Samuel Spelsberg

fortune favors the bold

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

I loved working with Luke at delphi and been genuinely excited for this launch because I think this software is so needed

check it out

[Interfere @interfere_]

Introducing Interfere.

Interfere observes everything that happens in production, investigates what’s broken and fixes problems before your users notice them.

Spend your time building what’s next, not fixing what’s broken.

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[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

I respect @patrickc and @tylercowen starting the new aesthetics grants. Maybe some wonderful new things will be built

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently - especially after visiting the Henry Ford museum of American innovation in Detroit and the attached greenfield village.

Henry ford literally moved the original laboratory of Edison from Menlo Park NJ to Detroit, as well as the first Heinz house and other notable structures. It is a preserved 1930s village of American innovation containing the largest fleet of functional Model Ts

Why do rich people in SF not do cool shit with their money?

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

This is a good rumination on sudden wealth (as someone who's also seen its impacts firsthand), and the cast of characters rings very true.

You have the relentless striver who stays in the game out of competitive FOMO.

Money is what those without talent use to keep score. They'll keep futilely striving, and then disappear one day. Whatever.

The bigger pity is those (and there are a few) who go off to become artists or writers or some other thing, untethered to financial constraints.

Well, where are they?

Because we're not exactly seeing a cultural Renaissance from this massive wealth creation, as we saw in 16th-century Florence, or even the early 20-century US.

The only guy from the FB pre-IPO crop who did anything interesting with his life (far as I can tell) is someone who was hellbent on making it to the Olympics as an athlete (starting off as very much not an athlete), and he actually made it! I followed his arc, and it was incredible.

(Elon, on this of all days, is the exception that proves the rule here.)

But how about the rest?

SF is mostly an unchanged one-industry town, the same misgoverned mess that greeted me in '99, and that almost everyone in this cohort bails on. There are no great monuments or works of art or institutions dating from this period...other than venture funds producing more startups. SF will not reflect this time of glory like Amsterdam and Paris still embody their golden ages.

To invert the Churchillian phrase: never has so much been given to so few, who seemingly did so little with it.

[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.

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

@karpathy @jenzhuscott This is @withdelphi

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

@calvinchen @MatternJustus @navidkpr congratulations!

calvin moved to sf deep in a pivot for his prev. business with a different cofounder.

one thing stayed the same the entire time

he's got that dog

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

@calvinchen is relentless. proud to be a tiny supporter 🫶

going to be an epic journey to be a part of

[Proximal @ProximalHQ]

Today, we are announcing Proximal. Proximal is a research lab for data. Our core belief is that data which is complex enough to teach today’s frontier models is not bottlenecked by domain experts, but by great ideas and excellent software.

We are excited about a world in which coding agents can autonomously run for multiple weeks, solve the hardest technical problems and discover novel ideas that advance progress in various domains of science and engineering.

We believe that we are not far from this future, but that the biggest bottleneck preventing us from achieving it is training data.

Many companies work on data, but most of them are approaching it the wrong way. Historical capability breakthroughs are the result of creative engineers discovering scalable data collection methods, not thousands of contractors manually writing task demonstrations.

Inevitably, the potential impact of human data will become smaller and smaller as model capabilities increase: agents are already outperforming most humans in many domains - the number of experts that are capable of judging model outputs shrinks with every new model release.

Proximal is a new data company. We are not a recruiting firm or a talent marketplace, but a research and engineering organization that treats data as a problem which deserves the same level of rigor as work on training algorithms and model architectures.

We think that this is the most impactful work towards agents that can autonomously solve complex technical problems, and intend to share our research and progress in the open.

[Startups to Join @startupstojoin]

The internet democratized distribution but not direct dialogue. We can consume an expert's podcast, scroll their tweets, or read their books, yet these interactions remain fundamentally one-directional.

@SamSpelsberg believes there's a better way. He's the co-founder of @withdelphi, a company creating digital minds trained on your content and conversations.

We sat down with Sam to talk about how Delphi extracts the best version of a person from mixed content sources, why interview mode unlocks the platform for creators without existing material, and how your Delphi will grow with you over time.

https://t.co/kjq31FMPZ2

[Dara @daraladje]

There are two ways to build a billion-dollar company.

• Join an existing market with billions in spend & capture share
• Create the market yourself

The investor behind Canva and Hinge says the second path is actually more reasonable.

ChatGPT didn't capture existing spend. It created an entirely new category through a jaw-dropping experience that spread by word of mouth.

The signal you're on this path? People who would never have paid for this type of product are now excited about yours.

Nikhil Trivedi (@nbt) breaks down how in our latest episode of the Library of Minds:

3:34 - The Figma regret story

7:08 - A business’ genetics determine its fate

10:20 - 0 to $2M in 10 days is a vanity metric

10:58 - ChatGPT created new spending, didn't capture it

13:52 - Brex vs Ramp product/brand debate

15:26 - Most VCs wrongly separate consumer/enterprise

17:17 - Canva's comp is Google, not Adobe

23:20 - The darkest moment of his career

26:02 - Should you even take venture capital

31:45 - Being the only vs being the best

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

i think this is going to be big. generative AI insurance for enterprises - only a matter of time before big corporations need this

[Testudo @testudoglobal]

🚀 Enterprises can now transfer AI liability risk off their balance sheet with our first insurance product live today!

🌉 Backed by Lloyd's of London capacity from Apollo, we bridge specialist underwriting with Silicon Valley technology to insure the AI economy and unlock adoption.

🛡️On the 1st January, General Liability insurance started excluding GenAI - we fill that coverage gap. If you are an enterprise deploying AI or a broker interested in distributing our product sign up below!

[Testudo @testudoglobal]

🚀 Enterprises can now transfer AI liability risk off their balance sheet with our first insurance product live today!

🌉 Backed by Lloyd's of London capacity from Apollo, we bridge specialist underwriting with Silicon Valley technology to insure the AI economy and unlock adoption.

🛡️On the 1st January, General Liability insurance started excluding GenAI - we fill that coverage gap. If you are an enterprise deploying AI or a broker interested in distributing our product sign up below!

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

don't forget to task your agents before u go to bed tonight

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

his zyn almost came flying out halfway into this take

[Forrest Knight @ForrestPKnight]

Honestly, Ben Affleck actually knowing AI and the landscape caught me off guard, but as a writer, makes sense.

Great takes across the board.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Bestselling authors like Tony Robbins and Gabby Bernstein have expanded their empires with AI chatbots promising personal advice https://t.co/3TrMIYqs1E

[Τobias Whetton @TobiasWhetton]

We're hiring a Product Designer at @withdelphi ✨

Shape the future of our consumer product. Work directly with me & @JoeASobrero. Help us build our new AI-focused design system from the ground up.

Is this you or know someone great? Drop them below 👇

[Dara @daraladje]

The CTO of Reddit (& architect behind the 6th most visited website on the internet) says A/B testing will make your product worse.

Green metrics ≠ better product.

In this week's episode of The Library of Minds, Chris Slowe (@KeyserSosa) shares the engineering decisions that led @Reddit from scrappy startup to global giant, how they navigated massive rewrites, and what it takes to build for a deeply opinionated community of millions.

02:37 How Reddit became a giant

04:27 Building for users who hate change

10:29 What tech debt really signals

15:39 The A/B testing trap

19:20 Why Reddit won't label AI content

25:15 Anonymity creates better content

27:57 Most memorable Reddit AMAs

30:11 His worst architecture decision

36:16 First YC batch: Sam Altman, Twitch founders

[Dara @daraladje]

Most "hard tech" startups fail because they choose the wrong kind of hard.

@Farshchi (PhD ex-chip researcher & GP at @Lux_Capital) has spent 18 years investing in the most complex companies on earth (Zoox, Relativity Space, Mosaic).

He breaks "hard" into two categories:

• Scientific Risk: Fundamental discoveries that don't exist yet.
• Technical Difficulty: Engineering known science into a monopolistic product.

The mistake isn’t ambition. It’s underwriting discovery when the job is execution.

In this week's episode of The Library of Minds, we discuss how elite deep-tech investors think about risk before metrics exist, why finding a cure for cancer means nothing without distribution, and much more!

01:16 — From PhD to Founder: Choosing Hard Problems
07:11 — The "Ask Nothing" Strategy for Breaking Into VC
11:38 — Balancing Technical Difficulty vs. Scientific Risk
13:59 — Deep Tech Startups Having One Shot
18:26 — The Controversial Mosaic Investment
23:56 — Learning to Trust The Bets You've Made
27:20 — Hard Truths About Scaling from 1 → N
31:44 — Why Money Is The Ultimate Commodity

[Samuel Spelsberg @samspelsberg]

pagerduty and eightsleep integration to make sure that the engineering team and i don't sleep through pages

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

BREAKING: The Trump Administration announces the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, putting REAL FOOD back at the center of health. 🇺🇸

https://t.co/tkGF01onpm