Bailey

evolving messaging programs @cordialinc

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

.@gokulr is one of the most prolific product builders and investors of the last 20 years.

He helped build the core ads and product businesses at Google, Facebook, Square, and DoorDash, working directly with many of this generation's best founders and CEOs. He's also invested in more than 700 companies giving him an unusually broad view into how products are built and scaled.

Gokul has an incredible ability to give precise and prescriptive advice on how to build products, particularly in AI, and he explains his thinking so clearly that you come away knowing exactly how to apply it.

We talk about why judgment is the only thing he believes is truly AI-proof, why Zendesk and Slack are more exposed than Salesforce and NetSuite, and what AI-native startups must do to move customers and their data off legacy systems.

We cover everything he's learned from building the most important ads businesses, including the only three ways an ad business can make money, and why ChatGPT may be even more powerful than Google or Facebook for highly targeted ads.

He also shares inside stories from Larry and Sergey, Zuck, Jack Dorsey, and Tony Xu, about how each of them approaches product, design, and communication.

Enjoy!

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:35 The Changing Nature of Product Development 4:09 The Merger of Product and Design
4:54 Managing Non-Deterministic Software
9:06 Judgment: The Future-Proof Human Skill
10:41 Building Durable AI Applications
16:43 The Risk to Legacy Software Companies
21:20 Sources of Stickiness in the Age of AI
23:43 Leadership Lessons from Google
27:41 Learning from Mark Zuckerberg
31:16 Jack Dorsey and the Philosophy of Great Design
35:48 The Product Manager as Editor
40:44 Three Pillars of a Successful Ads Business
49:03 Selecting North Star and Check Metrics
56:04 Hiring Functional Experts for the AI Era
1:00:06 Advice for Managing a Career
1:01:33 Evaluating Founder Authenticity
1:05:20 Best Practices for Board Management
1:11:15 The Kindest Thing

[Bailey @baileybusch]

excellent

[Ivan Flugelman — VVSVS™ @_VVSVS]

https://t.co/jLomQIFOvn

[a16z @a16z]

Marc Andreessen: “The person who writes down the thing has tremendous power.”

“There are so few people who will just write down the thing.”

Source: @pmarca on How I Write with @david_perell

[mitsuri @0xmitsurii]

How to outperform competitors without copying what they do.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

For SaaS companies to thrive, they must:
1. Replace human labor (support, biz dev, IT)
2. Move from seats to outcomes
3. Defend OpenAI from building workflows that commoditize their data
4. Maintain differentiation w/ code as a commodity

That’s why these names are down 50%

[Figs From Plums @FigsFromPlums]

DJ_Dave live coding music made with Jade rose(_switch_angel)

[Bailey @baileybusch]

this is well said

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The view that imagines AI wiping out jobs or causing some overnight shock to the system doesn’t contemplate that companies are a made up of a series of bottlenecks. When AI accelerates work in one area, you run into a bottleneck somewhere else.

As any individual workflow gets more efficient, the ultimate productivity gain is still constrained by some other part of the system. And usually it’s the case that that part of the system will not have inherently seen the same impact of AI efficiency, which means humans are still doing the work.

Take almost any process in an enterprise and you can see how this plays out. If AI Agents generate leads for the sales team, the bottleneck will be humans to have conversations with those customers. And if the leads are good, that will mean more sales hiring. If AI Agents generate more code, you will eventually be bottlenecked by the engineers that can review and incorporate that code into production.

You can quickly see how this scales to any process in an organization. Economists and others tend to totally miss how work actually happens in a company; it’s not a series of wholly independent tasks, but instead highly interdependent tasks that all link to each other across a system.

This is of course the natural rate limiter of AI efficiency gains, but also the reason why humans will still be doing so many jobs in the future.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

this makes sense to me

[Suhail @Suhail]

Whoever owns the AI first browser will win AI memory long-term. The browser is the closest approximation of humanity's memory that we have.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

flow state

[stepfanie tyler @stepfanie]

“Do you have any previous leadership experience?”
Me:

[Bailey @baileybusch]

good word

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

He who is rich owns the day.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

Smart

[Langflow @langflow_ai]

💌 Announcing [email protected]: our autonomous email agent that supports Langflow users everywhere, powered by Langflow and @SendGrid.

Soon, our newsletters and other automated emails will be conversational instead of noreply.

Blog post in reply.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Forward Deployed Engineers from Palantir are the ideal people to build vertical AI startups

Anyone can use these principles to learn about new industries yet untouched by software, and vibe coding means you can do it faster than ever

[Santiago @svpino]

The best code is the one you don’t have to write.

The best tool is the one you already have.

The best solution is the simplest one.

Always make it work first. Make it better later.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

Modern art

[jack @jack]

https://t.co/dKP9r8HdiJ

[Bailey @baileybusch]

@leonnoel @cursor_ai epic reaction

[Bailey @baileybusch]

woah cool

[Anduril Industries @anduriltech]

Introducing Pulsar-L: the man-portable variant in our family of electromagnetic warfare (EW) systems.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

impressive

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

The New York Times profiled a start-up with 28 employees serving nearly 50 million users.

That company is us.

The traditional startup playbook: raise massive funding, hire hundreds of employees, and worry about profitability "later."

But there's another way.

Everyone at Gamma could fit in a small restaurant.

We're not just surviving—we've been profitable for 15+ consecutive months, with revenue growing month over month, and lifetime negative net burn (we have more money in the bank than we've raised).

This isn't an accident. We've deliberately designed our organization to maximize impact per person.

Instead of creating specialist silos, we hire versatile generalists who can solve problems across domains. Rather than building management hierarchies, we find player-coaches who both lead and execute.

Our team leverages AI tools throughout our workflow - Claude for data analysis, Cursor for coding efficiency, NotebookLM for customer research synthesis. These aren't just productivity hacks; they're force multipliers.

Examples:

— When our growth PM needed better analytics, he didn't file a ticket with a data team—he built a self-serve system that anyone can use without SQL knowledge.

— When our marketing lead needed to understand our customers better, she fed thousands of interactions into an LLM and created actionable personas that now guide our entire strategy.

— When our design team needs to test a hypothesis, we create a rapid prototype and show it to our power users.

What we're seeing isn't just about "doing more with less." It's about fundamentally changing what's possible per person.

The most valuable employees aren't specialists who excel in narrow domains - they're resourceful problem-solvers who continuously expand their capabilities.

This approach creates remarkable resilience. Since everyone understands multiple functions, we don't have single points of failure when someone leaves or moves to another project.

If you're building today, the question isn't how quickly you can scale headcount … it's how much impact you can create with the smallest possible team.

The future belongs to tiny teams of extraordinary people.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

Agree, this is the memo

[Allie K. Miller @alliekmiller]

First Shopify.

Now Duolingo.

If you’re a “digital native business” (ie born in the cloud, born on mobile - think Pinterest, Airbnb, Stripe) and haven’t gotten the memo, here is the literal memo.

[Bailey @baileybusch]

@mattyp Yeah!