I left Silicon Valley 6 years ago Why? Because it's a monoculture The most extreme group think of any place on the planet Show up to a dinner party and everyone is in tech So what do they do? They start stack-ranking each other And it's a totally ordered set: being founder of co $100B market cap > founder of co with $50B market cap > managing partner of tier 1 venture firm > hired CEO of $50B public co > founder of $10B co > etc etc Pure toxicity that nerfs creativty And then as a corollary, people are especially afraid to speak truth to power as everyone knows their place in "The Hierarchy" Reject this nonsense. Stay weird. Think independently. Be honest with yourself. Have fun.

The nation owes a debt to @JGebbia and his excellent team. They worked incredibly hard, with no compensation, to make government services work better for all Americans. 🫡 🇺🇸

Hey Matan - CEO of Cognition here. I respect the work you have done at Factory but your allegations here about Cognition are not true. We have no interest in Factory’s info and Chris has never brought it up. He has not shared and would never share any information about you or Factory with our team, nor would we ever ask. Similarly, we would never ask our engineers or anyone on our team to collect info about any competitor under-the-table. Chris is an advisor to at least 10 companies, and he told you he was resigning as an advisor on Monday. The truth is we both wanted Chris and for good reason - he is a living legend with an unmatched reputation for results and integrity. Not only is he the only person who has built a sales org from the first sales hire to over 3B, he also has built incredible teams that he cares deeply about. His people love working for him. Again, I have a lot of respect for what you’ve built, but competing with integrity doesn’t include posts like yours.

What Cognition doesn’t understand is that we’re sitting on a nuclear weapon to end them Hopefully we don’t need to use it

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building. We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented. A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters. Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light. It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated. Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum. We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

what the hell is happening vinod led their $150M series c in april how do you call your own portfolio company "a struggling second tier competitor" i am so confused

Chief Design Officer @jgebbia officially unveils America.gov, the new online home for the United States of America