this is @davidhaooo . these photos are from two different days. same position, same RGB split keyboard, same glasses. at some point i stopped asking if he wanted a desk.

Maybe that culture is fine for you at linear, and it looks like it’s working great for you! You’ve created something worth over a billion dollars in 7 short years, that’s something very few people on the planet have done before. But sometimes there are big problems that need solving, and there is more creative thinking, not less, that happens with contact with the big problems. In our case, creating the financial operating system that owns the creation, transfer, financing, and investment of risk, using AI to automate the paperwork of the most regulated entities to make every business and person a little more profitable, waste a lot less time, and be more protected, is a big problem. Maybe there were super geniuses at the Manhattan Project working 1 day per week like zen masters. I doubt it though, because if you’re obsessed with a problem, you work hard. Nowhere did I or do I glorify lack of sleep (I always think sleeping right and exercise are very important), and different people have different visions, cadences, and ways they want to run their companies. And that’s ok, but you attacking our style based upon sound bites when we are solving a really important problem, by market sizing probably the biggest problem large language models can solve, isn’t it.

It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M). They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now. The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract. In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation. On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins. At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing. And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.