AI has terrible memory Introducing Micro, an agent that remembers more than Claude, Codex & OpenClaw Leave a comment (eg "memory") & I'll send 30 days for free to try it

this is insane cashier is literally zooming into nyc from the philippines

what is a good minimalist backpack that doesn’t make me look like i’ve never talked to a girl

- plant medicine - near death experience - quit a toxic job or relationship - meet your life partner

we live in the real life silicon valley comedy: - two young prodigal hacker/founders are at each others throats building competing AI pin startups - both startups are named Friend - one spends 1.8M to buy the Friend domain and launches on international friendship day - the other responds with a diss rap video

Sora's video quality seems impossible so I dug into how it works under the hood it uses both diffusion (starting with noise, refining towards a desired video) and transformer architectures (handling sequential video frames) read on 🧵

this is what I come to this website for

guy sitting next to me in this cafe just came up with a great name for his business. I just bought the domain name for it.

initially i was really excited but now my mind is wandering to this dystopian future where you live in this concrete jungle and none of the businesses you interact with have actual humans in them maybe a punishment for us not treating retail workers more human

only takes a short hop to imagine the near future where this is an AI avatar

pick your poison live in SF - increase your startup's odds of success 3x - decrease your odds of finding a life partner 100x live in NYC - increase your startup's odds of success 1.5x - increase your odds of finding a life partner 100x

18: can I buy some wine? USA: no that's illegal & irresponsible 18: can I go $70,000 in debt for education? USA: we encourage it

I went looking for some good UI design inspiration but instead, I fell down the rabbit hole of designers competing to create the worst UI possible happy to announce I won't use any of these hilariously awful bangers: 1/ the best way to limit username size

ambition in NYC = get rich ambition in LA = get famous ambition in SF = change the world

I like how dubrovnik, the most croatia city in croatia culturally is literally in the least croatia part of croatia geographically

company is called “happy cashier” no website but operating in 5 asian fast food places in new york city

jewish people chinese people 🤝 chinese food on christmas

zuck's leaked 2015 email on facebook's VR/AR strategy is a wild read I did an AR strategy project for the CEO of Google when I worked there and this is next level. 2500 words of pure brilliance from zuck on investing billions in VR/AR and acquiring unity. I obv had to dig in🧵

the tech industry has this obsession with building the "wechat of the west" billions of dollars have been invested in creating new super apps over the years yet we still don't have one. why? 🧵

- what you do for work - who you marry - fries or side salad

I worked on Google's M&A team when we were doing 40+ acquisitions a year 21 things founders should know about getting acquired 1. your team will likely have to pass interviews at the new company, so hire well. 2. every time your valuation increases, the number of potential acquirers decreases. 3. deals that come in through the corp dev team have a <1% success rate, so talk to actual product people. 4. build relationships with product teams years in advance of a potential acquisition. 5. your largest customers and partners are the best potential acquirers. 6. M&A is a FOMO game, so it's good to play acquirers off each other (when you are legally able to). 7. the deal isn't over until the $$ is in the bank (lots of deals dying very far along these days). 8. don't let your team know you're running a process until the very end. they'll leak the news or become wildly unproductive when they find out and even more unproductive when the deal falls through. 9. the best time to get acquired is when you don't need to or want to be. 10. when you talk to acquirers, you need to show them how you will supercharge their product/business – this can involve actual design and code. 11. full acquisition prices you see in the headlines often come with strings attached – usually integration, revenue/user growth, and employee retention milestones. 12. decide with your cofounder what the conditions would be (e.g., $$) for you to accept an acquisition offer before you have your first conversation. cofounder misalignment here can really really hurt. 13. running a fundraiser at the same time as an M&A process can help both – buyers can offer more if your fundraising options are good and investors love to see real exit opportunities. 14. there are 3 types of deals: acquihire (just the team), asset (just the tech), and full (entire company, team & assets). 15. acquihires can range from just getting a normal job (and the ability to say you were "acquired") to also including $10M+ payouts. don't trust folks bragging about getting acquihired because it's usually the former. 16. your liquidation preferences will largely determine your financial outcome. your investors get their money back before you get your payout from an acquisition, so if you've raised a lot (on bad terms) and you don't have traction, you're probably not going to make much at all. 17. some acquirers will hold back equity you've already vested as part of the deal. some will accelerate unvested equity AND throw in retention bonuses. 18. falling into depression after an acquisition is not uncommon. take care of your mental health and make friends who have gone through it. 19. make sure you're clean legally and financially. investing in good bookkeeping early on can save you tons of time and prevent your deal to get derailed. 20. acquisitions have complex personal tax consequences. hire someone good for that. 21. the best acquired founders at Google only stayed an average of 2.5 years before leaving to start their next thing. life isn't over after you sell!!

i love that this was steve jobs' favorite piece of art perfectly encapsulates what made him brilliant and one of the most important skills for founders - being able to simplify things down into their most essential form

this room temperature superconductor stuff is absolutely insane I dug around to find out how they work and how the world is on the verge of a complete transformation because of them read on 🧵

startups are sports teams, not families you have to put the best people in the right positions to win.

can’t believe how many 4.0 students i knew in college are doing nothing interesting with their lives

My dude. Now is not the time for b2b saas tweets

just stumbled on sequoia's 2005 investment memo for youtube when I was on google's M&A team, we considered it the best acquisition in the history of the company It's 41 pages of juicy details on why they invested (thanks for the lawsuit, Viacom) I obviously had to dig in🧵

someone will always be in a better position than you, but you can still beat them if you care more

why is this in every pitch deck

A designer I know told me his PM writes jira tickets that just say "make onboarding easier" or even "increase retention" 😂

to be clear my current backpack makes me look like i’ve never talked to a girl

vc: you see this? *sends competitor’s announcement* founder:

My dad died this Friday. Despite knowing this was coming for 8 years (he had a neurodegenerative disease), saying goodbye is still tough. Give your dad a hug for me if you can.

Name that startup █ 　　 █　 █　 █　 ＿ the growth the twitter hype

overall it was much more positive and experience the cashier was much more friendly than any in person cashiers in new york maybe says more about new yorkers than the service tho…

the real money in refrigeration wasn't made by the people who invented it but by brands that leveraged it like Coca-Cola. LLMs are gonna play out the same way.

how to pitch your startup by stage: - pre-seed: "this space is massive and my team was born to tackle this problem" - seed: "same as pre-seed + look how fast we're shipping" - A: "same as seed + we hired a killer team and are seeing traction with a scalable product"

why is it only socially acceptable for immigrants and conservatives to be proud of being american

i’m on a flight rn person on my left is eating skittles and watching netflix person on my right is eating mcdonald’s and watching sports i’m eating raw broccoli and chicken while working on some figma designs getting death stares from the others

Psychology is the most underrated major in tech. UX, growth, management, etc all boil down to understanding how people think.

what cities make you too much of: - LA makes you too soft - NYC makes you too hard - SF makes you too weird - Boston makes you too nerdy

my dude now is not the time for b2b saas tweets

nothing says “i’m from central europe and i haven’t been on a date in 3 years” more than this

excited to announce Micro the first product since gmail launched 21 years ago today that transforms email into what it should be an all-in-one tool that organizes itself

design is vastly undervalued in the Silicon Valley @bchesky who is actually a designer, lays out characteristics of great designers that are actually the exact same for great founders/CEOs. "I design the company. I design the product... and designing starts with curiosity. you have to listen, you have to be curious, you have to understand the problem" he goes deeper into the different steps for creating great products: 1. be curious about the problem 2. distill the problem & simplify its complexity 3. be imaginative and creative in generating solutions this process is something that the greatest companies leverage and should be practiced more by every team in a company. he ends with this amazing ask "for every CEO to have a designer report to them"

also don't forget the significantly older, veteran founder bouncing around the background also building an AI pin also dropping videos subtweeting the competition and negging investors

so bad their designers should go straight to jail

excited to announce @launchhouse's $12M series A led by @andrewchen of @a16z 🧵

creating a prettier version of the midwit meme is the ultimate mitwit move

I would like to see a startup create a netflix series as a marketing strategy

Soul was great. Couldn't stop thinking about this tho

ok not interested until these “LLMs” can a make motion activated sink actually turn on when i stick my hand under it

there are two founders in our current cohort that declined going to stanford and YC respectively to build their startups welcome to the future where great founders don’t need institutions

i would really not want my dentist to zoom in from another country

the most successful founders I know are always pissed off about something

some of the most successful founders ever started startups because they couldn't land jobs

first time founders think that hiring a big team is a sign of success when its actually the opposite

TIL sam altman’s first co was a cliche location sharing app and he used to wear a double popped collar if he can glow up, so can you

TIL the lead singer of system of a down founded a successful vertical SaaS startup for jewelers

the angst of a 5'7" man is powerful enough to move mountains

people are mad about accessibility it’s hard to read what’s the explanation?

I was reading into e/acc and fell down a much deeper rabbit hole - the history of accelerationism humans on the moon, the atomic bomb, and AI are all outcomes of choosing progress over fear how humanity has benefited from these movements & why we need them:🧵

no girls will ever talk to me if i wear this in new york

Calendly is 100x faster to set up a meeting than going back and forth with times on email. That said, sending a Calendly link still feels weird. Anyone know why?

trash UX is a symptom of entrenchment / anti-competitive practices I'd set up a government agency to investigate every product with horrible UX

I don't believe in venture studios @naval sums it up perfectly here that the scarce resource in startups isn't ideas or capital which is what venture studios provide its entrepreneurs who are motivated to slog through the idea maze to solve a problem they're obsessed with importantly, an idea that isn't yours is inherently less motivating than an idea that is the best entrepreneurs aren't mercenaries like this, so they almost never do venture studios

the most competitive industries and universities tend to be dominated by asians, indians, and jews all of whom emphasize academic achievement as a core part of their culture makes sense these groups tend to intermarry

pretty crazy that GPT3.5 can outperform GPT4 through an agentic workflow reminds me of folks I've worked with in my career who outperformed people who were much smarter merely because they had a better process

early sign of a startup on the decline is the founder picking up side projects and attending a lot of events

figma was not a vibe coded overnight success story it was a "fat MVP" - 4 years of heads down building before people really used the product imo these are the only kinds of startups that will endure the vibe coding era

excited to announce the micro relationship engine it pulls in all your connections and lets you message them on any platform & automatically updates their profiles and CRM records but don't call it a personal CRM:

3/ vivaldi would be proud

founders adding “AI” to their landing pages and pitch decks

no you havent bro

they could have easily made it a smile but its so authentic that it isn't i love it

the most brilliant people I know: 1. are truly humble 2. are curious 3. love to argue 4. are controversial yet flexible 5. are willing to be wrong 6. are surrounded by other great people 7. know life isn't binary what else?

hot take - where you live still matters we chose LA in the early days of our consumer startup and we would have failed anywhere else here are 9 reasons I’m bullish on LA:

if you're looking for a cofounder, you need to hear this

4/ the ultimate scientific date picker

web3 is basically a psychedelic "the deeper I go into web3, the less I relate to people who haven't and the more I question the actual nature of reality" (ht multiple people lately)

clearly there are three tiers of startups S tier - soham applied and was rejected A tier - soham applied and was accepted (then fired) D tier - even soham didn't apply

when I worked at Accenture on the R&D team, I had a project where we built a system kind of like this it was a good idea since ACN has the largest outsourcing operation in the world (millions in the Philippines) but this was 2013 and the technology.... wasn't quite there.

I've officially moved to LA. we may not be as rich as the folks moving to Miami, but we're definitely hotter.

true or false if a candidate fails an interview within 5 minutes it’s ok to tell them and end the interview early

Just got the first payment for my first startup ever. What is this feeling?? 🤩

steve jobs did calligraphy paul graham did art garry tan was a designer see a pattern?

creative direction on this was 100/100 gj

one of the best things I did for my career was take a year off it felt wildly indulgent at the time - I pulled out of interviews with Uber, Doordash, Stripe, and others in their early days to bounce around the world for a year without a job but as Altman rightly puts it here - the seeds were sown that worked in different ways later one of the most important things that happened on my sabbatical was discovering meditation & mindfulness, which has dramatically changed how I approach problems.

ask some of the engineers at open AI what they make and what they studied in college

99% of product managers think more critically about PM interview questions than their actual products.

being a founder is lonely af you'll meet tons of people for networking, building your team, marketing, and fundraising, but the journey is still lonely. I ran a 1000-member community and I still felt the loneliness. @bchesky puts it well - "the world will isolate you into a bubble, completely detaching you from reality. you can lose a sense of yourself and you've to fight every day"

fwiw bringing more brilliant foreign engineers and scientists to the US IS an america first policy american companies are more competitive globally when they leverage the best talent american citizens get better themselves when they compete against the best talent win win

notion is like the 3-in-1 shampoo/conditioner/body wash of productivity tools you can definitely do it, but it's not recommended

TJs reverse engineers independent CPG companies' products what goes around comes around bruh

my dad passed away a year ago today every child spends their lives trying to make their dads proud and this year feels like the first year I might have done it feels incredibly bittersweet but I'm also so grateful

the best product people I know are anthropologists they deeply understand - human psychology - the history of technology + society - pop culture - behavioral economics - game theory

how do you create things no one else can? stop being mimetic and ask yourself what do you know that no one else does

"The single largest beneficiary of remote work will be India. It has the largest population of English-speaking, STEM-trained talent in the world." - @naval (via clubhouse) 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

I got the second dose of the moderna vaccine today. Was feeling conflicted about it (I qualify but I'm obviously young/healthy). And then I went to the facility and there was almost no one there and heard they've been throwing out vaccines. Just get vaccinated if you can.

i like to invest in founders that are mad about something

Having a ridiculously short commute (10 min walk) may have actually degraded my quality of life. Been reading and listening to podcasts a lot less than when I had a >30min commute. I also feel some cabin fever not really leaving the same area of SF during the week