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Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
Why VC funding can hurt startups: selling equity for cash, chasing traction over profitability, and why bootstrapping may be safer for founders.
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ChatGPT's API is so good and cheap, it makes most text generating AI obsolete
Including OpenAI’s other text generating AI!
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The tiny corp raised $5.1M
Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank.
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Scalability is overrated
Startup founders like to think about scalability—and that’s usually a good thing. But overly focusing on scalability overlooks one of the biggest advantages that startups have over larger companies.
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Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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My startup banking story
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
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At this company, we are family
As I shared at our last family meeting, current economic conditions have forced family leadership to make many difficult decisions. I myself have reduced my golf outings to every other week, and you, undoubtedly, noticed that your mother’s car is no longer the current model year. Unfortunately, even these deep cuts…
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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Most data work seems fundamentally worthless
After going viral, there is one comment I'd like to address. One guy pointed out how comfortable this work seemed, how high the pay was, and said I am out-of-touch and privileged. To that I say, yes, obviously . I moved to the first-world to have first-world problems. Mission accomplished.
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Google no longer automatically indexes websites?
Can you please take a few minutes today, go to Google, and search for your website using the site search filter? (EX: site:mysite.com) Do you have about the right number of pages showing up, or just a few pages, or worse yet – none? The reason I am asking you to do this is that […]
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Every app that adds AI looks like this
and just like that - poof! - we scammed you into thinking this shit was cool // S1E3
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I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency
I'm often asked if I plan to hire more people and grow my own design agency? I don't, and in this article I explain why.
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Wolfram Alpha and ChatGPT
Accessing Wolfram|Alpha's computational knowledge with ChatGPT--an ideal combination of precise computation with human-like expression of ideas. Stephen Wolfram explains how.
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The Bond villain compliance strategy
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
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Mistakes to avoid to build a better 1-person business
Choosing the right markets and the pitfalls to avoid
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The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals
Disclaimer: This article is not meant to provoke anxiety or exaggerate the power of GPT. It is merely my personal observation after using ChatGPT/GPT-
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Goodbye, Twilio
As of this week and after almost four years, I'm not a Twilio employee anymore. I'm writing this while I work through a range of conflicting emotions, and try to adapt to new daily routines without…
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Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles
Learning about roles you work with can provide a meaningful competitive advantage in the modern tech world
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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief
Disguising self-interest as virtue
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Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
Last week, I had a fascinating conversation with a reader around frustration and unhappiness at work. Much of it was totally obvious to both of us, but it occurred to me that this probably isn't to everyone, which is why almost all of my colleagues (in very cushy, non-stressful jobs) nonetheless need therapy. And if…
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I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)
Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution. The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux…
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The Prime Video microservices to monolith story
The Prime Video team published this story: Scaling up the audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%, and the internet piled…
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Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
Not many people remember this 2005 documentary featured early interviews with Paul Graham, Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman.
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Why did Google Brain exist?
This essay was originally written in December 2022 as I pondered the future of my job. I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared, and last week, Brain and…
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