Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana

Product designer, aspiring chef and carpenter.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

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.

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

@HarryStebbings @nico_laqua For liability insurance? 😂😂😂

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

Someone can certainly *make* a billion dollars. That’s not the same thing as earning.

Growing fast and disrupting markets also often means chasing and wielding market power, political influence, and scale.

Take Airbnb. They heavily lobby politicians against passing housing laws to protect working class residents because it’s bad for their business model.

Airbnb could not exist at its current scale and size without the housing market destabilizations, displacements, and exploits that are supercharging the evictions of working people everywhere from Puerto Rico to Jackson Hole.

Now young people are planning for a future where they will never be able to afford to own a home while others have 20 and live off renting it out to them at extortionate rates with zero protections. Yes, a tiny amount of people can make billions of dollars doing that. And millions of everyday Americans are bearing the cost.

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

@Jacobtheclipper Clippers fans talking about Bron should and should t do is hilarious. Yall a bunch of literal losers.

[Rasmus Andersson @rsms]

This is really neat but it’s not a design tool as much as it’s a design _production_ tool.

The practice of design is mostly about what comes before production.

There’s no doubt in my mind that all parts of software production will become automated very soon. Writing code, making web pages, putting pieces of a design system together etc.

And that’s fine. I think few people actually enjoy this kind of production work. Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our precious time in life on what is more meaningful?!

At the core, the practice of design is methodical; like architecture, not like art. In a nutshell: We find constraints, form comprehension of the whole and propose solutions that honor those constraints. First after that do we enter some form of production phase, usually prototypes first, learn about some constraints that were hidden before, loop back, prototype and then build the production-grade “final” artifact.

These last few tasks are quickly losing value because AI tools can do it much faster (not yet better though) than humans. It’s simply just what has the best RoI for a business.

Some companies and individuals will continue to spend human time on certain parts of the “production line” as a market differentiator, but it will cost them a relatively high price compared to competitors.

Anyhow, I still haven’t seen a tool better than Figma that supports the actually-interesting part of the design process.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma focused their products on that, maybe separating “products for production” of “products for ideation & exploration.” The latter would obviously still leverage AI, but not to do the work for me but rather to support my efforts the way a therapist helps me live a better life (not living my life for me.)

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

https://t.co/srw9NQMkH2

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

@AnaKasparian @AOC Ah yes, cuz you’re effecting real change screaming nonsense on YouTube everyday. Bravo 👏🏿

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

@patrickc @sarthakgh @conor64 I love that SV tech founders think they’re experts at everything because they were really successful and building billion dollar tech companies.

[Jordan Singer @jsngr]

design seems to be viewed as dispensable in this very moment

but the reality that will become clear, as time has shown, is that design is what will make you rise above the rest

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

@eringriffith I do also think the companies that willfully looked away at "obvious" red flags also have themselves to blame in all this.

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

Tech startups, particularly those in SV, have gotten so used to stretching and bending the truth for decades, that some have taken to a point not discernible in anyway to outright lying.

[erin griffith @eringriffith]

A detailed and brutal look at the tactics of buzzy AI compliance startup Delve

"Delve built a machine designed to make clients complicit without their knowledge, to manufacture plausible deniability while producing exactly the opposite."

https://t.co/eiicE64eGr

[Steven Beschloss @StevenBeschloss]

No matter how long I live after we get through this dark chapter, I will never get over the immorality, the amorality, the corruption, the criminality and the cruelty in service to one of the worst humans to ever walk the earth.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war.  Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace.

I am focused on making sure that every New Yorker is safe. I have been in contact with our Police Commissioner and emergency management officials. We are taking proactive steps, including increasing coordination across agencies and enhancing patrols of sensitive locations out of an abundance of caution.

Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

One of the most shamelessly fraudulent presidential campaigns in American history:

[🧸ྀི @cinnamnlover]

daily reminder you can be both against the iranian regime and usa/israel bombings

[BRICS News @BRICSinfo]

JUST IN: 🇮🇷🇺🇳 Iran calls on the United Nations to hold emergency meeting.

"If the international community does not respond to the aggression, it will be the end of international institutions."

[jeremy scahill @jeremyscahill]

The term “preemptive” is pure propaganda. The U.S. once again used the veneer of negotiations as a cover to bomb Iran. Tehran had just offered terms that went far beyond the 2015 nuclear deal. What was preempted was diplomacy. The same propaganda tactics used in 2003 Iraq war.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Bombing Iran in the middle of negotiations, while starving Cuba, while genociding Palestinians, while threatening to invade Greenland… the US and Israel are the single greatest threat to humanity and it’s not even close. We are all forced to live in the nightmare they create.

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.”

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

https://t.co/Gg7Zb09IMR

[Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana @juwiling]

@AnthropicAI PR team absolutely crushing it!

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

https://t.co/Gg7Zb09IMR