Peter Luba

SmartPass co-founder (acq). Angel investing. Forbes 30u30

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

https://t.co/srw9NQMkH2

[Julian Lehr @julianlehr]

New essay:
The case against conversational interfaces

• Natural language is a bottleneck
• The "pass me the butter" test
• AI as augmentation

↓

https://t.co/9TaJvDsyWZ

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

My favorite quote from Atomic Habits by James Clear:

"It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.
If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.
To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment."

[Isabel🌻 @isabelunraveled]

This tweet is evergreen; if you find a way to quietly chuckle at what usually bothers you, you can just glide through life towards what you love + want, instead of being constantly yanked off of your emotional axis, always expending excess energy just getting back to baseline.

[Peter Luba @peterluba]

@ycombinator @Fiber_AI LFG!!

[Brian | #7inParis #25inParis @stanpokey]

Amazing edit of 2025 grand slam winners

🎥: antonalfy (Instagram)

[Ridd 🤿 @ridd_design]

not auto-focusing inputs is the easiest way to tell you don't use the product you design

such an easy win that way too many products ignore 🙄

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

folding concepts, not removing them:

most products keep adding features horizontally – new tabs, new tools, new "things" – because it feels safer than consolidating. but that's how you get bloated interfaces nobody can navigate.

the better way: fold concepts that should've been the same all along. when you merge "issues" and "bugs" into "database with status property", you're not taking anything away. you're revealing the truth that was always there.

the trick is layers. people start with simple, familiar concepts. as they go deeper, they discover the power underneath. they're never overwhelmed because they only see what they're ready for.

the hard part is the transitions. people who loved the old "bugs" tab feel like you took their thing away, even though it's still there and more powerful. you need to guide them through the folds gently.

this is why single-purpose apps can't evolve. their whole identity is "we only do X". but reality is messy. concepts and roles start to blend. the future belongs to systems like Cursor and Notion that are infinitely malleable, so it could fold and unfold to match how you actually think.

[Siqi Chen @blader]

you know how sometimes you read text and it just stinks of ai?

wikipedia has a great list of tells: https://t.co/V6CiJXuW9j

i thought it'd be fun to put all of it into a system prompt to avoid having text sound AI generated - it works pretty well.

prompt in the reply below:

[Anthony Hobday @hobdaydesign]

I've noticed I'm a better designer when I review other people's work than when I work on my own. This is not a new observation. People have noticed that e.g. critiquing is easier than designing. That designers struggle to design their own portfolio.

[Arpan Gupta @arpangup]

When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed "dream sheet" with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams.

It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method.

Here's exactly what Shohei did 👇

1. First, some history.... The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese junior high track coach. He took a team ranked last out of 380 schools and, using his system, turned them into the #1 team in the region within 3 years. They held that top spot for the next 6 years.

2. You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick."

3. Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal.

Ohtani's 8 pillars were:
• Body
• Control
• Sharpness
• Speed
• Pitch Variance
• Personality
• Karma/Luck
• Mental Toughness

4. You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines.

This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan.

To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like:

• Showing Respect to Umpires
• Picking up trash
• Being positive
• Being someone people want to support

5. The method goes far deeper than just technical skills. It forces you to analyze your weaknesses and build confidence. It also has a highlight on service to others, emphasizing that humility and contributing to your community are essential for personal success.

6. The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

In 5 years from now, probably 95% of the tokens used by AI agents will be used on tasks that humans never did before.

I just met with about 30 enterprises across 2 days and a dinner, and some of the most interesting use-cases that keep coming up for AI agents are on bringing automated work to areas that the companies would not have been able to apply labor to before.

Most of the world hasn’t quite caught on to this point yet. We imagine AI as dropping into today’s workflows and just taking what we already do and making it more efficient by 20% or something. Yet most companies realize that most of the time they’re doing far less than they could because of the cost or limited capacity of talent.

This shows up in different ways across every industry. In real estate it’s ideas like being able to read and analyze every lease agreement for every trend and business opportunity possible. In life sciences it’s being able to rapidly do drug discovery or improve quality by looking through errors in data. In financial services it’s being able to look through all past deals and figure out better future monetization. In legal it’s being able to execute on contracts or legal work for previously unprofitable segments or projects.

And these are just the Box AI use cases that deal with documents and content. The same is going to be true in coding, where companies tackle software projects they wouldn’t have done before. Security of all systems and events they couldn’t get to. And so on.

If you are working on AI Agents right now, the big opportunity is to bring enterprises “work” for problems that they couldn’t do before because it was nearly impossible to afford or scale.

And if you’re deploying AI agents in an enterprise, consider what things you’d do more of (or differently) if the cost and speed of labor became 100X cheaper and faster. This is going to get you the real upside of automation.

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

If you’ve forwarded the Shopify ai memo to your team but don’t know what to do next, here are a few specific things you can do to generate ai momentum in an org that’s not there yet:

- simplify buying: get infosec and finance to give you a budget and fast tracked approval process today

- create your building-w-ai channel for sharing wins, fails, and asking for new tools

- create slack emojis for devin, cursor, Claude, ChatGPT and slam them anytime a workstream uses or needs AI

- tap a single engineer to be in charge of experimentation, adoption, and driving usage of tools

- connect your team to a peer company that’s a little ahead of them on AI for inspo and info
- ask “where is the prototype?” when given docs or figmas

- add “prompt”, “prototype link”, “run link” sections to your document templates

- run an exec training and half day hackathon

- run quarterly all company hackathons

- every time a doc is added to a specific folder, zap a AI generated summary to a slack channel

- headcount request form now has “this role has already been automated partially by…” section

- yes allow coding copilots during eng interviews but a rubric for evaluating them well

- AI fluency in career ladders and levels

- identify toil, solve it with AI. Don’t threaten the fun parts of jobs, take away the painful grind

- hire junior folks that don’t know better

[Mika Ben Amar @100o111]

i made a chrome extension that hides all website content except ads

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

after years watching PMs obsess over frameworks, i've never seen one actually predict product success.

every PM has been in this meeting:

"we validated this with 50 customers!"
*feature ships*
*crickets*

or worse:
"customers said they didn't want this"
*competitor ships it anyway*
*becomes their killer feature*

validation theater is real.

now my thinking goes:

some thrive in ad tech complexity. others fail miserably.
same excel in simpler B2B domains.

it wasn't skill difference.
it was domain-specific product taste.

here's what nobody tells you about product development:

customer-driven works when:
- problems are explicit
- solutions are incremental
- domain is well-understood

taste-driven is required when:
- problems are latent
- solutions create new behaviors
- domain is emerging

Frank Slootman (Snowflake CEO) nailed it:

supply-led products (iPhone, TikTok) = taste
demand-inspired products (most B2B) = customer validation

most products need both.
most PMs only know how to do one.

Amazon doesn't just do "customer obsession."

they have master evaluators in PR/FAQ meetings who spread taste through osmosis.

these aren't frameworks.
they're apprenticeships in judgment.

Apple's approach is even more brutal:

hierarchical demo reviews where you earn your spot through proven taste.

Jobs didn't teach frameworks.
he debugged judgment through thousands of micro-decisions.

Pixar's braintrust as well:

experienced storytellers debug scripts together.
no voting. no consensus.
just collective taste, developed over decades.

so my rule now:

in simple domains, follow the customer.
in complex domains, develop taste.

most of us operate in the messy middle where both matter.

for IC PMs: start building domain-specific judgment.

pick projects where you can develop taste:
- consumer features over internal tools
- 0→1 over optimization
- emerging spaces over mature markets

for PM leaders:

stop asking "did you validate this?"
start asking "what's your conviction & why?"

build taste in your team through:
- detailed product reviews
- decision documentation
- apprenticeship, not process

companies that win build institutional taste.

it's not about the founder's vision.
it's about scaling judgment through deliberate practice.

validation gives you permission to build.
taste tells you what's worth building.

most PMs have one. winners develop both.

[Tuomas Artman @artman]

I'm sorry, but macOS Tahoe just looks stupid. I hope it's just a "everything new is bad" thing and I'll get used to it.
But something tells me that its not, and I'll be hating the the inset sidebar, the wasted space and the OMG roundness of it all for a very, very long time.

[Acre @Acre108]

There is no word in English that means someone is 30% sure something will happen

[Cedar You @our_decay]

I like exercise names like “Romanian deadlift” or “Bulgarian split squat.” The addition of an Eastern European country adds a certain gravitas. I’m gonna invent something called the “Moldovan pushup”

[seth @sethsetse]

what if we just connected SF to New York?

[Peter Luba @peterluba]

@ycombinator @tryfrizzle @abhaygupta_eth 👏 Let's go