Daniel Westendorf

Chief Innovation Officer @HuntressLabs

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@joemasilotti Just installed a new heat pump, $13k

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@mitchellh best flex of the year

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@staysaasy Empathy can be ruinous, and is probably the worst kind of cancer that can rot an org from the inside because no one likes saying the nice guy is bad at his job.

Be kind, not nice.

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@JasonSwett @robzolkos

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@staysaasy @GremlinIndustry god damnit 😅

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@wbmmfq @uwu_underground It’s funny because it’s true

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@JasonSwett I thought about this tweet for a few seconds but then added it to my backlog

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

I’d normally be pretty skeptical on this type of claim, but having been a @Verizon customer who recently interacted with their CS… I’m surprised it’s not higher.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Verizon CEO says the company’s new AI customer service agents scored "1,280 basis points" higher on customer satisfaction than humans.

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@JasonSwett You’re absolutely right!

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@staysaasy You’re right to push back

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

I don’t know that this is wrong, but I do know I feel a deep sadness for the long term effects this integration of work-as-self will undoubtedly have on this generation of tech workers. 💔

[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.

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@mjwhansen This is bad ass!

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@4ndr3w6S the wifi raw dog

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@staysaasy There is nothing worse than the mid talent with experience imo

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@VicVijayakumar

[Devon Kerr @_devonkerr_]

I opened a role for a manager reporting to me, focused on detection engineering and threat hunting. Before I post the link, here are the inflexible criteria:
- US-based
- detection engineering expertise in data-constrained environments
- leadership of high-performing teams

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

Mitchell out here harshing AI vibes reminds me of the “The Farmer” story in Bluey.

Maybe your velocity is slow without AI, but you’ll understand your code. Will it be worth it? We’ll see, Bandito.

Maybe your velocity is fast with AI, but you’ll have code you don’t understand. Will it be worth it? We’ll see, Big B.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Daniel Westendorf @dwestendorf]

@staysaasy

[Adam McCrea @adamlogic]

Do you know someone new to the Ruby community that wants to attend RubyConf in July? I have an extra ticket to donate. DM me.