guys & gals who are clowning the bangalore party today will become the uncs & auntys who won’t let bachelors live in peace in their housing society tomorrow

Everything is content if you are influencer enough

Poke is what Siri was supposed to be Massive fumble by Apple

RT @misak1nz: you will never feel ready because ready isn’t a feeling it’s a decision

> be Will Bryk > spawn in New York City, study CS and physics at Harvard, lead the robotics club, do ML research > also writing a book on the history of civilization in your spare time because why not > meet freshman year roommate Jeff Wang > Jeff: valedictorian, perfect SAT, running a GPU cluster FROM HIS DORM ROOM > normal roommate activities: study, hang out, prototype a search engine together > fast forward to 2021 > both have cushy jobs. Will at ML startup Cresta, Jeff building data infra at Plaid > quit both. same week. > pool money and buy a GPU cluster > goal: beat Google > no investors. no customers. just two Harvard nerds and a pile of GPUs > spend a year grinding in a SF hacker house. 9 people living and working together > convert two bedrooms into office space. eat together, sleep together, ship together > November 2022: launch their search engine. feel good about it. > TWO WEEKS LATER ChatGPT drops and breaks reality > lesser founders pivot to chatbots and chase clout > Will has an epiphany instead > "AIs are going to search the web more than humans ever will" > "Google is built for humans. nobody is building search for AI." > the timing that almost killed them becomes the luckiest near-miss in startup history > AI companies start hammering their API. zero marketing. zero ads. > Jeff tweets asking strangers to bulk order Japanese nap pods at $1k each > post goes viral. 100 companies DM him. he can barely handle it > they throw a TOGA PARTY to celebrate their rebrand. buy 30 bedsheets for the pods. > rename from Metaphor to Exa. Exa = 10^18. Google = 10^100. the audacity is not subtle > $1.1M ARR to $12M ARR in 15 months > Cursor, Databricks, Notion, AWS all quietly become customers > Benchmark, Lightspeed, Nvidia, YC pile in > $85M Series B. $700M valuation. 35 people. nap pods still in the office. > Will's original motivation for all of this? > he was writing a book about civilization and realized the future depends on the quality of information we consume > closed his laptop at Cresta. never looked back. > two roommates who met freshman year at Harvard are now threatening Google > the nap pods remain

Your favorite ₹1 childhood toffee has a wilder origin story than you think. When Parle launched Melody, Cadbury Eclairs already owned the chocolate toffee space. Parle needed something different, so they brought in ad agency Everest and tasked creative head Haresh Moorjani with making Melody stand out without directly calling out the competition. Haresh's idea was simple but clever. Show accomplished people, magicians, pilots, film stars, all stumped by the same question: how does so much chocolate fit inside such a tiny toffee? Copywriter Sulekha Bajpai was working on the lines, but she kept feeling they weren't quite there yet. On deadline day, while the rest of the team had already walked into the Parle office to present, she was still sitting in the reception, restless, reworking every word. And then it hit her. She wrote 'Melody ki andar itni chocolate kaise bhari, batao... Melody khao, khud jaan jao.' Just like that, in a waiting room, minutes before the pitch. That one line written out of last minute panic became one of the most remembered taglines in Indian advertising history, and turned a new toffee into a lifelong memory for an entire generation.

Another way to figure out Claude-generated design is extensive use of mono font, either Jetbrains mono or IBM mono

omg look at all the fake people we hired for the fake job @socapinc

Am I living in bangalore or berlin?

This is so good. I love Derek's essays.

Clipping industry died before it even started

🤔

Don't waste your time on these bakwass things . not important, important is that u r so busy that u don't have any time for this rubbish

say it with me now. experts are fake, smart generalists rule the world, everything is designed by people no smarter than you, and courage is in shorter supply than genius

you will do the best negotiation of your life for a job you dont even want

YC grindset:

1.5 Million views, 60K likes & 90% of people were so taken away by the cuteness that they didn’t even realise it’s AI All future D2C companies will run AI campaigns on socials to validate their ideas before investing any money in inventory This dinosaur skeleton dress is already looking at > $1 Million in revenue the moment someone capitalises on it Drop shipping is going to see a much higher success rate once they start validating & generating demand before investing

me & my homies at YC startup school tomorrow