One of the very best aspects of SF culture is that nobody under the age of ~27 cares about what college you went to. You are judged on the value of what you have produced for the world and not a decision that an admissions committee made for you when you were 17

The better you are at sales the worse you are at cold calls

Nah FUCK YOU @Collect this some fuckin bullshit

anthropic’s model lineup is about to be ridiculously clean right before ipo: - fable 5.5 - opus 5.5 (absolute goat) - sonnet 5.5 - haiku 5.5 this is what jobs did so well at apple. you were rarely if ever confused at the product offering.

My strongest “vibes not evidence” belief is that remote work is a cancer that’s making (most) people miserable even though it seems better in the short term.

I've interviewed 100+ in the past few months, a common pattern I'm seeing: seasoned sellers are NOT AI literate. That's a pretty big problem.

If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy. This sounds obvious, but surprisingly few founders do it, and it often yields valuable insights.

One of the most important things to understand about startups is that because they grow intensely fast, they tend to induce a lot of anxiety in their founders due to perceived lack of control, and this anxiety manifests itself in various ways. A classic one is in projects that amount to ways to achieve greater legibility - hiring people to build dashboards, 'processes' to 'get their systems in order'. Almost always this is not actually addressing the real problem, which is inevitably a people problem. A perennial one is problems with sales discipline. Most salespeople are by nature crafty, ambitious, lazy, and somewhat bad with tech. They want to be on calls yapping all day and will do the bare minimum of admin that's tolerated by the business. As a result, most businesses have CRMs with terrible data quality. This results in the hiring of RevOps people, data engineers, more recently 'GTM engineers', etc. But it's fundamentally not a data problem. The problem is that the sales reps lack discipline and accountability. The founders or execs will convince themselves that if they can just get the perfect system in place with the right dashboards and fields, if they just figure out how to dedupe the data just right and build the right context layer, they'll be fine. But it's bullshit. They're avoiding the real solution, which is that they need to fire their underperforming reps and tell the rest of them that if they don't have their hygiene on point by the end of the month, they'll be fired too. In the past this was a hard ask to make because CRMs were legitimately terrible and updating them took a long time. But this is no longer the case. If you give every rep a Grok Bot, keeping the CRM updated is trivially easy. This is what actually effective AI transformation in GTM looks like, btw. Anyone who is leading with the tech is selling you a bullshit snake oil solution that will be tech debt in a few months. The real opportunity is in raising standards, driving massive amounts of urgency, and then using the new tech to find resourceful solutions to these new demands. Otherwise you'll just spin your wheels and build some pointless science projects

Hiring managers in tech more than ever care about it you’ve done the exact same thing before at a similar level of scale, if you’re trying to work at a company that serves millions or billions and you’ve only served thousands it’s going to be hard to hire you

i did 4 rounds of interviews, made it to the last round, got rejected from my dream company … the whole process was from june to october

Software is dead It's now the era of personal software and everyone just builds what they need whenever they need it I think

If you are 22 and in tech sales, what is the best overall city to move to for opportunities, network, cost of living, taxes, etc.?

Where does one find people like this? I’d love to have an army of them at 37signals - or just one to start - but I’ve found everyone claims they can do everything but very few can actually do anything.

Online shopping is the best thing ever. I finish work, come home, take a shower, eat, turn on the TV for some background noise, grab my phone, and start online shopping. Best thing ever. I love tech, but this is one experience I will never delegate to an AI agent.

The funniest rebrand I see going on right now is companies saying that they're an AI company, not a SaaS / software company. It's like saying that you're an automobile, not a car. Buddy you sell 0s and 1s sold on the internet. It's all the same thing.

one of the best enterprise sales lessons we learned after YC was working the room between meetings early on I’d run a discovery call, bring a bigger group to the demo, then ask about next steps and hear something like “we’ll discuss internally” that’s one of the worst answers you can get because there’s nothing to do but wait the thing we eventually learned was that deals don’t close on the group call, they close between them once we started building separate relationships with each stakeholder in the deal (not just the champion) a lot of the guesswork disappeared between meetings I’d reach out individually and ask something like “how’s the team feeling about everything?” I had no idea this would work. people started telling me all the objections in the deal, who was raising them, and what we’d need to do to move the deal forward then we’d walk into the next call and spend time recapping everything we’d already addressed in our 1:1s once we began doing this, we started hearing a lot less "we'll get back to you" and a lot more "let's loop in legal to start contract review" it sounds super obvious, but you can eliminate uncertainty in any deal by just asking the other person on the other side of the table what they need you to do, and then doing it

Jesus christ, how do people work and interview at the same time. Is this like the white collar variant of doing drug deals. You like sneak off and meet another company in some clandestine location (Microslop teams)