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.

This is insanely dehumanizing and just fucking embarrassing on so many levels. @ndstudio @jgebbia y'all proud of your work?

Legal AI has moved fast since our first r/legaltech AMA in December. @gabepereyra and I are back this Wednesday for round two. Bring your toughest questions on Harvey. reddit.com/r/legaltech/comme…

Heading into the long weekend like…

We need to stop talking about product design in absolutes… there are no rules. Everything is made up. Do what makes sense and feels right.

Post training agents is actually starting to work. Initial results on LAB are very promising and plan to open source some models we train soon. Some challenges when using CMA: 1. ZDR - not supported / all our customer require 2. Multi-model - 5.5 now better than 4.7 for many legal tasks. 3. 100 file limit - we need to support millions for client matters 4. Uptime - no single model or cloud provider has the uptime required by our SLAs (we solve by failing across providers for redundancy. Can’t do this with a managed solution) 5. Private deployments - banks, PE, insurance, large firms want agents to live in their cloud subscription for security / regulatory reasons. 6. Conflicts - if a law firm uses only anthropic and they need to represent OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, spacex and those clients say please don’t send my sensitive legal data to my competitors model what do they do? 7. Cost - currently too expensive to serve at our scale Some of these issues will get fixed but others are structural or platform risk issues that large enterprises / firms won’t take on and are willing to pay for infrastructure to help them solve (this is what happened in the cloud era). We’ve built a multi-model, multi-cloud, ZDR compliant managed agent solution for our customers. We are also working closely with anthropic, OpenAI and the cloud providers as they build out this infrastructure. Definitely think people are underestimating how complex this infrastructure is going to be for enterprise.

I borrowed an umbrella from my Airbnb host in Kyoto. I forgot to return it when I checked out, and realized when I was already on the train to Osaka. I felt terrible. It was a nice umbrella, not a cheap one. I messaged the host apologizing. She responded: "No problem! Enjoy the umbrella. It's yours now." I said I'd mail it back. She said "please don't. Postage costs more than an umbrella. Just use it and think of Kyoto when it rains." I insisted I wanted to return it. She said "okay, but I have a different idea. Next time you see someone who needs an umbrella and doesn't have one, give them this umbrella. Tell them to do the same when they are finished with it. Maybe an umbrella travels all around Japan helping people." That idea was so beautiful I agreed. Two weeks later I was in Hiroshima and it started pouring. A woman with a baby was standing under an awning looking stressed. No umbrella, the baby was crying. I walked over and gave her the umbrella. Told her the story in broken Japanese. She understood enough. She tried to refuse but I insisted. Told her "when you're done with it, give it to someone else who needs it." She nodded, said thank you about ten times, and hurried off with her baby. I got soaked walking back to my hotel but felt good about it. Sometimes I wonder where that umbrella is now. Hope it's still traveling, still helping people.

How does a seasoned Supreme Court lawyer prepare for the biggest case of his life? Using Harvey. Read how Harvey supported @neal_katyal in refining his arguments before the Supreme Court and how we are bringing those tools to law schools with Harvey Moot: harvey.ai/blog/the-supreme-c…

We had an incredible April at Harvey. - Net new ARR is up 6x YoY - We’re about to break 50% DAU/MAU - Our average user now spends 12 hours a month using Harvey Job's not finished.

Polish isn’t decoration. It’s the accumulated effect of caring about every small thing until the small things stop calling attention to themselves.

How does one make sense of SF? We are living through the craziest computing revolution of the last 2 decades....and 95% of the value being created is within a 4-mile radius in SF (h/t @eladgil ) It's just hard to understand....why is the concentration so high? What is it about this place? There are good reasons that people will offer...good universities, great companies, talent networks, venture capital yada yada yada But all of that is hard to emotionally understand. I tend to try to answer these questions through my own lived experience. Two things happened this week that brought it home for me. On Wed evening, two GOATS of the design world (@soleio and @rsms ) did a design talk at SPC. I saw some other GOATS at the talk (@aaron_ , @benbarry ) And you realize that these GOATS are just so curious about the world. They just want to build and learn. And give back. And with an air of humility and passion. It's so so cool and inspiring. And then this week we had someone release a mind-bendingly amazing demo of every pixel being generated. x.com/zan2434/status/2046982… People were blown away but @eddiejiao_obj and @zan2434 had been jamming creatively for a bunch of time @southpkcommons . And in that entire time, they were surrounded by a culture and environment and ecosystem that says "that is crazy but my god, if it works, then what could happen" There is wonder, amazement and curiosity. And passion. I wish this city were cleaner and better governed (but Dan Lurie is crushing). We are so lucky to be surrounded by weirdos who love to build. This is why we are who we are.

Really enjoyed teaming up with @vercel for our AI Design Night! Our presenter lineup was amazing. Huge thanks to @andymadrick @yescynfria @pablostanley @thisiscsim for the live demos and to our packed audience for the great vibes. Let's do it again! If you're a designer who loves experimenting with AI and wants to show off your latest project, DM me and we can get you on the list for our next design night. cc: @notablecap

the only way to lose in life is to forget how wondrous it is

I need everyone to check out this link ASAP this is one of the funniest fucking things I've ever read tinyurl.com/join-polycule

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