Support cases at many businesses follow the Pareto principle. For example, DoorDash and Uber 87% of support requests relate to 16 issues.

When Vanmoof started shipping bikes to the US, they experienced a high number of returns because the bike arrived damaged, despite there being warnings on the box to be careful.

I tried out Zapier Natural Language Actions API and found that it’s not particularly good for the one thing I needed it to be good at glueing together other APIs with natural language.

I’ve always wondered why the nature of compounding and any exponential relationship feels unintuitive.

Several products these days have an AI bot that will join your Zoom call and take notes.

I am by no means an art buff but this is my explanation about what is so moving about Michelangelo’s David 500 years after it was made.

I read Speed x AI from Nfx. It says that founders need to move much faster or those leveraging generative AI will leave you in the dust.

I read How to do great work by Paul Graham. It’s a collection of advice I’ve heard from various places.

Engineers and product people tend to think about issues as frequency distributions.

It becomes exponentially more difficult to make up for losses as they increase.

Sometimes you need a “jump box” that you can SSH into and get shell-level access to a production environment.

A new paradigm for user interfaces is starting to take shape with the rise of AI powered tools.

Sometimes you want another email to be able to send email as you in HubSpot.

Speed matters because it lowers the activation energy needed to start a task.

Sometimes you should try to build the thing instead of writing about the thing.

Technology platforms exhibit one or more of the following models.

Let’s say you have a python function that is used widely throughout your code base.

Today, most large language models are run by making requests over the network to a provider like OpenAI which has several disadvantages.

An amusing talk by Darius Kazemi at XOXO, How I won the lottery, pokes fun at internet success and how we underestimate the role of luck.

I don’t recall where I heard this, but who you try to impress is who you become so choose who you want to impress wisely.

Attending college is still a major force in upward mobility for children with parents in the bottom quintile of income to reach the top quintile of income.

Context matters in the way that people recognize value. For example, a world-class classical musician performing in the street is unlikely to be recognized for their brilliance compared to performing in Carnegie Hall.

How to do positioning Make a short list of your best customers Form a positioning team Must be driven by the leader of the business and the leaders of each business function or it won’t be adopted Let go of baggage Everyone must be on the same page about what positioning means, each component of positioning, and styles of positioning depending on the market Get agreement that the product was created with a certain market and audience in mind but may no longer be best positioned that way List true competitive alternatives from the customers' point of view What would your best customers replace you with if you didn’t exist?

The true value of taking notes is not for recall later, it’s to give you the safety to forget.