@benhylak exactly. the future of personal software isn’t everyone becoming a builder. it’s software that quietly understands the shape of your actual life.
for families, that means fewer apps, less coordination, and more things just getting handled.
AI can now make you a great parent.
Introducing Ollie: the world’s first AI family assistant that manages your family life better than any human.
Here’s how it works:
@0xCharlota Heck yes! This is why we created @heyollieai. AI brings out complicated emotions, for sure, but it can also make our lives easier. As women, we need to jump in and help define how it's built and used. Not tear each other down.
someone yesterday asked me what i thought high agency meant. i think it’s usually some unholy combination of:
- resourcefulness
- relentlessness
- resilience
this has always been rare, but rn it feels borderline unfair. the world has never had more leverage just sitting around waiting for one person stubborn enough to use it.
@signulll people underestimate how much massive consumer distribution constrains product direction. seen it firsthand at snap with 800m — it’s a feature and a tax.
We get messages like this from users every day.
And it never gets old.
The best feedback isn’t that the product feels cool.
It’s hearing that it genuinely makes everyday life easier for families.
The future of family support is AI that actually helps families.
Busy families from leading companies are already using Ollie AI to reduce the everyday mental load of family life.
Get started with Ollie today 👉 https://t.co/xmgUMvH5It
Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job.
There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making.
I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer.
So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life.
The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.
And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them.
- #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs
prediction re the end of spreadsheets
AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness.
think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row.
The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero.
this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure.
The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.
A big new consumer category will be an AI house manager for the entire family
Can live in a group chat and can handle tasks like:
- Manage groceries
- Plug into home security
- Scheduling maintenance & cleaning
- Smart home controls and automations
Who's building this?
people always ask why i care so much about culture… why i read about it, write about it, post about it.
it’s very simple: it’s the only layer that actually matters.
everything else… tech, markets, relationships, politics is just emergent behavior stacked on top. they’re lagging indicators of cultural mood.
you can’t build, invest, lead, or even live coherently if you don’t feel what people want, fear, love, imitate, & aspire to right now.
if you’re a ceo, vp, or vc, your only real job is reading people, zeitgeist, & timing. everything else is paperwork.