The age of designing in a cave for a week and emerging with polished mockups is over. Sit next to an engineer for 30 minutes, transcribe, paste in @FactoryAI, load design skills, let Droid cook. Proximity to engineers is directly correlated with designer productivity.

assuming the current u.s. life expectancy of 79 years as a baseline, in your life you get: ~4,120 weekends ~8,240 weekend days 79 summers 316 seasons 79 birthdays ~980 full moons ~28,850 nights ~86,500 meals at common frequencies post childhood: - one major trip/year: 61 trips - three major trips/year: 183 trips - one great dinner/month: 730 dinners - one memorable night/month: 730 nights - one book/month: 730 books - seeing a friend annually: 61 meetings - seeing them every five years: 12 meetings - moving every five years: ~12 homes - building one startup every six years: perhaps 7 serious attempts during a conventional working life - owning each car for five years: ~12 cars - getting a new dog every 12 years: ~5 dog eras - taking one proper family vacation/year: 61 vacations, but only ~18 while each child lives at home - spending two weeks/year with parents after leaving home: 40 weeks over 20 years, versus ~936 weeks spent together during childhood life feels long cuz days repeat. measured in meaningful repetitions, it is shockingly small.

i had no idea what granular synthesis was 1 day ago. tonight, i built a proper engine with a complete sampler, effects signal path & tape recorder. learnt a ton. coming soon.

One of our more useful internal channels is gong-love. Every night a sentiment bot reads our customer calls to surface themes and quotes that bring calls to life It helps sellers articulate impact in customers' own words, share feedback to builders and make our marketing better

Business is often seen as the art of acquisition. Acquiring talent, customers, revenue, profits, mindshare, marketshare. Building and growing requires consumption, addition, parlaying some of this into a lot of that. But the smartest businesses, the ones that tend to stick around for the long haul, know that existence is also about avoidance. Avoiding careening variable costs, avoiding getting involved with things that aren’t core to your business, avoiding spending time on things that don’t matter, avoiding bad investments, avoiding people who don’t help you prosper, and even avoiding customers who aren’t the right fit. However, there’s something even more fundamental to avoid. It would be easy to call it “complexity” but that’s not quite it. Complexity can be necessary, and intricacy can be quite beautiful. Just stare into a Moorish mosaic and you’ll know it. So complexity isn’t the issue. Overkill is the issue. Overkill is the dust that settles on the stuff that took a lot of energy to build or buy, but turned out not to be necessary. The over-engineered, over-designed, over-hired, over-litigated, the over-spent, over-promised, over-deliberated. Overkill is the policy that was written but never enacted. The technology that was purchased that was never used. The seven steps that could be handled in two. The nine people in a meeting made for three. The business equivalent of the 8 bedroom house for a family of four. The cooks when you don’t even have a kitchen. Overkill is using five different products to run a single project. Overkill is an seven-stage interview process that exhausts everyone involved. Overkill is acting like a company 100x your size. Overkill is buying what they bought but that you don’t need. Overkill is paying thousands for something worth hundreds. Overkill is hoping that losing more will turn into a win. Every day is an opportunity to find just right. To toss that policy that’s in the way. To slim down the stack. To sharpen things up. To eliminate the work that doesn’t need to be done. To polish the scratched glass so you can see through again. Amass what you need, but ignore even more. Kill overkill.