Risk manager.
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Joined January 2022
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We’ve raised a $10M Series A to automate video creation for every company.
1,000+ organizations like Atlassian, GitLab, Samsara, Legrand, and Zendesk use @clueso to automate their videos for marketing, customer education, and employee training.
The struggle of video creation in companies is so real, that Netflix made a documentary about it
or 3rd order: the same shared base turns every shock event into an industry-wide selection event.
The moat is whatever lets you survive that filter: margin to absorb a cost spike, products that can robustly switch models
Moats:
- design to be model-agnostic and run evals against at least two models continuously.
- keep most of the product boringly robust (cached, deterministic, small models where they're good enough) and spend frontier-model inference only where it's the product.
- don't build anything whose unit economics only work at today's inference prices.
- route cost exposure through to pricing (usage-based) instead of flat plans.
1st order thinking:
- software is dead
-anyone can build now
- distribution is the moat
- taste is the moat
To me the second order thinking looks something like this:
If the friction to build something out of code (not only software btw but anything highly code reliant) is significantly dropping week after week, it also means millions of new apps/saas/websites etc are about to show up, which (on paper at least) looks like the most diverse software market we've ever had.
That's the obvious part.
Now the less obvious:
We are witnessing something similar to the internet boom, where a hyper verticalized society (one person talks to millions, through the TV news) became a hyper horizontalized society (millions of people talking to each other), but most of the value ended up captured by a handful of platforms (facebook, google etc), that all of them were talking through.
This time millions of people, (non programmers included), are able to build through code, and once again, most of them are doing it through the same 3/4 models.
It looks diverse from the outside, but it’s actually very fragile because all of it depends on the same base.
A new law/price hike/shortage of the chips they all run on (Nvidia, basically), or whatever and millions of projects all get hit at the same time.
It is super fascinating listening @DavidSacks talk
BIG EPISODE 🚨: AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop?
-- AI Researcher's Doomsday Warning Goes Viral
-- OpenAI’s Math Breakthrough: AI Training Privacy and Agent Swarm Innovation
-- Nike’s $200B Collapse: How Business Mistakes and Corporate Wokeism Killed an Iconic Brand
(0:00) Bestie intros!
(0:35) AI Doomsday: Valid concern or Doomer psyop?
(33:40) Steelmanning AI Doomsday scenarios and the impact on Anthropic's IPO
(58:45) OpenAI says it cracked a 200 year old math problem, but did it front-run users with their own data?
(1:19:55) Nike removed from S&P 100 after stock tanks 80%: What went wrong? $NKE
Yash Mathas retweeted
Claude connectors are interesting cause.
1. they give claude legs to know more about the user. A calorie-tracking connector means Claude knows day to day where you are in your weight loss journey
2. for the builder, they can take advantage of the context and user preferences claude brings.
People already come to Claude before buying a book. They ask what to read, whether a book is worth starting...
So, next time you are in claude asking for book recommendations
Coffeetable can bring you a few pages right inside the chat. What better way to decide than actually read a few pages
Claude knows me quite well, and it’s surprisingly good at recommending books ...
claude.ai/directory/coffeeta…
David out here on a generational run
Fable 5 won't be part of any Anthropic subscription plan after July 7
Claude Fable 5 will be available again globally tomorrow.
After a series of productive conversations with the US government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8. We’ll continue to refine these classifiers over the coming weeks to reduce false positives and better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests.
We’ve also begun drafting a consensus framework—with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Glasswing partners—for assessing the severity of AI jailbreaks and how AI developers should respond to them. We invite other industry partners and model providers to join us in this effort.
Finally, we’re scaling up our collaboration with the US government on model testing and safeguards. This will include pre-release access to models and safeguards for evaluation, information sharing on jailbreaks and misuse, and dedicated resources for joint research.
Thank you to our users for your patience, and to our partners across the government, industry, and the research community who worked alongside us to make Fable 5 available again.
Read our full blog: anthropic.com/news/redeployi…
Federer is arguably the strongest possible case to make for the Aristotelian point, because he’s supposed to be the least banausic athlete, rather the elegant craftsman - effortless, graceful, and balletic artistry. The anti-Nadal. The gold standard for not looking like a tool of one’s occupation. Life is bigger than the court.
Tennis is kinetic chain mastery. To hit a ball, you must activate every physical stem at once: [Legs: Lower-Body Power] > [Core: Rotational Torque] > [Upper Body: Kinetic Release]. Hormesis: Federer’s forehand got bigger not despite the load but because of it. Antifragility in action.
De-virtualizing mastery: local antifragility is purchased with fragility or dormancy elsewhere. Federer has certainly lived a life full of leisure. The specialization neither marks him nor makes him incapable of doing anything outside itself. Abiding love of the game and the desire to demand more of oneself.
For Aristotle, the banausos is not just physically deformed by his profession, but politically and ethically stunted: specialization makes him less a complete man than a TOOL of his occupation.
Politics, book VII:
"And any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body or soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of virtue, is vulgar; wherefore we call those arts vulgar which tend to DEFORM the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind."
Epistemically humble war stories
The Man Behind Grand Theft Auto VI and a $45 Billion Media Empire: Strauss Zelnick
Strauss Zelnick has been one of the most powerful people in media for decades, and most people still don't know his name. He took over Take-Two Interactive while the company was under criminal investigation and was 6 months from bankruptcy. It had one product that made money (GTA); everything else was unprofitable. Since then, Take-Two has gone from a $700 million disaster to a $45 billion empire built on Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, and NBA 2K. His management philosophy fits on a napkin: hire the best creative talent on Earth, don't interfere, and run a rational company. He's been doing that for more than 4 decades. This conversation was awesome.
0:00 Hostile Takeover With No Money
1:29 Becoming the New Media Guy
3:58 Lessons From Entertainment History
9:44 Why Hollywood Feared Games
11:52 Fox Turnaround and Barry Diller
20:54 Rupert Murdoch and High Stakes Calm
26:20 Taking the Leap to Crystal Dynamics
38:04 Bootstrapping Without Capital
43:57 Carl Icahn Connection
47:01 Take Two Proxy Coup
56:36 Turnaround Cost Cutting Playbook
1:01:37 Leading Creative Geniuses
1:06:24 Rationality Beats Magic
1:07:54 Borderlands Bet
1:09:28 GTA Timelines Pressure
1:11:22 Specific Goals Visualization
1:21:34 Service Leadership Mindset
1:31:52 Media vs. Entertainment
1:34:22 AI Productivity Reality
1:36:08 Why Hits Surprise
Includes paid partnerships.
Yash Mathas retweeted
One of my deep-seated beliefs is that happiness is a choice.
Obviously there are some natural temperaments and life circumstances that make being happy easier or harder, but I think you have to tell yourself your happiness is in your control.
Even outside the big pillars of life like health, relationships, and work, we can have a lot of control on our daily internal experience with things like:
- choosing to reframe losses as learning
- being happy for others' success instead of jealous
- looking for the good instead of bad in people
- focusing on what we're grateful for vs. what we lack
- looking forward to good things vs. dreading bad things
- etc.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.