Me costó mucho dejar mi trabajo para emprender.
Tuve que haber dado el salto antes:
Al final fue cuestión de:
+ poner una fecha límite
+ verlo como un experimento
+ tener el co-founder indicado (@orlandosorio_)
+ tener un plan B
+ tener un dream team de apoyo (esposa, familia)
Whenever a smart friends tell me they got a promotion or switched to a new job I say “congrats” reluctantly. I actually feel sorry for them.
So much wasted potential.
Spoke with many friends recently, designers and engineers, all people who've been doing it for 20 years or more and had a lot of success doing it.
And they all say the same thing. The AI stuff is genuinely useful right now. It's fast and things that used to take a week take an afternoon. Things you never even attempted because there was no time, now you can just do them. It's the biggest enabler ever.
But in the same breath, every single one also says that it's the least fun they've ever had in their entire career. They also mention it makes no sense to do it the old way. They're all in.
It's a strange paradox which I feel myself. Everything is possible now and I've never cared less about any of it. Both things true at once.
Not sure if thats just the feeling of the current moment, or if I just talked to people who're tired of the computer (since all of them been doing it for a long time).
For decades, Cuba has been the world capital for radical left-wing terrorism. The regime in Havana has recruited, trained and backed violent Marxist and third-worldist movements across our hemisphere and beyond. Today, we are targeting the network that enables and funds Cuba's subversive and radical operations.
Pursuant to sanctions authorities created by President Trump’s groundbreaking Cuba Executive Order, I am designating the following entities:
1. Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba (MINFAR)
2. Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)
3. Amistur Cuba S.A.
4. Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR)
5. Minera La Victoria S.A.
Anyone providing services to these sanctioned actors is at risk of sanctions themselves. Foreign banks and other companies that provide services to these entities should freeze those activities.
The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate radical Marxist regimes in our hemisphere seeking to threaten U.S. national security and engage in influence operations to export their poisonous and evil “revolution” to our country and around the world.
Documenting the headwinds I now see for AI.
It won't seem like it, but I love AI and am long-term positive. But when "math doesn't math" I take note.
1. The core thesis for foundation model lab investment has been high upfront investment made worthwhile by significant long-term profits.
2. These are capital intensive businesses and the compute commitments are very high relative to revenue and require strong growth over long time periods. The "leverage" (commitments versus revenue) is extremely high.
3. The fundamentals are not as positive as they previously were:
• Input costs are higher (commodities, chips, power)
• Interest rates are higher
• Competition is more intense
• Scaling Laws are now problematic: exponential costs/power cannot continue
4. Forecasting compute spend is challenging and high risk due to (a) revenue uncertainty and (b) algorithm uncertainty
5. Revenue growth appears to be slowing. The technology is valuable, but ROI is proving to be more expensive and take longer than anticipated.
6. The future is likely "different models for different use cases" with the lower end of the market being highly competitive.
7. Core use cases such as agentic software engineering are likely to need approaches beyond next-token prediction. They are Σ₂ᴾ complexity problems requiring multi-objective optimization and likely a combination of Transformers and other methods.
8. Current forecasts in memory makers are built largely on quadratic attention. That will not persist: we are already seeing work from DeepSeek, Minimax and Nvidia that can cut RAM needs by 80% or more.
9. This means semiconductor valuations are substantially overinflated and will go through the traditional glut versus shortage cycle.
10. For foundation model providers: lower costs with competitive differentiation is good. However, lower costs with a lack of differentiation would mean lower revenues. This makes it harder to (a) service commitments and (b) pay back investors.
11. Leverage is substantially higher than in previous cycles, evidenced by leveraged ETFs, call option activity and margin loans. Korea is particularly susceptible.
12. 0DTE options create a profile that has stronger parallels to portfolio insurance and 1987 than any other point I can remember.
13. The combination of exponential increases in call activity coupled with the ties of semiconductors to structured products means there is a non-trivial systemic risk to the financial system.
14. Implied earnings growth rates are inconsistent with other periods in history.
15. Macroeconomically we cannot and should not fund exponential cost increases. History has shown us repeatedly that there are better ways (see Quick Sort and Simplex).
16. Significant supply is hitting the market via IPOs.
––
Taken together: costs and competition are increasing while revenue growth is likely slowing. Valuations are fragile and prone to technology disruptions that are already here. Systemic financial market risk is extremely high.
We're finally shedding the .so (thank you Somalia!), and using the .com for @NotionHQ. And for this beautiful moment, I want to share a fun story:
Back in 2018, I had just joined Notion, and one of the first things @ivan asked me to do was figure out how we could own https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. I had never done a big domain purchase before, so I reached out to a few domain brokers to understand the landscape. We tried different brokers, kept things anonymous, and attempted to surface a price the seller might consider.
A year went by… nothing. Meanwhile, it was pretty clear this was only going to get more expensive as we grew. We needed a different approach. A fellow founder connected me to a broker who took a very different tack. Less transactional, more long-term relationship builder. He spent months getting to know the domain owner. Turns out owner was a fellow entrepreneur in the west coast… and a huge Grateful Dead fan.
So we figured, why not get creative? Something beyond just price. So I called up our investor Ronny Conway and asked if there was any way he could help set up a private meeting between the domain owner and the Grateful Dead. Ronny is one of those people who somehow makes impossible things possible. A week later he calls me back: “New York City. Halloween. 15 minutes after the concert. Done.”
The broker went back to the owner with an offer: some cash, some equity, and a private meeting with the Grateful Dead. That got his attention. He didn’t take the band meeting in the end, but he did lean into the equity (great call, in hindsight). We shook hands, and a few weeks later, the deal was done.
I’ve been waiting years for the day we move our product to https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. Looks like 2026 is finally the year. Safe to say I’m unreasonably excited about this update!
. @loom , we're getting a divorce.
Bill went from ~$40 per month to ~$1000 with the new seat pricing by Atlassian. Makes no sense for my team.
Plus I can't even access my account because Atlassian Id is broken. I need to reset password, and do a bunch of hops to get in every time.
End of an era.
Just found out that Google re-re-branded Data/Looker studio.
Insane how much money big corps waste.
Here's the timeline
> Google launches Data Studio in 2016
> Buys Looker in 2020
> Unifies products and re-brands everything as "Looker Studio"
Massive L, it's confusing but well time passes and users kinda get used to the new name, but not really.
> April 2026 Google reverses and re-re-brands into Data Studio
What a waste of time, money and effort. But surely a few managers got promoted.
If you want better outputs expand your vocab. As simple as that.
It’s the reason why a designer gets better designs out of an LLM and an experience programmer gets 100x the output of a vibe coder.
To get good animations from an AI you need to get good at telling it what you want:
- "stagger this list of items"
- "make this animation direction-aware"
- "spacial consistency", "crossfade", "layout animation",
I made a motion vocabulary for this:
https://t.co/ExAxpr31no
Recently @tobi shared the philosophy behind River, our Slack-native AI agent, and how it has become a teaching workshop for all of @Shopify.
Below River lies the Aquifer. Principal Engineers @burkelibbey & Javier Moreno share the engineering story of how River came to be, and the substrate it runs on: