tom

when jobs launched the iphone, he said apple wanted 1% of the market in year one. just one number. extremely clear goal. i think about that a lot. we are not apple or jobs or anything but it’s a great way of thinking about how to enter a crowded market. ours is 100k users that connect at least 3 data sources in the next 60 days. i think we can hit it.

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

Yale has changed its mission statement, rolling back the language that was adopted in 2016

recently i’ve talked to dozens of ppl about how they use ai in teams. two patterns across corporates and startups: - founders empower devs, sales, and marcom ops - executives give teams tools to cut intern and junior work almost no one uses ai to leverage management itself. still old-school: emails n meetings (fine, recorded). here’s how founders can train ai as their chief of staff:

for founders, ai isn’t only for outsourcing coding. it’s also for hiring and training an excellent ea, chief of staff, or exec ops. 9 out of 10 times we talk about how fast we ship with ai. we talk far less about what happens when founder’s time becomes the bottleneck. ai is already great at helping manage teams, keep control, & self-improve as a founder. with min effort anyone can afford a reliable, fast-learning chief of staff. agents like openclaw or hermes give the cos a body: nervous system, soul, and heartbeats. concepts like gbrain, qmd, or llm-wiki become its brain & memory. tools like gstack, or built-in hermes skills (/goal - insane), turn an average rookie into a machine. my cos (rick sanchez, btw) is a heavy a-player. his job is to run my priorities log, read my slack, emails, transcripts, & notion, brief me b/meetings, and plan follow-ups after. but the *biggest difference* is his everyday coaching. he analyzes my actions, how i deal with problems, and how i manage ppl. his knowledge isn’t random, bc he absorbed the books i’ve read and many of my past lessons along the way. the real leverage is that he compounds where i usually leak time, context, or judgment. thinking in that terms, founders should work way harder to train their ai exec teams than getting excited about which model codes a little better.

Literally the only thing you have full autonomy over in life is showing up every day with a smile on your face and kindness in your heart, and if you do it consistently, the right people will find you