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.

It might be the end of the the Great Resignation. A survey from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that quit rates fell to 2.

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.

A recent survey of 3,000 job seekers found the willingness to relocate for a new job fell from 3.

The absurdity of smart devices is maybe best exemplified by a toothbrush that goes out of it’s way to lock down refills with an intentional and sophisticated password scheme between the handle and the replaceable brush head.

The fastest way to lose your objectivity is to lose your sense of fallibility.

Developer experience is one of those things that is easily recognizable when it’s bad but difficult to articulate why.

People tend to respond in the manner in which you respond.

Making two offers with different tradeoffs sets the framing of the negotiation and reduces the amount of back and forth.

The most clear sign of a large degree of souledness is the internalization of other creatures' interiority.

A simple heuristic for whether or not to let someone go is to ask yourself, “Would you enthusiastically rehire this person?

A tried and true way to build a large business is to do something that is difficult really well that no one wants to do.

The Zapier NLA API solves a major problem for large language models—the ability to interact with real systems.

Predatory pricing claims are largely ignored by courts, but a version of it continues to happen with venture backed startups.

People often ask me in interviews where I see our company going in the coming years (which is more of a meta question asking about the exit strategy).

Advancements in AI powered tools can greatly improve productivity but many companies have taken steps to limit or outright ban the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and others.

The right to build something new needs to be earned from existing customers.

Building a FAISS similarity search index is not cross-platform. If you save the index locally using aarch64 and try to load it an x86_64 environment it will not work (for me, it loads an empty index).

At a certain point, optimizing productivity becomes optimizing for speed of decision making.

Making complicated things seem simple involves abstracting over reality in such a way that is clear and actionable.