"Now you see why, when I meet a founder, the first thing I ask about is their growth rate."

This obsession with growth instead of progress or value rubs me the wrong way, given the trend for enshittification of services sooner or later, also remind me of a video I watched yesterday when a founder gives examples of private equity people trying to force growth no matter what: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vNIsVY-0Y&t=412s

I thought usually founders try to pivot till they run out of money. I wonder if that is good or bad for a serial entrepreneurs if they decide to shut it down instead of pivoting?

Many founders do try serial pivots until the money's gone. An entrepreneur shutting down cleanly with half the runway still in the bank would be seen by future potential funders as a net positive. It's worse to grind through all the money trying increasingly extreme pivots away from the original.

It takes maturity and decisiveness to recognize when a startup's core idea isn't going to work. In cases where any pivot wide enough to get into different lane is essentially a whole other business, it's often better to just shut down. Even if the last desperate pivot starts to work, you often have some team members and investors who aren't a good fit for the new focus and, worse, the 'new' business that's finally starting to work is almost out of money and the cap table is messed up. It's usually better to shut it down and reboot cleanly.

Founders who've successfully raised millions and executed well are usually quite fundable, even if their first startup didn't work out. Sometimes the timing is wrong or the market evolves differently. The key is how well you think, execute and communicate through both the windup and the wind down.

I feel like pivoting got unwarranted hype in the 2010s or so, possibly because Slack was an outlier in how successful they were.

Major pivoting is almost always a really bad idea. (I admit I'm doing a bit of weaseling using the "major" qualifier, but when I searched for examples online, a lot of the ones that came back weren't major pivots, just slight refinements of focus to find better product market fit). Pivoting usually carries a lot of baggage - better to just give the money back and start afresh most of the time.

He might not have had that choice. Investors can put money into a bank account, and just as easily take it out. This is what happened in the 2000 dotbomb.

not really true unless you raise on terrible terms.

I was also wondering if it will result in Helium shortage and even higher prices the next few years, then/if it will be all over, new fabs might also come online and it will be the opposite - a glut. I believe that follows the historic pattern of boom and bust cycles of chip production.

What is this, Series for ants? It barely covers Andrej's sign-on bonus.

To put this into perspective, India has built 4000+ miles of new railway lines over the last five years including a Shinkansen style bullet train. That’s more than all the railway lines in the country of Switzerland for about $12 billion. The money being thrown around here is mind blowing.

NGL, I would gladly trade opus 4.8 in exchange for my city fixing the roads. Just imagine if even a quarter of the money being dumped into AI went to something that actually improved peoples lives. Man that would be a sight to behold.

AGI in the next 20 years is more likely than all the roads in my country getting fixed anytime in the future.

Well, if everyone is out of a job, the government is going to have to do something so I’m not too worried about it. If I had to be an optimist about it, I would say that this might be the perfect catalyst to build out a lot of renewable energy (for data centers) and maybe actually implement UBI.

give a bot a vote

Who is a bot? Boot on head, sharpie in pooper.

What type of projects you work on, in particular how rich it is in novelty, non-googlable data points and non-trivial project-specific deviations from industry standards?

Even if agents failed at that I'd wager that's a very small percentage of software projects anyway.

It's basically every game targetting consoles. Good luck finding any real infos about the Nintendo SDK API on Google.

I wonder if it is reasonable to assume the propagation of shortages further. At first it was GPUs, then RAM, then what?

Fresh water?

> Customers are finding value.

Where I can find confirmation of that in public sources?

Andrej has decided to become a billionaire. Anthropic keeps preparing for the IPO. I wish they IPO soon, let everyone see how the earnings look like.

> Defining exactly what the product is supposed to do is the hard part, writing code is the easy part.

> There is a massive difference between a spec, which defines what the product should do, and code, which defines exactly how it should do it.

He states: The difficult part is figuring out the details so LLM doesn't save much time. You state: If LLM is able to correctly assume the details that saves you a lot of time.

Case 1: Part of the spec describe some basic feature based on a popular framework and industry standards, everything is trivial. You are right, he is wrong.

Case 2: Part of the spec describe some niche feature and/or uses some not popular framework and/or require deviation from industry standards and/or cutting edge performance/latency requirements and/or uses a bunch of proprietary non-googlable data. You are wrong, he is right.

The more senior engineer are the less time they spend on case 1, those are easy, they don't spend much time on it, it is the 2nd which is much more time consuming.

I'm also confused with that as well as the moral of the story as the whole. I get the sentiment but what is the lesson here, leave production capacity keep going as well as a "hiring pipeline" and just stock pile the output forever? Also, given article's take on the current situation of AI assisted coding, it seems to suggest that we need to apply that same logic to other industries too, so just don't let any industry/practice die and keep it alive? I would appreciate some inputs into some sort of actual solution or at least ideas of the solution but that is not present in the article.