1/ Announcing the new Lindy: the first platform letting you build a team of AI employees that work together to perform any task — 100x better, faster and cheaper than humans would.
Watch how I build a Lindy to track competitors in 30s:
2/ The real magic comes from Lindies working together to do something. It’s like an assembly line of AI employees.
Here, I get a Competitive Intel Manager Lindy to spin up one Competitive Analyst Lindy for each of my competitors:
Sep 17, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I’ve conducted 100s of reference checks, and recently realized how much I’d learnt by giving a crash course to a friend about to conduct one.
There’s an art to getting someone’s friends / front door checks to say bad things about them
Much of it is from the must-read “Who” by Geoff Smart, but here goes:
First, ask the person you’re doing the checks about what other people will say about them, including their “areas for improvement.” Ask for examples.
Aug 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you go to the gym twice a week or more and still haven’t bought a Tonal — why?
Unaffiliated. This is just the best product I’ve bought in years — and I buy a lot of Apple products.
Takes the friction of working out down to zero.
And more than pays for itself, esp once you include the time savings from not having to commute to the gym.
Jul 26, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
1. I could write a book about this, unfortunately
First , these businesses are *insanely* expensive both to start and operate.
The tech alone is mind bogglingly complex, for just today’s table stakes. Huge amount of AI involved for pricing, routing, dispatching etc.
2/ On the operation side, as pointed out in the thread — acquisition costs are extremely high (esp on driver side), and the chicken and egg problem makes each city extremely costly to bootstrap. You have to heavily subsidize each one before it becomes self sufficient.
May 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A memo I sent to the team last month about changing my mind on remote, and moving the team to SF:
- "Can't believe you're forcing your employees to come back!"
Should have specified — we're not forcing anyone. Folks who were hired during our remote era are grandfathered into that policy, but everyone is highly encouraged to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mar 30, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Feeling v conflicted by the AI safety debate.
On the one hand, I 100% understand and mostly share the existential concerns.
Some counter arguments make sense[1], but the majority are not serious, their holders not understanding the concerns, or the power of superintelligence.
On the other hand, techno pessismists have, so far, always been wrong.
This time could be different, but there has to be a strong burden of proof on anyone who claims that a new tech needs to be stopped, as history, so far, has shown them to cause a lot more harm than good.
Mar 22, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Excited to announce @getlindy, the AI assistant putting your life on autopilot.
Think of Lindy as ChatGPT w access to all your apps, so it can:
- manage your email & calendar
- help you prospect / recruit
- record & summarize your mtgs
Quick demo videos below
Here's how Lindy helps me with recruiting:
"Find 10 engineers in SF, and draft them a recruiting email based on this JD"
Mar 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
That is in fact precisely the reaction I'm saying we need to stop having.
We've done that for the last decade. It's time to stop being reasonable with people who simply cannot be reasoned with.
Tech is the industry that's contributing the most to economic growth, job growth, and innovation.
It's also the industry that's most welcoming of outsiders — immigrants, uncredentialed people, and, yes, minorities.
Mar 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The events of this weekend change things.
The bank run isn't actually the biggest thing — the reaction to it is.
It's making me and a lot of people realize that the media's coordinated anti-tech campaign over the last 6yrs has been a lot more effective than we thought.
We're having actual, honest to god, hammer and sickle communists hating tech and actually wanting our heads on a spike.
Even I, who worked at Uber for years and was on the receiving end of that hatred, under-estimated how bad the situation was.
Feb 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
LLMs have generally sucked the oxygen out of the room, but robotics seems to have been particularly impacted
Been meeting with robotics experts over the last few days, and the mood is gloomy to say the least
People are realizing that Moravec's Paradox[1] means we have a choice between
1/ spending a fortune to automate something that ~any human can do for $10-20 / hr ($2-$5 with teleoperations)
This seems to have struck a chord. Lots in the replies make the good point that GPT3 isn’t always accurate.
In my experience, for well-documented “mainstream” history like this, it is in fact quite good — prob a lot better than most YT videos or Netflix documentaries (1/n)
Quite a few folks try to “prove” GPT3’s unreliability by asking questions such as “explain why the earth is flat.”
First, even that fails most of the time. You really have to go out of your way for GPT3 to play the role of a flat earther. You can also try “not doing that”
I often joke that CEOs are just glorified recruiters — what I fail to mention is that finding hidden gems and watching them grow and kill it on the job is by far one of the most gratifying parts of the founder’s journey
We’ve been almost irrational in how slow we’ve been hiring, and how uncompromisingly high we’ve held the bar.
We’ve now interviewed close to 4,400 candidates to hire just 40.
Apr 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Was recently asked for career advice by a candidate.
3 pieces: 1. Assume no one's gonna help you, but no one's gonna stop you either
2. Know thyself — one of the main reasons I switched from job in big tech to founder was because some of my core traits are weaknesses in a big co, strengths at a startup (desire for agency, not suffering fools, restlessness / impatience…)
Apr 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
So far I've found that Miami is a lot more nakedly status-driven.
SF is status-driven too (I think status is the core motivator of all humans, and all other motivations just proxies for it), but it at least tries to pretend it isn't. 🧵
Which leads to the sometimes comical "we are so passionate about changing the world through cloud-based enterprise CRM software!!!"
You could say that's hypocritical, but I actually think it's healthy.
Apr 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
True IME, and hard to overstate how toxic that is.
It’d be fine if the unnecessary 50-75% twiddled their thumbs all day.
But when you hire so many designers that they each have a one-week project every quarter, they don’t just do it and then chill for 11 weeks… (1/4)
They stretch it for the whole quarter! By calling more and more endless and completely useless meetings or writing complicated user journeys or inventing new fun things to do.
This kills productivity, quality, and makes the best talent leave. (2/4)
Dec 22, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I got my 3rd vaccine shot about a month ago, and shortly after started developing heart issues, which have been ongoing — uncomfortable fluttering, skipped beats, etc…
I have a friend in the exact same boat, apparently a recognized side effect
I do wish I had done some more homework before getting the 3rd shot.
The odds of dying of Covid for a healthy 30 years old are basically 0.
The odds of spending two very bad days after getting the vaccine are 100%, and of having long term side effects higher than you’d think
Jul 8, 2021 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
1/ Teamflow is turning 1 today! It's been a crazy year — we grew the team from 1 to 20 people, raised a pre-seed, seed and A and built and shipped our MVP.
Spent this morning reflecting on my learnings from this year:
2/ Always know your #1 priority, and repeat it non-stop.
Our monthly investor updates start with our vision and our current top priority. And I find myself repeating this top priority at least 3 times a day.
It's wonderful what a team can do when you give it a clear goal.
Jun 10, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Absolutely nuts paper by researchers from U Chicago analyzing the productivity of 10,000 workers before and after the pandemic.
Conclusions: WFH led to 2 more hrs of work per day, more meetings, less focus time, and *less productivity* bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/upl…
This does not surprise me. The way I think of it now is as a 2x2: formal / informal x text / video communication.
Email is formal text, Slack informal text, and Zoom formal video.
May 1, 2021 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Checked our applicant tracking system the other day and found out I’m closing in on 1,000 people I personally interviewed over the last year for @getTeamflow. Learnings below.
Look for attitude over aptitude. You can never fix a bad attitude, and a single person with one can ruin the culture of an entire organization.
Early in my career, I used to be surprised seeing managers fire high performers with a bad attitude — now I understand.
Apr 30, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Gonna sound like a boomer, but I’ve come to believe that 90%+ of cloud spend is irrational, coming from the fact that engineers aren’t finance savvy enough nor CFOs tech savvy enough
And I know the refrain — “you don’t wanna manage your own data centers,” “the cloud gets better while you sleep,” “it scales up and down,” “turn capex into opex!”
But still — 10-100x pricier. Just spreadsheet it out
Jan 6, 2021 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
1/ I'm insanely excited to announce what I've been working on for the last year:
Teamflow, a virtual office that makes you feel like a team again. Coming out of stealth and announcing our $3.9M seed round today 🎉🎉🎉 teamflowhq.com/blog/announcin…2/ @getTeamflow lets you see your video in an office where your team can hang out.
You can move yourself around, and only hear and see people around you.
So when you want to chat with someone, you can just drag yourself over and say hi — no more juggling with Zoom links
This does not surprise me. The way I think of it now is as a 2x2: formal / informal x text / video communication. 
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