/internet for equity. YCampinator, if you will.
"So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto."
I'm totally fine with this becoming the new startup playbook.
figma.com/blog/design-on-a-d…
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Facebook employees, in the hyper-connected world you dominate, information pollution is the new carbon pollution. You are new Exxon.
This nonsense may keep the revenue rolling in, but longer-term a failing democracy will ensnare you and your families as well.
Act ethically.
We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis – but others call fake news. We believe banning these Pages would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech.
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There’s this weird fantasy that the personal fortunes of the rich are a solve for structural problems if only they’d act.
HUD spent ~4 Bezos fortunes during the Obama admin.
This is gonna involve some collective action, folks, and we may even need to vote to get ‘er done. nitter.app/byrosenberg/status/101…
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It seems entirely possible that in 20 years Jeff Bezos will be managing our national health system & Elon Musk will be managing our transit infrastructure (from Mars).
America gonna America.
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Re Apple & remote work, the uncomfortable truth:
- for a million bucks a year most ppl will still commute
- those who choose lifestyle over careers are, on average, likely not to be missed
- companies will always make exceptions for exceptional employees, just not average ones
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Tim Scott was widely mocked in the primary for being unmarried and childless. Lots of gay jokes, especially by liberals.
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We joke about AI being too dumb to kill us all, but I am pretty sure accidentally building a world-destroying AI is an easier problem than building an AI assistant that can properly schedule meetings.
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I would be happy with a $50M exit if founders were happy with a $1M post on the seed round.
As long as y’all want to start at $12M, we are deciding together to go bigger because the failure rates are what they are.
Venture capital & entrepreneurship is so misaligned its pretty insane.
Most founders would be thrilled to exit and make a few million but investors need $10b+ outcomes to “return their fund” today.
Except a $10m-$50m exit for founders is life changing. For VCs it’s a write off.
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I like the thing about Silicon Valley where half the people complain that everybody is a libertarian & the other half complain everybody is a socialist, both over $6 single-origin pour-overs in co-op cafes.
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It’s unfortunate the Basecamp guys didn’t read my management book on not announcing radical policy changes via public blog post and then having a company-wide zoom to discuss what people hated about it.
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Warm take: in consumer finance the tent-pole product is trust. Everything else is an upsell.
No number of emails collected is worth being known for misleading customers.
Robinhood got 600k signups (as of yday) for their checking/savings aka cash management account
This was fantastic marketing
They had to change the copy today but only after they’d derived most of the value from the launch
Well played by their team
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You could not write a better thread on how to build a terrible engineering department.
10x engineers
Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.
OK, here is a tough question.
How do you spot a 10x engineer?
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Crypto hedge fund sounds so much sexier than highly-correlated long-only usb dongle.
Branding matters, people.
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2008: “Social media is a useless toy. Silicon Valley shouldn’t build these things!”
2018: “Social media is the most effective weapon ever wielded against American democracy. Silicon Valley shouldn’t build these things!”
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Remember before Openai when Google had a chatbot so powerful some guy believed it was sentient and tried to free it?
That was the stuff they didn’t think was worth shipping.
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Microsoft learned long ago it could leverage the network effect of its core product to sell a bundle of products & then use the bundle to win amongst lucked-in customers in new categories w/ even mediocre products.
Not an applicable lesson for a stand-alone/startup software biz.
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My heart goes out to everyone who loved their JPEGs so much and yet faced life circumstances that forced them to borrow against their JPEGs to make high-risk investments in unregistered securities that didn’t work out. Life is not fair.
Scrolling through twitter tonight is absolutely gut wrenching & it’s not bc of the bored ape floor price.
It’s bc so many OG apes I’ve grown w/ since mint are getting their apes liquidated via loan protocols.
I want to help, we should all be extending hands to help right now.
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Finally muting San Francisco. 90% people who tweet about it are people who don’t live there & think it sucks. The other 10% are people who do live there, think it sucks, and haven’t figured out they can move 10 miles in any direction but West to solve their issues.
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Apparently the mass VC Snapchat onboarding is due to a rumor on Sand Hill that Stanford CS kids use it to "share pictures of their decks."
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Upon consideration, I’m now pro anti-cafeteria laws. The net result has gotta be more hipster food trucks with $14 fusion tacos, and I’m all about that life.
I feel San Franciscans, on their phones, airpods in, waiting for lunch is the civic glue we need.
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SF has fewer murders per capita than Miami, Omaha, Fort Worth, Boston, Denver, & Houston to name a few. SF has always been much more gross than violent.
It really doesn’t need out-of-staters exploiting tragedies to push their anti-SF narratives, thanks. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List…
I fear for the safety of friends/colleagues in SF, and I continue to recommend to GTFO. SF is not back. SF continues to be dangerous.
It was only a matter of time and chance that a tragic, random act of violence like this would happen to someone many of us knew.
RIP @crazybob
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Do journalists consider it offensive if people talk publicly about themselves when they know they’re about to be written about? I don’t understand what the breach of trust is.
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My week in talent: A+ east coast engineer friend informed me he passed on a $170k job in SV because it’s a pay cut after taxes/rent, & TWO SF portfolio CEOs with companies that are really working well, both formerly militant co-locators, decided to move to fully remote hiring. 🙀
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Lyft is a bus that immediately responds to market demands & permanently boots bad riders. SF muni riders will appreciate the distinction. nitter.app/surfbordt/status/87680…
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A piece of advice I regularly give founders on using @AngelList to find their first angels/seed investors.
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If I send it to you a Calendly and you’re worried I’m trying to go all alpha dog on you, just send me your own link back and I’ll happily click it.
Just as long as it doesn’t take us 5 emails to schedule a half hour call, you can be whatever you want.
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“Screw these VCs only funding trivial stuff for rich people!”
VCs: “Lets compete to see who can invent cheap ecological transit for all. Bikes, scooters, rollerblades. Let’s try it all!”
“Screw these VCs. I hate seeing all these scooters everywhere. Where’s my Uber?”
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Whenever I hear this particular person talk about building a better financial system, I remember that he sells Shiba Inu coin to barely-literate people who think it is going to get them out of poverty and realize I really don’t care if he goes to jail.
3/ While we understand that this is all part of the journey to reforming our financial system, we are right on the law, confident in the facts, and welcome the opportunity for Coinbase (and by extension the broader crypto community) to get before a court.
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“…Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google and Ph.D. candidate involved in the study…”
I refuse to believe you can become a doctor of emoji.
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If Benioff can get SF to pass a tax that’s brutal for other companies but doesn’t cost Salesforce much, while painting their CEOs as scoundrels & personally getting the credit for helping the homeless, he’s truly the GOAT.
That is truly some Kaiser Söze-level shit.
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Exactly how I feel about people running night clubs who don’t let their 2nd graders drink at the bar.
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I'm a bit disappointed that despite all the change-the-world rhetoric in Silicon Valley, not one tech billionaire has become a superhero.
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Why do they only put one egg in ramen? A ramen place that put two eggs in the ramen would automatically get all of my ramen business. Three and I would never eat anything else again.
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I was mildly skeptical of WeWork already, but having infinite money and choosing Red Hot Chili Peppers for your event makes it all clear.
WeWork will be Softbank’s Alamo.
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I think Armstrong is not the leader he’ll be in 10 years. We could take shots at a younger you as well. To my the big issue is how you create environments that maximize your employees. You want that. They want that. He’s trying here and that’s valid. Dunking on him is a copout.
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Smart people have believed exactly the opposite for decades and built massive companies in tech on this theory. I personally think they’re amongst the best founders and managers in the business.
google.com/amp/s/hbr.org/amp…
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Silicon Valley is terrible because media organizations like (checks notes) Forbes (NY), Bloomberg (NY), and the LA Times wrote puff pieces about, and GM (Detroit) burned $2B on, Nikola.
I’m glad we have The Verge to hold us to account for all this fraud we keep making.
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This is perhaps the most damning indictment of Christianity I’ve ever heard.
Kellyanne Conway calls Trump "the most faith-centric, pro-life president in our lifetime" #VVS17
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I like that even Yahoo! is surprised when people use Yahoo! and is like, "hey, was this on purpose?"
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