🦜Macaws in Medellín

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something. And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy. Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output. This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work. I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution. Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook. With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it. My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day. There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed. Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work. I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things. I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master. Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

Shakira's story tells you everything you need to know about the Spanish 🇪🇸 tax system I had never looked into her case; always thought she had used some sort of shady business structure to avoid paying taxes But reality is way worse than that Turns out, she wasn't really living in Spain the year Hacienda claims she didn't pay her taxes She spent 163 days there. Less than the threshold of 183 days that automatically turns you into a tax resident So, what was Hacienda's claim? She was dating a Spaniard and had a house in Spain... So even if she was not really living there... She had to pay Now the National Audience has decreed that's not how it works, and Hacienda has to pay her back, with interests But this tells you a couple things: - If you're from a Western country and plan on leaving, you need to be VERY careful with how you structure things. Tax authorities will try anything to get your money - Shakira only got her money back because she has the time and resources to fight a legal battle for 10 years. You won't be so lucky - If you're a foreigner, stay away from the Spanish tax system. Yes, our cities and nature are unmatched. But just go there as a tourist

Almost all of the cities of the West sprawl, with high rise cores giving way to mid-rise blocks, to rowhouses, to detached homes, to exurbs and only then to countryside. One country stands out as an exception: Spain. Even today, Spanish cities expand in mid-rise blocks including shops and businesses, served by extensive metros, and structured in traditional courtyard blocks. The style of the facades has changed, but in other respects they are still close to the urbanism of Barcelona’s nineteenth-century Eixample neighbourhood. This is extremely distinctive. Americans often imagine that all European cities are like this, but actually most Europeans switched over to car-dependent suburbia in the twentieth century, much like the American norm. worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Why did Spain diverge? - Spain remained very poor until late in the twentieth century, limiting suburbanisation. By the time Spain was rich enough for suburbs, new urbanist ideals were already beginning to appear. - Traditional Spanish flat-building practices were not decimated by rent controls as they were in France and Germany, avoiding a forcible switch to owner-occupied single-family houses. - The Spanish state still plans street networks like European and American municipalities in the nineteenth century, and Spanish landowners normally pool their land in land readjustment schemes to create a unified landowner. Spain never really had a conscious plan to diverge from international urban norms – the divergence happened partly by accident. But it shows that multiple ways of building cities remain possible in affluent societies. Today, hundreds of Asian cities are near the densities and GDPs of Spain in the 1960s, when the Spanish Divergence began. If they want, they can choose the Spanish path, and grow like modern Madrid (left) rather than modern Alburquerque (right).

Eye-opening to see some non-coding LLM applications regress over the last year in functionality. I used to trust Perplexity as an AI search engine as it summarizes underlying sources, and did it well. It now hallucinates stuff despite crawling pages with correct information. Eg I asked it where Jamie Vardy (Leicester City hero / footballer) is playing. Perplexity says as of May 2026 there’s no information… despite crawling sources that confirm he’s been playing in Italy

I love how the tax system of most countries is like If you 179 days per year in our country, zero tax HOWEVER if you spend 183 days per year in our country, we get 50% of your worldwide income plus infinity tax

You remember how in 2022-2023, SaaS websites were absolutely soaked in social proof. FeedHive was too. We had star icons in the hero, tiny quotes saying how great the product was, G2 badges further down, a wall of love with links to reviews, more badges, and then another highlighted testimonial in the footer. When we launched the new FeedHive website, we decided to remove almost all of it. No more G2 badge parade and no giant wall of love. We kept a small section focused on outcome proof instead. More like: here is what the product actually helps you do, here is a tiny case-study style example, here is the result. Much less "look how many people like us." And the funny part is that conversions didn't hurt at all. Literally no impact. I think social proof on SaaS websites has been overplayed to death. People know you picked the best quotes. They know the badges are placed there because you want them to trust you. They know the wall of love is curated. If someone actually cares, they will go to Google and search "FeedHive review" themselves. They will check Reddit, G2, YouTube, X, whatever they trust. They do not need your homepage to tell them you are good. I still think proof matters a lot. But I think the old testimonial wall is dead. Show outcomes. Show the product. Show the result. Then let people verify you on their own.

For the first time in years that I'm suffering from hay fever here in Málaga. It’s something that I thought I never had to deal with again when I started to travel around the world. Every year when I was still living in Northern Ireland the weather started to get a bit warmer I had to deal with sneezing frequently (in the morning especially), my nose running and my eyes getting itchy. Yet when I was in Spain, Portugal, Philippines, Vietnam, Greece and Colombia I never had a problem with hay fever. Not having to deal with hay fever is definitely an underrated advantage of living in Medellín.