Writing about tech media | GTM Strategy | Statsig | Curating the best SaaS / developer resources and sharing them
Seattle, WA
Joined April 2020
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I always had an affinity for stories.
To me, stories are vehicles for change. They are vessels for words, and words hold the enunciation of meaning. Such meaning has the power to move people. To inspire. To connect them to something bigger than themselves.
Over the past two years at Statsig, I've watched this company's story unfold in real time - one shaped by the culture we built together.
From our clock speed to our craftsmanship. We collectively decided this is how we do things. And this is where we're going.
I had the chance to tell part of that startup lore - the people behind the product, the moments that shaped who we are.
This is our story.
--
Thank you to @vijayeraji, Margaret-Ann Seger, Marcos Arribas, Timothy Chan, Tore Hanssen, Minhye Kim, Cat Lee, Jiakan Wang, and Vineeth Madhusudanan for sharing your perspectives on camera, and to @geekwire Studios for helping us capture them.
And to the entire @statsig team - thank you for the milestones, the mischief, and the memories!!
Over the past three years at a Statsig, my main focus has been growth.
More subscribers, more leads, more pipeline (...always more pipeline).
In the beginning, the exciting part of the role was hitting a new target. Whether it was closing the quarter, launching a newsletter, or announcing our raise – growth came from the milestones.
But looking back, the growth that mattered most to me came from the people I worked with.
It was about the culture we formed through the small moments and how we showed up for each other in the hard times. From Wednesday coffee walks to war-rooms, from ping pong between meetings to playing League, we all shared this sense of camaraderie.
We were invested in the same mission, but we also knew how to have fun. We took our craft seriously, but not ourselves.
I could go on and on about our culture and how talented the team was.
But if I had to summarize it all: we were a rowdy bunch, with a drawer full of corndogs.
You had to be there.
(I'm grateful for the journey.)
✌️
Love this level of storytelling:
it’s grounded in a personal journey of craftsmanship and placed in the broader context of American history.
congrats to @nkhormaei and @nmitra2k!!
keep crushing it 🫡
How far must we look?
We who turn a blind eye to truth in search of happiness.
For if ignorance is the price of bliss,
then we exchange our two cents
for refuge within oblivion.
Is it just me...or is there an overuse of the word:
"actually"
Not just in writing, but in commentary (e.g., short videos) as well.
"This is how {insert subject} ACTUALLY makes money/ works/ flys/ etc."
I understand the use case: to emphasize a comparison between a commonly held belief that is not true and one that is.
To offer a correction.
But repeatedly using the word is lousy IMO.
It also lacks empathy with your audience – you take the initial stance that they hold a wrong fact or belief.
It becomes more about correcting them than about guiding.
Just a rant.
At the start of my career (a few years ago, I’m not that old), I believed your craft was limited to your main skill.
For me, that was writing.
Writing was how I communicated ideas and told stories.
Fast forward to today, and tools like ChatGPT Work and Codex extend that craft beyond a single medium. Not just for me, but for all marketers.
Over the past year at @OpenAI, I’ve been helping to tell stories about our product and the people behind it.
From Hannah and Scott, walking through the Admin console and control changes they’ve been shipping.
To Stephanie, Kyle, and Jackson, using ChatGPT Work to change how finance approaches the close process.
What these stories have in common is that they feature people who care deeply about their own craft.
So naturally, I saw my role as a caretaker of those stories.
The challenge was that my medium jumped from writing to livestreams. (I don’t have a background in livestreams – RIP).
But I rolled up my sleeves and figured it out.
Part of it was being scrappy: jumping in the deep end, asking questions, and listening. But another part was trusting my intuition about storytelling, then using ChatGPT Work to transfer my skillset.
That meant pulling context from Slack, Google Drive, and call transcripts to understand the product and how those colleagues used them.
Then, once I understood the story, I used Codex to build a Site that helped me visualize the webinar's beats before we stepped into the studio.
I could see the transitions, production cues, and how we might frame different moments on camera using Image Gen.
And once the livestream was over, I could carry the story forward by using Codex to cut video clips into social highlights (this was a huge aha moment).
For me, storytelling still remains my craft, but now frontier intelligence and agents have expanded the ways I could practice it.
The medium no longer has to define the boundaries of your craft.
You can just..tell stories.
maybe -
we seek solace in memory as a chaser to the bitterness in our cup
maybe that's why we reminisce on the good old days
Truly excited about this update! Congrats to the Codex team 🙌
Ian Ito retweeted
this has one of the most exciting launch weeks in OpenAI's history, with a goal of making agents more real, useful, and accessible for all our users.
codex can now smartly do much more on your computer, remember more of your context, and run more ongoing work independently.
This Week in SaaS: Salesforce bets on the logic layer while the battle for creator workflows heats up.
xitter.cf/ian__ito/status/204603…
An intuitive mental model of an agent’s harness and the interaction with memory
Harness, Memory, Context Fragments, & the Bitter Lesson
this is a work in progress mental dump on interesting intersections between how we use and design a harness, implications for memory being accumulated over long timescales, and the search bitter lesson we can’t escape
this is v30+, HTML diagrams help me iteratively refine + chat to roughly “see” and alter the mental model
Harnesses & Context Fragments:
a very important job of the harness is to efficiently & correctly route data within its boundaries into the context window boundary for computation to happen
the context window is a precious artifact. Harnesses make decisions on how to populate, manage, edit, and organize it so agents can do work. Each loaded object can be thought of as a Context Fragment and represents an explicit decision by the user and harness designer of what needs a model needs to do work at any given time.
many ideas on externalizing objects + loading into the context window are pioneered and very well described by @a1zhang with RLMs
Experiential Memory:
we’re in the very early days of deploying agents and agents produce massive amounts of data in every interaction they have. this is akin to humans doing things and remembering things they did.
however agent memory has a massive advantage as it can be accumulated across all agents which are easily forked and duplicated (unlike humans). @dwarkesh_sp does a good talking about this massive benefit of artificial systems
memory can be treated as an externalized object. the harness is tasked with doing good contextualized retrieval which means pulling in the right data from accumulated memories across all agent interactions
Search & The Bitter Lesson:
As we deploy agents in our world over year timescales, there is going to be a hyper-exponential in the amount of data produced by those agents. We should want to:
1. Own that data for ourselves. Open ecosystems are important here
2. Use that data
This means that we’ll have to search over, distill, and organize massive amounts of data. Our brain is exceptional at doing this. Both contextually using prior experience and mostly committing the right stuff to memory with enough intentional practice.
Our current infrastructure systems and algorithms will be put to the test and often break as we get used to this new data regime
some open questions:
- how do we efficiently distill experiences (Traces) into higher level memory primitives that capture the important parts? How do we do this over ultra long time horizons?
- How much of the future is Search just-in-time vs Search that gets integrated into model weights?
- How do we make models much better at self-managing their context window? How do we reduce error rates in recursively allowing agents to operate over external objects?
i’ll be expanding on, altering, and adjusting these mental models but these feel like an important subset to me on the future of designing agents practically
Reach is not a single-value product.
Not all distribution is created equal, because not all reach carries the same signal.
If you had the choice between being featured in TechCrunch or The Information, you'd probably choose The Information. If you had the choice between working with an Instagram creator with five million followers or Gergely Orosz, you'd probably choose Gergely. Smaller reach, higher signal.
The value extends beyond the audience size. What matters is the influence attached to the channel. Media properties transfer trust, status, and narrative context.
That’s what makes them kingmakers.
xitter.cf/ian__ito/status/204098…
This market map has now become the bingo card for the next media acquisition 🤷🏻♂️
xitter.cf/tbpn/status/1981797702…
Ian Ito retweeted
The future of marketing is buying creators/media properties
TBPN has been acquired by OpenAI!
The show is staying the same and we’ll continue to go live at 11am pacific every weekday.
This is a full circle moment for me as I’ve worked with @sama for well over a decade. He funded my first company in 2013. Then helped us fix a serious logjam during a critical funding round a few years later. When I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time, and then when I joined Founders Fund, the first deal I saw in motion was the post-ChatGPT round in late 2022. And as we started growing TBPN last year, he was the very first lab lead to join the show.
Thank you to everyone that has been a part of TBPN until now. The last year has been the most fun and rewarding part of my career and we’re excited to have more resources than ever going forward.