Taylor Cottrell

Design @shop • NYC

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

@stevelauda_ Have experienced this over the last 12 months. Making a strong effort to represent your loved one (my dad, in this case) in your daily actions, hobbies etc is one way to keep them ‘around’. Helped me.

[Regy @regyperlera]

Fall applications for @Shopify 's Design Apprenticeship Program just opened! Huge opportunity for anyone starting out or pivoting careers. Sept - March. Paid. Learn and work alongside some of the best.

Apps close May 29th

https://t.co/3wATQ9tcVd

[Tyler Angert @tylerangert]

Every time I do a live demo I’m reminded that the only reason anything gets done at all is because of unreasonable deadlines

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Designers earn more of the product stack by asking more of their tools. A natural progression of the curious designer is to absorb more of the product into their remit, and still call it “design”.

[Soleio @soleio]

tldr: The future belongs to designers who build.

[Katarina Batina @katarinabatina]

Thrilled to share this with you all today. We bring you a love letter to design and what it means to 'make the new normal'

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

@AlexMasmej @benhylak @naval Unsurprised that he nailed that

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Everyone is a 7/10 at everything. Ironically, achieving the last 30% is still as hard as it’s ever been, and is hidden behind 10,000 hours of toil

[Thariq @trq212]

somehow skills are still underrated

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Competitive sports will be a non-negotiable for my future kids for this reason. We are rapidly solving suffering (lol) but pressure creates diamonds.

[saila @sailaunderscore]

Kids will never feel the gameday pressure of having to start an essay at 2am and finish it by 8am before the deadline. Totally lost. Absolutely no evolutionary pressure towards a clutch factor anymore.

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Great distillation

[Todd Saunders @toddsaunders]

For essentially my entire career in tech, the most valuable person was an engineer who understood some business/GTM.

The entire economic structure of the industry was built on this.

Engineers commanded the highest salaries. The cap table was designed around equity comp because you couldn't afford them in cash. The seed round existed to buy engineering time/output. And VCs were, at their core, an arbitrage on engineering scarcity.

That scarcity is gone.

Now the most valuable person is the business/GTM person that understands some engineering.

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Agree with this stance, even with AI the goal is the same: you want mastery of your “thing”. Everyone is a 7/10 at everything now, so close the gap to becoming a 10/10.

[Lucas Crespo 📧 @lucas__crespo]

https://t.co/OBlVzlq3YQ

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

@RGA Make sure to tell them about timesheets too

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

LLMs do this and it not only makes it feel like you’re talking with someone very similar to yourself, it naturally makes you trust the output that borrows your phrasing

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

One learning I’ve absorbed from daily LLM use is that trust grows when people build a shared language, and then use it to interpret new information

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Maybe not a learning as much as something I’ve moved from observation to empirically understood

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Scary and fascinating

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

We’re spending $200B+ a year on data centers to power AI. One company raised $11M, grew human brain cells on a chip, and the cells taught themselves to play a 3D shooter in a week.

Cortical Labs grew 200,000 human neurons on a silicon chip and taught them to play Doom. The cells navigate, target enemies, and fire weapons in real time. Their previous game, Pong, took 18 months on older hardware. Doom took a week. An independent developer with zero biotech experience built the integration using a Python API. The neurons did the rest.

That compression from 18 months to one week tells you everything about where this is going.

Here’s what the “can it run Doom” crowd is missing: each CL1 unit costs $35,000. A full 30-unit server rack draws 850 to 1,000 watts total. Your brain runs on 20 watts. A single GPU cluster training an LLM can draw megawatts. The energy economics of biological compute are orders of magnitude better than silicon, and that gap scales.

The investor list tells you who’s paying attention. Horizons Ventures, Blackbird, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. In-Q-Tel doesn’t fund science projects. They fund intelligence infrastructure. 115 units started shipping in 2025.

Cortical Labs is now selling “Wetware-as-a-Service” through the Cortical Cloud. Developers can deploy code to living neurons remotely without touching a lab. They’re pricing access at the level of a software subscription while the hardware runs on real human brain cells derived from adult skin and blood samples.

The Doom demo is marketing. The platform play is a bet that biological neurons will eventually outperform silicon at exactly the tasks AI struggles with most: real-time adaptation under uncertainty, learning from minimal data, and processing ambiguity without brute-force compute.

The question was never “can it run Doom.” The question is what happens when it can run everything else.

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

🐦‍🔥

[Naval @naval]

Careers are dead. Jobs are dying. Opportunities arising.

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Like my colleague said today, “design should remain a team-sport”

[Jordan Singer @jsngr]

@juwiling still use Figma like always. lots of people say they're skipping it but I think the best products will still be designed together on a canvas where you can iterate quickly, refine details, and imagine different directions more broadly

then jump to coding agents afterwards

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Why isn’t there a WiFi gating provider called Wi-Fly and why isn’t it the provider at every airport

[Katarina Batina @katarinabatina]

Shop's got a new feed 🚀 We've combined your shopping from across Shopify stores, making it easy to browse updates from brands you love and discover new ones to fall in love with while getting a real feel for their story. We hope you enjoy 💜

[Taylor Cottrell @taylorlcottrell]

Very excited to have joined the first @shop DAP cohort. One month in and feeling the magic!