Mani Fazeli

Tech, politics, conservation. Views my own. VP of Product @Shopify. Prev: SVP Product @WaveHQ (acq @HRBlock), co-founder @Betterez (acq @Busbud) + @ContextLogic

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

@DKThomp @ben_golub @deanwball He's just saying the quiet part out loud.

[Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4]

every forecast had this quarter pegged as the rebound. ottawa projected +1.4%. rbc and td both said +1.7%. q4 was the dip, q1 was supposed to be the recovery.
we got roughly zero growth

yes, this is a technical recession but
the longer pattern is what really matters and what concerns me most

real gdp per person grew 0.6% in all of 2025. it fell in 2024. it fell in 2023.

we haven’t become richer per person in years, and it’s crazy to me that we keep acting surprised when our growth is stalled

we have fundamental productivity and investment problems that won’t fix themselves

I will sound like I’m beating a dead horse here, but worth repeating again… we know what we need to do to fix this:

1. make capital gains and corporate tax rates at least as good with the US, if not materially better. across all industries.

2. open up protected markets to competition (telecoms, finance, dairy, transportation etc)

3. rapidly reduce bureaucratic red tape and slow process across the board, not just for favoured projects or sectors

and finally, let’s all remind ourselves that we can just do things. every Canadian can be part of fixing this. we can collectively hustle - aim high

Canada can be the richest country in the world, if we choose to be

[1517 Fund @1517fund]

We live in an age of miracles.

3D printing and computational geometry make previously unimaginable geometries possible.

From: Kazuki Abe, Riichiro Tadakuma & Kenjiro Tadakuma's 2021 paper – ABENICS: Active Ball Joint Mechanism With Three-DoF Based on Spherical Gear Meshings

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

@Alex_Danco You can have a superb time in B, given you also have all of Latvia, and St. Petersburg at your disposal. More than one could do in 2 weeks!

But it's undeniable that by rank, E wins top spot, and D comes second.

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

AI now makes anyone a 7/10 engineer.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem.

As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)!

I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work.

It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results?

88ms => 1.5ms
150K allocs => ~500 allocs

Incredible right? Nope.

My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path.

This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput.

The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.

Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

@jmwind Welcome back from the gym. Looking swoll 😁

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

It's so disappointing to see Canadian regulators reach for nothing more than taxation as their only answer to growth and prosperity. Plot twist: it's not worked as well as they hoped over the past 20 years! So why do they keep the playbook!?!

[National Post @nationalpost]

CRTC to require online streamers to pay 15% of annual revenues to support Canadian content https://t.co/zHbQKBNjRa

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

@igrigorik I apologize for all those times I've made you flush cache to chat for "15 min" 😅

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

😂 this got me:

They’ll know that “when that hotline bling, it can only mean one thing” — they’re first in line, every time.

[Milan Malivuk @mmalivuk]

I'm the CRO of @Sync, Canada's end-to-end encrypted cloud storage provider, and Canada's Bill C-22 stands to cause immeasurable harm to the rights of Canadian citizens, and an industry that Canada should be leading in the technology sector.

This bill will cause an exodus of companies, investment, and talent and will not make Canadians any safer. This is a mass government surveillance bill that aims to make privacy companies and people agents of the state. Canada already has methods to collect data, through legal means and using warrants.

This goes against everything @Sync stands for and we will continue to fight against this bill and we are preparing additional measures should this misguided bill come to pass.

@mgeist @JCCFCanada @MelissaLMRogers @Tablesalt13

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

The price for the cheapest ticket to attend the World Cup final match in 2026 is seven times higher than it was in Qatar in 2022.

Let that sink in.

[Ilya Grigorik @igrigorik]

@tobi and I sat down to talk UCP and the art of protocol design. A couple of themes worth expanding on...

The hard part of good protocol design isn't the spec. It's the deep understanding of the problem you're solving and the humility to approach it at the right level. Commerce is infinitely complex and always evolving; it's hubris to pretend anyone can 'spec commerce'.

But wait — isn't UCP trying to do exactly that?

No, UCP doesn't 'spec commerce'. It models the rules of the bazaar that make commerce possible. The job of UCP is to build the boring parts: the small core of common and composable primitives, and the discovery and negotiation mechanisms that everything else runs on. Done right, this lets commerce thrive in the open, with merchants, agents, and buyers deciding what is advertised, supported, and adopted, not by fiat from a protocol committee. This is UCP. 👇🏻🧵

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

@ecom_scaler @igrigorik How many would you want? What page are you trying to build?

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

We just handed a commerce stack to EVERY developer in the world!!!

Catalog, cart, checkout, all through one protocol. Access to billions of products across the best brands on the internet.

@igrigorik’s got the full rundown👇 🤯

[Ilya Grigorik @igrigorik]

https://t.co/pp0ijCqVmj

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

@harleyf @rousseaukazi "... is real"

[Windscribe @windscribecom]

We won't be far behind if C-22 passes. In its current state, VPNs would almost certainly require us to log identifying user data.
Signal isn't headquartered in Canada so they can just shut off Canadian servers, but our HQ is. We pay an ungodly amount of taxes to this corrupt government, and in return they want to destroy the entire essence of our service to basically spy on its own citizens.
Not happening. We'll move HQ and take our taxes elsewhere.

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

Not to be forgotten. I know January felt like a decade ago, but this is simply not to be forgotten.

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

This woman lying here so peacefully is named Aida Aghili.
But her story has shaken millions of Iranians.

During the January 2026 uprising, the Islamic Republic killed so many people that hospitals ran out of space for the dead. Bodies were piled in hospital courtyards, and families were told to walk among the corpses to find their loved ones. Aida was 34 years old and was killed in Tehran.

Imagine a government murdering its own people in such numbers that mothers and fathers had to search through rows of bodies just to identify their children.

Aida became one face among thousands slaughtered by the mullahs but behind every body was a life, a family, a future stolen.

The media must not bury the stories of these people beneath headlines and politics.
💔

[Mani Fazeli @mcfazeli]

Love that we're finally speaking about her in the open. Well worth your read.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

https://t.co/5MJ7u1VHwf

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Figure taught two robots to make a bed together - fully autonomous

Honestly, they’re better at it than most humans

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

I promise this will be the best 20 min you spend today! Robotics: Endgame, the sequel to my last year's Sequoia AI Ascent talk, "Physical Turing Test". I laid out the roadmap for solving Physical AGI as a simple parallel to the LLM success story. Be a good scientist, copy homework ;)

And stay till the end, more easter eggs and predictions for your polymarket!

00:30 DGX-1 origin story at OpenAI, I was there in 2016 signing with Jensen and Elon. Heading to the Computer History Museum!
01:42 The Great Parallel
03:31 Robotics, the Endgame
03:39 Why VLAs fall short
04:32 Video world models as the 2nd pretraining paradigm
06:09 World Action Models (WAM)
07:46 Strategies for robot data collection and the FSD equivalent to physical data flywheel for robot manipulation
11:06 EgoScale and the Dexterity Scaling Law we discovered recently
14:00 Physical RL: bridging the last mile
15:39 DreamDojo: an end-to-end neural physics engine for scaling RL in silico
17:00 Civilizational Technology Tree and my predictions for the near future. Spoiler: it's closer than you think.

Thanks to my friends at Sequoia for inviting me back to AI Ascent this year! I had a blast! Last year's talk is attached in the thread if you missed it.