Dapo Awobokun

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You don't have to be a founder to have a life-changing outcome in tech Great trend for startup employees:

Marc Andreessen highlights why the people who work for Elon Musk echo the exact same sentiment as those who worked for Steve Jobs. Even after difficult interactions or a sudden departure, they inevitably report that they did the best work of their entire lives because they were pushed to their absolute limits. What drives this intense environment is a demand for truth-seeking at all costs. People who criticize Elon often miss this fundamental trait. He genuinely wants to know the ground truth and has zero tolerance for anything else. When confronting bad news, he is absolutely ruthless and relentless in making sure he understands exactly what is actually going on. This level of radical transparency is shockingly rare in the business world. The typical startup founder operates on forced optimism, constantly putting on a brave face, telling everyone to have faith, and promising that everything will be great just to keep talent from leaving. Elon completely flips that standard script. He operates with pure urgency by simply telling the unfiltered truth, even when that truth is that the company will go bankrupt and die if they fail. In almost any other corporate environment, that level of blunt, existential dread would cause the talent pool to immediately bleed out. But for the teams working under him, that brutal honesty acts as the ultimate catalyst. It strips away the corporate fluff and forces them to rise to the occasion, leaving them with the undeniable realization that, much like the engineers who built the first iPhone, they just completed the greatest work of their careers.

These two conned millions of innocent children into supporting Arsenal and our lives hasn’t been the same again 😭😭😭

This 15-minute talk by the creator of Pydantic on how to correctly use MCPs will teach you more about making your AI tools actually work together than everything you've scrolled past this year. Bookmark this & watch, no matter what. Then read the guide below by @eng_khairallah1

"Action produces information"

The UI era is ending. 🪦 For 70 years we designed computer interfaces. Mainframe, CLI, GUI, Touch. But with AI, the interface is disappearing. What will come next? My talk from @mastra's conf this week:

Nuvion Visual Identity by @vervetheagency 🌈

Nobody uses their user data for a better product and comms experience like Chowdeck. They're so good at this!

@xcllntt i’m in sales and i know/understand what you’re referring to. Just flagging that bringing it up on that tweet doesn’t really follow

@dapo_x -it is not completely unrelated. Sales professionals sell features that don’t exist yet this way. -he clarified events is live and I get it.

Low-key, this is how sales people promise things and put the product team under the pressure of stringent timelines 😭. May not be the exact scenario at play here, but this is how it works.

when financial institutions treat IT as a back office function (in 2026) and not as a core part of the business. 🤷🏾‍♂️

@AdewaleYusuf_ x.com/i/lists/204160…

Who are the top super-connectors in #SF?

the way rishi ended was tooo sad.

My biggest takeaways from @AnthropicAI's Head of Growth Amol Avasare: 1. Engineering is getting the most AI leverage—and it’s squeezing PMs and designers. With Claude Code, a five-engineer team now produces the output of 15 to 20 engineers. But PM and design productivity haven’t scaled proportionally. The result is a compressed ratio where one PM is effectively managing the output of a much larger engineering team. Anthropic's growth team is responding in two ways: hiring even more PMs (!), and formally deputizing product-minded engineers to act as mini-PMs for any project with less than two weeks of engineering time. 2. Anthropic is using Claude to automate its own growth. The internal initiative is called CASH (Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth). It works across four stages: identifying opportunities, building features, testing quality, and analyzing results. Right now it handles copy changes and minor UI tweaks. The win rate is comparable to a junior PM with two to three years of experience, and improving rapidly. 3. The one part of PM work that AI can’t automate yet: getting six people in a room to agree. Amol and his head of design joke that even with AGI, it’ll still be impossible to align six stakeholders. Cross-functional coordination—managing opinions, navigating politics, mediating tradeoffs—remains the bottleneck that AI doesn’t touch for larger projects. This is why Amol believes PM roles aren’t going away, and may actually grow. 4. 60-80% of Anthropic’s growth team's projects have no PRD. For smaller work, kickoffs happen on Slack—messages back and forth with product-minded engineers who can push back and ask the right questions. For larger projects, Amol believes in a proper 30-minute cross-functional kickoff (legal, safeguards, stakeholders) to surface concerns early. 5. Adding friction to onboarding drives growth—if the friction helps users understand why the product is for them. His work Mercury, MasterClass, Calm, and now Anthropic, adding steps to onboarding flows consistently improved conversion. The key: cut annoying friction that doesn’t add value, but add friction that helps users understand why the product is for them. 6. AI companies need to focus on bigger bets, not better A/B tests. Amol’s argument: if your core product value is driven by AI, then the future value is orders of magnitude higher than today’s value, because model capabilities grow exponentially. In that world, micro-optimizations capture a shrinking share of a growing pie. Traditional growth teams do 60% to 70% small optimizations and 20% to 30% big swings. At Anthropic, they flip this ratio. 7. Amol built a weekly AI agent that scans Slack for cross-functional misalignment. Using Cowork with the Slack MCP, he has a scheduled task that looks across his projects and conversations and surfaces areas where teams are about to do overlapping work or pull in different directions. A colleague on the enterprise team already caught major misalignment that would have caused weeks of wasted effort. 8. A traumatic brain injury taught Amol the principle that now drives his work: freedom through constraints. In early 2022, a kick to the head during a Muay Thai sparring session caused a traumatic brain injury. Amol spent nine months off work and months relearning to walk, unable to look at screens or listen to music for more than 20 seconds. He was re-injured a month after joining Mercury and had to take two more months off. He’s still not fully healed. But the constraints—no alcohol, no caffeine, mandatory breaks, daily meditation—have become the habits that let him operate at the intensity Anthropic demands. “The true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don’t get what you want.”

So blessing ceo is differnt from nkechi blessing 😑 What kind of hell fire is Nigeria man?

I have one question, why should a merchant accept stable coins? We need to ask hard questions if we want to scale stuff. So please respond with your best thesis.

I ask most guest speakers I meet at Stanford about the “bull case” for developing countries with high youth unemployment as AI advances. Clip from @DKThomp responding to my question about it: youtu.be/SyFAcDx8Hi8?si… His take: “…it’s nerve-wracking, given that many (African) countries lack a competitive manufacturing base, and their services sectors focus on low-skill, low-paid work that’s easy to automate.”

The best career advice I ever received: There's nothing more valuable than someone who can just figure it out. Do some work. Ask the key questions. Get it done. Repeat. If you do that, people will fight over you.

This story off Frank Lampard and Micah Richards is jokes 🤣🤣