"it's below n log n" *looks inside* > n (log n)^(0. 54 trailing 9s)

Okay. I’ll take the bait. I went to work for Peter in 2013 with opposite politics. He sat me down right at the beginning. PETER: “I don’t want the (Thiel) Foundation to do good that the market can do. That is the job of the market. Likewise, I don’t want to do the good work that is seen as good. That work can be done by people richer, weaker and more needy of approval than we are. I want us to do only the work that is *deeply* good but somehow confused for being evil, because that is the work of the courageous and the strong. We strive to be both and that is where a small foundation can make the greatest positive difference. Go look for such good and let’s do that. But remember. Good has TWO different antonyms. What is “bad work”? It could be seen as shoddy work. Or it could be seen as evil work. And we can’t do shoddy work. Why? Because evil that isn’t competent never gets to be evil. It’s just pathetic. So we have to be exceptionally competent at the good work which we do to make sure it is always confused for evil.” I thought it totally logical. So that’s the argument. And that’s classic Peter. This is an old idea of his. And now you know.

The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source. I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection. The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be. This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all. 1/2

Yann LeCun's latest talk at ETH Zürich "You should not work on LLM. At least if you're in academia, you should absolutely not work on LLMs. There is nothing you can bring to the table. If you're interested in making real progress in AI, in sort of grounded AI for the real world, if you want physical AI, don't work on LLMs, and don't work on generative models either. So, as you can probably guess, this does not make me very popular in Silicon Valley." ---- From "Perfology Clips" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

I've been talking to a YC founder who's 15 years in and still doing big new things. One of the biggest popular misconceptions about startups is that founders have a brilliant idea, then implement it. In fact more often than not the biggest idea comes later.

Surprisingly so many founders in YC and my batch gave up after like 6 months and settled for a cushy job at some big lab or late stage company I'm surprised by the lack of grit That's why I'm a little more bullish on international founders, they have something to prove

It's OVER for accountants? Look at these numbers. Mercor put 12 licensed CPAs, averaging 5.5 years of experience, up against frontier AI on four accounting tasks. The humans averaged 37%. Claude Opus 5 scored 100% across all 20 attempts, finishing each in under 10 minutes. Most human attempts took 30–180 minutes. Just 18 months ago, the best AI couldn't beat the average accountant on these tasks. Now it beats even the best participant. Mercor wanted to measure how much AI could help accountants. But AI alone scored perfectly, leaving no room for improvement.

if you’re a venture backed founder, you should be 100x more ambitious & risk seeking than you think you should be. i’ve unfortunately made this mistake constantly. your brain naturally wants to take the next logical step & you obviously fight that instinct because you have to. so naturally you end up at like 10x. but 10x is still more than likely extrapolation of existing trends. if you want to end up somewhere genuinely far ahead you have to think 100x while still making sure what you’re up to is familiar & relatable. very difficult multi dimensional problem all around.

YC and dropout culture have convinced us the ideal founder is 22, straight out of school, but the data tells a different story. Some interesting data: - An MIT study of 2.7 million US founders found that the average founder was 47 when starting a company that later exited through an acquisition or IPO. - The same study cited that the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of U.S. startups were 45 years old on average when they started their companies. - A 50-year-old founder was approximately twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to produce an acquisition or IPO. - Founders with at least three years of relevant industry experience were twice as likely to build a top-0.1%-growth company as founders with none. So it seems that experience is one of the strongest advantages a founder can have. Two lessons here: 1. It's never too late to start 2. It might actually be TOO early to start; getting work experience is worth considering

Two random honest thoughts on the market right now.. First is on people: It's harder than ever to find missionaries. I'm seeing people leave the companies they have cofounded to join the "obvious" winners. Public CEOs are leaving for positions at labs. Founders leaving and rejoining neolabs at a moment's notice. Companies getting Windsurf-ed where only the choice people are getting to join the future company. Founders raising tranched valuations without worrying about the next employee that will join them will have 409As that make early exercising impossible. As early stage VCs, we are often just betting on people. And, when those people leave on a dime's notice, then the remaining company (usually) becomes a shell. It seems like a great time to be a mercenary, and everyone feels like one even though there are missionaries out there. Second is on defensibility: There's a lot of chatter on moats, so I won't re-litigate the matter here. But the thing that I want to call out is given the pace of what's happening the moat is no longer "one" thing. Like if you really think about it especially in the app layer - the harness is like a thousand small things done well. And, a lot of it is invisible. And given the competition is so fierce and new entrants overnight, you really have to dig into the details to figure out why a given company is different. What is their edge, and their combined edge across product, tech and GTM. And often times even with that, you end up going back to "well the real defensibility is the founders". And in those founders the defensibility is their speed of execution and being able to adapt to the market. That has become the new bar for every founder out there, given there are no "blue ocean" markets. And even if there are, any company with a LITTLE bit of heat, will have a lot of competitiors overnight. Even though I think I have a pretty good sense on finding the best people who have founder market fit, I find this current climate really hard and it's testing all my priors (and patience) at the same time. I know it's not true, but feels like everyone is in it to grab the bag and not really care about their legacy of what they want to build (please reach out if you do).

This guy coaches Sam Altman. He also works with leaders at Anthropic, Google, Apple, and SpaceX. I sat down with him to learn how he coaches billion dollar businesses. Here are Joe Hudson’s 7 operating rules: 1. Kill your 1:1s These meetings lead individuals to solve problems instead of the team. Much better to bring problems to the whole team so everyone feels responsible for solving them. I agree, haven’t done them for years... 2. Rotate who runs recurring meetings When the same person always leads, people focus on pleasing or rebelling against them. Spreading the authority makes everyone accountable to the team instead. 3. Give anyone the power to change a bad meeting Everyone already knows when a meeting isn’t working (and usually why). Giving people permission to say it makes meetings more effective. 4. Make every employee run at least 5 experiments a quarter on their own job It makes the team more productive, keeps people interested, and helps retain smart employees who would otherwise get bored. 5. Ask your team to push back on your ideas If you try to sell them on the idea, they may nod in the room and do nothing afterward. Asking for objections tests the idea + gets everyone aligned before you commit to it. 6. Start by building the part you understand the least If you leave the confusing part until the end you might find out it doesn’t fit and have to rebuild everything around it. 7. End every email with an action needed Name the person responsible, the action they need to take, and the deadline. Joe says this rule increased productivity in his business by 35 to 40%. Thanks for coming on @FU_joehudson and sharing how you run your business. Search “BigDeal pod” on youtube.

.@sama says the advice to pick one thing to build and pour all your focus into it no longer applies. "The canonical advice that was correct two years ago was, 'Pick one, and put all your effort into it, because you can't build all 30 things.'" "You can now build all 30 things. And you can get people to use them all. And you can work more on the ones that work." "So I think this mindset of lots of ideas, quick feedback, and being open to a lot of things not working is great for this new era for how people build."

Peter Thiel in his lectures talks about how the railroads were an amazing public good, but because there was no monopoly, the railroad building companies kept competing until they tore each other apart, so could not extract the economic value, and they went bankrupt. It was obvious from the beginning that that was AI. The big AI companies are screaming doom and safety because they know they are the 21st century railroad companies and know the only way to avoid that fate is a monopoly from government regulation. It really is that simple. So I just want to say, sorry frontier labs, u knew what u were getting into, don't hold us hostage. Ur going bankrupt, but thanks so much for what u r doing before u do.

if you give opus 5.5 perfect access to a company’s email, slack, docs, browser, databases, calendar, internal tools, permissions, institutional memory, etc, plus enough reliable computer use & verification loops, & nearly all of white collar labor could already be done without any human. it is that good. it is true agi.

This has never been more true. The opportunity cost of endless planning and contemplation just went way up. Agents allow you to just try vastly more stuff, so let them, and you'll learn way more, way faster.