The opportunity has never been greater. Neither has the risk of building the wrong thing. I spoke to the SPC community about the state of the market for founders building in and around AI. Weeks of debate followed, and the conversation continues to evolve. It increasingly feels like founders are…

Data insights March 6, 2026 Topics AI Share Slack will be the Waterloo of closed data. For companies like Fivetran that are heavy users of Slack, it replaces email and even conversation as the primary place and mode of collaboration. Questions are asked and answered, arguments are had, decisions are…

It’s official. Apple’s added Steve Lemay and Molly Anderson to their executive leadership page. After much drama following Alan Dye’s departure, the company has decided to not only elevate the two designers but give them the kind of platform that they deserve. They’re now listed right alongside…

For most of my early career, I believed respect came from being polished, discreet and tightly self-edited, if a little dull. Oversharing—especially revealing something embarrassing—felt not just unnecessary but professionally dangerous. Credibility, I assumed, was built by projecting competence and…

It still shocks me how much difference there is between AI users. I think it explains a lot about the often confusing (to me) coverage in the media about AI and its productivity impact. I think it's clear there are two types of users to me now, and by extension, the organisations they work for.…

The rise of AI and particularly agentic development presents an existential threat to an entire category of low-code platforms. While the adoption of new techniques and tooling will take years to propagate through the Byzantine ranks of larger, slower-moving enterprises, the fundamental ROI case for…

Today, we're in the hard seltzer era of AI code review: everybody's doing them. OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Augment, now Cognition, and even Linear. Of course, there's also the "White Claws" of code review: pure-play code review agents like Greptile (that's us!), CodeRabbit, Macroscope, and a litter…

In the struggle for American independence, conventional battles were the exception. Small-scale violence was everywhere. By Stephen Brumwell Jan. 9, 2026 12:58 pm ET ‘The Battle of Long Island: Retreat of the Americans Under General Stirling Across Gowanus Creek’ (ca. 1860) by James Stirling. East…

Around the turn of the 21st century, Jung Chang easily traveled in and out of her native China. The rise of Xi Jinping made it harder to visit. By Meghan Cox Gurdon Jan. 14, 2026 3:01 pm ET In 1991, Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans” hit the world like a meteor. Tracing the lives of three “daughters of…

About That ‘Disappearing’ Middle Class Yes, the middle class is hollowing out—because more are rising upward. Jan. 11, 2026 at 5:23 pm ET City employees install a flood wall in downtown Mount Vernon, Wash., Dec. 10, 2025. Associated Press We’re pleased to report the American middle class is indeed…

KERSHAW, S.C.—Lynn Lee had just arrived for work at the ADM soybean processing plant one April morning when she spotted the cars with out-of-state license plates and knew something was wrong. After more than five decades in this town of about 2,200, agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland was…

I spent part of Saturday morning listening to the All In podcast, which I do most weekends to better understand how the valley’s culture is changing. I have a unique perspective: I had Chamath Palihapitiya as a guest lecturer in grad school a decade ago, and I would often listen to Jason Calacanis…

The World is Ads Here we go again, the tech press is having another AI doom cycle. I've primarily written this as a response to an NYT analyst painting a completely unsubstantiated, baseless, speculative, outrageous, EGREGIOUS, preposterous "grim picture" on OpenAI going bust. Mate come on. OpenAI…

Things aren’t as rosy as they were Five years ago, hardly anyone had heard of Sam Altman. But by the time I ran into him, in May of 2023 in Washington, at the US Senate, he had become a superstar. Senators called him by his first name, and flaunted the meetings they had with him. Prime Ministers…

Zohran Mamdani” by Taymaz Valley, CC BY 4.0 (via Flickr) A note: on January 22nd I’m hosting a webinar for Harvard’s Ash Center for Democracy with Kim Stanley Robinson, Baratunde Thurston, Renee DiResta, and others on how to get pro-democracy ideas into popular culture. More info and registration…

Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society. On Monday, a friend emailed to let me know that the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann had passed away overnight. While I may not mention Borgmann as often as Illich, Ellul, or Arendt, he has undoubtedly been a critical voice shaping…

By Kevin Deal Share Published Oct. 01, 2025 • 6:00am Over the past few weeks, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has delivered a series of lectures about the Antichrist at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Thiel is a Christian (a self-professed unorthodox one) who has drawn headlines for…

Say the word “politics” to most engineers and watch their face scrunch up like they just bit into a lemon. We’ve all been conditioned to believe that workplace politics is this dirty game played by manipulative ladder-climbers while the “real” engineers focus on the code. I used to think the same…

China's Christians, at 100 million strong and constituting that country’s largest religious minority, are facing a new government policy of severe religious repression and persecution. The modicum of toleration that, for two generations, allowed the development of a robust, evangelizing Chinese…

I’ve written at length about the growing influence of pro-extinctionist sentiments within Silicon Valley. Pro-extinctionism is, roughly put, the view that our species, Homo sapiens, ought to go extinct.1 Well, it looks like we just witnessed “the first example ever of someone openly being fired…

Subhead start close in Author rob hardy All the best manifestos I've written have been birthed during a moment of personal frustration and turmoil. The Ungated Manifesto came after hitting yet another wall with the promises of the "creator economy." The non-coercive marketing manifesto was a…

WHY YOU SHOULD NOT JOIN Y COMBINATOR YC seems like a reasonable proposition. They give you some money to help you start your business, and they promise you access to a community of people that can help you along the way. In exchange, they only ask for a small amount of equity. Doesn’t sound that…

Image by Annie Ruygt A heartfelt provocation about AI-assisted programming. Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from. Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been…

The following books are selected by Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University. He is the author of Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities, Religion in China: Survival…

As Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the CCP, delivered his quinquennial political report in the Great Hall of the People on October 16, 2022, he began by outlining the key themes of the congress, including the “comprehensive implementation” of his own governing concept, “[Xi Jinping] Thought on…

December was the most challenging yet most hopeful month for Christians in China. Before Christmas, the 11th National Chinese Christian Congress (NCCC) was held in Beijing. The quinquennial congress elected new leaders of the officially sanctioned National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic…

As we seek unity in our churches, there are three counterfeit forms of unity to watch out for. The first is coercive unity, in which people are pressured to conform outwardly while they secretly harbor unspoken dissent. The second is token unity, in which people appear to tolerate everything but…

In Three-Self Protestant churches in China last Christmas, robed choir members again raised their voices in song, but this time their music was not traditional carols and hymns of praise to God. It was “My Motherland and I” and other anthems of homage to the Chinese Communist Party. In the Chinese…

Timex is an American brand almost as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola over the past century. Nothing shines a light on Timex's impact in the world of watches more than the quintessential modern Timex marvel: Indiglo technology. While the past 30 years have seen Indiglo dials spread to nearly every Timex…

The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy Get our newsletter! Get our newsletter! Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. Granger Collection, New York In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the…

Third derivative work In No One is Really Working, I provide possible justifications for the high salaries of early-career professionals. This post presents a theory of "derivative levels" as a way to understand why certain roles and types of work are highly compensated. Both CEOs and professors are…

Historically, I have found that hiring for first designers is a bit more idiosyncratic than building out an engineering team or a first business hire. Oftentimes, founders' networks intersect less with designers and even if they have an appreciation and eye for design, founders often have a more…

If you grew up in America, you’ve probably been told your whole life you could be an astronaut, that you could be anything you set your mind to. This is patently false. America is indeed a land of opportunity with more social mobility than many other countries. But you most definitely cannot be an…

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…