Manish

Stuff about tech and products, may be books and life. Love full stack & infra. Always building. SF Bay Area (Mountain View). Friend to solo & small teams.

[Manish @dotmanish]

Reminder that should be fresh all the year round, but it's December, so here is it, anyway.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

21 thoughts from 2021 I'd like to take into 2022:

[Manish @dotmanish]

@marclou Echoing what everyone else in the replies said - try Claude Design and hand it off to Claude (built in feature). Iterate on it.

[Manish @dotmanish]

Happy to see @structured_app in Apple's Design Awards this year. I tried it in 2021 and loved the UX!

[Manish @dotmanish]

@structured_app @Google @leoMehlig @rmgoncalo Didn't realize you folks were at I/O - would've caught up - loved the app since 2021!

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

So my buddy Jim email-intros me to his buddy Jordan. Jordan's an angel investor. Jim says we have a lot in common and should chat. OK, fine, Jim, I'll meet Jordan.

Jordan replies and says "Ernie can help schedule it", cc'ing his EA, Ernie. I send Ernie my schedule availability for the following week. I tell him Monday is mostly open, Tuesday afternoon, and parts of Wednesday.

I check back, and Ernie has replied saying, "Mr. Jordan has a very busy schedule, but he can see you on Monday at 4pm in Madrona at XYZ coffee place." I'm thinking, man, 4pm Monday is going to be brutal bridge traffic. Plus all the schools are letting out, it's gonna be snarled. But fine, whatever, if he's that busy, I'll leave early.

I tell Ernie, fine.

So Monday rolls around and I do the 20-minute drive in 45 minutes, as expected. I meet Jordan at the coffee place, and we decide to walk around the neighborhood.

We get our drinks, start the walk, and our conversation goes like this:

Me: So I see you've got yourself an EA! Or Chief of Staff?

Jordan: Oh that's an AI.

Me (internally): Mother fucker. I am going to wring Ernie's fucking neck.

Me (out loud): Oh, that's nice.

Jordan: It's a piece of shit, doesn't work very well.

Me (internally): God DAMN it. How did I fail this Turing Test so badly? And how do I get one of these fuckin' things? I want one that says, "Well Mr. Yegge is phenomenally busy and can only see you at 3am in the graveyard!" and have it fight it out with Ernie.

Me (out loud): That's cool. Well the drive over from Kirkland was pretty tough.

Jordan: Oh you're in Kirkland? Jeez, if I'd have known I'd have met you halfway.

Anyway that's my story. Fuck you, Ernie. Fuuuuuuuuck yooooooooou.

[Rick Brewster @rickbrewPDN]

I GOT THE DOMAIN! I FINALLY GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!1 🥳🎉

Paint​.NET is now at https://t.co/ZJTUII4bVG!

Well, it will be just as soon as I push all the buttons to migrate content and set up redirects from getpaint​.net etc. For now it's just a "hey go here" redirect page.

[Manish @dotmanish]

nifty new cool thing!

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

ok tinkerers, i've got a fun toy for you

introducing baby-menu - a mac menu bar icon, and it's just a baby

it can't do anything, but you can feed it prompts and help it grow. it's what i think hyper-personalized, self-evolving software can look like

details in thread 👇

[Manish @dotmanish]

@suekhim This is amazing! Have been wishing for mathacademy-like but a lot more interactive system. Would love an invite for math and coding - thanks!

[Brandon Carl @brandonjcarl]

Earnings Before Tokens

[Manish @dotmanish]

Always love their videos.

[Pika @pika_labs]

Attention, all you geniuses with products, but no marketing skills.

Today we’re launching the Founder Starter Kit—4 skills that will help you look and sound like a legit company, including:

> Build-a-Brand
> App Screens
> Product Sizzle
> Founder Video

Available for Claude via the Pika MCP.

[Manish @dotmanish]

Today's reminder that PostHog just enabled "opted-in by default" on AI training on your data. If that's cringy as a paying customer, the option is in org settings.

[Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki]

Founders finding out building a startup is 90% sales and marketing:

[Виктор Блъсков @ViktorBlaskov]

@Freyy_is It's so weird that I've written like AI my whole life and now I have to adapt to writing differently so people don't think I'm AI

[Manish @dotmanish]

A backup you've never restored is theatre.
Test sometimes.

[Arnav Gupta @championswimmer]

Little known fact: If you're red-green colourblind, then you're never impacted by Claude reliability issues.

[Manish @dotmanish]

Can this be used to solve crimes of which only animals were remaining witnesses?

[shirish @shiri_shh]

chinese startup built an AI collar that translates barks and meows into full sentences.

95% accuracy. cost $118.

10k people have already pre-ordered it.

It uses mics, motion sensors, and AI to read body language and vocalizations.

[Manish @dotmanish]

@TR3NTG @seraleev That’s 912 apps that were added to trustMRR.

[Manish @dotmanish]

@gokulr I've mostly done it one-way (Claude code; Codex review) but found Codex to be good at reviewing unmarked code (I only recently started asking it to format the output to make instructions easier for Claude) and finding P1/P2 bugs that the code-authoring LLM agrees with.

[Manish @dotmanish]

@GergelyOrosz I’d be concerned if my product manager has NOT used other competing products. Every PM should do that. Just that it remained in their video is the sloppy bit - I agree.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Blueprintsmb @blueprintsmb22]

Long post but the TLDR is choose your reference points carefully.

I grew up comfortable in Kansas with a father who owned a small business pulling $40k a year. I felt rich until I went to Brown. Then I felt like the poor. There were students that had BMWs parked on different parts of campus so they wouldn't have to walk far to get access to a car.

I needed to make money to pay back my parents for college so I went to Wall Street. After Morgan Stanley, I worked for a single manager hedge fund managing $1.5Bn (alot of money back in the day) in SF that had just received an anchor investment from Yale University.

My boss was making more money than ever and was spending it. He would vacation with Lance Armstrong and Cindy Crawford. He became close with Wes Edens at Fortress. We made investments in Fortress portfolio companies. My boss took board seats on some of these investments. My boss spent alot of time frustrated he was not on the same level as Edens.

My boss was also close with Charles Schwab and we also invested in SCHW. Charles would let my boss and the firm stay at Stock Farm in Montana to host events for our LPs and management of some of our portfolio companies. It was the first time I ever flew private. I met Don Valentine of Sequoia who was an LP in our fund. We ran into Huey Lewis in the men's locker room before playing some golf. It was a world I never knew really existed growing up in Kansas.

We were also investors in Herbalife and would complain to the CEO at the time Michael Johnson (ex Disney) that he was massively overpaid and that the compensation structure of the company needed better alignment for shareholders (based on hitting key KPIs, etc). He would say he impressions mattered in his industry and living in LA was expensive.

When 2008-9 happened, our fund got decimated as we basically were a long only. Heavy exposure to Fortress names with massive leverage was no bueno. My boss had board seats which meant we were restricted. Yale pulled their entire investment. While the world was burning down, my boss in his fancy office in the Transamerica building told me that I was lucky "to not have any money to lose" while the world was burning down lol. I get what he was saying now as we saw clients that had amassed generational wealth in tech or owning boring businesses in Louisiana lose half of their net worth in 12 months. People were scared.

I would move back to NYC and end up working for 3 billionaires at different points during my career as a journeyman buysider. I did well enough at points to have direct contact with some of them. I saw the same dynamic - always someone doing better. Always frustrated. Not that happy.

I stayed in this world just trying to stay alive with some good years and years I got paid nothing when performance was poor. I was fine staying on this never ending hamster wheel until 1) I got married 2) we had a daughter 3) my dad's cancer diagnosis got more grim and I did more self reflection on what game of life I was playing.

Ultimately I left to buy a small business which has been hard. I still have friends on the buyside and in tech that struggle with comparison. But the reference points I was around constantly in my W2 are no longer loud. I wake up early and turn on machines. Most of my team members never graduated high school. My customers are mostly salt of the earth sales people working for small distributors sprinkled with some big publicly traded companies. $4 gas is a huge problem to everybody I interact with during my day - my customers complain daily about it in their daily lives. I sometimes lend money to my team members when they need help. I have to fix problems every day as the business isn't big enough to support hiring a general manager right now. But I'm home for dinner every night. This works better for me and my family.

My life is simple now => bring in business to make sure the 10 team members can feed their families. Last year when tariffs and a big customer shutting down hurt business badly for 3 months, my accountant told me to start firing employees as my competitors were either shutting down or firing 25-33% of their entire staffs. Entire shifts were shut down. I fired no one. It didn't feel right. I just stopped paying myself.

This year things have turned around. Team members are making 25-33% more due to overtime. I have more purpose now as my life is simplified as I'm just focused on making sure my team can eat, we make good product for our customers and the business can continue to pay down debt.

This is a hard path. I wouldn't recommend it for many, but it works better for me at this point in my life. My mental health has never been better. My wife reminds me how big of an asshole I used to be in finance as I was always stressed about my exposure / frustrated I wasn't doing better. What changed? My reference points changed. I no longer live in NYC. I live in this myopic world where I spend my weeks talking to team members, customers and vendors. 4am until 4pm is spent living in this world. 4pm-8pm is spent with my family before I go to bed ahead of a 330am wake up.

I have no doubt if I stayed in finance and was living in the Upper West Side in NYC, I'd still be playing my own version of "why aren't I doing better."

It took having a child and thinking more about my Dad's mortality (he passed this October from cancer) to re-evaluate things. I wish I had been brave/smart enough to consider a pivot earlier in life.

https://t.co/kenM7z2Feh