Jihern

my hot take is the ai community vastly underestimates what humans can do

I see a lot of discussion around taste and craft for designers, but surprisingly little about business models and how they impact your day to day work. This came up twice last week as I was talking to designers evaluating their next role, so I figured I’d write down some thoughts I often find myself sharing. ----- The business model of your company will, to a large degree, constrain and shape the work you do as a designer. It will set the metrics you optimize for, the efforts that get prioritized, and the instincts you’ll build over time. Many designers, especially those early in their careers, don’t think about this when choosing where to work. While ultimately your job is to design a great product that users love, there are many nuanced and predictable ways that you’ll be impacted by business models. Here are a few examples: Ad-supported products Your world will orbit around attention. Impressions, time on site, scroll depth, CTRs, ad managers. These are all the things that pay the bills, and that in one way or another you’ll be impacted by them. Ad placements and engagement loops are required, and will create somewhat constant tension between what’s good for the end user (who is not paying you) and what’s good for your business (and advertisers). SaaS Users often enter these products via trials or sales. But much of the work is everything after that. You’ll be concerned with things like activation, churn rates, seat or net revenue expansion, as well as onboarding flows, admin and enterprise management, and all sorts of compliance features like SOC2 and more. Marketplaces With these, you’ll be designing for two (or three!) very different audiences at once. Think buyers or sellers, riders and drivers, hosts, and guests. You’ll spend time working on trust and safety (reviews, verification, dispute resolution) and how to increase or solve for liquidity on your supply and demand sides. Tensions can often come from trying to improve one side’s experience in a way that doesn’t compromise the other side that most users will never see. Gaming Whether paid or free-to-play, much of the business of gaming is spending time on monetization and habit formation. You want to sell upgrades and digital goods and also get users to complete streaks and challenges and unlock rewards all in a way that doesn’t feel extractive or icky. E-Commerce Conversion is king. Everything revolves around optimizing funnels, reducing bounces and cart abandons, and obsessing about how you can take a user who is playing with options on a product detail page all the way through the checkout flow. ----- No matter the business model, your chief responsibility is simple: design a great product that your customers love. But a designer who spent five years in an ad-supported product has built a very different set of instincts and habits than one who spent five years reducing SaaS churn or balancing a marketplace. Neither is better or worse. They’re just different; and will emerge as slightly differently shaped the designer, whether they realized it or not. So when you're evaluating your next role, don't just ask "What’s the product and who is it for?” Ask yourself: "How does this company make money?" That answer might just tell you more about your day-to-day than any job description will.

for better or worse the world is run by whoever shows up

If you didn’t see this coming, then you really didn’t understand this country and what it has done to so many people throughout its history. Realize that many people *did* see this coming, because their history, their wisdom, and their political instincts were (and remain) superior to yours. So listen to those people who are smarter, wiser, and better positioned to understand this country than you are, before it’s too late.

There has always been a very “healthy” dose of psychopaths in the Valley, one very notable example being the much venerated late cofounder of the fruit company. All frontiers attract such people. But the early years were still characterized by the disproportionate number of people who were in it because they loved the tech and innovation in their own right. That has not been the case any more for at least a decade or two.

@siddharthvader_ someone had to

and we tried airbnb but @jibae_k killed it

"the BATNA to using a paid messaging service is simply switching to SMS, iMessage, Signal, or Telegram—all of which are free. The core utility of sending text over the internet has become a commodity." this is why our high school groupchat moved to linkedin

@victoriakimse lmao

SO IF YOU CARE TO FIND ME LOOK TO THE WESTERN SKY AS SOMEONE TOLD ME LATELY EVERYONE DESERVES THE CHANCE TO FLYYYYY

@victoriakimse shit

@jibae_k you

My one problem with Christmas music is that it immediately makes me want to stop working, find a fireplace and take a nap.

My computer science college professors used to look down on programming -- it's too volatile to deserve formal education (new paradigms and languages come out all the time). Instead, we did all kinds of theory: types, probability, queuing. Back then, it felt anachronistic and smug. Today, it feels like solid ground in a swampy AI world. The professors were right, and probably didn't even know how right they would be. Universities are not meant to optimize for a fancy X bio today, but for a lifelong career. Also, I can't wait for the credential arms race to be over. Universities should attract the intellectually curious, not the success-motivated. Newton didn't discover gravity under that tree in front of Kings College in Cambridge to get a job at OpenAI.

The greatest thing about being inebriated is knowing so clearly which playlist you should add a song to.

@vanlancker @untitleddotnew Would love a link!

If you'd like to read it, reply below and I’ll send you a link.

In addition to @untitleddotnew, I wrote a comprehensive “how-to” guide that covers the art and act of naming. With this process, you can name anything in an afternoon. It is incredibly thorough but can be moved through efficiently. How to Name Anything in an Afternoon

getting tired of software promo videos that compare their work to athletic excellence (carl lewis), space exploration, political breakthroughs (always the berlin wall lol) and rock icons (freddie mercury). besides it being a tired trend (a16z's first was amazing), you are doing a disservice to freddie, you didn't write "bohemian rhapsody", you hunch over slack all day selling secondaries under the delusion that building software is somehow rebellious, i'd love to see you at wembley saying one original thing

Real question: are Anthropic’s target users its own team members?

Congrats to the team!!

1/ Manufacturing is the backbone of the global economy, but much of the expertise on factory floors still lives in people’s heads or paper binders. @SquintAI captures decades of operator know-how, auto-documents it, and turn it into step-by-step guides so any worker can perform like an expert. Customers like Pepsi, Michelin & Ford use Squint to reduce downtime, boost productivity, and operate more safely at factories across America. Congrats to @DevinBhushan on raising a $40M Series B from @TheWestlyGroup and @TCVTech. We @sequoia are proud to have been your early backers, alongside @MenloVentures.

Proud to back @DevinBhushan and the @SquintAI team in their Series B! They're transforming manufacturing intelligence for everything from automotive to food production. Excited to fuel their next chapter of growth! 🚀

I’m not trying to rag on these guys specifically, but the more I think about the phrase “if faster design research is threatening your employment status, you’re ngmi,” the more bummed out I get.

@caidentity Lookin clean!

In the spirit of building in public, I want to share some updates to a tool I’ve been making on the side to help me at least eliminate subscriptions and boost productivity. It's a productivity tool with a suite of modules. Such as files, tasks and more wrapped into one

@DoraiswamiRahul @grok is this true

A while back, Soham Parekh reached out to us with an idea. The rest is history.