shari doherty

ANY PROBLEM IS NO PROBLEM is now available to watch on Apple TV and Prime Video with more platforms coming soon! From the Oscar-nominated team at Actual Films and Emmy award-winning directors Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink, ANY PROBLEM IS NO PROBLEM captures the personal journeys of five young entrepreneurs. In an industry often misrepresented by hype and stereotypes, this intimate portrayal reveals the grit, creativity, and passion required to make it as a startup founder in crypto, no matter the headwinds. Thank you Brandon (@brandontory), Ellie (@elliefarrisi), Adam (@levychain), Chris (@creeefs), and Ryan (@ryanouyang ) for sharing your stories. You continue to inspire us!

Your old smartphone could soon be the central brain of a walking humanoid robot. Researchers at UCLA have developed PhoneBot, an innovative open-source robotics platform that transforms a standard Android device into a complete robotic control center. By mounting the mobile device on a customized bipedal frame, the phone serves as the primary onboard computer, motion sensor, and camera system for the machine. Costing approximately $400 in external parts to assemble, this miniature humanoid robot utilizes thirteen servo motors alongside reinforcement learning algorithms to achieve dynamic walking capabilities. The project effectively reduces the hardware costs associated with advanced robotics development by repurposing common consumer electronics. What other discarded consumer electronics could be repurposed for modern engineering? Media: @Alacritic_Super

Now that the Lenny & Friends Summit is a few weeks behind us, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the day. Here are the themes and takeaways that have stuck with me most: 1. There’s a huge need for (curated) IRL events right now I’ve rarely felt this much PMF for anything I’ve done. It’s wild. My sense is that the more time we spend working with agents, the lonelier the work becomes, and the more we need to find a place to connect with other humans. I heard this theme more than anything else from attendees: - “Things are certainly different now, but underneath all this technology, we’re still just ancient humans looking for connection.” —Charlie Koch - “I left filled with gratitude for the experience, the conversations, and the reminder that even in a role that can sometimes feel lonely, we don’t have to figure everything out alone.” —Hemanth Babu Shekar - “I left feeling genuinely sparked by what’s possible, and also a little less alone in figuring out what comes next.” —Attendee - “I left this conference having fallen in love with product all over again.” —Jenny Zhao 2. Nobody has it figured out Should we be building software factories? Are roadmaps over? Should PMs be shipping to production? We had speakers take both sides of these debates throughout the day. But what everyone agreed on is that there’s no one way to do it. My takeaway is we’re all still figuring it out, and the best way to do that is together. We heard this theme from both speakers and attendees: - “The answer that we have come to is: it depends. It depends what type of product it is. It depends on what phase in the product it is.” — @TYehoshua, Atlassian - “We don’t know the answer. We don’t think anyone knows the answer. We’re all going to discover it. And we’re all fundamentally on the same team.” —Ami Vora, Anthropic - “This is just one way. There’s so many ways to build products. You probably heard 10 other ones today that were just as valid as this one. You should decide on what makes sense for you.” — @rmstein, Google Search - “The best practices have not been written yet. We get to do that.” — @lil_dill, Stripe 3. It’s never been easier to build something nobody wants As building gets easier, choosing the right thing to build, knowing what good looks like, and caring enough to fix it are becoming increasingly important for successful product teams. Almost every speaker touched on this theme: - “And now we can ship all our bad ideas, like congratulations to us.” — @clairevo, How I AI -“If almost anything you can think of can get built, it’s more clear to me than ever that the actual true value of PM is around judging. It’s around taste. It’s around doing something extremely well.” — @rmstein, Google Search - “They’re not impressed if we animated something with Three.js and Blender in 30 minutes. They are impressed by us solving their problems and clever touches in the details that show we anticipated their needs.” — @lil_dill, Stripe - “The output is not the product. Customers are not buying the lines of code.” — @karrisaarinen, Linear - “Is this useful or is it just new? It’s a big thing you need to differentiate.” — @danshipper, Every 4. The PM job is expanding, not disappearing Instead of the PM, eng, and design circles of the Venn diagram collapsing into one “builder,” each role is instead evolving and expanding. - “Roles are overlapping, but they are also expanding. . . . Everyone can do so much more than they could do before.” — @TYehoshua, Atlassian - “PMs will absolutely evolve and expand their role to not just the product organization but the marketing organization, the sales organization, the growth organizations, the operational organizations. PMs will become GMs, and they will own the actual business outcome and lead the entire function.” — @geoffintech, Ramp - “I build and change the pricing page. I build prototypes, I deploy to production myself. I do the user research, I do the analysis, I do all of the optimizations.” — @ElenaVerna, Lovable 5. It’s important to be reminded of what’s possible—and to raise our ambitions One of the most inspiring parts of the experience for me, and for a lot of people at the Summit, was to be surrounded by people at the top of their craft, demonstrating what great looks like. This is especially important now that AI allows us (and forces us) to be a lot more ambitious. - “If we only use AI to make the things that we already make just faster, then we are definitely missing out on the most interesting part. AI can help us raise the ceiling, not just the floor.” — @lil_dill, Stripe - “The biggest constraint is honestly people’s understanding and ability to absorb what you’re giving them.” — @thenanyu, OpenAI - “I think next year is the ambition game. . . . What experiments can I run in two weeks, three weeks, that would have taken us a year last time?” — @clairevo, How I AI - “Other conferences collect a bunch of people seeking validation that what they were doing in product wasn’t too off the mark. Whereas this group set the bar for what’s possible.” —Attendee To get a taste of what the day was like, I’ve pulled my favorite messages from attendees: afterglow.lennyssummit.com/ Also, a little slideshow. It’ll warm your heart. 👇

Claude makes you feel like a wizard. Quiver lets your friends see you as one.

The Next Rung At some point I realized that almost all of the code I had ever written had been deleted. At the very least, refactored or rewritten, but my LOC were for the most part confined to the dustbin of repo history. I was lamenting the fact that the stuff that did survive felt like it was all some embarrassing junk I had thrown together in a couple of days before moving on to the next thing, and I wondered what mark I had really left on the code. The trend accelerated once I became a manager and my dwindling contributions were swiftly consumed by normal code churn. Most of the coding I did was nights-and-weekends tinkering on personal projects. I was turning all this over in my head and spiraling a bit thinking about what really makes a great software engineer and was I ever one and would I ever be one. I realized the people I admired most weren't the galaxy-brained folks who built magnificent "future-proof" systems that would still work in ten years but the ones who could see just one move ahead. When the next big problem arrived, their design was just malleable enough to make the transition straightforward. Their code felt almost designed to churn. Great software engineering is building rungs on a ladder. The code that got mowed over in a refactor had to exist for the refactor to happen. It served its purpose and now sails off in a Viking funeral. What is the alternative? Climbing back down? All that code I wrote to indulge myself on nights and weekends? I still have absolute git blame dominion over it. 100% of the lines have my name on them. And they do not matter at all, and the way you can tell is that they're not churning. Many of those repos haven't seen a commit in a decade. With vanishingly few exceptions, churn is a sign of life. The stuff that doesn't last is the stuff that matters. — "The models are the worst they will ever be." I hear from my friends at the labs that some researchers act almost as if programming (even with agents!) is a waste of time, because the models are going to eventually just be able to do it all for you. Yes, of course nobody writes the code by hand anymore. Some people have given up on reading it altogether. Some people don't even try to understand how it works anymore. But it is a mistake to assume that just because the code is disposable, the understanding is too. For my part, the amount of handwritten code I'm producing does indeed round to zero. But not understanding what's actually going on underneath is insanity for anything non-trivial. You might be able to get away with this someday, but you cannot build a system of any complexity whatsoever using even the best models without good technical guidance, and you cannot give good technical guidance if you have no idea WTF is going on. Maybe we will get to the point where you can just let go and let Claude. But we are not there yet, and we will never get there if we try to operate as if we are already living in some imagined future instead of the real one we live in today. There is a difference between being able to see a rung and being able to grab it. We have to keep building. We have to keep climbing. fic.us/writing/the-next-rung

make :**: out at NODE this fall make out is a two-person exhibition by @luke_shannon_ and @mayaonthenet exploring how the self today is made up of software, screens, and social media. RSVP: nodefoundation.com/program/m…

Hey @Strava, can we get a @Muse connector, please? :)

Nike ACG unveils the new Picklejus, a big-mountain trail runner built for long-distance efforts and demanding terrain 🥒👀

My mind has too many tabs open.

One of the things I was most excited about in the early days of Android was the idea that we were going to get all kinds of different phones. Evolution did its thing and we ended up with the uniform brick of glass we all know now. It's actually so cool to me to see people experimenting with form factors again. This picture is from my desk in early 2007. Everything old is new again. I hope these guys are successful!

Lamine Yamal shares a World Cup memory with his little brother Keyne 🇪🇸🏆 [📸: via/ GettyImages]

He Called His Shot, Then Backed It Up: Josh Kerr took down one of track’s most untouchable records. One of the most famous moments in sport is Babe Ruth pointing his bat towards the stands and calling his shot. Josh Kerr just did him one better. In March of this year he announced Project 222, an attempt to break one of the hardest and most hallowed in sports, El Guerrouj’s 3:43.13 mile world record. Something that had stood for 27 years. Kerr called his shot: “It’s time for that record to have a real go at it, and I’m going to be that guy to do it.” Today, July 18th, Kerr backed it up. Running 3:42.66 to bring the record back to the UK, to join legends like Bannister, Ibottsen, Coe, Ovett, and Cram. And the way he did it was impressive. Just look at his splits: 55.22 (400m), 1:51.06 (800m), 2:46.45 (1200m), and 3:27.6 (1,500m). He had two rabbits that got him to 1,000 meters, but then had to make a long push home. And let me tell you, pushing for a lap and a half while you are riding the razors edge is HARD. During that push, his 100m split only varied between 13.67 and 13.88. Just incredibly consistent. It was one of the most impressive performances I’ve seen. And Kerr has one of the most impressive mental games you could imagine. Kerr’s M.O in his career has been confidence. It’s sometimes interpreted as cocky, but what it really is is a deep conviction that’s founded in the work. He and his coach, Danny Mackey, are methodical in preparation, and always keeping the main thing the main thing. It’s one of the reasons why Kerr always shows up at the big meets. He’s got a history of coming through at championships when the lights are brightest. It’s so hard to do, and yet Mackey and Kerr almost always get it right. Part of that comes from how they approach training and performance. They know what matters most: consistency. “I don’t do crazy workouts or crazy mileage. I just don’t miss days. Consistency is my biggest weapon. I’ll break any athlete down with how consistent I’m going to be training wise and just getting the work done.” They realize that the whole game is compounding. It’s not having one killer workout here or there. It’s putting together a body of work that prepares him. Too often at this level, we turn workouts into proving grounds, to show what we’re capable of. It’s easy to fall into that trap, both as an athlete and coach. Often, it’s the doubt and insecurity that pushes us to prove ourselves, especially in the era of strava and comparison. “The way that I get fast is stacking. I’m stacking years, I’m stacking days, I’m stacking months.” It’s about winning the workouts. As Kerr said, “If you show up and put in the same level of effort regardless of how you feel, you’re winning every day.” Putting in the work is step one. The second and just as important is: trusting and letting go. Kerr uses the analogy of the work filling the cup: “If you can stand on a start line with a filled cup, you’re ready to go to war.” Then it’s time to release and show what you’ve done. You can see it in his pre-race talk. Yes, he’s after the record, but he’s chasing that feeling: “That’s what I’m chasing with this record — full flow — like I’ve done every single thing I can. I’m now giving my body and my mind over to this experience. That’s living for me.” On the starting line, trying harder is the enemy. If we overthink, try to force actions that are ingrained, we get in our own way. You turn down our impulse to overthink by trusting what's underneath. And that only works if you've built something to trust It’s why famous sprint coach Bud Winter coined the term “Relax and win.” And jazz maestro Charlie Parker once said, “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then you practice, practice, practice. And then when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.” Kerr certainly let it wail. His similar philosophy could be seen in what he said before the race: his body was capable of the mark, so his job was “to have my mind be available to let my body do its job.”You spend years grabbing control. Then, in the moment that matters most, the skill is letting go of it. As Kerr alluded to, it’s not turning your brain off completely, it’s getting out of the way so you can focus on the task at hand and let you do what you’ve trained to do. Kerr has some of the best insights and quotes on mental performance. But more so, what I’m thrilled about is that you can trust this record. I’ve known his coach Danny Mackey for almost two decades. He was right there with me in the hardest time of my life as a whistleblower. He put his career in jeopardy by stepping forward in the same situation. He loves the sport and respects it. So celebrate this one. An absolutely amazing performance. He called his shot. And got it done in the hardest event in track and field. Astonishing. -Steve

3:42.66!!!! MILE WORLD RECORD!!!! JOSH KERR!!!! Takes down Hicham El Guerrouj's 3:43.13 mile world record, which has stood since 1998. Smashed it.