Johann Van Tonder
@jvt
20 years in ecommerce, now CEO of a CRO agency. Probably doing analysis in R or building stuff with AI. Or walking on the beach. Yeah, probably that.
Johann Van Tonder
I don't play zero-sum games.
I noticed that whenever I was faced with a competitive, zero-sum game – a situation in which someone else had to lose in order for me to win, or vice versa I chose to opt out of that game completely.
- Tiago Forte on X
As more human jobs become assisted, automated, or replaced by artificial intelligence, we must spend our hours where we have a competitive advantage over machines: developing new ideas, expressing old things in new ways, innovating process, and crafting the story that infuses our creations with meaning .
Scott Belsky • Creating in The Era of Creative Confidence
Yes.
Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking.
Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.... See more
“First the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then it’s a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.”
Daniel Goleman • Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence
Original quote is by Clay Shirky
“A more practical answer is that it’s a file. This right here is a large language model, called Vicuna 7B. It’s a 4.2 gigabyte file on my computer. If you open the file, it’s just numbers. These things are giant binary blobs of numbers…”
Simon Willison, attempting to explain LLM
AI skepticism and
Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on. What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.
Frank Slootman • Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity
Over the next year or two, I expect GPT-4 and its successors to become a copilot for the mind: a digital research assistant that will bring to bear the sum total of everything you’ve read, everything you’ve thought, and everything you’ve forgotten every time you touch a keyboard.
It will solve some of the perennial problems in productivity culture:
... See moreDan Shipper • GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind
Remember: you + your cofounder vs The Problem
“I encourage founding teams to do everything they possibly can to remember that their co-founders are on their side”
Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC
The story-driven company thrives because its people have a collective narrative identity that gives them a sense of purpose and creates a cohesive culture.