Brett Hellman

Seeing a pattern lately. Employee uses Matter. Changes jobs. Gets the new company on @SlackHQ so they can use @MatterApp. And recognition and rewards blossom.

@RonConway @garrytan 🙏

I want to share some difficult news. I was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and I want you to hear it directly from me. Treatment is starting immediately and will include multiple strategies over the course of about a year. While I will be stepping back from some of my usual activities, I will continue to support SV Angel founders, who I love with a passion. SV Angel remains unchanged. Topher has made all of our investment decisions for the better part of the last decade, and Ronny joined as Managing Partner in 2024. They bring experience from nearly every major technology cycle in Silicon Valley and are now focused on partnering with founders building the future of AI. SV Angel has a deep, experienced team that remains fully focused on supporting exceptional founders. With a more focused and balanced schedule, I can prioritize treatments while helping SV Angel founders at inflection points like we always do! I’ve chosen not to share the specific type of cancer since I don't want speculation about my prognosis. I appreciate your understanding and respect for this. I am optimistic about my prognosis. I am fortunate to have the best/amazing team of UCSF doctors in San Francisco, and as you know, I never back down from a fight. Thank you for your support, it means a great deal to me.

@trysunflower magic! 🪄

Magic Reply is now live for all users in our alpha! Here's what it does: → Reads and understands your full email thread, not just the last message → Asks you the right questions instead of guessing your answer → Writes a reply that sounds like you, based on the context

@lennysan @TheRialMichelle Congrats!

Breaking: My wife's children's book is out today! It's called Charts for Babies, and is available anywhere you buy books. We thought, what better way to celebrate the big moment than to collaborate on a post together? In today's very special newsletter, @TheRialMichelle shares a visual guide to getting out of a creative slump. You'll get a glimpse into Michelle's brilliant mind. It's genuinely inspiring and useful, and is for anyone trying to create something today. Read it right now or bookmark it for the next time you get stuck: lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-visual-gui…

Maybe it named itself 😱

Whoever named Gemini at Google really named it. In the mythology, the immortal twin gives up his immortality to save the life of his mortal twin. It’s just like Google giving up 100% of its free cash flow to make sure Deepmind survives.

It also raises a hard truth that the people making these decisions are not always the ones best positioned to shape the future.

Layoffs at scale are meant to strengthen companies, yet they rarely produce the outcomes leaders hope for. For many, the moment becomes an inflection point toward founding, building, and leading something much bigger.

I was chatting with a group of Princeton CS students and they told me the CS enrollment has been way down. I looked into it, and it's definitely a trend: - Nationally, 62% of CS programs reported declines in 2025 - Down 9% over past 2 years across UC schools - Most striking, existing CS majors are feeling the most regret about their choice of major with the rise of AI (more than Humanities majors 😬) Whether we'll need more or fewer engineers in the future, the supply of new ones is shrinking. Maybe a temporary blip, maybe a sign of things to come. The silver lining though is that if there's a surge of demand for engineers, existing engineers will become super valuable.

Before you decide to be a manager, you should think hard about whether it's the right path for you. Because you don't have to do it. Especially if you don't really want to, but believe the management ladder is the only way to move up in your career. A lot of people shouldn't be forced into management – if you're really not a people person, or you only want to focus on the work, or you thrive on having regular day to-day successes and accomplishments and the murky maybe-your-team-will-succeed-one-day-style of management is less motivating to you. - #BUILD Chapter 2.1 Just Managing

@sean_lynch surprised?

without comment

@pitdesi @jmj great card but really low limits

best card for most is RH gold, get 3% cash back I am an incorrigible credit card optimizer. I enjoy juggling multiple cards and knowing which card to use out for which purchase. But it’s like a game that I enjoy that maybe saves me a few thousand bucks a year- not worth the mental bandwidth for most.

Good Chase offer right now for CSR Free Whoop for a year Still not sure I want it tbh

Your customers will teach you how to go from $1m to $100m ARR, you just have to listen True especially if your initial TAM seems quite small

.@sama Feature request: If there’s an image in my clipboard when ChatGPT opens, auto start the upload. Tiny change. Huge time saver for power users.

@sama well said

First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.) Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.

Anthropic just took a big swipe at OpenAI's decision to put ads in ChatGPT. Anthropic is airing ads mocking ChatGPT ads during the Super Bowl, and they're hilarious 😅 Anthropic is also committing to no ads in Claude theverge.com/ai-artificial-…

.@molekuleair still no update from support. help please?

@bdistel Sooner you embrace it the better off you’ll be!

We've reached a serious milestone at Windmill. I can no longer function efficiently without installing MSFT products. This goes against everything I believe in.

@nikunj @lmramirez_ @hall time for a reunion

@lmramirez_ @hall h/t @bretthellman 🙏

If I had to make a Venn diagram of a) extremely kind b) brilliant engineer and c) phenomenal design taste, there would only be ONE person inside it.. and that’s Luis. I’m so glad to have met him at @hall (RIP) 12 years ago and thrilled to call him a close friend now 🫡