leeds

Building @usepalace

Nullius in verba. views are my training data’s. leedsr.eth @alchemy @golden @bloomberg @columbia @cornell

[leeds @LeedsRising]

oversubscribed in steez

[Aaron Slodov @aphysicist]

taps sign

[carried_no_interest @carrynointerest]

IT BEGINS: the 'vibe code generalized self serve saas as a lead funnel' era is here

Things will never be the same

Companies will copy docsend, docusign, VDRs, CRMs, and release for free as lead funnel for much high ACV products

Reminds me of the SEO strategy of releasing simple tools that are hyper SEO optimized

Companies with high ACVs will vibe code low ticket saas and give it away

Crazy

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

What I love the most about these "omg I missed out on $500m because I didn't respond to Cursor" posts:

People are falling out of the woodwork posting DMs from @mntruell where he's asking for help and/or trying to recruit people to a miniscule startup called Cursor. In every screenshot the dude is polite and reasonable, but more importantly he's sitting at MIT, or I guess some random apt in SF after he drops out, and just really really really really really trying to make his totally unknown startup work.

So he DMs what appears to be the entire tech community (not me but it's ok I'm not mad) trying to hustle and get stuff done. Big fancy MIT brain, could probably be doing quant trading or big tech and making bank somewhere (although not $60b!), and instead he's at his startup sending cold emails like he's a Salesforce SDR who just graduated from ASU with a dual degree in waterpolo and beer pong.

Cold outreach sucks. I once sent 120 straight recruiting emails (in fact, trying to recruit MIT students from campus recruiting) and got exactly 0 responses. It's a gloriously pure form of rejection. So many people, especially ones with fancy credentials, refuse to do this sort of thing.

So anyway, I really respect the humility and drive, and I hope that he spends his share of the $60b on something awesome.

[leeds @LeedsRising]

@adhoc97 definitely overoptimized bringing people to this link. all feels like an orchestrated marketing stunt.

[leeds @LeedsRising]

@AlexTalamonti @jasonjche @quotainai bullish

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Elite admissions select for one trait: getting the known answer faster than anyone else. 18 years of optimizing against an answer key someone already wrote.

AI just made the answer key free. Everyone has it instantly now.

So the kids trained hardest to win spent their whole lives mastering the one thing that's now a commodity. The premium moved to the questions with no answer key yet.

We need a new training.

The new training is about one thing:

How to be the first person standing in a new land, exploring it, preparing it for the coming billion people who will need it. The future will be built by these people.

And there is a lot to build.

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

https://t.co/TjJDFgynKm

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @tfadell:

1. When building a v1 of anything, decisions should generally be opinion-based, not data-driven. You have very few analogues when creating something the world hasn’t seen. You need one or two tastemakers charged with making those decisions. If you try to make everything data-driven, you either end up with an undifferentiated product or you’re using bullshit data. The key is informing your gut by gathering input, prototyping, then making the call.

2. The customer journey matters more than the product in isolation. You need to think about the entire journey—discovery, marketing, sales, distribution, installation, usage, and support—not just the product. The Nest thermostat reinvented how you bought it (Best Buy instead of installers), installed it (DIY instead of professional), and how it worked (learning instead of programming). You’re not building a product; you’re building a system.

3. Marketing is as important as the product itself, and most builders don’t realize this. When building, you’re living in the context—you understand the pain points and features. But customers don’t have that context. When the iPod launched in Europe using the same marketing they used in the U.S., it flopped because European consumers were at a different adoption stage. Even an amazing product like the iPod can fail without the right marketing.

4. Storytelling is an essential skill for builders, because humans are wired for narrative, not feature lists. Tony learned from watching his dad sell Levi’s—sometimes convincing customers not to buy, building trust. He watched Steve Jobs refine the iPhone story every day for two and a half years, pitching to friends, refining constantly. By launch, Steve had done it 10,000 times. The key is telling the why, not just the what.

5. Every new product needs three generations to succeed: make the product, fix the product, fix the business. The first iPod only sold to Mac enthusiasts (less than 1% of the market). It wasn’t until the third generation, with Windows connectivity and the iTunes Music Store, that the iPod took off. Same with the iPhone—it first worked only on AT&T with 2.5G; the third generation had margins and reliability dialed in. Stick with your idea through these three iterations.

6. Don’t cognitively surrender to AI. AI can help with prototyping and subtasks, but architecture, opinion-based decisions, taste, and ethics require human judgment. Just like Steve Jobs shut down porn in iTunes immediately, you need human leaders with clear principles. The companies that win will use AI to amplify human creativity and judgment, not replace it.

7. Tony predicts that the next breakthrough consumer device will be voice-first, screen last. Right now we tap first, use the keyboard second, and voice third. As AI improves, voice will become the primary way we interact with devices. But we’ll still need a screen of some kind.

8. Steve Jobs was wrong about several major product decisions. Steve refused Windows connectivity for iPod—“over my dead body.” Tony’s team kept working on it anyway. Eventually it shipped and became essential to iPod’s success. Same with the iPad stylus—Steve hated it—another skunkworks project, now a major feature. Sometimes you should keep working on things the leader doesn’t like when you can see it on the horizon.

9. The iPhone keyboard decision was the longest, most heated debate for the original iPhone. The team was split. After months of tests, where they compared typing speed and error rates, the data wasn’t definitively clear. Steve Jobs made the call: virtual keyboard, full screen. Those who couldn’t get on board were told to leave.

10. Start from pain, then ask “why now?” The biggest product breakthroughs pair an old, often habituated-away pain with a new technology that has made solving it possible. For Nest, it was AI that could finally learn your schedule and optimize your heating/cooling costs.

[Sam Gerstenzang @gerstenzang]

Love this from the Bending Spoons S-1:
https://t.co/7gLihSz6Wt

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

The best founders know that final 1% is what truly matters, and will stop at nothing to get it.

--
"You would think that in a world where AI does more of the building, who you stand next to matters less. It is the opposite. The danger of 99% is that from inside it, it feels like totality. The dim sky looks bright enough when your eyes have adjusted to it. The only reliable way to find out you are in twilight is to stand next to someone who has been in the dark: a builder whose work actually flips, whose artifacts go all the way across. Proximity to the real thing recalibrates your eyes. It kicks you out of the local maximum you didn't know you were sitting in, because suddenly you can see the gap between your 99 and their 100, and you can't unsee it."

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/BA5kVYqcji

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

The best hires are the ones you can delegate outcomes to, not tasks. Good hires come back with smart questions about the next step. Great ones just get the job done.

[leeds @LeedsRising]

your nightmare is my moat

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

It can be hard to recognize the downsides of short-term thinking without having personally experienced the aftermath.

[roon @tszzl]

the greatest whitepill of all is that local minima are rare in high dimensional spaces

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I get that business insurance is similar Nobel level type of pursuit as ground breaking physics and the Manhattan project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained.

I don’t think the disagreement is whether hard problems require intensity.

The disagreement is whether intensity has to become a permanent operating model, and whether working seven days a week is the thing that compounds.

My argument is that for most startups, the real compounding advantage is not raw hours. It is clearer thinking, better judgment, learning, and a team that can sustain high-quality work for a long time. You can always spend a lot of time working, but the PMF might never arrive.

There are moments where extraordinary effort is necessary. Launches, incidents, existential deadlines, customer commitments. Those moments matter, and great teams rise to them.

But if the company requires heroics every day of the eek, that usually points to a system problem. It means the operating model depends on burning reserve capacity instead of building it. Company that is constantly on fire is company that is not operating well.

Whenever you put something out there, people will argue and people can argue the way I run Linear. The reason I comment on these things to offer some counter point.

There is a growing cliché in startup culture where founders and startups feel the need to perform intensity publicly. How hard they work, how little they sleep, how many tokens they spend, how busy they are, how much personal sacrifice they make.

You almost never see this from the most successful companies or people. Even if they work that way, they usually don’t make it the story, because they have more important things to talk about, like the product, the customers, the insight, the strategy, the quality of the work.

That’s my issue with the narrative and why I think startups shouldn't blindly follow it. Not that is bad to work hard but grindmaxxing narrative can become the greater goal and become counterproductive. The performative intensity becomes the thing, and loosing sight of what actually matters.

Lets check back in 7 years.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Hustling is great but hustle porn sucks

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[leeds @LeedsRising]

@alexfmac @oasishealthapp @cormachayden_ What were the mistakes

[leeds @LeedsRising]

I feel like I could cause ww3 with the new skill chaining I can do in cowork

hard to imagine what happens when one of these 'meat markets' gets good marketplace liquidity and a good MCP..