Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸

Co-founder of Postmates (acquired by Uber) and Serve Robotics ($SERV). Now building a computer at Mother.

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

We believe in open source local AI.
We are building a powerful & personal computer that runs local AI models and agents extremely fast.
We are hiring in Mountain View.
We believe good things start in a garage.

We are Mother 👇🖥️

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

@davidsenra @pmarca Amazing

[David Senra @davidsenra]

A conversation with Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar. I've been making podcasts about Ed for over 8 years. He invited me to his home and told incredible stories from his 60 year career. Ed worked with Steve Jobs longer than anyone else — for more than a quarter century. We talked about what he learned from Steve, the founding of Pixar, building a company at the intersection of art and technology, why getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the idea right, and so much more.

Ed is full of hard-earned practical wisdom. Spending time with someone I’ve studied for almost a decade was awesome.

I hope you listen.

0:00 Most Companies Are Full Of Shit
4:28 The Brain Trust Mechanism
10:13 Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Braintrust
17:48 Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics
23:27 Betting The Company On Toy Story
24:35 Engineering Eisner's Worst Nightmare
36:51 Bob Iger's Crappy Hand
38:44 Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing
43:48 Take The Hard Problem
44:38 The Director Can't Lose The Team
48:48 Quality Is The Best Business Plan
52:32 What Walt Disney Taught Him
59:25 George Lucas And The Motion Blur Problem
1:08:48 Now What's The Point Of My Life
1:13:31 How Much Of This Was Me
1:16:10 George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy
1:25:11 Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class
1:32:38 The Truck In The Building

Includes paid partnerships.

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

@shivon ❤️

[John Suh @john_ssuh]

Increasingly, I believe companies may need to be rebuilt from the ground up, where you have a single timeline of all observability + product metrics + file changes laid out in a retrievable system, like Datadog + Posthog + Google Drive + Slack (really unified filesystem of Claude Code chats + Codex chats). This might be the new data foundation for any and all companies to maximize AI. Needs to be rebuilt because keeping track of diffs on existing system basically impossible to produce longitudinal information on decisions and rollbacks, something coding agent storage companies are actively trying to figure out, but this should extend to businesses as a whole.

Highly skeptical existing businesses will adopt this though because it means overhauling everything about their instrumentation and business data, but I think businesses built on this foundation probably can execute 100x better and faster

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

@creativemints This is extremely good. Well done. Maybe we can work together one day.

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

@ryanzhuuuu @Teknium @NousResearch 💪

[David Haber @dhaber]

https://t.co/OF9MZRPoIX

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

💯

[Sriram Krishnan @sriramk]

just to state the obvious: think there's a collison course between those who believe research and science should be open and those who believe we are in an accelerating singularity curve.

I have many smart friends who have believed both for a while but seeing more and more their realization that these beliefs will be in conflict.

I for one believe that America and the west needs open and distributed access to research and computation and sharing of ideas at all times.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Legend!

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Here is @SpaceX's full IPO roadshow presentation from CFO Bret Johnson, who has been CFO at the company for the last 15 years.

It's worth watching.

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

@ritwikpavan Total trash

[Harrison Barnes @hbarnes]

Grateful for this group. The work continues. 💪🏾🏆 #GSG

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

@hbarnes Congrats Harrison and Team.

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

I hope he has @eightsleep mattress!

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".

Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.

- The company works 7 days per week.

- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.

- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.

- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.

Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.

My condensed notes below:

1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:

Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.

2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:

Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.

3. Lead from the Front Lines

You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.

4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning

Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.

5. Lifespan vs. Victories

Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."

6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."

If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.

Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

B all the way!

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Damn I am an E guy through and through

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

True.

[Elad Gil @eladgil]

The events of the last 6 months in technology are arguable amongst the most important in human history

The tools now increasingly exist for recursive self improvement of models & agents

We are likely in very early lift off & exponential

Largely unnoticed outside of tech

[Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸 @Basti]

Indeed.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Concerning.

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

Surely emotional for the Blue Origin team

But they’ll get through it

Rockets are hard but they’ve passed through the great filter

Ad Astra

[Quick Thoughts @lthlnkso]

I don’t think California’s wealth tax is a good idea.