unemployed. former head of product @x, ex-founder @thetbhapp (acq by @meta), ex-founder @gasappteam (acq by @discord)
LA
Joined July 2012
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It’s still early but I wouldn’t be surprised if AI’s contribution to GDP is neutral in the short-term when accounting for the financial impact of data breaches and spam.
I’m always impressed when people discover new heights in a career path that everyone assumes has a “cap”.
Nathan Fielder was already the new hit “Silly Camera Guy.” Every few years a new one emerges after people get sick of the humor of the last guy—like Sasha Baron Cohen, Eric Andre, Tim & Eric, and Tom Green.
But what’s remarkable is that he used his 15 minutes of fame to break out of “Silly Camera Guy” and prove that he is one of the greatest filmmakers of our time.
Everyone in the replies wants to make it about immigration, but it’s brainrot surface-level analysis.
The better question is:
Who influenced those policymakers? And what were those policymakers doing during their formative years that made Europe OK with this?
What’s happening in Paris and Milan is no surprise to anyone who has spent time around young people in Europe during the 2010s:
Virtually all of them were working on their 4th masters degree in social welfare, were unmarried, attended communist dinners every night, and regularly participated in riots.
Now the economy is suddenly transforming and they have nothing to show for it.
One of the things that hasn’t been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes:
She was created in the era of the Ted Talk Entrepreneur.
Between 2011-2015 (after the release of the Social Network), there was an entire apparatus built around “Child Prodigies”: college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations, etc.
I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as “faking it ‘til you make it.” But Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else.
When the Ted Talk Era came to an end and people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook—and in the most scrutinized field there is: medical technology.
When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.
Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X.
When Meta puts its full weight behind something -- by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5:
You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app.
However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening:
It was strengthening X.
If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet.
But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app.
Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet.
And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.
Sometimes a demo is simply to remind the world that your competition has no desire to dream -- and no ability to evolve.
We are now entering into an era where any product can be created exactly to a consumer's preferences & needs.
I vibe-fabricated a dog door with a wifi-controlled lock, perfectly to the specifications & design of my house.
I know nothing about metal fabrication or electrical engineering.
It's now getting manufactured and delivered in 2 weeks -- for almost the same cost if I bought a mass-produced item off-the-shelf.
Every social surface on the internet is in a state of constant entropy. Its default state is to decay and turn into slop. The only way a public space can endure is to be fighting tooth-and-nail every hour for its survival.
There’s something beautiful about the most expensive game of all time ($2B) being dropped the same month that AI models became capable of creating comparable experiences.
The swan song for the Big Studio Era.
I took a 14 month break from real, unadulterated Nikita-posting.
But I’m back -- and it feels so good to be doing what I love again.
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
• Proprietary data
• Network effects
• A physical component
The only group more insufferable than tech people is anti-tech bluesky users, who have been coming back to X in droves the last few weeks.
And they’re just discovering that the entire world got rich over the last two years while they were busy arguing with each other about politics and AI.
And they’re very, very angry.