I pretend to be a night owl so I can have interesting conversations I am a morning person. No matter what time I go to bed at night, I wake up before 6am. I don't plan it. It just is the way my body wants to work. It turns out that being a morning person is a lucky life hack: in theory, morning people are likely to be happier and healthier. I don't know how the science on that will bear out over time, but there's no doubt that it's an advantage to have your best energy just as your work or...
7 days ago • 3 min read
RTOh well In 2024, I collected more than 1,100 hours of recorded meetings across 150+ teams. In analyzing the corpus, I found much to recommend about in-person work: People both participate in discussions and disagree with each other more in person, especially women. Startups that work in person grow faster than those that are remote. Based on the data and also my own feelings of isolation last year, I decided that, whether I started another company or took a role at someone else's, I wanted...
14 days ago • 3 min read
I don't talk cool, and neither does your LLM I live with three teenage girls, so I am constantly reminded how not cool I am. For a few years now, my kids' favorite hobby has quizzing me on what I think different Gen Z words mean. They'll be like "you ate and left no crumbs, go!" and I'll guess something like, "you were really hungry!" and hilarity ensues. Sometimes I guess wrong on purpose. I don't think they've caught on yet. But as uncool as I am, even I am better at teenage code switching...
21 days ago • 3 min read
It's a UNIX system! I know this! I've spent a good amount of time building with Claude Code and GitHub Copilot the last few months. CLI (Command Line Interface) honestly feels like a throwback to UNIX days. But as it happens, the command line is a good interface for making software in a world where you're using natural language to do it. With the rise of natural language interfaces, I don't feel like I'm coding when I build software. "Vibe coding" is not the right description of this work...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Vive la résistance Over the last month, I've built six awesome apps for my personal use without looking at a line of code. This does not include the agents I've built in my day job. As a hobbyist developer, will I ever open an IDE again? Maybe not. Natural language is the new building modality. These days, even my non-technical friends are making apps. Anyone with a credit card can easily experiment. It's simple to build hands-on (you should) or try open-source AI agents like OpenClaw (you...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
But does it scale? A few years back, I managed a leader who was an excellent student. She read the management books and attended the development conferences. If there was a process, she followed it. If you asked AI to generate a "diligent executive" persona, it would look like her. Like a lot of leaders who are good students, she enjoyed applying her knowledge. She used standard rubrics to measure performance. Her team meetings had structured agendas. And by far, her favorite question to ask...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
You are probably a weird special case too Last year, I published a lot of data about the job market and the experience candidates were having (getting ghosted a lot). But I didn't share much about my own recruiting experience. I started a new job just before Thanksgiving. I wrote about my role, as well as some others I'd considered, when I first announced it. This week, I wanted to share some data from my job search. I was a long-time founder and startup person who was interested in seeing an...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
You can't outsource having a point Every once in a while, I hear someone announce that they have a goal of doing more thought leadership. For a long time, I didn't understand what this meant. Magic decoder ring to the rescue: "I want to do more thought leadership" often means the person wants to write articles, often on LinkedIn but sometimes elsewhere, that make people believe the author is smart, forward-leaning, and inspiring. More often than not, it actually means they want someone else...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
You say spam, I say data set Across all four professional email addresses I used in 2025, I got a lot of random cold email: 5,122 messages in all from 229 distinct vendors trying to sell me stuff. In fact, I get so much cold email that I wrote about it: they're not all about AI, but after ChatGPT launched, the percentage of total pitches trying to sell me AI went through the roof. You probably get these messages too. If you're like most people, you hit the unsubscribe button, block the...
2 months ago • 3 min read