The Uninspired Company of Silicon Valley Six years ago, “The Browser Company of New York” was born. This week, its acquisition by Atlassian closed. Regardless of how you feel about the product, or the ultimate acquisition price, it’s undeniable that Josh, Hursh, and the team brought an incredibly…

A programming note: I initially wanted to cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but I am changing the schedule a bit as I felt more inspired to write today’s piece. Almost two decades ago, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first tech company to exceed $100 Billion annual revenue threshold in 2007. At that…

dynomight · Oct 2025 · life economics Here are a few things that seem to be true: Dating apps are very popular. Lots of people hate dating apps. They hate them so much that there’s supposedly a resurgence in alternatives like speed dating. None of those are too controversial, I think. (Let’s stress…

Uber offers ads in its app, on in-car screens, and on vehicles. Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images Dec 8, 2025, 6:01 AM PT Facebook Email X LinkedIn Reddit Bluesky WhatsApp Copy link Impact Link Save Saved Read in app Add us on This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers.…

On a random Tuesday night, I stumbled across a YouTube video by Product Management career coach Nancy Chu that helped totally change my mindset around behavioral interviews: “Busy leaders don’t need your chronology, give them the punchline first.” 🔥 That one insight changed everything. I applied…

Silicon Valley is not a milieu known for glamour and charisma. Still, Peter Thiel has cultivated a mystique. A billionaire several times over, Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal, the digital-payment service, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He went on to co-found Palantir, the…

One of the things I have spent a lot of time doing is interviewing software engineers. This is obviously a hard task, and I don’t claim to have a magic solution; but it’s given me some time to reflect on what effective software engineers actually do. When you watch someone who knows what they are…

Of all the questions I'm living right now, this is the one I've been most humbled by. For the last decade, I've tried to thread the needle between my soul work (aka what feels most alive and resonant), and my desire for financial security. I've hustled and pushed and forced my way through the land…

For the last year, I've been weaving together a new philosophy of marketing, designed to radically reshape the emotional landscape of the internet. Like all marketing, it aims at finding and creating new customers, specifically for solo and creator-style businesses. But beneath the surface,…

I first encountered Figma in 2013, when Dylan Field demoed an early prototype to me at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. I remember the pen tool feeling surprisingly elegant, but I missed the bigger picture: the radical implications of a design tool that ran in the browser. A decade later, Figma is a core part…

A decade ago, Gokul Rajaram fundamentally changed the way he makes decisions. Then a product management director for Google AdSense, he was presenting to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. A gnarly challenge related to Google’s display ads business surfaced, and the discussion got heated. Schmidt’s voice…

If someone helped build and lead a company from $0 to over $20 Billion in revenue, you'd be pretty interested in how they did it, right? That's exactly what Andy Grove did at Intel. And lucky for all of us, he's written numerous books on the key concepts he felt made his company successful. The most…

Gokul Rajaram 11 min read· Oct 10, 2016 -- The other day, I attended an event that took me through the gamut of emotions. I was educated, inspired, amused, moved and energized. There were moments where I could literally feel chills down my spine. When it ended, I wanted to go leap tall buildings in…

Kevin Kelly isn’t known for one ‘big thing’, and doesn’t aspire to be. He’s as intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, and prescient as history’s most iconic entrepreneurs—only without any interest in building a unicorn himself. Instead, in his words, he works “Hollywood style”—in a series of creative…

How do you build a moat in consumer AI? Right now, sorry to say, there is none. The landscape is simply evolving too quickly. When foundational models and infrastructure are shifting every month — introducing new updates weekly! — it’s become nearly impossible to build as slowly or methodically as…

I think the AI industry is facing a handful of urgent problems it’s not addressing adequately. I believe everything I write here is at least directionally true, but I could be wrong. My aim isn’t to be definitive, just to spark a conversation. What follows is a set of expanded thoughts on those…

When Cluely, a startup claiming to be building a product that helps people “cheat” on everything, announced that it raised a $15 million Series A financing round from Andreessen Horowitz, some people on X criticized the VC firm for backing the controversial company. After all, Cluely isn’t just…

SUMMARY Our business model optimizes for measurable value that is shared with customers and partners, not captured solely for the business and its owners. It takes into account social and environmental benefits and costs as well as the responsible management of financial capital and profit that is…

SUMMARY We surrender our personal ambition to God and seek first the good of others, not ourselves. Instead of privately yielding our desires to an accumulation of wealth, power, and prestige, we cultivate gratitude, joy, and humility in the way we lead and serve. OUR REALITY As entrepreneurial…

From: screwtape@infernalinitiatives.org To: wormwood@earthlyerrors.com Subject: The AI Masterstroke Wormwood, my dear, I hope this email finds you mired in delightful mischief. Your recent report on your patient's spiritual wobbling pleased me greatly, but I sense you're missing the grand design.…

-- I got this email recently from a CEO: “Hey Gokul, I want to start a biweekly newsletter to the entire co. I read your blog post on all hands. Was super helpful. Do you have any guidance or examples on how to best structure a regular written update?” In a previous post, I talked about a company’s…

As a coach who helps recovering people-pleasers master the art of self-advocacy, I've learned that differences in communication style can lead to some of our deepest wounds and feelings of invisibility in our relationships. That’s why my reel about the three communication differences⁠—Volunteer vs.…

Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her…

TESCREAL—pronounced “tess-cree-all.” It’s a strange word that you may have seen pop up over the past few months. The renowned computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru frequently mentions the “TESCREAL” ideologies on social media, and for a while the Twitter profile of billionaire venture capitalist Marc…

For years, I expected my family to leave me alone for a period of “decompression” when I got home from work. I’ve always worked in highly relational, conversation-based roles. I’d often arrive home overstimulated and disappear into my office. My wife would want me to address a discipline issue with…

Maybe you have heard it said that you will be content when you learn to empty yourself of all your desire. If you want nothing, you will always be happy with what you have. Maybe this seemed like an extremely godly point of view, and you felt guilty that you had not yet achieved a complete void of…

Fred Freundlich is an American researcher who has been working for Mondragon, the world’s largest group of worker cooperatives, for the last 25 years. Here’s our interview about what it’s like to work for a company that is also a democracy and why we need to create more social businesses. Elle…

Oxfam’s Inequality Report recently wrote that “the world's five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes since 2020… while nearly five billion people have been made poorer.” Oxfam keeps reporting it like that, as do many media organizations, but those two things are not correlated. Five…

“I am a capitalist, I believe capitalism has the opportunity to be an incredible force for good,” says Davis Smith, CEO of Cotopaxi. “ It has lifted billions of people out of poverty. Like we are eradicating extreme poverty.” According to the World Bank, since 1990 more than 1 billion people were…

Facing Our Difficulties Sometimes, the struggles we face, both as individuals and as a society, seem insurmountable. While there is much around us that is good, some problems and conflicts—personal, relational, political—can appear intractable. It may not always be reasonable to be optimistic, but…

Yaqub Chaudhary is a Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. At the time of writing, several leading AI companies have demonstrated new conversational agents that can generate intelligible fluent speech with a wide range of vocal…