zulu

[Matan Grinberg @matanSF]

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition.

The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building.

We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented.

A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans.

It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters.

Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service.

Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed.

On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light.

It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated.

Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum.

We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

[Sawyer Covington @sawyercovington]

After 6 months in NYC, I almost left.

I stayed to build my own company.

Most of my friends and family thought I was crazy. Here's the story:

I grew up on a dairy farm in North Carolina and started working at 8.

Mowed lawns, cleaned gutters, delivered pizzas, managed a bar.

That eventually turned into a career figuring out how companies grow:

- Built enterprise GTM at a fintech company that had just raised $100M
- Worked with top fashion brands, media companies, and more at a Manychat competitor
- 3x'd Amped in 6 months as Head of Growth, later acquired by Intuit
- Built my own media agency, then shut it down to join a hypergrowth startup

On paper it was going great.

But I kept noticing the same thing:

I was pretty good at growing other people's companies. So I left to build my own.

We raised, picked a direction, and started building an AI creative platform.

A month later, Claude Code came out.

From January to April we watched non-technical teams start building in-house various pieces of the platform we were building.

And it became pretty obvious that our moat was evaporating before we'd even scaled.

So we went back to customers. Hundreds of them.

And asked what they were actually stuck on.

The answer surprised us:

Creative research is massively underdeveloped.

The data exists, publicly, at enormous scale. It's just brutally expensive and technically complex to aggregate.

Which is exactly what makes it worth doing.

So we killed the first product and rebuilt the company around that.

Everyone who thought I was crazy was almost right.

The first version of the company didn't survive the year.

But that's the part nobody tells you about starting something:

You don't have to be right on day one, you just have to be willing to find out you're wrong and move faster than that.

[Rahul @sairahul1]

https://t.co/uRsQBBhTcH

[Ritwik Pavan @ritwikpavan]

stay tuned

[Ritwik Pavan @ritwikpavan]

i brought 45 hardware founders and leaders together for dinner at CES this year

it was a lot of fun

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@rom1trs Editor

[Ritwik Pavan @ritwikpavan]

48-hour challenge: turn this empty room into the hardware nation studio.

my hope is that founders will one day launch products here, test cool products, and tell their stories.

how should i set it up?

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@MichaelAArouet The people that can afford to retire at 50 probably have much better resources for health, wellness, and medical care.

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@ritwikpavan @RideOnewheel Great interview!

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@paurooteri Ironwood has 192 GB of VRAM and seems to map to the V6P chip with Broadcom. The mediatek chip won’t go into production until 2026 and ironwood is coming out this year.

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@icon Icon is doing what every SaaS founder *wishes* they could. Massive congrats on the launch.

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@ritwikpavan @espressodisplay Awesome display

[zulu @DMDZCO]

I’m excited that Rogo just got released to the public! @johnwillettrogo and @GabeStengel have been doing great work introducing a new, accessible way to analyze and dive into data.

[Jesse Pujji @jspujji]

We create "Upper Limits" because of some combination of 4 hidden barriers:

1) Feeling fundamentally flawed
2) Disloyalty and Abandonment
3) More success = Bigger burden
4) Fear of outshining

Let's unpack:

[6529 @punk6529]

1/ On How Short Life Is

A few years ago, I was walking around in a blizzard in SoHo (New York). It was late, midnight, and it was beautiful.

Some friends, about 15 blocks away, called: "come over?"

It was late, it was cold, was tired, thought "maybe not worth it" but then...

[zulu @DMDZCO]

@paulg Is there a way to donate money for their legal fees?

[michael scott paper company 🏢 @_bruceexo]

me if listening to kanye west was a job :

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

The Failure Paradox

You have to fail more to succeed more.

Our greatest moments of growth often stem directly from our greatest failures.

Don’t fear failure, just learn to fail smart and fast.

Getting punched in the face builds a strong jaw.

[Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson]

I read a book that blew my mind a little and I can’t stop telling people about it.

It explains why so many people dedicate their lives to achieving things that make them miserable.

This might sound crazy, but an unseen force is pushing you towards empty and unfulfilling goals…

[Rob Perez @WorldWideWob]

even before Chris Bosh signed with the Heat, Pat Riley gave Bosh his ring from Miami’s 2006 Championship under the condition he give it back after they won one together.

tonight was the night.