Marc Andreessen explains how to identify fake founders “There are definitely people that come in [to pitch us] and present themselves to be something they’re not. They’ve read all the books. They will have listened to this interview. They study everything and they construct a facade…. And the amount of this is exactly correlated with the NASDAQ.” As Marc explains, when stock prices are high and tech is hot, there are a lot people who decide being a tech founder is a fast track to high status: “They’re fundamentally oriented for social status — they’re trying to get the social status without the substance. And there are always other places to go to get social status. So after 2000, the joke was B2B meant back to banking and B2C meant back to consulting — which is, the people who showed up to be in tech were like, yeah, screw it. This is over. I’m going to go back to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey where I can be high status. So you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in a downturn. But in a big upswing, you get a lot of people showing up with, let’s say, public persona without the substance to back it up.” How does Marc identify these people? He uses the same technique that homicide detectives use to find out if you’re innocent — keep asking increasingly detailed questions: “You ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble making things up and things just fuzz into obvious BS, and fake founders basically have the same problem. They’re able to relay a conceptual theory of what they’re doing… But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you want to back can do it. What you find is they’ve spent 5 or 10 or 20 years obsessing over the details of whatever it is they’re about to do. And they’re so deep in the details and they know so much more about it than you ever will.” Source: @hubermanlab (Sep 2023)

If you don’t want this moment, then you will never be happy.

Remember when compilers would detect that someone was using it to build another compiler and silently inject bugs?

Sadly there was some beef between runk and grunk over the GPL and flag syntax so Ronald is now only reachable for patches by email once a week when he’s not making raw honey. MacOS ships with crunk.

Every latin american young professional should listen to this. People put these mental barriers that just artificially put them at a disadvantage when trying to achieve their dreams. Literally at every stage of life no matter what you have accomplished, the untrained mind can trick you into still get stuck complaining in circles. The trained mind tricks you into thinking about solutions. Just go out and do stuff, play the cards life has given you.

While I share Elon’s distaste for credentialism, I think he’s swung a bit far on the anti-researcher pendulum. It is my experience you need researchers chewing on cigarettes, walking circles in the parking lot, lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, producing many ideas that don’t work, and making terrible engineering decisions, to find the novel borders of Truth. One of RenTech’s earliest successful strategies didn’t make money until an entry level engineer came in and fixed a trivial mistake in the code. Necessary, but so too was the thousands of hours of cigarette chewing from mediocre engineers. Having the right ideas >> beautifully engineering the wrong idea. Beautifully engineering the wrong idea == lots of work with little displacement

C. S. Lewis with maybe the most important paragraph ever written for people with creative ambitions

W opsec ❤️‍🩹

I was reminded recently of an article by David Brooks in The Atlantic, titled "You Might Be a Late Bloomer." Two paragraphs that have stuck with me: "We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It's doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. 'Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,' the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. 'Effort means you care about something.' 'The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,' the sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall. 'And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.'"

People get emotional over failure and that’s when the problems compound.

Never saw things this way! Interesting thing to think about

You cannot think clearly about your path while optimizing for the applause of people playing a different game.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

The cloud won! You don’t have to think about servers anymore! Everything is a microservice! Lambdas are king! Kubernetes is our garbage collector! Hardware scales infinitely!

One of the biggest problems with using LLMs as a google replacement for programming, is that getting zero relevant results on google used to be a signal that you had the wrong idea about the root cause. Whereas LLMs will happily indulge any terrible idea you suggest.

Being a full time fuzzer and benchmarker sounds dreadful and the opposite of what made me want to love computers

I don’t care if: Ilya was right Rando company rewrote rando web tool in x lang Rando company laid off x amount of people I want: People building COOL things, and thinkers thinking about things. Algorithm show me the right things my mute button is eroding.

The AI existential crisis incoming

I fear the day I lose the fascination of going deep. Computers are wonderful