Michael Malyuk

@oanaolt Was just rereading that book today - always a great read.

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle. The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness. The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy. The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. a16z.com/the-struggle/

@oanaolt Do you think Uber's outcome (current market cap) would have been different if it had started with a larger valuation?

Uber was valued at $4M at seed and now has a market cap of $143B Founders, please aim for the billions of dollars later, not the valuation you get at seed before you even know if the customers want what you’re building. Do you think because you raised at $150M valuation at seed or at $1B you will build a business as big as Uber? Hopefully!! It’s also true that as VCs, we overestimate the number of companies that make money but we also underestimate how much money the really good companies can make. I bet when the Series B of Uber was done at $200M, a lot of investors thought Menlo Ventures was nuts. But they didn’t give that valution at seed. If I was a founder, I would be worried if I get a big valuation at seed. It’s like putting a bomb in your backpack. And I’d probably want to send my VC to jail if they advised me to go for the big valuation and set myself up for failure. I know the valuation is a number that can flatter the ego, you can brag that you got a bigger valuation than your peers. But one could brag even more successfully about the product, the number of users or the design, the healthy brag vs starting the clock on a bomb, the valuation that you can’t grow into till the next round.

@garrytan vibes are important though!

ngl, 110 IQ vibes-based seed/pre-seed investors probably shouldn't be allowed to raise funds larger than $10M

@MicRum My take is to pay market in the 30-50th percentile for the role & geo & stage if you have enough runway. And be prepared to go under that in case your runway is shrinking and you’re missing on your milestones. Low / zero pay makes sense in the very early stages only.

How much to pay yourself as a founder? Founders' view: ideally it’s $0 to maximize resources for growth. Realistically, a salary that's just enough to cover living expenses. Investors' view: they are more concerned with whether you have skin in the game than with your salary.

@alexalbert__ You may want to try our framework Adala: github.com/HumanSignal/Ad… It implements the same loop in an automated way

Lots of LLMs are good at code, but Claude 3 Opus is the first model I've used that’s very good at prompt engineering as well. Here's the workflow I use for prompt engineering in tandem with Opus:

@jmmv I think it all depends on the abstraction level that you operate at. But more importantly, learning how memory management is done, and how C compiler helps (or sometimes doesn’t) is fun! What would be a reason for not doing that if you’re a curios great dev? 😊

Over the last few days, there has been this… debate over at Twitter sparked by a claim that you cannot be a good programmer without knowing C. You obviously can be one, but there is some nuance in what “knowing” C is truly about. Here is my take on the matter.

@eshear None if you use lisp, code is data and data is code, and all of it is a sexpr 😊

Software engineering question: What's the difference between code and data?

@ankurnagpal @teachable When you know, you know 😉

Curious what an immigrant to America has to go through before they can legally start a startup? Here was my insane journey before starting @teachable at 24: - Moved here for college at 17 - Graduated college at 20. Found a loophole to create my own LLC and sponsor my “training” after my degree for 12 months - Because I was in a technical field, I could then extend it for another 17 months Then, I ran out of time. Now what? - Googled the cheapest community college nearby (go Foothill Owls!) and enrolled in random songwriting classes to stay in America - Got threatened with deportation when the USCIS saw I was only enrolled in online classes - Realized driving to Los Altos for classes I didn’t care for was insane and begged a friend to hire me so that I could apply for an O-1 visa - Used my successful O-1 application to finally apply for a green card Only then could I finally start the startup I always wanted to —— As insane as this sounds, most successful immigrants in America have a similar story. And for every one of us that stuck it out, countless others end up leaving or not coming here in the first place Can you imagine what it would be like if we made it super easy for high potential immigrants to start businesses in America?

@jjen_abel Whats the definition of early stage here?

Early-stage startups are trial and error gameplay. Everyone's job is to (in lockstep) turn over every stone until a strong enough market pulse is (hopefully) uncovered. It's in the trenches executing -- the only job at this stage. I can assure you there is no playbook, or "strategic advisory" any c-level executive can offer you. I'm seeing some weird stuff going on. This is individual contributor/executor sh*t.

@dinodaizovi @eatonphil Also +1, I’ve read quite a few back in the day, and this one has clarity like no other.

@eatonphil This book, while somewhat dated, is the best book on intermediate/advanced C for systems programming: amazon.com/Expert-Program…

Folks who've done C professionally: what books/videos/whatnot would you recommend? Beyond the basics. Everything else?

It’s been 27 hours and 32 minutes since openAI devday, here are all the 27472 github commits that were created. Thread 👇

1/ 🚀 Update 0.0.2 to Adala is now live! This release features the introduction of skill sets, a data processing concept that mirrors real-world problem-solving where the output of one skill feeds into the input of another.

HumanSignal launches Adala open source framework for autonomous data labeling agents venturebeat.com/ai/humansignal…

It's autonomous, it's intelligent, it's reliable, and it has the most elegant name – Adala!

💫 We're excited to announce our latest experimental open-source project for autonomous data labeling: Adala github.com/humansignal/ad…

💡 It’s becoming clear that data quality is a critical issue in applying LLMs to real-world applications. It’s essential not just for the initial retraining with domain knowledge but also for the ongoing evaluation and maintenance of expert systems.

@nikitabase @neondatabase Congrats!

Some thoughts on Why anyone, why us, and why now @neondatabase raised 46M series B. neon.tech/blog/series-b-…

Heartex is now HumanSignal. ✨ The future of AI isn't just about complex algorithms or massive computing power. It's about people. ❤️ It's about the signal that humans provide to power these models, helping them to adapt, learn, and align with specific needs.

San Francisco bars are going to be as busy as it gets tomorrow #svb #SVBFinancial #SVBCollapse

Lots of work went into that one. NPM package shall make it easy to embed the app into custom pipelines. Would love you to take a look @Mattsco @markus_with_k @PWGTennant