This is a good example of large scale security issues companies can face with AI adoption. Enterprises have years of baked in assumptions that work because people following processes do not necessarily understand the capabilities those assumptions imply. Now, potentially any user
In grindmaxxing there are a couple of questions inside it.
First question is that whether you should do it or not, and to what level. I don’t think there is one right answer because it is situational and plays into the dynamics of the market.
Most startups the mode is either finding PMF or scaling that.
PMF is about building, talking to customers and learning from those activities. There is some level of grind involved but I think the risk of too much grind and you don't internalize the learnings enough to correct the path. The speed makes you blind.
Then at scaling, there can be grind because the business is booming, but goal should be finding leverage to scale effectively. With leadership, hiring, with processes, software, anything.
Then there can be higher urgency when you are in some landgrab moment where there is real advantage in being first. Many will over-index on being the first, often it doesn't matter the way you think it would. It matters when you learn from it, because you gain advantage being the first to learn, not because you somehow automatically capture the market and can keep it. Often in reality doesn't really matter much if someone comes later with lot better product or experience. Customer will gravitate to the better solution, not to the solution that was first.
And I think you can be fast in different ways.
You can be very fast but have a very inefficient model. Or you can have a very efficient model and use less effort to the get same speed. The latter will might be slower at first, but will be more compounding and more scalable in long run.
For example in the beginning, you might be onboarding every customer. But eventually you have to realize it probably won’t scale, your and your team's time is not leveraged well, you don't learn much from repeating that over and over. You have to find leverage from the product, or some other solution that doesn’t require as many human hours.
So many startups and teams do have to work a lot and intensively. But there will always be a tradeoff to consider. Teams will burn out. Mistakes will happen. Bad decisions will be made. A lot of the work might be wasteful if the team never stops to consider.
Sometimes it is not an option. You have to grind through it. I get that. But you as a founder can still choose the culture, the values, the operating principles. Is it based on grind, or is it based on something else? Grind is not always optional, but culture built around grind is.
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And second questions which the most interesting part to me, which is always optional, if you make the grind as part of the narrative and the brand.
Does the grind narrative actually make your brand better or more valuable for customers? I’d argue only a few businesses benefit from the grind narrative. Most probably do not.
For example, when I joined Coinbase early, we knew that trust was the most important thing. We had to be secure and project stability and trust. That was what I was also trying to do with design. The team also did it on the legal side by trying to be the trusted option operating from the US instead of the Caymans or China or somewhere else (many of those are now gone).
In the aspect of trust, in domains where you want high trust and stability, like banking, security, databases, payments, insurance, infrastructure, etc., the grindmaxxing narrative doesn’t make me trust the vendor more. It makes me trust it less.
Because it makes me think about the mistakes that might eventually happen, or the risk complete implosion of the vendor.
I always evaluate vendors on their culture and brand. I want my vendors trustworthy and operating values that provide stability. We’ve picked vendors over others because we sensed stability and a kind of unhurried expertise. And often we have picked right.
I don’t want to buy vendors and then have them create problems for us, or force us to find another vendor a couple years later.
When you work in a high-trust domain and sell to businesses, the better story is almost how stable and boring your operations are. I want people operating in healthy way, making solid decisions, focusing on operational excellence not building cafes, sleeping at the office or other various side quests.
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.
@harjtaggar yeah, ideas are fragile early on. the useful person is usually the one who can find the smallest version worth trying, not the smartest reason it might fail.
🧵We all saw Gabriel Zucman's NYT op-ed justifying the California wealth tax proposal, along with ostentatious claims that billionaires pay lower tax rates than average Americans. Let's dig into the methodology...
California elections are next week (June 2), here’s my voting guide.
As usual, the ballot is way too long and asks voters to decide things no normal person should be expected to know. I did my best to figure it out.
My basic lens: competent government, housing abundance, public safety, fiscal discipline, better schools, and less performative politics.
TL;DR:
Governor: Matt Mahan
Lt. Governor: Josh Fryday
Secretary of State: Shirley Weber
Controller: Herb Morgan
Treasurer: Eleni Kounalakis
Attorney General: Rob Bonta
Insurance Commissioner: Patrick Wolff
Board of Equalization, D2: Sally Lieber
US Representative, D11: Scott Wiener
State Assembly, D17: Matt Haney
Superior Court Judge: Phoebe Maffei
State Superintendent: Josh Newman
Board of Education: Phil Kim
Props:
A: Yes
B: Yes
C: Yes
D: No
Statewide races
Governor: Matt Mahan
He’s the most pragmatic, execution-focused candidate in the race, and the only candidate (of 61) that I really like. California needs someone smart and pragmatic who has dealt with stuff that matters: homelessness, permitting, public safety, and budgets. Mahan has done a great job as Mayor of San Jose and is the governor California needs.
On the others:
Katie Porter is sharp, but insufferable and a bit performative... We have enough political theater. We need a governor who can run the state.
Tom Steyer is economically illiterate in the way rich progressives often are. He favors a wealth tax, which would be a disaster for California. We already have a narrow, volatile tax base that depends heavily on high earners, capital gains, and founder outcomes. A wealth tax would push more mobile capital, founders, and investors out of the state, potentially reduce tax revenue, and make the budget more fragile. It feels good to some people politically. It is terrible policy.
Xavier Becerra also worries me. He feels like an old-school machine politics candidate who has held jobs with no evidence that he can actually run things well. California has a serious insurance crisis, and I don’t trust him to handle it. When asked for his plan, he said he would "tell insurers they can’t raise rates." But if you treat insurers as villains that can simply be forced to write policies at politically convenient prices, you don’t get cheaper insurance. You get fewer insurers, more non-renewals, less availability, and more risk dumped onto the state. That is already part of the problem.
He also does not strike me as an effective executive. His time in the Biden administration was widely viewed as underwhelming, and California is too big and too broken to hand the job to a default partisan résumé candidate.
If the general election ends up as Becerra or Steyer vs. Steve Hilton, I would vote for Steve Hilton. I don’t like Hilton’s style, and if Trump endorses him, he’s probably toast in California. But Hilton has genuinely good ideas and is at least thinking about the right problems: housing, affordability, energy, schools, and government failure. He would be a better candidate than Becerra or Steyer.
Lieutenant Governor: Josh Fryday
The race for backup governor doesn't really matter much TBH. Fryday and Tubbs are both smart and pro-housing, I could vote for either of them. Fryday has the idea to build housing on the vast amount of developable land that universities and state agencies sit on top of. Let's do it!
Secretary of State: Shirley Weber
This office oversees elections, business filings, campaign and lobbying disclosures, and state archives. Weber is the incumbent and seems fine.
Controller: Herb Morgan
You could make a reasonable case for Malia Cohen. She seems to have done an okay job, and she will probably win. But I prefer Morgan because he seems more focused on audits, waste, and fiscal discipline.
The mark against Cohen for me: when she ran last time, she said she would audit state homelessness spending. That still hasn't happened.
Cohen is not bad, I just think Morgan is the better vote.
Treasurer: Eleni Kounalakis
She has private-sector experience and has actually built housing. The treasurer’s office touches debt, infrastructure finance, housing finance, and the state’s balance sheet.
Two things I especially like: she wants to hold California’s debt-service-to-General Fund ratio at or below 6%, and she wants to publish a public “California Balance Sheet” dashboard. Make the state’s finances more legible and harder to hide behind accounting fog.
Attorney General: Rob Bonta
He’s fine. I don’t love everything about him, but he is going to win, and I don’t see a better option here.
Insurance Commissioner: Patrick Wolff
This is sneakily one of the most important races on the ballot... California’s insurance market is in real trouble. Homeowners are losing coverage, premiums are rising, and wildfire risk is making the system harder to sustain. The next Insurance Commissioner needs to understand insurance as a market, not just as a political talking point.
Wolff is really smart, knows insurance well, and thinks about the problem from a market perspective. He is also a chess grandmaster, which is not a qualification by itself, but does suggest a certain kind of analytical mind.
Please vote for him.
District / local races
Board of Equalization, District 2: Sally J. Lieber
Honestly, I’m not even sure why this role still exists in this form. It has a weird, random set of responsibilities, and I don’t think voters should be electing people to this office.
That said, Lieber seems to have done a fine job, and I don’t see a strong reason to replace her.
US Representative, District 11: Scott Wiener
Listen, I don’t love everything about him. I disagreed with his AI regulation approach, and I think he sometimes has the standard Sacramento instinct to regulate first and ask questions later.
But this race is not close for me.
Saikat Chakrabarti is an economically destructive populist. He supports a wealth tax, backed Prop D with $500K of his own money, and seems far too comfortable with the idea that San Francisco can tax its way out of dysfunction. That is exactly the wrong lesson to take from the last decade. SF does not need more anti-business symbolism. It needs more housing, more jobs, cleaner streets, better schools, and a government that can execute.
Connie Chan is also not the answer. Her record is too NIMBY and too aligned with the old SF politics that got us into this mess. She has opposed or slowed housing, resisted streamlining, and was opposed to the recall of Chesa Boudin. She represents less housing, higher rents, and more veto power for neighborhood obstructionists.
Wiener is imperfect, but he has been genuinely pro-housing, pro-transit, and pro-abundance when those positions were politically hard. That matters. He is the best choice in this race.
State Assembly, District 17: Matt Haney
He’s good and unopposed.
Judge of the Superior Court: Phoebe Maffei
To be honest, both candidates seem fine. You could just as easily make the case for Alexandra Pray. They are both experienced.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Josh Newman
This is another important one. Newman has good ideas, including learning from the “Mississippi Miracle,” focusing on basic literacy, and being open to school choice.
I also strongly agree with him that we should not be electing this position at all. It should be appointed... voters do not have enough bandwidth or information to evaluate this role!
Board of Education: Phil Kim
His top goals are student outcomes and safety. He also voted to bring algebra back. It is insane that this was even controversial, and even more insane that it passed narrowly. He was on the right side of it.
SF Props
Prop A: Yes
This is the Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bond. It authorizes $535 million in bonds for seismic upgrades and emergency response infrastructure.
I hate spending money, and I especially hate when people pretend bonds are free - they are not! The city says this won’t raise tax rates, but that does not mean it has no cost. Taxpayers are still committing to repay principal plus interest. In this case, the estimated repayment is about $933 million over 26 years for a $535 million bond.
That said, bonds are probably the best way to fund long-lived emergency infrastructure. Earthquake safety, fire response, and emergency facilities are exactly the kind of things that can justify debt financing. I haven't been able to figure out if we REALLY need it but I'm going to say it's important enough that I'm ok paying for it.
Prop B: Yes
I don’t feel strongly about this, but it fixes a weird quirk in our law. San Francisco has a two-term limit for mayors and supervisors, but it is written as a limit on successive terms. So you can serve two terms, do something else for a while, and then come back.
Two terms should probably mean two terms.
Prop C: Yes
This is a very slight adjustment to San Francisco business taxes. It helps small businesses while raising rates on larger businesses to partially offset the cost.
The main reason I care is that Prop C is that it's a foil to Prop D. Both change the same tax code, so if Prop D passes but Prop C gets more votes, then Prop C gets enacted instead.
Stupid California politics, but here we are. Vote yes on C.
Prop D: No
Saikat and Bernie Sanders call this the “CEO tax,” but that’s misleading. It’s really a business tax, mostly through the gross receipts tax, with the rate tied to executive-to-worker pay ratios. It would raise some tax rates by roughly 800%.
This is emotionally satisfying to some, but would be economically destructive. It could cause companies to shift jobs, headquarters, or revenue out of SF. Companies that stay may hire less, pass costs to customers, or avoid expanding here.
The revenue may also get tied up in court, while businesses face years of uncertainty.
SF needs more companies choosing to be here, not another reason to leave. Vote No on D.
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It took me a long time to research all this. The fact that voters are expected to have an informed view on every race and measure is part of the problem. California has too many elected offices, too many ballot measures, and too little accountability... but here we are, so vote for the least crazy path toward a more functional state, please!
Debunking Bezos’s nonsense that the rich pay most of the taxes. (He’s only talking about a narrow slice, the federal income tax). And these days are from 2019 - the rich even less today thanks to Trump.
Care about the WA state income tax?
Not only are signatures being gathered to challenge it, but five Supreme Court seats are up for election this year. The high court could decide if the tax fails - or if 93 years of WA tax precedence is shattered.
I put together a site to help you decide on which candidates matter to you in this historic fight.
Knowing is half the battle.
https://t.co/Ouq8whbHou
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States.
The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi.
Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe.
1. The growth numbers
Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000.
But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled.
Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe.
2. Is it all the tech industry?
Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices.
This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued.
His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails.
Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat.
Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit.
A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity.
The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025.
This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!).
3. What about inequality?
Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy.
But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries.
The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman.
4. What about hours worked?
Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000.
The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more.
5. Is America not a bad place to live?
Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter?
American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities.
Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today.
The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans.
Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000.
There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor.
https://t.co/VOpQ32R5tg
"@MayorofSeattle Katie Wilson has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner," writes @HowardSchultz. "Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave."
https://t.co/0lfdfNKn6B via @WSJopinion
Article Text:
"Washington state has been my home for more than four decades. I arrived in Seattle with dreams and ambition and ended up building Starbucks into a company known around the world. Many Pacific Northwesterners joined me in shaping the culture, benefits and brand of Starbucks—contributing not only to a business, but also the civic and entrepreneurial life of the area.
"I am no longer a resident of Washington. My decision to leave had much to do with family choices and my stage of life. Still, I feel a responsibility to speak up about the business and job climate in a city and state that gave me so many opportunities.
"Washington’s economic story over the past half century is extraordinary. Microsoft, Amazon, Costco and a host of other new companies transformed the state into a global center of technology, innovation and logistics. Entrepreneurs exported ideas worldwide. Capital flowed. Wages rose. Imported and homegrown talent flourished.
"That ecosystem worked because risk‑taking was rewarded, growth was possible, and civic leadership—while imperfect—understood that private enterprise wasn’t the adversary of the public good. It was one engine for improving the public sphere.
"That ecosystem is fractured today. Seattle and much of Washington face serious problems: chronic homelessness, disorder in core business districts, persistent budget deficits, declining public-school outcomes and a slowing technology hiring cycle. These challenges aren’t unique to the state—but Washington’s response to them is.
"Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner. Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave.
"In the state capital, the Legislature and governor have confronted difficult fiscal trade-offs by emphasizing taxation rather than reform or performance management. The theory appears to be that prosperity can be mandated through redistribution rather than generated through growth.
"Washington has a broken tax system. The reliance on sales taxes—10.55% in Seattle—is deeply regressive. The state needs to rewrite its tax code across the board in a way that ensures people and businesses alike pay their share.
"But instead of reform, those in power have opted to increase the burden on businesses and successful entrepreneurs in ways that discourage them from growing within the state—at a moment when Washington’s economic situation is growing more fragile.
"Microsoft and Amazon—once hiring engines—have slowed recruitment and reduced head counts as they race to build data-center capacity and compete globally. Starbucks recently announced it will shift hundreds of corporate roles to Tennessee.
"These companies imported global talent at scale for decades, anchoring an interconnected system of suppliers and startups. As those businesses reduce their local role, Seattle has no clear answer to the question of what will provide the next set of jobs and revenue growth.
"Cities and states don’t decline overnight. They drift when public safety, fiscal stability and economic vitality deteriorate together. Downtown vacancies reduce foot traffic. Declining foot traffic weakens small businesses. Employment falls. Revenue shrinks. Services erode. Confidence—something that’s hard to build and easy to lose—begins to evaporate.
"Entrepreneurs are accustomed to accountability: If we fail to deliver value, we lose customers. If we misallocate capital, we absorb the loss. Government, too, should be judged by results, not intentions. In Washington, steadily increasing government spending hasn’t delivered commensurate results on a range of issues, from addressing homelessness and drug addiction to poor prospects for new high-school graduates.
"Entrepreneurs take risks others won’t. We build before certainty exists. We hire before revenue is guaranteed. We invest locally, pay taxes and support civic institutions. When our companies succeed, entire regions benefit. America can’t afford to forget that.
"Leaving doesn’t mean abandoning. My family foundation remains invested in Washington’s future, seeking to help the next generation achieve economic mobility and prosperity. But that future is linked to economic growth and job creation. Across the country, other states are competing for capital and talent by simplifying regulation, reforming tax systems and investing in workforce development. One important initiative comes from the bipartisan National Governors Association, helping states craft pro-entrepreneurship policies.
"I hope Washington’s leaders will embrace these policies and forge a new compact—one grounded in job creation, sensible taxation and accountable public spending. Washington once embodied the future of the U.S. economy, and it can again. But the current government needs to learn that future entrepreneurs won’t be attracted by ineffective public systems, especially when joined with policy and political rhetoric that demonize businesses."
Mr. Schultz is a former CEO and chairman emeritus of Starbucks.
I swear to Christ the Democratic Party’s message at this point is “all of the most progressive places are unaffordable shitholes where nobody can afford an apartment, therefore you should vote for us”
This is economically illiterate. Airbnb has a trivial effect on rent prices—we're talking near 0 percent. NYC banned it & rents still increased.
We know why housing costs are high: lack of supply. But some people would rather scapegoat the rich than acknowledge basic economics.