It just seems unthinkable to me to start a company right now Everything is moatless

Devs will “cash in” AI gains as time. Dax Raad(@thdxr), creator of OpenCode, on the incentive problem most companies are ignoring: “We forget how big the software engineering industry is. Every company in the world employs software engineers to some degree. The majority of these environments aren't like the most motivating, exciting environments. Most people there are trying to do their job, go home to their kids, have a reasonable life. You give them a button that lets them do their work faster. The natural place for them to go is to hit that button as much as possible, do the same amount of work and just cash in that extra time, right? Which makes total sense. If you have no reason to be above and beyond motivated, you're not going to really use that to push your organization harder. Yeah, these tools may make you more productive, but be really realistic about your employees. Where are they going to cash in those gains? Obviously some companies are not like that. Employees are motivated. They have good reason to be. They're compensated in a way that makes sense, but most places aren't like that. The problem with that is usually in those environments there will be a couple people that are irrationally motivated because they love the work they do, et cetera, even though the rest of the company isn't as motivated. They're usually the ones that are trying to make sure everything is good quality, trying to push everyone to try harder. They're all now overwhelmed by slop PRs. And we've had a few people on our team that have joined and their previous company was like this. They were the person that still cared. The rest of the organization just hits the button and gets their tasks done and they're drowning in just garbage and they're getting burnt out and they're leaving.”

Btw I believe we have a mostly wrong framing of what could be done in Europe. Italy's Leonardo supercomputer datacenter alone plus Swiss National Supercomputing Centre has more than enough compute to train a very large LLM. It's not something impossible, also there is not magic recipe: it's just scaling, every smart team with the GPUs is doing it. People that fatally believe it is not something within reach are wrong.

They didn't get here by working for somebody else and saving

Dan the 🐐 is onboard in supporting the fund/grant! We are discussing specifics over DM and share more info soon.

Introducing Arcs in Motion 12.40. Arcs animate elements along curved paths. These aren't static like offset-path, they're dynamic and work with both x/y and layout animations. They're easy to tweak too, thanks to strength, peak, and auto-rotate options!

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.