Priyaa

does anyone else type "co" to get to codex but then remember you have to type chatgpt instead

At Microsoft, for the PMs there was a performance review rubric for each level. To get promoted to the next level, they had laid out the scope of work and collaboration you must have driven to justify your readiness to get to that level. If you look at the toolbar in Word/Excel/PPT, you can clearly see this performance review framework play out. It is a hot mess of buttons, with no clear alignment or thinking from first principles, keeping the customer at the center of product design. Because the higher you need to climb, you’re rewarded for “creating a new product” and “driving new collaborations.” More often than not, it’s easier to add new buttons and call it a day, as larger holistic improvements involve a lot of dependencies with other teams. And that has a direct impact on your shipping timelines. It does not matter if the customers would likely benefit from improvements to the current flows or rethinking them. The incentive structure in big tech really rewards the behavior of empire building with complete disregard for customer value. There’s a lot of attribution to performative plays and vanity metrics. And this is quite evident in the kind of products millions have to deal with, but such empires are also hard to topple overnight. But slowly and then suddenly, a small and determined startup eventually does.

I have loved Google all my life, but there’s a particular pathology I’ve been observing over the last 3 years and it’s starting to bug me. Google keeps creating overlapping AI products with confusingly similar names. Back in 2024, it was Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Gemini Pro/Ultra subscriptions, Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, etc. Today it’s Gemini Spark, Google Antigravity, Vertex AI, Gemini API, Google AI Studio, the Gemini app, and more. I would love to see a coherent product umbrella like OpenAI or Anthropic have built. Instead, I’m often left looking at product names that sound similar but serve very different use cases.

Why Has Jensen Huang Stayed Married for 46 Years?

I rented out a 250-seat theatre in SF to screen one of the best movies ever: 3 Idiots. ​It's a beautiful film set in India about 3 friends trying to figure out wtf to do with their lives. If you're in a rut, need some inspo, or just want a laugh, come watch. Tickets below.