🥐 NYer in Paris 🛠 Building. He/him
Paris, France
Joined January 2012
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Epyr is doing the same thing in France. First deployment is a paper mill in Troyes running 25% of the site's steam from heated bricks. The founder was previously a co-founder of InnovaFeed, the French insect-protein unicorn. He's on his second act.
Rondo Energy heats stacks of bricks with cheap wind and solar electricity, then releases the heat as steam when a factory needs it. Think a thermos the size of a shipping container. First deployment: an ethanol plant in California. Backers include Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Form Energy makes iron-air batteries that store 100 hours of electricity. Lithium gives you 4. They raised $750M in August at $2.5B. The factory sits in a converted West Virginia steel mill. Google just signed on to power a Minnesota data center with them.
Great to see a free, open-source version of a product category that is genuinely useful. Will give it a try!
Introducing Design OS—the missing design process between your idea and codebase.
Step 1: Set your product vision
Step 2: Design your screens
Step 3: Export production-ready components
Not mockups. Real components. Ready to build.
Free & open source: buildermethods.com/design-os
Don’t just generate it and forget it
Write it first, then ask an LLM for feedback
Thinking from first principles helps you make good strategy. Good strategy is what makes you win
What are first principles?
Physics.
Some physics principles that help you win:
Diffusion, flow is proportional to the size of the gradient and the medium’s permeability
Gradient = how much particles want to move from A to B
Permeability = how hard is it to move from A to B
So increase value and reduce friction and watch conversion flow increase
Phase transitions, matter snaps into a new arrangement once its energy crosses a threshold
Many products have the property that before some activation point they stagnate, after it they self-propagate
If your product can self-propagate, do everything to get it to that point
Resonance, a system excited at its natural frequency produces outsized feedback
Don’t fight natural rhythms, use them
Understand the cadence of your audience’s attention and match it
Look for patterns in how your market fluctuates and align with them
Inertia, first law of thermodynamics
A body in motion (or at rest) stays that way unless external force is applied
Protect momentum by blocking distractions
When you’re stuck, do whatever it takes to force any motion. Then acceleration will be easier
Entropy, second law of thermodynamics
Chaos grows unless you burn energy to control it
So yes, try just deleting the feature. Try deleting requirements, code, process
If you’re not forced to add things back some of the time, then you’re not deleting enough
Request for product:
A chatbot that connects to notion, JIRA, intercom, slack, etc and gives me daily summaries of how each project is doing, writes up stuff, answers questions for me, helps me think through problems,+
Product people please tell me you have something for this
Christian retweeted
When I was CEOing at Twitch one of the thing I’d do every batch of interns was a very short presentation on the origins of the company and then a Q&A. One of the questions was always, “Where should I work and what job should I get, or should I start a company?”