DeepAI

Be careful moving towards these A.I. website builders. They build with JavaScript frameworks like React. Your browser is doing all the work to render the content, so to you the site looks great. Google doesn't see what we see. It reads all the code line by line, and a majority of the time it does not have rendering enabled. So Google comes by, and at first it sees that there's nothing there. It sends your page to a secondary queue. That queue can take days. It can take weeks. It can take months. Rendering costs Google money. It's not going to come by and try to figure your site out. Check your own site. Right-click, view source. If you can scroll through your content, you're good. If it's mostly script, you know what to fix. Search Console, settings, crawl stats, by file type. If you see JavaScript high there, that is a big issue. The fix is pure HTML, or server-side rendering. With static HTML, every crawler, every AI, every LLM sees all your content. Every single time. That's why I build static HTML.

Lesson I learned the hard way: Getting 20 customers to pay you $5,000 per month is 10x easier than getting 5,000 customers to pay you $20 per month. Most people who want to build a company should be thinking more about catching a few big fish than thousands of shrimp.

Eric Schmidt on the controversial hiring rules that built Google, and the beloved "glue people" he says you don't need at all: Schmidt admits the early rules were unpopular, even inside the company. "One of the rules is that we didn't want to hire your friends, which always was upsetting. We also didn't want to hire anybody from what were considered to be lesser universities. And so we also wanted to hire people who had very high GPAs." That meant saying no to people who, by most measures, deserved a yes: "So the constant problem was that somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, very hard working, who was not from a great university, did not have a very good GPA and we would not hire them." He concedes the policy has since been softened. But he doesn't apologise for it: "So that was controversial and we've relaxed that a little bit now. But the fact of the matter is it got us to where we were today because it produced these high IQ generalists from prestigious universities." Then there was the second rule, built on a lesson Schmidt learned before Google, at Novell. He calls them "glue people": "The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups and they assist in activity. They are glue and they're very, very loyal and people love them and you don't need them at all." The problem wasn't that they were bad people. It was that they cost speed: "At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people because they were getting in the way because they slowed everything down." And once inside, they were almost impossible to remove: "And every time I'd get rid of in one group, they'd show up in another group and they'd transfer and get rehired and all that." When @ericschmidt raised this with Larry and Sergey, Larry's answer was to stop glue people before they ever got in: "And Larry said, yeah, let's just review all the hiring." "So guess what? From that moment on, we reviewed every offer packet. Literally everyone." The review was strict enough that even Schmidt's own preferred candidates got caught: "And anybody who smelled or looked like a glue person, plus the people that Larry and Sergey thought had backgrounds that I liked that they didn't, would all be flagged. And so anybody who sort of met the original profile, they'd go right through."