Dave Anders-Richards

People Strategy & all things Talent. @OscarHealth, ex-$UPST. Instructor @MavenHQ. LP @MythosVentures 🔭 Ameri-Englishman, UCLA Bruin, OE, rugby player, he/him

[alli @sonofalli]

if you are more junior in your career (or really at any point) there is great alpha in having agency, a sense of urgency, and being proactive vs. just reactive.

don’t wait for your manager/someone else to “assign” you work. look at what’s on their plate, what the business needs, and actively work on it. people like people that work hard and make their lives easier. it benefits you in that you’re then seen as helpful, critical to the business, etc. and get promoted/get recognized, and have more opportunities given to you. high agency people are successful people!

the people that wait to do something until they are told are C players. be an A player.

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

3/ I’ve been lucky to learn about communication from other Xooglers.

In my first day working with @alan_warren at @OscarHealth he gave me an adage which I use to this day:

“Tell me about smoke, not fire”

That has saved my ass on many an occasion :)

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

2/ Say what you want about where @Google has ended up, but so much of what they got right in the early days came down to strong core fundamentals - especially w.r.t. communication.

@davegirouard taught me the importance of focus, candour, and rigour in communication

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

1/ There are many nuggets of wisdom from @jkeltner in this 🧵, but this one hits home.

Many squander the opportunity of autonomy because they never realise (or are taught) the importance of communicating in the round.

Glad to have learned this lesson early in my career @Upstart

[Jeff Keltner @jkeltner]

The thing I had to learn the hard way: autonomy without communication isn't really autonomy. It's just operating in the dark.

The people who earn more autonomy are the ones who keep everyone around them visible into what they're seeing, doing, and where they're heading.

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

Today, in dystopian news

[shift @joinshiftX]

Today, we're launching shift. We're starting by cleaning your apartment in New York City, for free.

Here's how it works. Book a shift cleaning. A vetted shift operator comes to your home wearing one of our devices. They clean. They leave. You pay nothing.

In exchange, we record the cleaning. Robotics is being built on data about how people do daily tasks, and the value of that recording is what funds the service. Anything personal in it is anonymized before the recording is processed.

By now, you have heard about the shift to AI more times than you can count. About the shift toward you, the part where you actually feel it, you have heard almost nothing. Shift is what starts to make it concrete, in specific cities, with specific services.

Today, cleaning in New York. Soon, handymen, repairs, and errands across the globe. And this is just one side of shift, with more on the way.

Comment “shift” and we’ll send you an early access link.

[Nick Davidov @Nick_Davidov]

The biggest bullshit move by DHS in its history. So everyone on a O1 or H1B visa would have to stop working legally in the US, go back to their country and wait for years of backlog? This includes top scientists in our universities, founders of billion dollar companies (at least 3 just in our portfolio would be affected by the way). And if we look at individual countries it becomes even more bs. Indians would have to wait decades. Russians don’t have anywhere to go (there is no US embassy in Russia, hello?).

This is the worst imaginable way to disrupt important work for the country and pretend you’re fighting some loophole.

[dany @danywander]

what on earth made you name your company ai slop backwards?

[Greg the Sorcerer @gregthesorcerer]

Tweets from the 18th century

[Oscar Health @OscarHealth]

Oscar Health is proud to debut at #412 on @TIME's World’s Most Impactful Companies list.

The list recognizes companies that work to address high-priority global challenges as part of their core business.

Oscar has been on a mission to make a healthier life accessible and affordable for all. We have spent over a decade challenging the status quo, using our full-stack technology platform, innovative plan designs, and investment in funding mechanisms like Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRA) to reorient healthcare around the individual.

Our work is important because cost, accessibility, and experience are still major barriers to care for millions of Americans. As healthcare becomes more expensive and complex, we are solving for all three to create a system that puts consumers in control of their healthcare.

We’re grateful to TIME for recognizing our work, and proud of the team whose dedication has brought us here.

Check out the full list: https://t.co/Ujq3sTp5G1

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

“Accessibility, cognitive economy, and the very notion of creativity are being bypassed in the name of output” - https://t.co/gqxITPy5mo

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

We tortured electricity into this. But hey, Amanda seems cool

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from Claude Code's Head of Product @_catwu:

1. Anthropic’s product development timelines have gone from six months to one month, sometimes one week, sometimes one day. Part of this acceleration is access to the latest models (i.e. Mythos). Another is shipping new products into “research preview,” making clear it's early, experimental, and might not be supported forever. Another is an evergreen "launch room "where engineers post ready features and marketing turns around announcements the next day.

2. The PM role is shifting from coordinating multi-month roadmaps to enabling teams to ship daily. As Cat puts it, “There should be less emphasis on making sure you are aligning your multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams and more emphasis on, OK, how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door?”

3. The most efficient shipping unit is an engineer with great product taste. On Cat’s team, many engineers go end-to-end—from seeing user feedback on Twitter to shipping a product by the end of the week—without a PM involved. Also, almost all the PMs on the Claude Code team have either been engineers or ship code themselves, and the designers have been front-end engineers. The roles are merging, and the most valuable skill is product taste, not job title.

4. Build products that are on the edge of working. Claude Code’s code review product failed multiple times because earlier models weren’t accurate enough. But because the prototype was already built, they could swap in Opus 4.5 and 4.6 and immediately test whether the gap was closed. Teams that wait for the model to be ready will always be a cycle behind.

5. The most underrated skill for building AI products is asking the model to introspect on its own mistakes. Cat regularly asks the model why it made an unexpected decision. The model will explain that something in the system prompt was confusing, or that it delegated verification to a subagent that didn’t check its work. This reveals what misled the model so the team can fix the harness.

6. Every model release forces their team to revisit existing products and audit their system prompt to remove features the model no longer needs. Claude Code’s to-do list was a crutch for earlier models that couldn’t track their own work. With Opus 4, the model handles it natively. Features built as scaffolding for weaker models become debt when the model catches up—so the team actively strips them.

7. Anthropic employees build custom internal tools instead of buying SaaS products. A sales team member built a web app that pulls from Salesforce, Gong, and call notes to auto-customize pitch decks—work that used to take 20 to 30 minutes now takes seconds. Their core stack is Claude Code, Cowork, and Slack. No Notion, no Linear, no Figma.

8. People underestimate how much Claude’s personality contributes to its success. As Cat describes it, “When you reflect on everyone you’ve worked with, there’s just some people where you’re like, I really like their energy, their vibe.” Claude is designed to be low-ego, positive, competent, and earnest—qualities that make it feel like a great coworker, not just a tool. This isn’t cosmetic; it’s what makes people want to use Claude for hours every day. The team has a dedicated person, Amanda, who “molds Claude’s character,” and it’s one of the hardest roles at the company because success is so subjective.

9. The future of work is managing fleets of AI agents, not doing the work yourself. Cat sees a clear progression: first, individual tasks become successful. Then people start running multiple tasks at the same time (multi-Clauding). Next, people will run 50 or 100 tasks simultaneously, which will require new infrastructure—remote execution, better interfaces for managing tasks, agents that fully verify their work, and self-improving systems that incorporate feedback. The human role shifts from doing the work to knowing which tasks to look into, verifying outputs, and giving feedback that makes the system better over time.

10. Hire people who lean into chaos and face every challenge with a smile. At Anthropic, there are weeks when a P0 on Sunday becomes a P00 by Monday and a P000 by Monday afternoon. If you get too stressed about any one thing, you’ll burn out. Their team looks for people who can look at a hard challenge and say, “Wow, that’s gonna be hard. But I’m excited to tackle it and I’m gonna do the best that I possibly can.” This mindset—optimism, resilience, and comfort with constant change—is increasingly essential as the pace of AI development accelerates.

Don't miss the full conversation: https://t.co/1wOUHcdYQN

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

@v_maini @HenryInvests @phoebeyao @MythosVentures Legend

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.”

— Carl Sagan

[Middle Earth @_middleEarth]

If Bilbo asked ChatGPT

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

🕯️

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

The world is a museum of passion projects.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson]

If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut Education and Science Research the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.

[Dave Anders-Richards @DaveA_R]

https://t.co/KQ6nn0AyNO

[Oluwajomiloju @JomiAdeniran]

I think more companies should be willing to lose money in sake of good art