Effort is the algorithm

Culture is not a “nice to have” in a startup. It is the operating system. Technology changes. Markets shift. Strategies evolve. Culture is the thing that gets stronger the more you invest in it. At Backboard, that means: ✓ clear goals ✓ trust over micromanagement ✓ people who care deeply about the work ✓ ownership with high standards The best teams don't need more control. They need more context. That's the culture we're building, and I am so proud of the team that is building it with me.

Holy crap! @MiniMax_AI continues to score better than Claude code in tbench 2.1 on our harness!

For one glorious day, Canadians from every province, political party, and postal code came together in agreement: “That Globe and Mail headline was insane.” Nation-building works in mysterious ways.

Tested on our harness and it performed equal to Claude 4.8 on TBench smoke test. Minimax M3 is joining the world class oss.

> you’ll never start a rocket company > you’ll never build your own engines > you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts > you’ll never survive three launch failures > you’ll never reach orbit > you’ll never win NASA’s trust > you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS > you’ll never compete with Boeing > you’ll never compete with Lockheed > you’ll never make rockets reusable > you’ll never land a rocket vertically > you’ll never land one on a drone ship > you’ll never reuse a booster > you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times > you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times > you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times > you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing > you’ll never lower launch costs > you’ll never launch every month > you’ll never launch every week > you’ll never launch multiple times a week > you’ll never carry astronauts > you’ll never replace Roscosmos > you’ll never fly civilians to orbit > you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale > you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever > you’ll never make satellite internet work > you’ll never make satellite internet fast > you’ll never make satellite internet affordable > you’ll never serve rural customers > you’ll never serve aircraft and ships > you’ll never build a methane rocket engine > you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work > you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever > you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V > you’ll never build it out of stainless steel > you’ll never launch Starship > you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship > you’ll never relight Raptor in space > you’ll never bring Super Heavy back > you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms > you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide > you’ll never change the economics of space > you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you > you’ll never win > you’ll never IPO   Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.   Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.

* Correct quote is “politically left” not socialist. Point stands. Entrepreneurs take potential and turn it into value that’s added to the global GDP. They capture a small amount of that value in the process which is a big part of the incentive. The rest goes to others, employees, shareholders, government, suppliers etc. You can always criticize them. You can always criticize the redistribution efforts. But you should always remember that without them, there is very little new value enters society and that locks everyone in zero sum competition, sometimes war. Entrepreneurs are load bearing for human thriving. It’s a glorious act to put yourself out there and build a company that provides good and services to everyone. And Elon is the best entrepreneur that ever was. You don’t have to like him, and sure he’s crazy, but otherwise he wouldn’t do crazy things. Same coin, two sides.

You don’t have to love Elon Musk to recognize what this headline says about us. A country that spends more time criticizing wealth creation than encouraging it sends a clear message to builders: your success is tolerated, not celebrated. Canada should be the best place in the world to build ambitious companies. Headlines like this make us look like we’re not quite ready for that.

You have absolutely disgraced yourself publishing this, globe. We all clearly don’t hate the media enough.

If these aren’t in the shape of Air Jordan’s I don’t want them.

Interns demoing CLI live.

Boards don't care how many tokens you processed last quarter. They care about: → cost per support ticket → cost per lead generated → cost per transaction completed We're moving past the AI experimentation phase. If you can't explain the cost of an AI powered action, you're effectively flying blind on one of your fastest-growing expense categories. That's why we built Backboard Studio. A place to inspect workflows, understand compute usage, and connect technical activity to business impact. Turn AI spend into something you can actually reason about. If you are preparing for your next board or exec review on AI spend, I am happy to share how teams are using Studio to make that conversation concrete instead of hand wavy.

Notes for panel today at AccelerateOTT: What does AI-native mean? Practical: intelligence baked into processes. I don’t think we’re there yet but it’s coming this year. Cultural: Iit’s a mindset. Asking ourselves ‘can ai do this or at least assist me?’ The answer is always yes. Hiring: Still hiring engineers and would hire more if we had the capital but less management and admin roles at least for now.

Notes for panel today at AccelerateOTT: What’s different from starting to build a business that turned into a unicorn 15 years ago and starting anew ai-native company now? 1. Speed to viable product. 2. Lower barrier to entry especially for less technical. 3. The industry is moving as fast as the technological tools, but there are two deltas to think about as areas to serve. First, most vertical’s adoption has been slower and, second, markets where it’s been cost prohibited, like South America, northern Africa, and other regions. We hope to solve this by offering best of class tools at accessible prices. What’s surprising to me is how much is the same ie. people, stress, VC, getting the timing, right, etc.

Our Anthropic bill is about to jump from $400K → $1.4M/yr. Not because usage exploded, but because we're about to cross 150 seats. Past 150 seats you're forced into Enterprise tier. Seats stop including any usage, every token bills at standard API rates. At our current run rate that's 3.5x overnight. Unfiltered thoughts on AI spend: 1. We should spend tokens to grow as aggressively as possible. But most people (me included) aren't conscious of what they're spending. 2. Visibility comes first. People see their personal number and they're shocked. I accidentally spent $4,000 in 3 days in Claude Code. 3. For engineering the spend is clearly worth it. Pay for the best model, it saves more than it costs. 4. For a lot of other roles it's questionable. Apps nobody uses, skills someone already built. No ROI. 5. Spend limits are coming. We already require approval for more tokens on our support team. The era of token-maxxing is coming to an end.

Target

Your terminal just became a team. One prompt. Recursive agents. They plan, build, test, and deploy a full app while you watch. R-CLI is live. 300 models, BYOK, /expert mode that plans with Anthropic and executes with OSS. @BackboardIO @RobImbeault

VOICE! backboard.io/changelog/voice…

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Just got our water!