Amy Zhen

Rising out the world, you and I,

a finite flame among the infinite darkness

of two nebulous chasms…

Born into a disenchanted world

of Cartesian rationalism, our minds

and spirits isolated from the universal,

a race of convulsionaries trudging

though the wastelands of a technocratic

nightmare, afraid of what we might become

if we rid ourselves of the... See more

I’ve always believed the best early-stage founders are artists – they're obsessive about new and unusual things, they feel compelled to bring creation into the world, and they are often misunderstood for long periods of time–even lifetimes. Building businesses is their art.

Hedonic Treadmill : Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.

Her book The Sounds of Life , in many ways about AI -- how AI might help us communicate better with animals -- had just come out the previous fall, and was immediately wildly successful. She was on sabbatical at Harvard, gave a fantastic TED talk on the prospects of using AI to decipher animal communication, and was constantly doing podcasts and in... See more

If everyone is busy making everything,

how can anyone perfect anything?

We start to confuse convenience with joy.

Abundance with choice.

Designing something requires focus.

The first thing we ask is:

What do we want people to feel?

Delight.

Surprise.

Love.

Connection.

Then we begin to craft around our intention.

It takes time.

There are a thousand no’s for... See more

Tech began to feel extractive, rather than additive: more and more people are in tech to make money, to climb the corporate ladder, to extract value, rather than adding it and growing the pie out of sheer curiosity of genuine love for the craft. Tech is attracting a different type of people than before, and everyone who's been in this industry long... See more

I'm really inspired by also how they were really quiet for a really long time at the beginning. They were not trying to become the next new success story on the pages of every paper. They were much more just like, "We're just going to prove through the quality of our output over time that we are doing something interesting, and weird, and... See more