clstrns retweeted
Too many people have told me this completely unlocked AI for them personally and in their business
If you actually want to master AI, here’s the playbook:
1. You’re only using Claude code or codex now. You’re not allowed to open any other apps. No cowork or chat nonsense either.
2. Every task needs to go through AI. No email, no browser, no figma, NOTHING
3. If AI can’t connect or do a task for you, you’re only allowed to give up after 20 attempts. Yep, 20. You need to learn how to figure shit out with AI.
If you do all your work this way for a month, you’ll be a master of AI.
Here’s the alpha: being good at AI means knowing how to figure shit out with AI. You need to train that muscle.
clstrns retweeted
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call:
the newsletter is dead
@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly.
persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox
with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to.
i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it.
this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered.
what it means
It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to.
luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new.
we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (every.to/agent)
it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc.
to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over.
here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: every.to/chain-of-thought/we…
clstrns retweeted
after switching our approach to building a "FirmOS", I'm increasingly confident that the future of agent collaboration within organizational settings is going to be a "company operating system" or CompanyOS, designed for agent and human collaboration
instead of a "company brain" that holds everything, the OS is for storing rules, processes, decisions made, which tools to use and how. it can mirror some data, but the source of truth is often best held in your existing tools (CRM, etc.). it's continuously updated and used by your agents
i think of this as a "flipped playbook" where instead of writing down the company rules first and following them (which is kind of like waterfall development), you're constantly updating the playbook as you decide or learn new things day-to-day running the business
clstrns retweeted
New from @stripepress: the definitive guide to sales.
I notice that startups today are scaling sales faster than ever, making it more valuable to get structures and incentives right from the outset.
Out now! Built to Grow: A Handbook for High-Performance Sales Teams, by Stephanie Friedman: press.stripe.com/built-to-gr…
I love all of the books in our catalogue, but I particularly love the turpentine collection: High Growth Handbook, An Elegant Puzzle, Scaling People, and now, Built to Grow!
Building a sales function—especially today—is more of an art than a science. Stephanie has more than 20 years of experience building 100+ person sales teams, and advising some of the fastest-growing companies in the world on how to do the same.
I hope you love it as much as we do.
clstrns retweeted
This is absolutely what I'd be doing if I wasn't doing what I'm doing.
In fact, I've fantasy-flirted with 37signals getting back into client work because building new stuff and improving existing stuff has never been more fun! EVERYTHING can be better quickly, but it's still a secret, plenty have no idea, and even those who do need a lot of help and direction to see what needs to be improved.
I love to fix. I love to make stuff easier on people. I love to show people a better way. I love to blow away the fog. I love to untangle.
Yes, we could just make more products ourselves, but rapidly improving Basecamp and HEY keep us plenty occupied there. And I'm less interested in the selling, servicing, marketing, and maintaining of brand new products, and more interested in reorienting, fixing, and helping dozens of companies with their own tangle of stuff, and then setting them free.
clstrns retweeted
Over the past 7years, I’ve spent about $130k between CAD and CAM software for my small machine shop.
We run:
Fusion360
MasterCAM
ESPRIT
Solidworks
The future looks different
Big news for CAD: SMLIB, NVIDIA's NURBS based kernel is finally open source today 🍻🎉
We have been working with SMLIB and its dev team for more than 20 years. It enables all our products: classcad.ch headless CAD, GUI, AI/MCP, PDM, etc
github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/…
clstrns retweeted
A list of talent with great taste whose range can’t be captured in a single label cosign.co/lists/eriktorenber…
clstrns retweeted
I'd expand the moats left to:
- Proprietary data or content: data nobody else has, or unique content you can create
- Network effects / community: users make it more valuable for each other
- Audience / distribution: you can get attention on demand
- Physical component: hardware, locations, real-world operations
- Capital: owning assets and investing (esp into the AI companies as they are and will suck up large parts of the economy)
- Regulatory: licenses and legal barriers
clstrns retweeted
If you're one of these people reply here - I'll build a list from it that I'll share with any of the companies or leaders looking - a big part of this is personal style/fit (we can all have similar superpowers but to be in this intimate of a role you have to be a vibe fit too imo) @katiewav @adelwu_ @eriktorenberg @ASalyers3 @emmajo @jordanrcrook @minafahmi @katiekirsch @michaelmiraflor @kashvi @flexiblefoodie
ive talked to many teams in the past few months who are thinking about this but dont know quite what to call it/have called it everything from brand marketing to comms to storytelling to special projects to content/social
4 high-profile startups in past ~2 weeks have explicitly told me they are stealthily looking to hire for someone in this sort of role
these roles are quietly and quickly exploding if your ear is to the ground!!
clstrns retweeted
If you're elite at content, I want to hire you.
I'm hiring. My network is hiring, and there's a massive shortage of great creatives.
Thumbnail artists, creative directors, copywriters - every role is open.
Work with the best in 2 minutes.👇
forms.gle/fw824tZpGHANcjPt9
clstrns retweeted
Reflecting on how much this tweet changed my life. When I was trying to move to San Francisco, I hesitated for ages before posting it. Pitching myself publicly felt vulnerable, and a friend finally convinced me to do it
Every interview process I ended up in came from this tweet. I received so many unexpected DMs from founders and teams, most of whom weren't even hiring for an advertised role. Especially for unusual, hard-to-categorise roles, these were opportunities I never would have discovered through a conventional job search
I cannot recommend making yourself legible to opportunity enough. Tell people what you're interested in, what you're good at, and what you want to do. You'd be surprised how many doors exist that you can't see until you give people a reason to open them
hello! i am exploring my next chapter and looking to move to SF for the right role
looking for work somewhere in the overlap of narrative, growth, culture, brand, and company-building
made a short Notion page on who i am, what i’ve created, and where i think i could be useful
very grateful for any thoughts, pointers, companies, or people you think i should meet :)
clstrns retweeted
many questions and lots of input on this thread and the unfortunate real answer in most cases is "it depends on the team and its goals"
BUT perhaps my #1 piece of tactical advice if you are in conversations for this sort of role
startups WILL ask you which other startups you think are doing this work well - do NOT just say stripe or ramp
ive talked to many teams in the past few months who are thinking about this but dont know quite what to call it/have called it everything from brand marketing to comms to storytelling to special projects to content/social
4 high-profile startups in past ~2 weeks have explicitly told me they are stealthily looking to hire for someone in this sort of role
these roles are quietly and quickly exploding if your ear is to the ground!!
clstrns retweeted
“If we truly believe that AI is changing how we work, then ICs should get paid more than managers, because an IC can drive more impact than a manager could in the pre-AI system.” — @ElenaVerna
clstrns retweeted
Logical: in the future ICs with agents will be more productive and create better outcomes than equivalent people managers from prior eras
“If we truly believe that AI is changing how we work, then ICs should get paid more than managers, because an IC can drive more impact than a manager could in the pre-AI system.” — @ElenaVerna
clstrns retweeted
Over the past couple weeks, I onboarded our first marketing ops manager at Cognition. Their name is Devin.
Here's how we engineered it, and why we're hiring marketers and GTM engineers to build what's next 👇
clstrns retweeted
The evolution of going direct:
Distribution was scarce, so the alpha was in building an audience
Then every company started posting all the time, and attention became scarce
Then attention became exploited with bait and slop, so now credibility is scarce
And there are no shortcuts for credibility
clstrns retweeted
Lulu hits the nail in the head, again
I also see so many people looking for shortcuts. AI, scheduling tools, anything to try to become "credible" or "influential" to help their business or themselves
I haven't seen a shortcut to trust a person or company tho
clstrns retweeted
Come join the team.
We're a small band at Notion who write, design, film, and ship our own work. Nobody here does just one thing, and nobody's job looks exactly like the one they were hired for.
Imo the JDs are fuzzy on purpose. We're not looking for someone to run a playbook. We want people who can build something n of 1 too.
I’m crafting a team of these very special folks @NotionHQ — I struggle to write JDs for these roles because everyone here on the team now is n of 1, and the “job” reveals itself as we talk.
Everyone works directly with @ivanhzhao @akothari, our legendary engineering, AI, design, and product team, as well as marketing, ecosystems, and more — and Storytelling’s expertise is valued deeply as an equal partner on solving business problems.
And I know we all talk about the rise of the “super IC” but it is true for us — Notion as a culture rewards people who make things amazing over those who just run things made by others, and that’s true for Storytelling. @ishverduzco @jamesjacoby_ @nikhilville @iscoe and some others TBA are coooooooking.
I do have a few more roles/problems-to-solve opening up … come talk to me before I have to write an insufficient JD for your brilliant spikiness. I’m looking for a “head of soft power” (eg, external media and creator lead), an Instagram creator and strategist, YouTube show runner, and [insert your pitch here].
clstrns retweeted
Back in my day, we called this a creative or brand strategist.
In tech, some of that work lives under content marketing, product marketing, or comms. These are different disciplines, but the request often sounds familiar: help us explain what we do, why it matters, and why people should care.
When brand is treated as the logo, colors, or launch campaign, it can seem like something to address once the product is ready. by then, people may already have formed an opinion.
Your product sets expectations. Onboarding, support, and how you communicate help determine whether the experience lives up to them. Brand takes shape through those interactions, with or without someone managing it.
The same applies to your personal reputation. People learn what to expect from how you act, even if you’ve never thought about having a “personal brand.”
that’s what i recognize in these roles: someone who understands the business and its audience, helps it communicate clearly, and notices when its words and actions drift apart.
The work might involve positioning, content, a product decision, or advising against a campaign. Its value depends on what it helps the business achieve, which means the person doing it needs access to the decisions behind the message.
If you want someone to give your company a coherent voice, include them in the conversations that shape it.
I’m glad teams are hiring for this. The titles may change, but the need feels familiar.
ive talked to many teams in the past few months who are thinking about this but dont know quite what to call it/have called it everything from brand marketing to comms to storytelling to special projects to content/social
4 high-profile startups in past ~2 weeks have explicitly told me they are stealthily looking to hire for someone in this sort of role
these roles are quietly and quickly exploding if your ear is to the ground!!