Shout out to all the dads watching the World Cup, and by watching I mean assembling furniture while the tv is on in the other room.

Take my money. Free Fable.

Name a better CEO I’ll wait.

Hot take: both are awesome cities.

Love this. 👏👏👏

This is the first time I've used @claudeai for web dev without it feeling like a house of cards. Absolutely insane how spot-on it is, with the right context.

What a time.

Curious how everyone’s experience has been with @NotionHQ meeting notes. I’ve dialed in instructions quite a bit which has helped, but it can be hugely inaccurate on clients’ workspaces, esp w/ attribution and creating rogue tasks.

Best cure for AI psychosis.

Huge shoutout to @NotionHQ for massively improving duplicating/moving pages. This was often a headache, especially with high-volume databases. Seeing the real-time progress, plus just overall speed...it is a huge quality of life improvement. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Why would you use @ChatGPTapp on desktop when you can use Codex? Honest question.

Finally got around to trying @ChatGPTapp Codex. Very powerful. Very fast. Very economical with tokens.

Working with VCs then joining their vendor networks has truly been a gamechanger. Always a reminder that investing in the right relationships is exponentially more valuable than simply creating more content.

Brian Halligan and @ivanhzhao unearthed a common term at @NotionHQ but is actually perfect for our moment in time: Jazz Mode. Best frame I've heard for AI-era org design. And the cleanest answer to one of the hardest scaling problems: how to grow a team without killing what made it work in the first place. From what I gathered, Jazz Mode = operators who improvise with little direction, and feel at liberty to push and pull into different/new directions. Structured exploration with the ultimate goal of making something new, great, cohesive. It actually works pretty well as a framework for AI-native companies. The jazz band-modeled company is whatever mix of humans and agents you've assembled. They make the music. This highlights the trap a lot of companies fall into. They start with a tight group that ships, improvises, contributes. Then they scale. And the default move is to (d)evolve into a marching band. Standardize the playbook. Formalize the chart. Push everyone to play preset sheet music. The magic that made the work special — the riffing, the improvisation, the contribution — gets pushed out by the machinery built to scale it. Ivan described his role on the pod as being able to "dance around really smoothly either direction" — top-down when it's needed, bottom-up when the team's running. That's the producer's stance. The band wants total freedom. The label wants total predictability. Someone has to hold them together. Jazz Mode is the alternative. Keep the structure light enough that the band can still play. Reading it back, I kept landing on a question: for companies in jazz mode, what exactly is my role, parachuting in to design a new way of working? I’m not part of the band. I’m not making any music directly. I'm there for a defined window, then I'm out. The best analogy I could come up with is a producer. I don't listen to a ton of jazz. But one album I keep coming back to is Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. It's a 1970 double album that doesn't really sound like jazz at all — electric instruments, rock and funk rhythms, sprawling tracks that loop and drift for 15-20 minutes at a time. Some of it sounds more like a film score than a cohesive album. There's nothing else quite like it. I decided to go down a rabbit hole on how it actually got made. That's where I learned about Teo Macero — the producer Miles worked with at Columbia. Macero didn't play a note. He didn't write the music. He recorded Miles and his band in long, loose studio sessions, then cut and spliced the tape to build the tracks we now hear. The album as a record didn't really exist until Macero edited it into existence. Davis was the face of the album. Accompanying musicians got their credit. But the producer built the conditions for the music to exist. What the producer actually does: → Builds the room — systems, context, source of truth → Sets the constraints — key, tempo, scope, roles → Provides taste — which take makes the record → Stays out of the take — doesn't play the instrument Ivan described his role on the pod as being able to "dance around really smoothly either direction" — top-down when it's needed, bottom-up when the team's running. That's the producer's stance. The band wants total freedom. The label wants total predictability. Someone has to strike the balance to make it work. (Maybe the ‘label’ is a good parallel for investors?) This is why companies scaling without strategy can kill the magic. A tight quartet doesn't get better by becoming a big band. It gets noisier. The move isn't more musicians. It's more production capacity around the band you've got. That's how I think about consulting. I'm not playing an instrument. I'm part of the music — but I'm behind the glass, not on the record. The magic comes from the team. My job is to set the room up so it can happen. Then package the result so it lands. There’s a lot about consulting that can feel unnatural. You pop in, take a full download of how the team operates, and try to shift their patterns from outside. Nothing meaningful happens without true partnership – you need buy-in, partnership with leadership, real clarity on what the engagement is for. Then you hit the mark and offboard. Then onto the next record. The trade-off cuts the other way too: every record you produce, you carry forward. The patterns that worked, the studios that didn't, the moves that unlocked the band. That's the IP you build as a consultant who gets lots of repetitions solving the same types of problems in different contexts. The producer becomes a creator in their own right. I think post-AI, this becomes more common, not less. Smaller core teams. More expert producers brought in to solve specific challenges. There's real value in hiring and building culture the traditional way. But there's also value in pulling in fresh ears, plugging in expertise that doesn't need to live on the payroll forever, and letting the core band stay tight while the producer handles the album, the marketing, the tour. Jazz Mode is the right frame. The band makes the magic. The producer ensures the record is a hit.

Since I started consulting, I avoided asking to loop in C-level team members unless the client lead pushed for it. It's fine when you're just building out Notion workspaces, but not when you're transforming a company to become AI-native. Now having every C-level team member involved is not optional, it's mandatory. Each leader has one sliver of the picture, and you can't rewire how a company operates without all of them.

Most consulting missions are positive buzzwords that say very little about the work itself. We empower teams. We unlock potential. We help businesses scale. None of that tells a prospect what you really stand for. I rewrote Workcraft's mission. Here's what I learned →

Going all in on building AI-native companies with @NotionHQ at the center. Spent three days on-site with a client, kicking off the engagement that really crystallizes what this work looks like. Wrote up the working blueprint while it's still fresh →