SpaceXponential

Conscientious Questioner

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

This is all truly incredible.

As we continue to give vast majority of mindshare to how AI will super charge human entrepreneurs, zero human companies etc, we fail to think enough of the fact that producers cannot subsist without people with the wherewithal to consume. Would love to see similar passion and creativity applied to this question.

This doesn’t have to happen through the current mechanism of Jobs as we currently know them >> income; and yes these convos are happening but don’t resonate much with their tenor that the elites are doing us a favor via UBI.

It is much more the dynamic of: the Anthropics, etc, the most formidable successful companies of our time, building their products on top of the edifice of knowledge and creativity we have all collectively produced.

This surplus belongs to no ONE.

And no, I am NOT arguing for agency/accountability deadening collectivism.

But I am praying for the evolution of capitalism - the will to free the creative human spirit in service to the whole.

[Craig Hewitt @TheCraigHewitt]

Stop what you’re doing and spend 80 seconds understanding this

Not because you’re training LLMs.

Because Karpathy just showed the cleanest example of the agent loop that’s about to eat everything:

1.Human writes a strategy doc

2.Agent executes experiments autonomously

3.Clear metric decides what stays and what gets tossed

4.Repeat 100x overnight

The person who figures out how to apply this pattern to business problems…not just ML research, is going to build something massive.

The code is almost irrelevant. The architecture and mindset is everything

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

Gotta love the velocity and impact of user feel and feedback in this space

[Derek Nee @DerekNee]

codex got noticeably nerfed past few days. ran several tasks for 20+ hours, none finished. switched to claude code, done in 30 min. something's off @thsottiaux

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

❤️

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion

@jack gave us the circular org chart.
@brian_armstrong gave us player-coach.
@ivanhzhao just added Jazz Mode.

@NotionHQ is one of the clearest examples of a great SaaS company making the successful leap into becoming an AI company. That transition is much harder than it looks.

@ivanhzhao is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times.

Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one 👇

Notes from our chat:

1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom

You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music.

2. Build a barbell engineering team

Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision.

3. The best companies reinvent themselves

When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh.

True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward.

4. Why Wartime is More Fun

Peacetime in SaaS was comfortable, but wartime is where companies actually feel alive. When survival is on the line, the stakes are higher, and a shared, urgent purpose amplifies meaning for everyone.

5. Hire people who can blur traditional roles

The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas.

6. Acqui-hire founders aggressively

As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate.

7. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes

You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational.

8. Make compensation radically more meritocratic

The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers.

9. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must

Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best.

10. Decentralizing the CMO

Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function.

Lots lots more on this one. Ivan, as stylish as ever, was a blast. Enjoyed this one a lot.

(links below) 👇👇

00:00 Introduction
02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org
11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency
24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto
30:27 Craft Versus Commerce
32:26 When to Refound
34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock
45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy
53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

By the People, for the People

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Here’s an idea…

Rather than the government mandating digital ID on all of us, we should be mandating digital ID on the government to monitor exactly where they spend our tax money and the meetings they have with corporate lobbyists. We don’t serve them. They serve us.

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

@daniel_mac8 @jaskol_ski Since everything we build is open source and works with both leading and open source models, I'd say pretty high.

[Paul Bakaus @pbakaus]

my approach for impeccable:

(eventually have to monetize something, but i still want to give more than i take)

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

Mantra of the year

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

@TommyGriffith @yacineMTB Think (use AI, but think)

[GrapheneOS @GrapheneOS]

Apple and Google are gradually expanding their use of hardware-based attestation. They're convincing a growing number of services to adopt it. Google's Play Integrity API and Apple's App Attest API are very similar. Apple brought it to the web via Privacy Pass, which Google intends on doing too.

Google's Play Integrity API requires hardware attestation for the strong integrity level and is gradually phasing in requiring it for the more commonly used device integrity level. Apple already has it as a requirement. Over the long term, this will increasingly lock out hardware and OS competition.

The purpose of these systems is disallowing people from using hardware and software not approved by Apple or Google. This is wrongly presented as being a security feature. Banks and government services are the main ones adopting it but Apple and Google are encouraging every service to use it.

Apple's Privacy Pass brought hardware attestation to the web to help with passing captchas on their own hardware. Many people saw that as harmless since few sites would be willing to lock out non-Apple-hardware users. Apple and Google are both likely to bring broader hardware attestation to the web.

Google's reCAPTCHA is planning an approach where they use Privacy Pass on Apple hardware, their own approach on Google Mobile Services Android devices and a QR code scanning system to require an iOS or Google certified Android device for Windows and other systems:

https://t.co/7rQnioRa8A

Banking and government services increasingly require using a mobile app where they can use attestation to force using an Apple or Google approved device and OS. Apple's privacy pass, Google's 'cancelled' Web Environment Integrity and now reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification are bringing this to the web.

Current media coverage for reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification misunderstands it and the impact of it. They're bringing a hardware attestation requirement to Windows, desktop Linux, OpenBSD, etc. by requiring a QR scan from a certified smartphone to pass reCAPTCHA in some cases. They could expand it more.

Control over reCAPTCHA puts Google in a position where they can require having either iOS or a certified Android device to use an enormous amount of the web. Google defines certification requirements for Android which includes forcing bundling Google Chrome, etc. It's enormously anti-competitive.

Google's Play Integrity API bans using GrapheneOS despite it being far more secure than anything they permit. It also bans using any other alternative. This isn't somehow specific to an AOSP-based OS. You can't avoid this by using a mobile OS based on FreeBSD instead. You'll just be more locked out.

Google's Play Integrity API permits devices with no security patches for 10 years. The device integrity level can be bypassed via spoofing but they can detect it quite well and block it once it starts being done at scale. The strong integrity level requires leaked keys from TEEs/SEs to bypass it.

It doesn't provide a useful security feature, but it does lock out competition very well. Services requiring Apple App Attest or Google Play Integrity are primarily helping to lock in Apple and Google having a duopoly for mobile devices. Play Integrity is more relevant due to AOSP being open source.

Governments are increasingly mandating using Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity for not only their own services but also commercial services. The EU is leading the charge of making these requirements for digital payments, ID, age verification, etc. Many EU government apps require them.

Instead of governments stopping Apple and Google from engaging in egregiously anti-competitive behavior, they're directly participating in locking out competition via their own services. Requiring people to have an Apple device or Google-certified Android device is anti-competition, not security.

reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification will currently work with sandboxed Google Play on GrapheneOS but it clearly exists to provide a way for them to start using hardware attestation on systems without it. People without an iOS or Android device will be locked out when this is required even without that.

This isn't about security or any missing functionality. GrapheneOS can be verified via hardware attestation. Google bans using GrapheneOS for Play Integrity because we don't license Google Mobile Services and conform to anti-competitive rules already found to be illegal in South Korea and elsewhere.

Services shouldn't ban people from using arbitrary hardware and operating systems in the first place. Google's security excuse is clearly bogus when they permit devices with no patches for 10 years but not a much more secure OS. It's for enforcing their monopolies via GMS licensing, that's all.

[Lange @djlange]

The hardest part about Digital ID is getting people to see the risk. There won’t be a “I’ll deal with it when it affects me” moment - by then, it'll be too late.

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

Reject the narrative. Yes, children must be protected - but not primarily via the state apparatus. (It is so much harder to “fix” or legislate parenting, presence, family structure, morality.) The Internet must remain a free platform for communication to the furthest extent possible.

[Tuta @TutaPrivacy]

🚨 The UK says it wants to "protect children online"

Yet, forcing EVERYONE to verify their age won't stop harm - but put all of us under surveillance.

Today, we've signed an open letter together with @mullvadnet @torproject @mozilla & others to stop #AgeVerification in the UK 💪

Read the complete letter: https://t.co/jf3NVURtDH

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

If you’re not scared by what this portends, you should be. Nobody is spending these resources trying to keep kids from seeing boobs.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

https://t.co/4DDA2D1iHy

[Nym @nym]

"Technologies such as mixnets and traffic-shaping systems obscure IP-level information, making it significantly harder for adversaries to trace activity back to individual users. Nym is currently the leading implementation in this space."

Zcash writeup:
https://t.co/FTgQMWDrcg

[Glenn Meder @GlennMeder]

🧵 THREAD

1/ The law passes on a Tuesday.

Age verification now becomes mandatory for every website. Every social media platform. Every forum. Every comment section.

No more usernames. No more pseudonyms. No more anonymous accounts.

Every word you type online is now permanently attached to your legal name, your government ID, and a database that will outlive you.

Anonymity is dead. And by Friday, you will understand what you lost.

[Glenn Meder @GlennMeder]

12/ Not enough people are talking about this.

Age verification laws are passing in state after state right now. The infrastructure to end anonymity forever is being built while most people are not paying attention.

We have to wake people up. Fast.

Share this thread. Show people what happens when anonymous speech dies. Make them see what their children will inherit if we do not stop this now.

Follow me for the warning. For the context that makes you see what is being built. For the alarm bell that will not stop ringing until this threat is understood.

The window is still open. But it will not stay open much longer.

Preserve Liberty by Preserving Privacy.

[Tom Howard @_TomHoward]

These must be protected at all costs

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

It’s absurd that American authorities can purchase personal data – that they’re not allowed to gather themselves without a warrant – directly from data brokers. This violates the Fourth Amendment, and it’s time to close the data broker loophole.

Today, @RepThomasMassie, @RepBoebert and @naomibrockwell at the @LudlowInstitute introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act. It requires warrants based on probable cause for all government surveillance and data access. You can read more about it at https://t.co/iFX17ELSLA

[SpaceXponential @SpaceXponential]

@Jason I’m in

[Emir Han @RealEmirHan]

Alien 3 is one of the most diabolical sequels ever made. Fincher and studio made such a mess. The decision to kill off the child character Newt ruined entire movie from the beginning. James Cameron said:

“The stupidest f***ing thing. It killed the emotional payoff of Aliens.”

[John Fio @johnfio_]

@thedowd Break the chains. Set them free.

[kepano @kepano]

@imkarthikk Social networks are public. The problem is with SaaS platforms that are meant to be for private data.