David Katz

I like building and I like thinking

[TBPN @tbpn]

"I think the highest turnover job of any Silicon Valley executive position might be the CMO."

Airbnb's @bchesky says he has a huge amount of respect for people in marketing because it's one of the hardest functions in a business.

"Because once something works, it almost becomes stale. Because everyone does it."

"Part of my theory is that what works in marketing changes every few years and you have to be adaptable. Your old playbook gets outdated."

"It's this thing called 'banner blindness.' After you see something over and over, you tend to be blind to it, so you need a new tactic."

[TBPN @tbpn]

.@Collision is bullish on two types of people: high-agency individuals and double majors.

"There are two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now and I think will do incredibly well over the next 10-20 years. First, high-agency people. The people at Stripe who have been talking to customers and know exactly what we should do. It's the people who have that pep in their step and want to go make Stripe better. They are so much more empowered thanks to AI."

"The second is double majors. I think if you understand software and understand finance, or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company. Now, one person can do what would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems."

"Charlie Munger talked about the importance of being multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking. He thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books now or you can talk to your AI about it. I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well."

[David Katz @_dkatz]

There has never been a better time to reframe what your field is and what your skills are.

Where is your zone of genius?

Then leverage heavily with AI.

[ADAM @adamcohenhillel]

mid-tier talent now with AI will only slow you down. Top 0.1% of any field will produce 99% of output

[a16z @a16z]

Adam Neumann’s new CTO had to pitch @pmarca and @bhorowitz on building Flow’s architecture from scratch—just three weeks into the job:

"Marc is very strong in architecture. Ben is very strong in use cases and how it’s used."

"After three hours, they said, 'We agree.'"

"We go out to dinner. They argue between themselves for another two hours."

"At the end of it, Ben is like, 'Adam, I’m good.'"

"I said, 'Why?'"

"He goes, 'Because Marc is good… We’ve been working together for 30 years, and I know when to trust my partner. He’s good—I’m good.'"

On @tetranow with @RickRubin

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The unit of software production has changed from team-years to founder-days.

Act accordingly.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Patrick Collison on what he wishes he did differently when scaling Stripe

“I think one of the most pernicious mental models you can have is that you are on some growth curve… I think a much better mental model to have is that you’re serving some market, and then there’s the percentage of the market that you’re serving. And whatever percentage you are not serving, you just haven’t built the go-to-market functions and organization that’s brought the product to those market segments.”

In the early days of Stripe, they assumed they were on some growth curve, but Patrick believes they could’ve accelerated their growth by viewing growth as a function of their go-to-market apparatus:

“What we did not do, but what I wish we did, is six months after launch, we should’ve mapped out the concentric circles of our market.”

As he suggests, Stripe should’ve started with very early stage startups then mapped out the larger set of all technical startups - not necessarily very early stage. Then continue this process in successive increments until they got to all companies handling online payments. Each step along the way, figuring out the size of each market, the fraction Stripe was currently serving, what it would take to serve more, and so on. And then work backwards from there:

“What would the organization look like that was serving the entire market? Let’s just start building that organization, because the growth curve is under my control. Of course, it’s not 100% under your control, but I think it’s much more under your control than people tend to think.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2018)

[Jack @Jackkk]

MrBeast shares the wisest piece of advice he’s ever been given

“Honestly you just really are who you surround yourself with. The five people you hang around the most are gonna decide who you’ll be”

“If you wanna be a YouTuber, hang out with other people who wanna be YouTubers. If you spent the next two years with me and my four smart friends that I talk to about YouTube a lot, you would become a YouTuber, you just would”

“You just are who you surround yourself with and you really gotta internalise that and the sooner you do, the quicker you’ll achieve what you want in life”

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

You do not lose because you were wrong.

You lose because you hesitated
after you already knew. ⚡️

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

From an AI user perspective, the four big leaps so far in ability:
1. GPT-3.5 (ChatGPT, November 2022)
2. GPT-4 (Spring 2023)
3. Reasoners (starts with o1-preview, but the real deal was o3, Spring 2025)
4. Workable agentic systems (Harness + good reasoner models, December 2025)

[David Katz @_dkatz]

@EliLake A few destroyed buildings, that’s it. Photos of them are easy to find.

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

"An empty chair is better than a chair filled with the wrong person." — Jensen Huang

[Jared Friedman @snowmaker]

Software engineering changed more in the last 3 months than the preceeding 30 years.

Everything about running a software company needs to be rethought from first principles.

[Sam Blond @samdblond]

We just launched Monaco. Here’s the exact playbook we used. I hope it's helpful to other founders and startups:

1. The launch video: most launch videos I see orient around some stressed out person at their desk or some philosophical approach to company building. Do not do this.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Airbnb CEO: entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood

[a16z @a16z]

Stripe co-founder John Collison views hiring as "branches of a tree."

"When you hire this person, you're not only bringing them, but you're bringing their effect on the culture, and all the other people they're going to bring in with them, and the norms and the working style they have that will spread throughout the company."

"As time goes on, you have less and less influence on the company, and all the new people you’re bringing in have more."

@collision at @ECorner

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Brad Jacobs on how to identify A players:

"I do a mental exercise where I picture the person coming into my office and saying, 'Brad, I quit.' And then I try to feel and visualize what would be my reaction if that person came in to me and quit.

If my reaction to that is, 'Yes! I don't want to smile, so I don't want to act like I'm happy about this. Nobody likes firing people. No problem at all, we'll replace them'—that's a C player. That's someone you should get the courage to get off the team right away.

On the second category, if my reaction to it is, 'You know, it kind of sucks. I would've preferred that person stayed, but it's not the end of the world. We'll hire a headhunter. We'll get someone as good, maybe someone even better, and things will work out'—that's a B player.

But if when I visualize that person quitting, my reaction to that is pure terror and absolute panic, and like somebody took a baseball bat and just whacked me in the stomach and then punched me in the face. I'm going, 'Oh my God! Like I'm never going to find someone as good as her. No way. I'm never going to have someone as talented as that person. I'm never going to have someone who brings to the table their particular superpower.' And I can't even hear what they're saying anymore because I'm just having this internal panic dialogue going on—that's what you call an A player.

So I want all A players around me. I want people whose relationship with me I value so much that if it was terminated, I would be lost."

[Z Fellows @zfellows]

Jack Dorsey:

[Naval @naval]

Work with hardcore people on hardcore things.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Steve Jobs: The difference between good people and great people is 50-to-1

“I’ve always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. I mean that’s what I consider one of the few things I can contribute individually myself — versus the team that work with — is to really try to instill in the organization the goal of having only A players.”

Steve argues this is especially important in technology where there’s a huge range between the best person and the worst person:

“In a lot of fields, the difference between, say, the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town in Manhattan might be 2-to-1. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour… Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it’s 3-to-1… But in the field that I’m in. In software in particular. The difference between the best person and the worst person is about 100-to-1 or more.”

He continues:

“The difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50-to-1 or 25-to-1. Huge dynamic range. And therefore, I have found — and not just in software but in almost everything I’ve done — it really pays to go after the best people in the world.”

But as Steve points out, this isn’t always easy:

“It’s very painful when you have some people that are not the best people in the world, and you have to get rid of them. But I’ve found that my job has sometimes been exactly that, to get rid of some of the people that didn’t measure up. And I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way, but nonetheless it has to be done and it’s not ever fun.”

[Naval @naval]

Self-directed learning through AIs is an autodidact’s paradise.