Paul

Optimizing for non-zero chance outcomes | Building things for humans at DriveX Labs

[Paul @pgleger]

In the future, your @bot crew will make their own headshots and spin up a team page. ... nvm, we're there already.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I know it is a lot for instructors who never asked for AI to change things, but if you teach and have not updated your expectations over the last 6 months over what AI can do (a lot more), its error rate (a lot less), and its ubiquity among your students (near total), you need to

[Paul @pgleger]

Last weekend I made cookies for the first time and can confirm they were not plastic. 3D printing was involved though.

[Paul @pgleger]

Thanks @bot for the GTM session today!

[Paul @pgleger]

Amazing, @jjen_abel is the best. So cool to see.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

.@jjen_abel is mogging the frontier AI labs

[Paul @pgleger]

Great write up by @paulg. I went to grad school in the UK and experienced the reading period in reverse. Didn’t realize how much independent time (…study time) there was in the program.

That took me down the rabbit hole of organizing the school business plan competition (agree the format needs to be reimagined), which helped me find my people, and thankfully shifted career trajectory towards startups and building things.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

How Universities Should Prepare Founders: https://t.co/OC08TLxSvX

[Paul Graham @paulg]

How Universities Should Prepare Founders: https://t.co/OC08TLxSvX

[Paul @pgleger]

These DC speed cameras are getting out of control.

[Paul @pgleger]

We’re getting to a place where learning management systems can finally serve as a record of demonstrated capability, not just a collection of grades and learning materials.

Great essay by the former and now returning CEO of Blackboard, Matthew Pittinsky https://t.co/vhYj88ZvvQ

[Paul @pgleger]

Agreed with @scottbelsky - curious to explore what modern "Schools of Lost Crafts" could look like.

@ROLEX Education Center in Texas follows a similar premise: https://t.co/zEUbwbI6aM

[scott belsky @scottbelsky]

i suspect demand for labor-intensive aesthetics will go up over the coming decades.

furniture with wood carving, stone masonry, architecture that incorporates sculpted structure, and other deep crafts.

and there will be a talent shortage. we need more schools of lost crafts.

[Nicolas Bustamante @nicbstme]

At what point do we admit that all AI agent products are kinda similar: connect your email, calendar, docs, Slack, cloud, whatever. The agent will then extracts a ton of context about how you work, who you work with, how you communicate, what you care about to turn that into markdown memory files & then an orchestrator on top that learns your patterns and tries to reproduce them.

The frontier isn’t really “chat” anymore. It’s proactive background agents. Users don’t prompt the AI. Agent notices something needs to happen and does the work on the behalf of the user.

And underneath, a lot of it is surprisingly simple conceptually: give the model more context, give it tools, memory, and some cron jobs / triggers / routines.

So the actual game is becoming: who can build the best memory, take the most useful actions, and do it while burning the fewest tokens. Because it’s actually pretty easy to build an amazing personal memory system if you’re willing to spend $100+ per user. The hard part is getting 95% of that quality for $5. The goal is the highest quality context and actions, lowest inference cost to get the highest gross margin.

[Tyler Denk 🐝 @denk_tweets]

the age of the “influencer” is over

the age of the expert with 10+ years of experience, sharing it online for the first time, is just beginning

we are very early

[Paul @pgleger]

“When an object serves a purpose with elegance, it’s a lasting product. And a lasting product is a sustainable one.” - Tim Richter, Head of Industrial Design, @Siemens Healthineers via @RIMOWA Design Challenge covered in @MonocleMag

[Alex Lieberman @businessbarista]

Unsolicited founder advice: hire missionaries for as long as you can before you bring in mercenaries.

Missionaries view their work not as profession, but as purpose. Your company feels like home to them. A place where they can be themselves, channel their agency & creativity, and spread the gospel that is your culture and mission.

Now mercenaries. There's absolutely nothing wrong with mercenaries. They can be great employees & high performers. But there will always be a sort of palpable detachment, an invisible space, they keep between the business and themselves. There's no way to avoid hiring mercenaries as you scale, but there's a definite trade-off.

[Paul @pgleger]

@mattcynamon Can’t commit to 175 degrees, but heading on vacation this week and added to reading list.

[Maxim Leyzerovich @round]

starcraft prepared me for this era of software

[Mike Wang @zmwang]

TIL the lore behind a few iconic tech company names that I had taken for granted. My Top 5 that I am marveling at right now.

1. Oracle: The GOAT 🐐 company names IMO. So mystical, wise, and magical. Named after a CIA project to build a system that could provide authoritative answers from data.

2. Intuit: Software that works through intuition. What’s more human and powerful than intuition?

3) Intel: Short for Integrated Electronics; name owning the whole vertical of intelligence.

4) Cisco: Taken from the last five letters of San Francisco! Calling your company after where you founded the company.

5) Nvidia: Started with the internal codename “NV” (“next version”) and evolved into Nvidia, inspired by the Latin invidia (“envy”).

[Vivi @vivilinsv]

If you’re a builder, you’ve got to listen to this.

The “godfather of mobile gaming,” @markpinc, joined @reidhoffman on @mastersofscale podcast and shared his Proven, Better, New framework for building products people actually want.

One of his most valuable distinctions is between instincts and ideas:

Your instinct may be right—you sense that a real problem exists or that something could be fundamentally better.

But your first idea for solving it is probably wrong.

That’s where the framework comes in:

- Proven: Study what already works and copy the essential mechanics without ego.

- Better: Improve something users already care deeply about.

- New: Isolate your original bet so you can test it quickly without reinventing everything else.

Great product builders don’t copy because they lack imagination. They copy what has already been proven so they can focus their creativity where it truly matters.

As the saying goes, great artists “steal”—but the real art is making the gameplay unmistakably your own.

That’s deeply inspiring to me as I build @Souli_AI and work to create a distinctive gameplay of our own.

A must-watch for every founder, product manager and builder.

P.S. So happy Mark followed me back - honestly made my day! 😊

Full interview link in thread.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Recently discovered @DavidDCain's newsletter, and it's my new favorite

https://t.co/b1UKv4lQ8R

[Paul @pgleger]

As the labs announce a deeper push into education (like @AnthropicAI's announcement this week https://t.co/8Ic32N55Hs), feels like an opportunity for edtechs to position themselves as the ones *doing* the implementation, last-mile handholding, on the ground professional development, and going deeper into niche use cases.