Edo van Royen

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

A new meta-analysis on the impact of goal setting on performance found:

1. Process goals had a large effect on performance
2. Performance goals had a moderate effect
3. Outcome goals had a negligible effect

[Naval @naval]

Good Products are Opinionated.

“Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things.

Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.

If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.

@Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.

You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google.

Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do.

You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it.

ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer.
It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer.

So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough.

To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.

In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.

In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”

[Edo van Royen @edo]

😂

[Beanie👾 @CoCoKruszynski]

Elon Musk @elonmusk on the need to lean in the direction of sustainable energy:

“The reality of the whole climate change thing is that, you know, you've just had sort of people who say it doesn't exist at all, and then people who say... the world is going to be underwater in five years. And obviously neither of those two positions are true.

At some point, if you continue to take billions, eventually trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer it to the atmosphere and oceans, so you transfer it from deep underground into the surface cycle, you will change the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans.

And the reality is that, in my opinion, is that we've got at least 50 years before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've got 500 years, but we've probably got, you know, 50. It's not five years.

So really, the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action, which is to lean in the direction of sustainable energy.
And lean in the direction of solar and sort of a solar battery future, and generally have the rules of the system lean in that direction. I don't think we need massive subsidies. But then we also shouldn't have massive subsidies for the oil and gas industry.”

[Edo van Royen @edo]

@edoweb3 @HYPEconomist $$$$$

[Edo van Royen @edo]

@vanlancker @untitleddotnew Would love to read it! In the process of naming now

[DHH @dhh]

There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the work that actually means something to you.

I feel this acutely as someone responsible to employees, customers, followers, and readers. I could do nothing all day but check up on projects, people, and posts, but my brain would quickly check out if it was just doing that.

So quite frequently, I just don't. Don't check in, don't check up, and instead dive into the work that checks my own intellectual boxes. Programming for the love of it. Experimenting for the hell of it. Researching for the fun of it.

In another age, I might have been tempted to apologize for such privilege, but screw that. Privilege is wonderful. You should do your best to earn more of it. Even if you have to carve it out of the bare rocks around you.

Ironically, the best way to do that is also to choose to always pay yourself first, however little at first. By solving your own problems, tickling your own interests, chasing your own curiosity. That's where you'll find the motivation to elevate your talent. To turn interest into competency.

And once you've developed some competency, you'll be rewarded with more privilege to build it further. This is the virtuous circle of merit.There'll always be an endless list of work that could be done.

You'll never get through it all and onto your own priorities, if you continue to put them at the bottom.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

This video is literally 50 entrepreneurs giving you an MBA in 18 minutes:

[Acyn @Acyn]

OBAMA: It's fair to say that 80% of the world's problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won't let go. They build pyramids, and they put their names on everything. They get very anxious about it.

[DHH @dhh]

To be a successful founder, you have to believe that what you're working on is going to work — despite knowing it probably won't! That sounds like an oxymoron, but it's really not. Believing that what you're building is going to work is an essential component of coming to work with the energy, fortitude, and determination it's going to require to even have a shot. Knowing it probably won't is accepting the odds of that shot.

It's simply the reality that most things in business don't work out. At least not in the long run. Most businesses fail. If not right away, then eventually. Yet the world economy is full of entrepreneurs who try anyway. Not because they don't know the odds, but because they've chosen to believe they're special.

The best way to balance these opposing points — the conviction that you'll make it work, the knowledge that it probably won't — is to do all your work in a manner that'll make you proud either way. If it doesn't work, you still made something you wouldn't be ashamed to put your name on. And if it does work, you'll beam with pride from making it on the basis of something solid.

The deep regret from trying and failing only truly hits when you look in the mirror and see Dostoevsky staring back at you with this punch to the gut: "Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing." Oof.

Believe it's going to work.
Build it in a way that makes you proud to sign it.
Base your worth on a human on something greater than a business outcome.

[Edo van Royen @edo]

@PrajwalTomar_ IDK man, I tried this approach, but all the extra context just makes the AI confused. And it's so much maintenance too, doesn't seem like the way RN

[Alex Reibman 🖇️ @AlexReibman]

My co-founder was spending 20+ hours per week handling sales calls

So I built an AI clone of @adamsilverman to replace him

- @elevenlabs + @tavus to create an interactive replica that asks questions related to the deal
- o3 agent reads the transcript and finds identifies key qualification points
- Leads get uploaded to our CRM and every interaction gets saved in @AgentOpsAI

The tool took me less than a day to build at the @elevenlabs hackathon. Automate the boring stuff with agents. DM/comment for access

[Edo van Royen @edo]

Wonderful

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

people actually greet LLM’s, say thanks after responses and say goodbye when done with conversations…

This is what they’re talking to.

[Edo van Royen @edo]

wow, so cool. Where r we headed? 😆

[Eddy Xu @eddybuild]

built an ai that sees 5 moves ahead in any conversation and tells you the optimal thing to say

[Edo van Royen @edo]

College must be a weird place RN

[signüll @signulll]

was walking around a college campus recently & holy f, most of the students are being groomed for a world that’s on the brink of vanishing.

it’s like we are teaching ppl how to farm with oxen in the middle of an industrial revolution.

[Aaron @aaronp613]

Apple's Machine Learning Research team just gave us our first look at the possible upcoming tabletop robot which was reported by @markgurman

[Coldplay United Kingdom @ColdplayUK_]

Chris Martin x Jacob Collier - Fix You [Live at the O2] | December 9th. 2024

[Edo van Royen @edo]

😂

[anton @abacaj]

Ok Claude, please use DeepSeek-r1 to build me a billion dollar SaaS. Make no mistakes

[Edo van Royen @edo]

🥲