Shantanu

@vverawang GIRLBOSS 👸🏻👸🏻 hottest event of the year

Gathered 16 senior women engineering and product leaders around one cozy New York kitchen table! 🌸🍷 The wine and conversation flowed, a few themes we’re still thinking about: - The role of the 10x engineer; at what level do those gains actually accrue, and to whom? - Hiring for AI fluency vs judgment - Execution velocity is commoditized; gains are accruing to individuals vs whole companies. The bottlenecks have moved outside of eng. Is faster really better? - Blurred lines between roles; are we trading away healthy tensions between orgs in the name of efficiency? - Industry needs better frameworks for measuring AI ROI beyond token usage - Team incentives, core motivations, and building meaningful culture in a world moving this fast - Human connection and IRL mattering more than ever inside orgs cc @kathrynweinmann / @DaversaPartners 🤍

@julianh651 Nerd

Mario party but every game comes from a game theory textbook.

@RideroAI YUP YUP

Yup.

@vverawang @McKinsey Devil wearing Prada out here 😈😈

loved this evening with @McKinsey and their brilliant moves series! heard from anna wintour herself and am still in awe of her elegance, wit and instinctive decision making she is the epitome of dedication to a craft and uncompromising vision (and gave credit to her friends, mentors, and mentees alike for shaping her, like katharine graham)

@vverawang @sneha8sivakumar @spurtest_ @danielreidcahn @mattturck @AmanKabeer11 DATA DRIVEN QUEEN

Last #DataDriven of 2025! 🎉 Featuring live demos from: > @sneha8sivakumar (@spurtest_) -UI/UX testing agents and persona agents for AI QA in ecomm (we went through a “where’s waldo” exercise to find real bugs once on Alo Yoga that agents caught) > @danielreidcahn (@slingshotai_inc) - increasing IRL human connection via Ash (vs. typical AI therapy/chatbot isolation) + a rare peek under the hood on value/reward models > @DynamicWebPaige (@GoogleDeepMind) - latest on Gemini 2.5 (3 is on the way!), AI studio for full app deployment (made a live halloween costume app), Colab walkthrough Until next year!

@vverawang @Libbiefrost @BessemerVP @FirstMarkCap @mwil20 @OpenAI Loved your talk. Can I get an autograph?

Such a fun time talking through what we’re seeing in AI in Financial Services with Brittani & @Libbiefrost / sharing our views from FINTOP, @BessemerVP & @FirstMarkCap ✨ Great to share the stage with @mwil20 on the latest from @OpenAI (reasoning model breakthroughs + how startups should tackle last-mile gaps now) Thank you Jenn (@Grit_VC) & the Morrison Foerster team for being wonderful organizers and hosts :)

Ahead of Trump and Putin's summit in Alaska today, I wrote down some thoughts on the meeting and what I think we can expect from here. Give it a read! open.substack.com/pub/shantanu14…

Champions League finals have been so shit in recent years. Most consistently underwhelming fixture in the football calendar. Probably have to go back to Real / Atletico in 2014 for the last properly good one

@kunalvalrani It’s annoying because I’ve always been a big user of them

Got inspired by a post by @raphaeltraviss and @justinskycak on using the ideas from the Math Academy Way and Math Academy to quickly code up something that lets you "learn anything". It works by generating a tree like knowledge graph that you can edit, and then generating lessons with questions for each node. Going to try to test this out for personal use for a few days. The UI isn't great right now and a lot could be improved. I still have some ideas for a few features I want to add like FSRS review for lessons completed, image / graph generation, quizzes and XP. Also had the chance to test out Claude 4 for this. Once I add a few more features maybe I'll add a download link if anyone wants to use it.

New substack dropped - like / comment / subscribe / send hate mail x shantanu14s.substack.com/p/hello-and-we…

Update: I had to use the red nipple mouse on my laptop today because my trackpad stopped working

Why do they still have the red nipple mice on laptops... never seen someone use it.

1/14 It is hard to see much systemic thinking in the new round of tariffs, and because trade can only be resolved on a systemic basis, and not on a bilateral basis, this means that they are unlikely to be very helpful. nytimes.com/live/2025/04/0…

@sbg0411 great thought, Sarah!

We need loyalty punch cards at bars

@pranav_aurora Hahahahahaha

my gpt 4.5 is an absolute geeza

@julianh651 Very much agree

I have a thesis that Singapore would be a good place for a robotics startup that deploys into public urban environments. In pretty much any other city in the world I feel like if you sent a bunch of humanoid looking robots walking around, within 3 hours they'd either be stolen or someone would kick them or something. In other places where that wouldn't be an issue the city wouldn't be large or dense enough with enough variation to be interesting and provide meaningful data / challenges. I'd also consider it an easier starting environment because of how good the public infrastructure is with good clean roads and pathways and clearly marked signage. Also the 5g coverage is great. The other contender in my eyes would be the major cities in Japan.

What Colby (hopefully) represents is a third way: recognize that the US can't be everywhere, empower allies to take responsibility for their own defense, and pursue highest-priority foreign policy goals (i.e., China and the Pacific) wholeheartedly

Ofc, key question is whether guys like Colby will be decisive in shaping foreign policy. Real risk that crusty old neocons who want to project power everywhere or isolationists who disregard alliances will wield the most influence

this is finally a great DoD pick after a series of shit nominations from Trump. Colby is one of the smartest foreign policy thinkers rn - knows that the U.S. needs to focus on the Pacific, and that the EU has to lead defense efforts for Ukraine and itself. Cautiously optimistic