Andy Dunn

Let me tell you a ghost story. My Ghost first arrived in the year 2000 and would haunt me for the next sixteen years. It was a secret, known only to a handful of my closest loved ones.

"it is the damn phones." new essay in comments. 👇

does anyone know a highly recommended company that does podcast production, editing, booking for founders? recently met a firm that does this and looking to calibrate... happy to share who i'm talking to on dm to compare notes...

.@praddenkeefe = absolute legend

@ryanvailbrown six hours

@dunn how long did it take ChatGPT to write this?

The Age of Dragons has arrived. open.substack.com/pub/dunn/p/the…

The rise of the Product Engineer is not a fad. It is a structural shift in tech. For years, the split was clear: - Product Managers wrote specs. - Software Engineers implemented them. - PMs owned discovery, user interviews, roadmap, prioritization. - Engineers owned architecture, APIs, performance, deployment. AI tools are collapsing that boundary. With tools like ChatGPT, Notion AI and Perplexity, engineers can synthesize user research, draft PRDs and decide priorities themselves. With Cursor, Claude Code and Copilot, they can turn those product decisions into working software in hours. The bottleneck is no longer typing code to build something. It is actually deciding what deserves to be built, how and when. The Product Engineer combines both tracks: - Frames the problem - Talks to users - Defines the MVP - Designs the system - Ships the code - Measures the outcome Fewer handoffs. Fewer translation errors. Faster learning loops. And for Startup Founders, this changes hiring. Instead of asking “Should we hire a PM or another Engineer?” the better question is: - "Who can own this product end to end?" For Senior SW Engineers, this changes careers. - If you only execute tickets, AI will compress your role. - If you define value and ship it, your leverage expands. The Product Engineer is not a new title. It is a new career and a new set of expectations.

ME TOO @ManuelasWeb @HelloKadeya

Two entrepreneurs. One marriage. What could go wrong? 👇

@RobertJBye Dick’s?

We’re #1! Thank you everyone for you support 🎉

📖 open.substack.com/pub/dunn/p/the…

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

ok WOW. Woke up this morning and said, for fun, lets try to recreate monday. com w Claude cowork. it wont work or anything, but we can just show our audience that its plausible. 1 hour later... I literally have my own monday. com that's plugged into my calendar & gmail and surfaced a kids bday that was not anywhere on my radar and I need to get a gift for. Can imagine next step being: order gift and have it delivered by Sunday. 2026 is WILD.

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When you apply physics to your job

She came to crawl, but did something no one expected 🥹🥹🥹

Winning six Super Bowls isn't that impressive when you really think about it. There have been like 60 of them. x.com/AdamSchefter/s…

Founder vision is bullshit. 🔗 👇