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Post-hype, pre-value: The real AI-pharma shift starts now

I’m personally much more interested in machine intelligence as human augmentation rather than the oft-hyped AI assistant as a separate embodiment.

How might we create teams of human and non-human intelligences in the service of better designed systems, products, environments?

Vertical integration is typically the dominant strategy when industries are in their early stages or undergoing significant transformation, when marke

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to en

The best lead generation companies usually have some combination of a distinguished and highly trusted brand and a proprietary channel or value propos

The brokerage model is what we employed at Fundera. There are several distinctions between brokerages and marketplaces, but a key one is automation ve

There are many other products where a brokerage model is required to facilitate a transaction such as online insurance and mortgage agencies. Usually

You and your ragtag team of engineers likely won’t be able to create something that is competitive with any big incumbent product. However, you can b

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to en

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to en

The best lead generation companies usually have some combination of a distinguished and highly trusted brand and a proprietary channel or value propos

1/ Why AI is not going to replace programmers: When I was in college studying Computer Science in 2005, I was told that out-sourcing to India will re

Why would any company pay when they could get software for free? And yet we saw the opposite: open source software enabled an explosion in software pr

More broadly, what will remain are jobs to be done. Software needs to be stable and predictable and have infrastructure to run on; that is a lot easie

The End of Software

There is no ideal pitch deck. The narrative depends on what you’re building—but I really like this one: 1. Vision for the world in 5 years 2. The nove

There is no heaven for newthings. There is no Hall of Fame. There is only memory and change. Nothing (the opposite of newthing) and no one are immune.

Conviction

The importance of agentic program managers to the success of the ARPA model isn’t surprising or new. The “aha” was that the only way to cut through th

The reality is that there have been successful ARPA programs all over the spectrum. JCR Licklider “just” spelled out an extraordinary vision, found pe

This realization made several things click: All program managers are program leaders but not all program leaders are managers. Licklider and many othe

If you’re trying to replicate DARPA’s success, most of the structural bits are a distraction. They’re certainly useful, but if you don’t get the agent

This is the overall promise of your startup. Expert level performance through appropriate use of your software to speed up a defined part of a busines

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constra

This is one of the fundamental errors of tech thinking. For a certain class of problems caused by technology (e.g., climate change, traffic accident

This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentr

And you have to offer it sustainably. Sustainability isn’t a thing you think about after you’ve designed a product. Your product’s business model is a

A room is not just a data structure. The moment you draw a boundary around a social space and say “these people are in, these are the rules,” you have

People withdrew into smaller spaces where trust could once again be accumulated rather than continuously spent. Communities became increasingly bounde

Regretful Accelerationism

I've been trying to create a "social network for makers" for the last 15 years with different approaches. I made what was basically WIP multiple time

With an intake process that emphasizes past accomplishments and interviews rather than bureaucratic credentials, and with an ethos of taking chances o

Entrepreneurs often describe building a company as a harrowing experience and doing this alongside a peer group serves as an emotionally powerful init

Early-stage venture capital investments take a long time to come to fruition. These or other YC companies from after Graham’s tenure may yet prove to

There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place,

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and mor

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed o

A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — a

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and mor