Excited to share that I’m joining @AnthropicAI! I’ll be working on Claude Code and helping bridge brand and product.
Dream role, dream team. Grateful for the opportunity and excited to help shape how people discover, understand, and build with humane AI.
"hey man what do you do?"
"im building the future"
"thats awesome. but what do you actually do"
"i sleep 3-4 hours a night and grind all day with the team"
"that seems... unhealthy and unproductive. what are you guys working on"
"its not WORK. its a LIFE GOAL. if i dont put in 140 hours a week i LOSE! id rather die young and rich than live long and poor"
"dude thats grueling"
"thats the MISSION. everyone at the company agrees. they have the logo tattooed on their ass. if theyre not willing to die for this they're OUT"
"holy shit. what are you building, i bet its some future tech that changes history"
"an insurance company"
"..."
"it has AI in it"
"got it"
Successful founders are telling up and coming founders that working ungodly amount of hours and larping about it on the internet isn't the right path, and these founders that probably won't ever reach product-market fit are disagreeing in the comments.
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.
or try to force users to use it in one particular way. that's the whole point of ai, that we give users as metaphorically blank a canvas as possible with enough functionality built in the background that can be combined in many different ways to paint the canvas.
mentored folks building products at #buildwithailagos2026 hackathon and i actually enjoyed it. the most popular advise i saw a lot of them needed was, "build from usecases backwards to product decisions, not make product decisions and try to find usecases for it, or...
@NotionHQ any chance you guys could give the regular Notion ai the ability to delete mcp connections, and also mcp connections added directly to notion ai dont show up in any UI i can fiddle with, maybe it should show up in settings > connections ?
Pretty urgent ask.
@NotionHQ if you guys don't mind, could this icon be changed to sth less weirdly shaped, e.g see trae's own.
i'm using notion so much these days and i can't ignore this icon's weird flatness again🫠. thank you.