charlierguo

I'm sure the engineers at Google worked 4 days a week, 2 hours a day

Why are you sure of that? Anecdotally everyone I know in and around Google Deepmind works incredibly hard.

Crazy amount of funding, little to no revenue, no competitive moat, no demand.

Doesn't this also describe Thinking Machines Lab?

It's fascinating/spooky how different LLMs are slowly developing their own "personalities," so to speak. And they seem to be emerging as we're giving them access to more tools and modalities which are harder to do broad RLHF on.

With computer use, we first learned that Claude sometimes takes breaks to browse pictures of Yosemite, and now this:

Claude really likes Firefox. It will use other browsers if it absolutely has to, but will behave so much better if you just install Firefox and let it go to its happy place.

Have we figured out a way to monetize AI-powered search yet? Presumably a product like this (or Perplexity) will ultimately be free, in which case they'll be forced to offer ads (bringing us back to Google's status quo) or perhaps worse, we'll have "product placement" in our AI-written results.

I guess it really did come down to the GPUs in the end. Funding and talent matter a lot less when it takes you 12 months to get H100s.

Some stories that I've heard personally:

- Tony Xu (DoorDash) figured out that many early users were moms, and he would go and knock on their doors to ask them why they would use the product, and where other moms would hang out so they could get more signups. All of the founders also took shifts to drive for the app so they had to use it themselves.

- Tom Preston-Werner (formerly GitHub) emailed tons of OSS maintainers, including John Resig of jQuery, to try and convince them to migrate over to GitHub. He admits that it wasn't a great strategy though - project maintainers have to convince themselves to switch VCS systems.

- Jessica Mah (formerly inDinero) became a CPA in order to do accounting services for her startup. She would talk to customers and make sales during the day, and study for the certification at night.

- Ricky Yean (formerly Crowdbooster) struck a deal with an early customer/cafe owner to get paid in food, so they worked from the cafe all the time. They ended up building the cafe owner custom dashboards which later become their product.

- Nikki Durkin (formerly 99dresses) spent $10,000 at a time on Nordstrom, listed the clothes on her clothing marketplace, and then returned anything that wasn't sold or traded to users within the 30-day return window.

- Jake Jolis (formerly Verbling) would act as an English speaker trying to learn other languages at all hours of the night in order to improve the matchmaking on his language learning app. Most people were their to learn English rather than the other way around.

- Rujul Zaparde (formerly FlightCar) stood in front of a major airport parking lot for nearly 12 hours with a sign that said "ask us about free airport parking". He had the cops called on him three times that day.

- James Richards (formerly Teleborder) paid people from Craigslist $20 to sit and use their app in front of them. It led to a lot of valuable feedback, and they ended up hiring many of them later on.

- Walker Williams (formerly Teespring) drove an hour and a half to Petaluma in order to pack and ship bobbleheads for a long-term client that wanted to sell something other than t-shirts, despite the fact that the company... only sold t-shirts.

A while back I had this same question - and I ended up writing a book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Unscalable-Charlie-Guo-ebook/dp/B019E...

There's a bunch more in the book - I was lucky enough to also talk to the founders of Codecademy, General Assembly, and Zenefits. But those were some of the ones that I still remember pretty well.

I honestly think tightly integrating language models with email will be one of the most impactful use cases for LLMs in the short-term. Email, as a medium, is pretty much nothing BUT text, and it's something that I (and probably the average HN reader) spend tens of hours on each week.

In trying "write it for me" AI tools, the biggest hurdle is always matching my own tone and style - I'm pretty particular about my writing, and I kind of hate the default tone that ChatGPT and Bard use. It seems like you've put a ton of hard work into making sure that isn't the case here.

And the analysis is really a cherry on top - I've been waiting for a tool that I can ask "what are the 3 most important messages that are unread in my inbox?" Excited to try this out!

Texts, emails, love letters. I work for a company that's got nothing to do with AI and I write some internal content, but not much that's designed for public consumption.

Oh wow, crazy to see this on the front page! Author here.

Shameless plug: if you like my writing, I mostly write about AI these days: https://www.ignorance.ai/

Gut Check: Especially if you’re off by quite a bit, this is a chance to take a step back and ask whether the company has reached growth scale or not. It could be that there are plenty of obvious 0-1 tactics left. Not everything has to be an experiment.

This is a key point, imo. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of companies are running "growth teams" that don't have the scale where it actually makes sense to do so.

Every situation is different, but in cases where AI has been valuable for me personally, "silly process X" isn't something that I can easily get rid of. People are messy. Processes are messy. AI doesn't straighten them out, but it does speed up sifting through the messiness. YMMV.

Have you tested this with GPT-4 + Code Interpreter? The plugin can unpack zip files, but I'm not sure about tar files.

Fair point! I think my main idea was "prefer building with an API over training your own model" but that isn't as pithy.

The jury's still out on how much training and fine tuning are going to matter in the long run - my belief is that there are many great products that can exist without needing a new model architecture, or owning the model at all.

This allows you to run API migrations and data migrations independently. Which is crucial for any service that will last longer than 1 year.

I've felt nervous for years about going all-in with Django Rest Framework, and you've articulated exactly why.

I've been checking out Notes all morning (I write a jargon-free, FOMO-free, AI newsletter). It's kind of a weird product launch? My feed is primarily content that the people I subscribe to post or comment on, but I don't subscribe to that many people.

I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now. As an author there are definitely things that I want to share that aren't worth of an email, but I'm pretty sure very few of my audience members are going to see it. Maybe this makes more sense for writers with audiences who are on the Substack app all day.

Sure, just submitted! We'll see if it gets any traction.

The deluge is quite something, isn't it. Over 40% of the latest YC batch are related to AI/ML: https://www.ignorance.ai/p/analyzing-over-100-ai-startups-fr...

I can't speak to OpenAI being hell-bent on monopoly, but they stopped being a non-profit a while ago: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

Wow. I wrote about the potential for this literally last Wednesday: https://generatives.substack.com/p/hearing-voices

I really didn't think we'd see it play out this fast, though.

I've been grappling with this same question myself. Depending on what areas your focused on, you should probably look in different places.

- New product launches: HN, Reddit, Twitter

- Technical ML advancements: arXiv, GitHub, HN

- Building your own projects: Project docs (Stable Diffusion, OpenAI), Andrej Karpathy, GitHub

Shameless plug - I've been asking myself the same question lately, and I've started exploring as much as I can and documenting everything I find: https://generatives.substack.com/

Do you mind sharing examples of overfunded rivals? I'd be interested in reading about their trajectories.

I'm also working on helping creators monetize their audiences (but bootstrapped), and it often feels like Patreon is either going to vacuum up all the creators or explode in a VC-funded blaze of glory.

What were your favorite resources for learning SEO?

Very cool. Having made mobile splash pages in this past, pretty sure this will save a ton of time on projects going forward.

Is there a way to customize the site? I want to maintain a consistent UI/UX.

It's not exactly Founders at Work 2.0, but I'm working on a book that's been heavily influenced by Founders at Work, as well as pg's "Do Things That Don't Scale" essay.

It's called Unscalable: https://www.inkshares.com/projects/unscalable

</shamelessplug>

Hey everyone! Author here.

First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here).

Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your idea completely isn't really a "pivot" (but I don't know if the industry has as concise of a term for throwing everything out and starting over). In my mind, the real failure was squandering the opportunity of YC, an opportunity I know many people would kill to have. Clearly we should have stuck it out with our idea, but we were 21 years old, stressed out, and foolish.

I also want to note (in case anyone was wondering) that my experience hasn't diminished my opinion of YC at all. PG's advice was spot on, and YC remains an amazing program for founders. We simply didn't make the best use of our time in it.

Hopefully reading about my experience is helpful in some way. If not, sorry about that. Give it a downvote and send it on its merry way.

https://twitter.com/charlierguo :)

I built it because of a project I was working on :). Feel free to create an issue if you need some new features or have use cases that aren't covered.

Thanks! I was working on a side project that needed to access my GMail, and I couldn't believe that a good library didn't exist already. If you find any bugs or use cases that aren't covered well, file an issue or make a contribution!