saif

Cofounder & CTO @ NiaHealth.
Making longevity accessible.

[saif @psyf01]

@karrisaarinen @linear Fantastic ship!

[saif @psyf01]

I really appreciate how consistently thoughtful Karri has been in posting. It shows in linear.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

In grindmaxxing there are a couple of questions inside it.

First question is that whether you should do it or not, and to what level. I don’t think there is one right answer because it is situational and plays into the dynamics of the market.

Most startups the mode is either finding PMF or scaling that.

PMF is about building, talking to customers and learning from those activities. There is some level of grind involved but I think the risk of too much grind and you don't internalize the learnings enough to correct the path. The speed makes you blind.

Then at scaling, there can be grind because the business is booming, but goal should be finding leverage to scale effectively. With leadership, hiring, with processes, software, anything.

Then there can be higher urgency when you are in some landgrab moment where there is real advantage in being first. Many will over-index on being the first, often it doesn't matter the way you think it would. It matters when you learn from it, because you gain advantage being the first to learn, not because you somehow automatically capture the market and can keep it. Often in reality doesn't really matter much if someone comes later with lot better product or experience. Customer will gravitate to the better solution, not to the solution that was first.

And I think you can be fast in different ways.

You can be very fast but have a very inefficient model. Or you can have a very efficient model and use less effort to the get same speed. The latter will might be slower at first, but will be more compounding and more scalable in long run.

For example in the beginning, you might be onboarding every customer. But eventually you have to realize it probably won’t scale, your and your team's time is not leveraged well, you don't learn much from repeating that over and over. You have to find leverage from the product, or some other solution that doesn’t require as many human hours.

So many startups and teams do have to work a lot and intensively. But there will always be a tradeoff to consider. Teams will burn out. Mistakes will happen. Bad decisions will be made. A lot of the work might be wasteful if the team never stops to consider.

Sometimes it is not an option. You have to grind through it. I get that. But you as a founder can still choose the culture, the values, the operating principles. Is it based on grind, or is it based on something else? Grind is not always optional, but culture built around grind is.

--
And second questions which the most interesting part to me, which is always optional, if you make the grind as part of the narrative and the brand.

Does the grind narrative actually make your brand better or more valuable for customers? I’d argue only a few businesses benefit from the grind narrative. Most probably do not.

For example, when I joined Coinbase early, we knew that trust was the most important thing. We had to be secure and project stability and trust. That was what I was also trying to do with design. The team also did it on the legal side by trying to be the trusted option operating from the US instead of the Caymans or China or somewhere else (many of those are now gone).

In the aspect of trust, in domains where you want high trust and stability, like banking, security, databases, payments, insurance, infrastructure, etc., the grindmaxxing narrative doesn’t make me trust the vendor more. It makes me trust it less.

Because it makes me think about the mistakes that might eventually happen, or the risk complete implosion of the vendor.

I always evaluate vendors on their culture and brand. I want my vendors trustworthy and operating values that provide stability. We’ve picked vendors over others because we sensed stability and a kind of unhurried expertise. And often we have picked right.

I don’t want to buy vendors and then have them create problems for us, or force us to find another vendor a couple years later.

When you work in a high-trust domain and sell to businesses, the better story is almost how stable and boring your operations are. I want people operating in healthy way, making solid decisions, focusing on operational excellence not building cafes, sleeping at the office or other various side quests.

[saif @psyf01]

Never noticed because composer 2.5 is THAT good

[Dylan Field @zoink]

Opus 4.8 is a very strange model. Clearly Anthropic tried to improve honesty, which is commendable. However, the model's curiosity (already worse in 4.7) degraded further. Result is a judgmental personality + sycophancy + sooo much hedging. Basically the opposite of Opus 3.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

Under appreciated

[saif @psyf01]

Gone through exact same pattern at Nia. Usually we use something off the shelf to ship fast, run into annoying problems, "k I'll make it myself"

Only time we've been burnt bad is when we were convinced of the need to build in-house before the 'hack it together and get signal' phase

Different scales and industry ofc, but same pattern!

Almost have to "earn the right" to diy

[saif @psyf01]

This is fascinating

[Jake @JustJake]

@morajabi Not really

The only time we’ve regretted it is when we’ve done it without being first burned by an existing tool

This is just the circle of vertical integration life

[saif @psyf01]

@adamdotdev Basically seeing the same

[Fahd Ananta @fahdananta]

The only thing worse than a problem is a guy doing nothing but complaining about it

[Matt Margolis @ItsMattsLaw]

tort law exam ass case

[saif @psyf01]

I gotta try this. Novel idea.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

This is brilliant.

'I write a paragraph about why I should take a meeting.'

If you should take the meeting it's easy to do, but if you start writing and you're like “I don’t want to do this,” then the meeting is a waste of time.

"For the things that I think are really important when I’m like, “I got to write that paragraph, I could write 20 pages. It's easy”

A lot of otherwise smart people, don't spend enough time thinking about what they're working on.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

https://t.co/GJKYsvPZye

[saif @psyf01]

@scottastevenson This is way more dangerous

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Become the person who makes vague problems concrete, concrete problems tractable, and tractable problems solved.

[Fabian S. @fabianschmid_09]

delusionmaxx. always always always be optimistic. not gonna fucking make it otherwise.

[saif @psyf01]

@scottastevenson I struggle with this one as an amateur builder.

Assuming ypu don't have taste, the best thing you can do is ship more and observe. Which means you need to ship faster if you can sustainably do so.

What am I missing?

[saif @psyf01]

Hard earned lessons

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

At every level of every profession there are two types of people:

1. Those who got there due to their craft
2. Those who got there due to social mimicry and manoevring

Paradoxically, it gets *harder* to tell the difference the higher up you get, because the chameleons get so good at always saying the same things that the real experts do.

They become like an LLM trained on the responses of experts, by being in rooms filled with experts.

IMHO the hardest part of hiring and partner selection is learning the subtle differences between real mastery and surface level mimicry at higher and higher levels of play.

It’s an arms race, because as soon as the mimics learn that you are going to test for X, they learn how to say X.

So you need to build a secret book of subtle signals that helps you differentiate between real value and mimicked value.

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

“Being able to consistently suffer for long periods is arguably one of the deepest moats”

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

Many people just give up when their context window gets overwhelmed.

If you can handle large amounts of information coming at you from many directions, it’s actually very rare to be able to deal with that well.

You need to wire your brain to do one of two things:

1. Compress context to fit in your window constantly (lossless)
2. Filter and use lossy compression constantly, enabling you to discard a lot of information

These are skills that impact the core of how you think and process information. They can be learned but it takes a lot of practice.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

This advice is generally right, but for any individual founder the timing of a launch depends on their market: its maturity, dynamics, risk tolerance, and frankly, noise.

Today it’s easy to make a professional-looking MVP quickly with AI. That also means people have less time, interest or patience for trying 100 different half-formed products.

You need to launch with a point of view. Something that resonates. Then build enough product to prove that point.
Where that bar is depends entirely on the company and category.

When it’s the last time you’re seen Snap type company being crated? Snap was founded in 2011 when mobile was really taking off. I’d wager most of consumer apps are form that era and we actually hav seen very many attempts but very few breakthroughs.

[saif @psyf01]

@scottastevenson Pssst kid you wanna see my ARR?