Please come if you are in/near Berkeley!

Congratulations to @descript's new CEO, @burkenstocks! And congratulations to me on my new role, executive chairman! If you haven't heard it, “executive” chairman is a title founders give themselves so they can still hang around the office and undermine their successor for a few years until they get listless and put themselves back in the job. That’s a joke - at least in our case! As executive chairman, I won’t be in an operating role or be responsible for making decisions… I’ll just be around a little more than a normal board member - to be a sounding board to Laura, to provide historical context and continuity, to solemnly reflect on why no one actually wants to talk to me, etc. Why the change? The very short answer is that Laura is the better CEO for Descript. The longer answer… We’re at an exciting moment in Descript - $55M in ARR, growing 75% YoY (and accelerating!) - and we’re at the beginning of a transformative shift in the company with the launch of our AI video editing agent. As the company gets to this scale, the nature of the CEO role changes. I’ve been through this before, so it’s not a surprise. And I’ve been transparent that, at some point, it would no longer be the job for me. I can work myself into a state of being excited about the role… but why bother when I’ve got someone on deck who will take to it like a fish to water? Which brings us to Laura. Within weeks of becoming our head of product two years ago, I had Laura marked as my successor. She has these things that never occupy the same body: Incredible product judgment, keen business sense, S-tier communication and leadership skills, deeply principled, courageous, unshakable self-confidence — AND she’s a weirdo (I can’t imagine a better culture carrier than the namer of Underlord). I feel lucky to have had this opportunity to work alongside her and be someone she will mistake for having given her a career opportunity that she would have gotten anyway. So once again, congratulations to Laura - and to Descript! May you win at business with grace and magnanimity! Note: I posted this already on LinkedIn. Is that ok? Did I do it alright? Sorry if you read it in two places, it's exactly the same.

Berkeley/Rockridge residents: @nabeel and I are opening a board game social club by Star Market called Tabletop Library this fall. If you're interested in joining: tabletoplibrary.com @BerkeleyTTL This has been a great side project for experimenting with AI - we talked about that on the How I AI podcast this week: youtube.com/watch?v=HuLL6wOE…

hm probably not good if we are getting complements about this - I just want to be average. @burkenstocks please make canceling harder

I suspect the "idea guys" we made fun of 10 years ago will still get made fun of 10 years from now. The thing they lack, that AI doesn't necessarily solve, isn't just technical know-how; it's resourcefulness, the ability to "just find a way" to turn ideas into reality. I haven't yet found the word to capture the quality that will define the ruling class in the age of AI... ideas, taste, creativity... they're part of it, but not all of it! blog.samaltman.com/the-gentl…

My 11 year old loves baseball - we've been watching lots of player interviews... and ChatGPT has now confirmed what I feared. Is this the general perception, that baseball players are the dumbest of the athletes?

What does this mean? Is this good?

We're reimagining @descript around agentic vibe editing - lots of talk about Cursor for Video but nothing is close to the truly open experience you get in Descript, go give it a try!

Cool @descript agent workflow thing - after I finished my edit, I just asked it to create a prompt so I that I can paste into my next video and single shot edit it.

What do I know, but all those people predicting that AI is going to create a bigger wealth/power gap in the short term, I'd bet on that atm. My sense is that not everyone goes through life with a certain kind of sensitivity to noticing problems, and I think the people who do - whatever that quality is - are going to do incredibly well, while many/most will themselves become agents in a meat sack. 😐

For founders trying to scale, these vibecoding tools feel like being a sober drug addict at burning man - the hardest transition we go through is learning how to stop doing the thing that got us there in the first place - building stuff - and delegating it to our teams. Vibecoding is like mainlining that feeling that we get from buliding.

I hope this helps move some Descript units youtube.com/watch?v=x30z470j… Context: youtube.com/watch?v=9g5SGACV…

Getting ready to ship a new AI thing in @descript that analyzes edit boundaries so it only makes good cuts when you remove filler words, etc.

If you're not doing anything, I'm about to do a live video customer AMA to coincide with @descript's AI avatar release youtube.com/watch?v=Y_29wPE1… Now is your chance to ask how to correctly pronounce "Descript" and get an evasive answer!

I didn't see this announced, but now when you ask ChatGPT for feedback, it'll leave comments on your canvas - so cool... and feels like something that's certain to be staple of the emerging interaction language for agentic editors

Was listening to the Lenny podcast w/ the Cursor CEO… TL;DR where he sees programming going is that it’ll look more like you’re writing application logic in natural english language instead of code. Struck me that they’re basically operating on the same belief as us at @descript - that “text” (i.e. natural language) is the fastest and most intuitive interface for humans, and what you want is a pairing of an agentic co-editor with a text-based UI for humans when they want to manipulate content directly. They are trying to push programming from code to text. We’re trying to push video editing from timeline to text. They started with the agent and we started with the human editor.