Tarquin Hellier

Problem solver, family guy, swimmer, ex-runner & product guy

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.

[Oliver Cookson @olivercookson]

Everyone says they back people.
Everyone says they lead by example.
Everyone says they want to develop talent.
Those words mean very little unless there is evidence behind them.

I was leading this way long before I had read a leadership book.
It was not a management technique.
It was simply how I operated.

A young man called Neil joined Myprotein as a customer service agent.
He was quiet, lacked confidence and was still rough around the edges.
But there was something about him that stood out to me.

We had hundreds of employees by then, but I always made a point of speaking to people across the business.
I wanted to understand who cared, who was learning and who had more potential than their current role suggested.

I spoke to his manager and said that I thought Neil was sharp.
She agreed that he was doing well.
I thought there was far more in him.

So I watched him.
I encouraged him, challenged him and gave him more responsibility.

He worked late when it mattered.
He wanted to learn.
He accepted feedback.
He kept improving.

Eventually, I told his manager that Neil was leaving customer service and coming to work directly with me.
I wanted him to become the country manager for a new European launch.

His manager did not think he was ready.
Neil did not think he was ready either.
I did.

He took the opportunity and flourished.
Within the senior management team, he became known as a rising star.
He continued progressing through the business and eventually became CEO of Myprotein within the wider group.
Other leaders eventually saw the same potential in him that I had seen years earlier.

That story captures a large part of how I lead.
Talent does not always arrive polished, confident or carrying the right title.
Sometimes it is quiet.
Sometimes it is inexperienced.
Sometimes the person cannot yet see it in themselves.

The role of a leader is not only to manage people who are already proven.
It is to recognise potential early, create opportunities and back people before the outcome is obvious.

I will go a very long way for people who care, keep learning, take ownership and pull in the same direction.
But leadership is not endless patience.
I am equally willing to remove people who resist ownership, reject feedback or continually pull the team in the opposite direction.
Backing the right people and moving on from the wrong people are part of the same responsibility.

Neil started in customer service and reached the top of the business.
That is what can happen when potential, effort and opportunity meet.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The best predictor of success for tech companies, at every stage from during the YC batch to public company with billions in revenue, is the rate of shipping new stuff.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[Danny Wallace @dannywallace]

What we crave is an old-school government so boring no-one knows their names. Competent, professional.
But we're led by a story-hungry media desperate for new drama for sponsored podcasts.
If they had their way we'd have a new PM every month, each worse than the last.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

In the aftermath of WW2, Hong Kong was a bombed-out British colony of 600,000 refugees, with no natural resources and a per capita income lower than many African nations. But by the 1980s it had become one of the richest places on earth. The man most responsible was John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971.
Cowperthwaite refused to plan the economy. He cut taxes to a flat 15 %, scrapped tariffs and subsidies, rejected industrial policy, and even stopped collecting detailed economic statistics - lest civil servants use the numbers to meddle. “I did very little”, he said. “All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might have been done.”
Government spending stayed below 15 % of GDP. Markets, not ministers, decided what to produce. The result was explosive growth: poverty collapsed, skyscrapers rose, and Hong Kong’s income overtook Britain’s.
Today, most Western governments still strangle their economies with taxes and regulations, ignoring the lesson Hong Kong proved: the surest path to prosperity is to get out of the way.

[Allen Holub. https://linkedIn.com/in/allenholub @allenholub]

In my experience, the vast majority of waste in a software shop is time spent building things nobody wants on top of overly complex architectures that solve problems we don't have. Focus on that. Put solving your customer's actual (not imagined) problems first. And do exactly that—no bells and whistles; no futureproofing (select a change-friendly architecture instead). Forcing AI onto a customer who doesn't want it (because it doesn't solve a real or critical problem for them) is worse than waste. It drives people away. Sitting around imagining how AI can "help" your customers without understanding their specific problems is just expensive arrogance.

[Tarquin Hellier @tarquinhellier]

@opodo what joke. The prime subscription is the worst money you can spend. Impossibel to cancel and no refund even 1 hr after auto renewal #opodoscam

[Handre @Handre]

LASIK eye surgery cost $2,200 per eye in 2000. Today it's around $1,000 per eye despite 24 years of inflation. Meanwhile, an MRI that cost $1,200 in 2000 now costs $3,000+. The difference? LASIK operates in a free market with no insurance interference and minimal regulation.

When patients pay directly, providers must compete on price and quality. LASIK clinics advertise prices, offer financing, and constantly improve technology to attract customers. Compare this to hospital procedures where prices are hidden, patients never see bills, and insurance companies negotiate opaque rates that somehow always increase faster than inflation.

Cosmetic surgery follows the same pattern. Breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, and other elective procedures have become more affordable and safer over decades. Surgeons invest in better techniques and equipment because they must satisfy paying customers, not insurance bureaucrats or hospital administrators focused on maximizing reimbursements.

The lesson is clear: remove third-party payment systems and excessive regulation, and you get Austrian economics in action. Prices fall, quality rises, and innovation accelerates. Healthcare costs aren't rising because of aging populations or new technology—they're rising because we've destroyed the price mechanism that makes markets work.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding:

1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now

2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend

3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets

4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time

5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users

6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists

7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees.

8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing

9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A

10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros

i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings

the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start

you don't

[Tarquin Hellier @tarquinhellier]

@JamesMontemagno @code Good work. When you say UI refinement, do you mean design or html/css? Or both

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

This is the best explanation I have heard of how AI is impacting the software landscape. Not just the stocks, but the actual fundamentals of the businesses underneath

From AI Czar David Sacks himself

"You take a product like Salesforce that deals with all your customer contracts and revenue. You are not going to replace that with code that has been spit out of a coding assistant that has not been fully vetted

Think about how many bug reports on Salesforce's code base over the last 25 years. Maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises

The idea that you are just going to rip out that system and replace with code that has been probabilistically generated by an AI engine yesterday, with a small team to maintain it internally, just does not seem realistic to me"

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

Tom Brady on not being mastered by your circumstances:

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

The problem with a “single stack-ranked list” is comparing incomparable items (e.g. “increase sales or prevent cancellation?).

But how else to decide what to execute next? How do you select between important but incomparable projects?

This is my way:

https://t.co/0yumIUSnwg

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

Reducing a strategy to one page is powerful because it forces you to be clear and focused.

If you can't get it on one page, it's not clear in your own head.

And won’t be clear to anyone else either.

https://t.co/eyxNd8zx3m

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇨🇳 Chinese EVs have been taking the world by storm, whether you like it or not

When I look around here on the street in China I try recognize the car brands and I see so many brands I don't know

One brand I see a lot is LI, but also BYD, Zeekr and XPeng

Apparently there's now 129 (!) EV brands in China producing cars, which kinda shows the massive scale of the EV boom here

There's a real historical parallel here with the US a hundred years ago, where there were about 2,000 new American car companies in America. Of course most failed, and only a few remained

The same is predicted for China, where only 15 EV brands are predicted to survive in a decade, so a real battle is going down here now to see who will win

One interesting thing is that there is one American brand that is remarkably present here, and that's Tesla, you see Teslas everywhere, the Tesla Y often holds the top spot for most cars sold in China, and you see Tesla superchargers here a lot

What's also interesting is that where Elon Musk gets so much hatred in the West (not from me), in China he's revered as a hero. Elon is a high IQ engineer and successful entrepreneur. And it's a real artefact of the culture that Chinese respect that kind of person while in the West if you're rich, successful and smart you're seen as a bad person by at least half of society. I think that says a lot about our society and how we educate people in the West and we should really reconsider that. Engineering and entrepreneurship are the key stones of a functioning society. Engineering invents new things and entrepreneurs turn those inventions into businesses that bring them to people. Without both, you don't have jobs, money, and well, prosperity! Chinese culture seems to understand this well, which is why they like Elon Musk and still drive Teslas as one of the few Western cars here.

Anyway to continue, in this video I visited the Huawei store and I have to add a correction, because due to new Chinese regulation that requires car brands to fully own their manufacturing, Huawei has "officially" separated their car business, but in fact they still fully design the car, sell the car, and get most of the profit from it. They just can't call it a Huawei car anymore

Huawei is interesting because they produce everything, phones, tablets, watches, laptops, and, well indirectly, EV cars too

A similar brand is Xiaomi, who actually do own the manufacturing of their EV, and their EV is one of the fastest growing in sales in China

It's a real slap in the face for the West I feel that Apple, the creator of the iPhone, wasn't able to produce a car and cancelled their car project, when many of the Chinese phone companies are producing their own cars now with relative ease

Of course the iPhone is produced in China, and manufacturing is in China, so being closer to the manufacturing physically, it must have been easier to design a car, than try to do it remotely from Apple's office in Cupertino

But it does seem significant that we couldn't do this

While I'm writing this the news comes in that Germany's car and greater manufacturing industry is tanking, their energy costs have gone up 2-3x due cutting off the Russian gas, and they've simply become too expensive overnight

Germany's car industry, the historical center of car production in the world with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Volkswagen, has started laying off 100,000+ employees and scaling down their production due to declining sales, which are a direct result of the competition from China offering cheaper, more advanced EVs with better software than the Germans

And I mean you can feel it, I walk around in EV car stores here and the cars look great, the interior looks modern, the software is miles ahead of the clunky interfaces of German cars, most EVs here have a little cute robot on the dashboard that you talk to, so you never have to touch the screen anymore to do anything, like "switch on the wipers" or "route me to my hotel" etc. The EVs here honestly do not feel cheap, they're well built and comfortable

Europe has tried to stop the rise of the Chinese EVs in the European market with a 45% tariff, but even with that tariffs, many Europeans still prefer to buy Chinese EVs over others, and they're still cheaper than the German cars! The US went further with a 100% tarrif, and that stopped them from being sold mostly in the US because it's not profitable anymore for the Chinese

One thing I have to add which you probably know is that the Chinese government does heavily subsidize their EV industry (with about $230B+ in the last decade), it's not a secret and their subsidies do not compare to the ones the US and EU provide for their industries, which gives Chinese EV companies the (unfair) advantage to produce them at a discount and sell them abroad cheaper, which is exactly why the EU and US put tariffs on them

Even with the subsidies, the engineering and production and software is impressive and feels very modern, I'm a Tesla fan, own a 2025 Tesla Y, but the Chinese EVs feel and look more modern to me. They usually have more screens, more features etc. There's real innovation happening here it feels like

And that's kinda the conclusion you get being in China with every industry, they've already by far departed from being cheap clones of Western products, they're now at the next stage of adding their own features and ideas, which is what we always criticize Chinese on "they're not creative", well they are creative, they just start from the point where Western products are now, and then start innovating from there (instead of starting from scratch fully, I mean, why would they?)

If you ask Grok how does the future of the Western car industry look like, especially the European/German ones, it's pessimistic. The only positive it can find is that maybe European brands can focus on premium and exclusivity. Like they do with Hermes hand bags, but then do the same with cars. BMW and Mercedes-Benz are of course luxury brands and they could survive by remaining premium and make money that way. But the regular middle and low end of car production in Europe (and America?) will most probably be wiped out and replaced by the Chinese I think

That is if the Americans and Europeans will keep allowing them into their markets

But even if they don't, the Chinese are happily going to the rest of the world like South America, the Middle East or the rest of Asia where you see BYDs literally everywhere

As a European this does feel bittersweet, but then again we've all been shouting from the roof tops for years that this would happen if you didn't create a pro-business climate where startups would sprout, so now it's kinda "I told you so"

[BG (Bryant Garvin) @BryantGarvin]

There’s a lot of noise right now about AI “transforming ecommerce.”

Every week someone posts some hot take:

“AI is already changing how people shop.”
“Chat is the new Google”

And while I agree with the suggestions Dave gave on how to prepare for it...

I wanted to see what the actual numbers say... NOT THE VIBES

So we pulled the full dataset across Triple Whale’s 50,000+ stores.

Here’s the year-to-date picture (Jan 1 → end of last week):

617.8M total orders
573.9K AI-related orders
= 0.09% of all orders

So yes… AI is growing.
But in the larger context of ecommerce, the share is still microscopic.

That’s the hype vs. reality moment.

But the REAL STORY is what happens when you zoom into the growth curve.

AI-attributed orders went vertical this year.
Early months were quiet… (Only 1226 orders the first week of January 0.01%) THEN the line bent sharply upward.

This is one of the steepest adoption curves I've seen across any new behavior in ecommerce

By last week it was 28k orders a week or 0.17% of all orders tracked on Triple Whale

And the dominance is absolute:

ChatGPT drives ~96% of all AI-influenced orders.
It’s not even a race really...
It’s ChatGPT… then everyone else still at the starting line.

The only other one with any really volume is Perplexity with 3% of the share of orders

So what’s actually happening?

AI isn’t replacing search channels.
It’s creating a new one.

AI as a recommendation layer.
AI as a product discovery funnel.

Brands aren’t going to see massive revenue ... yet because the volume isn’t there.
But the behavior is forming.
The curve is bending.
And the acceleration is unmistakable and exponential.

This is what the “beginning of something big” actually looks like.

Not domination.
Not replacement.
Just a small, fast-growing slice that compounds until one day it’s not small anymore.

We’ll keep digging into this across 50k+ brands, but for now the takeaway is simple:

AI isn’t transforming ecommerce today…
But it’s laying the track for the next transformation.
And the signals are already here if you know where to look.

[Allen Holub. https://linkedIn.com/in/allenholub @allenholub]

Bear in mind that even after the dot-com bubble burst, we were still making websites. In fact, after the outsource-to-foreign-climes madness had worn off, wages were at a premium because a lot of people had left the industry in the interim, and the people who were left could ask for the stars. I expect the same to happen with AI. LLMs are an interesting and useful technology that's not about to disappear. There will be good-paying jobs for people who know how to wrangle that tech.

The bubble, however, is all about trying to make that tech appear better than it actually is through brute force. No number of GPUs and no number of patched-on kluges that hide specific limitations (like the number of r's in "raspberry") can correct fundamental limitations in the underlying theory and thinking, however. Only fundamental research can do that, and that research will happen (and is now happening), though given the current US government's hatred of education and research, probably in other countries.

But… This is not the programmer apocalypse that some claim, but a lot of investors in the brute-force strategy being pursued by outfits like OpenAI will not be very happy in a year or so. That money will simply evaporate, and it will be an economic catastrophe. However, companies will start hiring again simply because work needs to get done, and they can't get that work done cost-effectively with vibe coding and no people. They'll have to pay through the nose for those programmers, but that's just poetic justice. It's fine by me.

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

“With AI, we won’t have to be good writers!”

Just the opposite. With “prompts” as a primary UI, we will have to be extremely clear explainers: what we want, how we want it, what “good” looks like, …

And to write for humans, we’ll have to be better than AI to win attention.

[Tarquin Hellier @tarquinhellier]

@olivercookson @netflix 100%, I don't know why the streaming services don't get behind more specificity. Give the user what they want, which isn't necessarily the latest release. Sometimes you want to go deep and stay there for some time!