Building 0-1

As you build newthing you will discover that building a newthing is a strange act where the harder you go about trying to do it, the harder it becomes. It will resist direct force and control. The more you relax and allow it to speak through you, however, the easier it will be.

AI is like water.

Or more specifically, generative AI applications are like water. We've looked at hundreds of AI companies, and much like bottled water, many of them are the exact same under the hood.

This is just the reality: there will be 100 teams trying to do what you are doing, in the same way you are doing it. True tech differentiation in AI... See more

We are an exceptional software development team. But, we now also need be an excellent customer development team. That’s why, in the first section of this doc, I said “build a customer base” rather than “gain market share”: the nature of the task is different, and we will work together to understand, anticipate and better serve the people who trust... See more

The fact that there is a newthing has come to feel like a certainty, even as we cannot fully perceive it. This will spark a search for underlying structures, analogs, and ways of being that feel natural to this newthing.

Does the newthing exist in this context or some other one?

Is it a newthing that’s meant to run all the time or is it more seasonal... See more

How to de-risk building a social network The components that have the most engineering scope tend to be wholly reusable—such as the friendfinder & invite system. The fastest way to arrive at an app that resonates is to run rapid experiments by only changing the interaction model

The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out