Tiago Henriques

How could this be perceived as anything but a massive failure in today’s world? Would Stripe even be investable today? Which investors would ever think that only launching after two years of work and with 50 users would ever be the beginning of something gigantic? I can’t see how anybody would be happy with this today. And yet, almost imperceptibly, Patrick and John were painstakingly laying the foundation for something that was built to last and built to grow strong and immovable like a Sequoia. How can mushroom growth rates produce anything other than mushroom longevity? I’m not saying that real value CAN’T be built quickly. But I think it’s far more common than we like to talk about that founders work for two, three, four, seven, even fifteen years before something extremely valuable is born into the world and really takes off. James Dyson worked on the design of his vacuum cleaner for 5 years before he got to a working prototype and 8 years before it became a commercial product. Dylan Field worked on Figma for four years before launching a *closed* beta. Tim Leatherman worked on his idea and prototype for 8 years before he had his first multitool design that was ready to sell. Palmer Luckey spent about 7 years from the time he began working on VR prototypes before Oculus released the first consumer headset. Jensen Huang started Nvidia in 1993 and it wasn’t until 4 years later in 1997 that they had their first major commercial success with the RIVA 128. Steve Wozniak was the fastest and went from an idea for a personal computer in 1975 to the Apple II release 2 years later in 1977. Time and again the reality is that great things take time to build. I’m not saying it doesn’t take hard work. I’m definitely not saying it doesn’t take determination and extreme focus. But it does take time. I think we try and pretend that it doesn’t take time and lift up the seeming exceptions to the rule. Why not be honest and instead focus on the determination and extreme grit that it takes to keep building for years before any outward success arises or glory is received? I hope we can be honest with young founders and repeat these stories again and again so that they learn to work thanklessly for years before the outward vindication comes, because that’s what it really takes.

One impact of remote or partially remote teams - lower purchase price if startup goes for a smaller exit / M&A (or in some cases acquisition doesnt happen at all) Reason: fewer buyers want fully remote teams, or teams w key person in eg Thailand or Portugal, w some exceptions

someone at ANTHROPIC just showed CLAUDE finding ZERO DAY vulnerabilities in a live conference demo claude has found zero day in Ghost, 50,000 stars on github, never had a critical security vulnerability in its entire, history... it found the blind SQL injection in 90 minutes, stole the admin api key, then did the exact, same thing to the linux kernel

BREAKING: Cluely CEO officially responds to TechCrunch

We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.

The maintainer of libxml2 put it very well