dick costolo

@buccocapital i had precisely the same thought about his tweet with the exception that i was surprised he actually wrote it in public. it is so comically ridiculous and self-serving at literally EVERYBODY ELSE’S expense. it reads more like an internal memo that should never have been leaked.

OpenAI taking a page out of the Bush administration’s playbook. You can get a smart-sounding person to justify anything! If you can get a Ivy League law professors to use constitutional theory of law and the concept of statehood to justify a proactive war on the abstract *concept* of terror you can definitely hire smart-sounding people to tweet about why we need to regulate open source models because it is bad for your company We don’t have to listen to them. We can laugh at them. But if you have the money and your competitive advantage is on the line, fuck it, why not? Hire some smart people to say plausibly smart things, even if when you take a single second to pop the hood they are so comically self-interested the whole thing collapses in on itself At least OpenAI doesn’t have an army

@EpsilonTheory the funny thing is, and i mean funny in the not funny sense, is that a lot of people will read this and say “yeah a triple levered single stock ETF was patently absurd” and then in the same breath say “but i wonder why he included <insert other thing from your list> in there?”

One day we'll look back and recognize ALL of this ... crypto, 0DTE options, prediction markets, levered ETFs, etc ... as increasingly infectious gain-of-function variants of a semantic virus no less dangerous than Covid.

Alex continues to be levelheaded and forthright about AI cybersecurity matters and does about as good a job as possible steering clear of the ranting and finger pointing.

@collision you and your much better handstand-doing brother @patrickc always impress. This is just fantastic.

We're launching Intercept, a new philanthropic initiative to fight respiratory viruses like colds and flus. interceptfund.com

@nikesharora operator mode!!

The AI Business model trap: LLMs want cash flow to fund the race to AGI or the next model. Enter free consumer AI - they are losing a lot of money on the breadth of models to serve consumers for free! They are caught in the post training data trap, free consumer usage feeds post training needs, it can't be right to stop serving customers for free? But they need money for the compute: The monetization challenge is being pointed to Enterprises. Phase 1 - seemed easy, value capture in coding, the most bottom up motion in enterprise - with low customization per customer. Developers continue to train coding, tasks and eventually will train flawless skills. Phase 2 is where the challenge lies, showing true enterprise value. The promise of efficiency, accuracy, elimination of resources - that requires a different approach, build depth with harnesses, context, memory, solving for edge cases with deterministic guardrails! Build skill libraries - enter FDEs. Yes,FDEs will train the enterprise Waymos of the world. The risk - high token pricing for enterprises while consumers for free! Yes for consumer distribution businesses (aka Google, Meta, Apple, etc) it makes sense to hold on the distribution with free AI. If you want to win enterprise, you should be forward pricing tokens. The cheaper the tokens for enterprises it will allow for experimentation, workflow reimagination - instead CIOs are busy restricting AI use and working on making the use more efficient! Paradox: They still haven't fully understood and embraced the value of AI in the enterprise. If I were them: 1. Cut token pricing now, else send enterprises to secure opensource and end up with friction filled routing layers. 2. Show me how enterprises can use their context, training and data as their competitive advantage. 3. Build tools for rapid edge case learning and reducing false positives. @HarryStebbings @sama @DarioAmodei @demishassabis

Happy to be investing for the fourth time here in Baseten. While it’s obviously always great to see a portfolio company doing well, it’s just as delightful to see four awesome human beings (Tuhin, Amir, Phil, and Pankaj) having tremendous success alongside their teammates.

@teddyschleifer very funny take. made me lol which very few things do. i usually just say “that’s funny”

Tom Steyer spent $558 million over the last six years on two races to remain a private citizen.

@zoink i haven’t watched yet and you’re RUINING IT FOR ME! 🤓

Not my best work 😅

@micsolana this is great fun. what a great idea

mafia episode two is live: palmer luckey, bryan johnson, and dylan field take on the town. let's see if trae's as good at sniffing liars out as he is at manipulating cherished friends into murdering the angel.

@markpinc just for the record and in the interests of policing hyperbole, i don’t think you’ve really spent your life trying to perfect the perfect bolognese. Surely there were a few years that were lots of Farmville and not so much bolognese. 😘

I’ve spent my life trying to make the perfect bolognese. Breakout product makers have great taste. They bring a strong pov on quality. Product makers who don’t use and deeply understand their own products are like chefs who don’t eat their own cooking.  Recently I got to spend half a day in the @FlourandWater test kitchen perfecting my recipe. They gave me a couple of strong tips:  1) focus on the fond – the crusty brown bits at the bottom of the pan after you cook your meat. Gives your bolognese a more complex and savory flavor. You can use red wine to deglaze it before adding to your sauce. 2) You can shock your sauce with vinegar if it tastes flat. You can find my recipe in my new book out june 23. lifeatthespeedofplay.com

@bijans @pkedrosky @nickbilton this is sincerely appreciated. next time please list me first. it’s bad enough i’m after nick in the podcast title.

I know we are all overwhelmed with podcasts but this new series from @pkedrosky @nickbilton and @dickc is so good - and the AI Datacenter bubble episode was fantastic. Well worth adding to your favorites podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

@AlexPallNY @eastdakota @TheChainsmokers i knew you were going to respond to this. i was hoping you were going to say “he’s referring to Drew, not me!”

@eastdakota @TheChainsmokers Haha in fairness this wasn’t a bad story just a worthy funny story

So my evening in Lisbon is texting with one of the @TheChainsmokers who’s encouraging me to post my Chamath story as bad VC story #4, and me saying it’s just not as cringe as the first three, and him lecturing me on how to structure a set. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@robnorman @TheRickWilson @ProjectLincoln underrated tweet

@TheRickWilson @ProjectLincoln Carte Blanche

The man running the largest coverup in American history has spent the last year protecting pedophiles. So on brand for Trump and the GOP it's amazing.

@gokulr @bhalligan this is far more articulate than i was. Like, by a lot.

The Operator's Case against Founder Mode [I loved this interview that @bhalligan did with @dickc. Tons of great nuggets for leaders and operators. I'm enclosing an executive summary below. I post one executive summary daily of an interview I enjoyed and learnt from] Dick Costolo, ex-CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015, interviewed by Brian Halligan (Sequoia Capital, ex-CEO of HubSpot) Summary. Costolo walked into Twitter the year the bird had hanged itself on two magazine covers. His next five years were spent making the place capable of executing a vision. The playbook he describes is a counterpoint to the founder-genius archetype. Push every decision down a level. Default to yes. Solve problems with directly responsible individuals. Fire fast. Stop trying to be Steve Jobs. The hardest scale-up problems are organizational, and organizations need a different playbook from the founder-genius one. 1. The Drama Queen. Twitter was the drama queen of hyper-growth companies. Decisions were made by committee around a table, the front-end status bar got changed without anyone deciding to change it, and a poster on the engineering floor read "We'll Make Better Mistakes Next Time." Costolo's first move was to throw the poster out and end the voting. An organization that treats sloppiness as a vibe will treat outages as a vibe, too. 2. Velocity, Velocity, Velocity. Costolo's only initial slogan was velocity, repeated three times. The diagnostic question he kept asking: "If this takes six weeks, what would have to be true for it to be two weeks?" Organizational barnacles are why hyper-growth companies slow down. You speed up by ripping the barnacles off. 3. Push It Down The Stack. Costolo hated hearing "Dick said" used as a reason inside Twitter, including times he had not said it. Once a CEO's name becomes a get-out-of-disagreement card, every middle manager wins arguments by invoking the CEO, and every decision waits on a person who is not in the room. His fix: your direct manager owns your decisions, you own theirs, and "Dick said" stops being an answer. 4. Bias To Yes. Borrowed from Bezos, adapted for Twitter. Only your direct manager, or legal if you are about to violate the privacy policy, is allowed to tell you no. No other org. No trust-and-safety sign-off, no security committee, no marketing veto over your use of Mailchimp. The result was that experiments started flying out the door, engineers stopped routing around design for 1% tests, and the company learned that most of what it called "process" was really one team's veto power over another. 5. DRIs, Not Processes. When a customer churns or a launch goes bad, the cheap reaction is to add a step. Costolo's rule was the opposite: solve problems with directly responsible individuals and span of control. He points to Google's 17-page launch checklist as the cautionary case, a CEO managing to the process. The trade-off is real. If you push decisions down and refuse to add process, you also have to stop punishing people for mistakes. Leadership corrects mistakes quickly when they happen. 6. Make Sure They Understand What You Understand. This is the line Costolo took from Ben Horowitz's Loudcloud management class and circled three times. A manager's job is to make every report understand what the priorities are, why they matter, how the report's work connects to them, and what hitting them means for the report personally and professionally. Priorities without context are useless. Without context, you have a worker laying bricks. With context, you have a worker building a cathedral. 7. Management By Walking Around. Costolo would come back to the office at 9:30 p.m., find whoever was still there, ask what they were building, and then call it out by name at the next all-hands. Within a few months the engineers around at night noticed they were the ones getting prioritized, and the rest of the org noticed why. The payoff is information you cannot get from a dashboard: who is actually working, what is actually shipping, and who is being throttled. 8. Forestry, Not Firefighting. Costolo would tell tactical directors that their job was forestry management, not stamping out forest fires. The fires were for their teams. Their job was to map the territory and ask what had to be true 24 months out so the next fire did not burn the house down. Senior leaders who have scaled with the role spend most of their time on the map. 9. The Transfer Trick. Inexperienced managers will do almost anything to avoid firing a low performer, including quietly transferring them to another team that "needs people." Costolo calls it transfiring. His countermove: if your performance review score is below the bar, you cannot switch teams. And if a manager's reviews ping-pong an employee between 2 and 3 every cycle, that pattern is itself a flag. The manager is gaming the curve to avoid the conversation. 10. The Second Conversation. Jeff Weiner's image, which Costolo borrowed: a manager walks to the mound, asks the pitcher how he feels, gets told "I've still got it," walks back to the dugout, and watches the next batter put one in the parking lot. The cost of having the first conversation when you should be having the second one is a game you already lost. The CEO version: write the feedback down the night before, deliver it, and sit in the silence without filling it. 11. The Instagram Regret. A month and a half before Facebook offered Instagram a billion dollars, Costolo took Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger to dinner and offered them more than 10% of Twitter, about $700 million in stock. Systrom said no. In retrospect Costolo would have sweetened the offer by borrowing another $300 million from JP Morgan and handing it over too. Once Instagram was inside Facebook, Costolo's read was checkmate on rich-media social. By the time the auction is open, the price is no longer the variable that matters. 12. There Is No Archetype. Costolo's last warning is about the founder-mythology industry: the Walter Isaacson book on Jobs, the one on Musk, the Jensen Huang playbook with 60 direct reports and no one-on-ones. He quotes Hakeem Olajuwon on Charles Barkley: Charles has anxiety about whether to be public Charles or private Charles in any given moment, while Hakeem is always the same person. Trying to operate as someone you are not slows you down. Nobody is fooled anyway.

@nickbilton you should have said “first day as exec producer of 60 minutes. job one, undermine…” oh never mind

It's the honor of my career to become the executive producer of 60 Minutes. I just shared the note below with the incredible staff and can't wait to get started.

the less poetic but equally pointed Dickens in Great Expectations: “How common are the instances of such souls, who, through a life of comparison and false pride, chase only the shadows of what they think they ought to be, turning away from the quiet light of what they truly are, until the night falls and the shadows consume them entirely.”

“They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

@_sonith @alex_lapolice @scottbelsky @TheChainsmokers i’ll do double duty and sub in for the chefs. my version of Ottolenghi’s double lemon chicken and a ragù bianco di coniglio which was fantastic 👨‍🍳

@alex_lapolice @dickc @scottbelsky @TheChainsmokers Danny is on my list to reach out to, 100p

People who can blend art (more metaphorically than literally) & commerce fascinate me deeply. As such, some upcoming conversations include: - @dickc - @scottbelsky - @ markpinc - @TheChainsmokers - and more

Brilliant, as usual, from the @linear team

This is just fantastic. Executives ask for these sorts of how-tos from successful GTM leaders all the time. Such a great idea and so well executed.

@adambain @MBGilroy whoa whoa whoa!! I’m just a simple farmer!

@MBGilroy Me rolling up to the metric measurement weigh-in knowing I got @dickc on my side

As a sign of the times, the “dine-to-play” covenant has re-entered term sheets