James Honsa

how did Allbirds pivot to AI compute hardware before the shoe company literally called ASICS

email subject line from hell

@GregKamradt congrats greg!!

This week ARC Prize Foundation launched ARC-AGI-3 This launch wrapped up nearly a year worth of work across an amazing team of engineers, game designers, and AI researchers Now the hard work of using V3 as a tool to inspire open source research starts Onward and upward

@nickysop @toddsaunders Turns out it’s complicated to explain why your best customers are showing negative NDR in the first 90 days

@jameshonsa @toddsaunders You killed it before even testing it because of accounting headaches??? 😭

I got a DM from a CEO yesterday who charges customers $5,000 for onboarding. Not as a fee.. but as a deposit. If the customer (ICP is SMB $1-5M in revenue) completes onboarding within 35 days, they get every dollar back. If they don't, the company keeps it and uses it to fund a dedicated onboarding specialist to finish the job for them. (don't worry they call the onboarding specialist a forward deployed engineer) It sounded a bit crazy at first, but the results are pretty interesting. Before the deposit, their average onboarding took 67 days with 10% churn during the process. After, it dropped to 31 days, and 3.5% churn. The deposit didn't just speed things up..... it filtered for customers who were serious about implementing, which is a leading indicator of long-term retention. This year so far, 98% of customers have completed onboarding within a 30 days. Is anyone else doing something like this with setup fees for onboarding?

@ElliotComite @toddsaunders It was a recommendation from an advisor you know :)

@jameshonsa @toddsaunders We thought about this? Kind of sounds fun, wish we did it

The forward deployed engineer has rebranded from a niche role at Palantir to the hottest job in tech. Does your startup need one? On The Review, we spoke with founders and operators who’ve successfully built FDE teams to reveal the nuances that make this idiosyncratic role work, along with advice for hiring your own team. Our panel includes: -@jakeserval, who’s building out an FDE team at @getserval -@jameshonsa, who built and scaled Ironclad’s version of FDE -Tiffany Siu, First Round’s Head of Talent and former recruiter at Palantir -Shilpa Balaji, who leads talent and ops at Promise and was previously an FDE and hiring lead at Palantir Read the full guide here: review.firstround.com/so-you-want-to…

I think Dropbox was one of the first companies to have a strategic finance team back in ~2014 and it was similarly 'front of house' for that era (modeling spend to migrate from s3 to our own storage, creative data center/hardware deals, capacity forecasting a self-serve business with sales-assist on top, etc.) perhaps no surprise that founding members of that team are now c-level at figma/openai!

The strategic finance role increasingly feels like a 'front of house' role at compute-heavy companies. Everything is being re-written when there is no longer zero marginal cost to serve the product. Do we have enough GPU reserves? How do we price this contract? Lots of opportunity for people to shape this career in the years to come.

I'm also a believer we figure this out, but astounded that none of the labs/leaders have painted a concrete version of the future that's actually aspirational. Dario's Machines of Loving Grace is the closest attempt and even he proactively says the 'Work and Meaning' part of that essay is the least fleshed out. The most compelling story I've heard: a post-AGI world has a lot more things that feel like F1. elaborate status games that channel the best of human creativity, tool building, competitive drive, and storytelling to give people common purpose. Trying to square that with spending my days building a company whose whole job is converting labor into inference faster...

On a rare serious note re the Citrini essay: - kudos to them for creating a scenario to react to - I do think we often underestimate the speed with which markets correct - eg Bear Stearns was a blip and then on Lehman weekend, it all unraveled at once - that being said I'm a believer we will figure this out - AI that is this impactful will also be incredibly deflationary - this will enable incredible stimulus like we have never seen - other countries will be even more in trouble so dollar will still be in demand - US military dominance is important here - citizens will force change so the inertial Titanic collision is hard to imagine - literally 15 pct unemployment causes massive change given how electorate system is so razor thin - AI being so deflationary means people will also benefit from massive access - eg their need for income drops I have no idea what happens but I know it's not a fait accompli.

somewhere at docusign there is a pm failing to build the world's most obvious AI feature (place the cute lil boxes for me)

@amorriscode Huge updates! Would be awesome if the mobile app started supporting AskUserQuestion tool. Ideal flow for me is kick off a bunch of plans at my computer, interact with them on mobile to get them dialed in, then teleport the session to CLI. Mobile is missing link!

more to come next week. if you wanna hack this long weekend, give desktop a shot: code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop

a few things we shipped on desktop in the last 2 weeks: - Plugin support - SSH - New session toolbar and input UI/UX - Open files in your editor, Finder, or GitHub from the diff view - Ability to select a base branch your worktrees - Better performance when initializing and switching sessions - Drag and drop support for files - Better diff design

@Stammy Feeling the neutral buoyancy of that arm fresh out of the box would be worth it

if i win the lottery, i won't tell anyone.. but there will be signs

when the FDEs are allowed to merge to main on fridays

@chenliw Humans are a tool call for agents!

Plot twist - AI creating new jobs for humans

working at dropbox in 2014. endless pods of developers handwriting code on kinesis keyboards to migrate us off of amazon s3. felt like the future at the time. that's how this photo must have felt to the guys in it too.

@nrmehta I'm so sorry Nick. Sending love your family's way.

[This post is very heavy] “There are moments that the words don't reach There is suffering too terrible to name You hold your child as tight as you can And push away the unimaginable” “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton Last Tuesday, the unimaginable happened. We lost our 17-year-old daughter, Summer Devi Mehta. Unimaginable suffering. Unimaginable grief. Unimaginable fog. We held her tight for so long, with the help of so many. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough. But yet, equally unimaginable was the love. We hosted a celebration of life on Saturday, which we called “Summer Lovin’,” after the song “Summer Nights” from the musical Grease (we are all theater nerds here). About 100 of her classmates, teachers and staff joined our family and we heard countless tales about how Summer impacted the lives of others in big ways and small. One person told us that Summer lived a more vital existence in 17 years than most do in 100. To that end, Summer’s last wish was to raise $1M or more for the Trevor Project, with the goal of reducing youth suicide and having fewer stories end in such an unimaginable way. Check out Summer’s story and donate, if you choose, here: lnkd.in/g_R9RC39 We felt so much caring from the community and recommitted to living our lives with heart and purpose, as Summer did. On Friday, we handled the most painful task of cremating her remains. After the ceremony, we went to Half Moon Bay and stared out into the ocean. I imagine Summer’s spirit riding those waves into peace. The final lines of “Summer Nights” capture how we feel now: “Summer dreams ripped at the seams But, oh Those summer Nights! (Tell me more, tell me more, more, more)”