helping founders to take better (and faster) decisions
Joined September 2009
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friday in the netherlands: borrel at 5, cycling home by 7. friday in sicily: nobody even thinks about dinner before 10. same continent, the weekend starts five hours apart. which rhythm do you think builds better companies?
openssh shipped 10.6p2 to close a password authentication bypass, and alpine put out an advisory the same day. the most boring piece of infrastructure you own is usually the one everything else is standing on. when did you last check yours?
nobody validates the wrong segment on purpose. they pick the one that answers their emails. reachable and in pain are two different lists, and most early startups only ever call the first one. which list are you working from?
the us moved its clocks on sunday, so every call between amsterdam and new york shifted an hour this week. europe voted to scrap the switch back in 2019 and then quietly forgot. some policies fail by never happening.
conductor is joining meta and the hn thread is full of users asking what happens to their setup. acquisitions get announced to investors first. the people who actually depend on the tool always find out last.
the riskiest moment for a startup isn't launch. it's the week after, when the founder starts explaining away the numbers. a good story about why nobody came back is still just a story. where do you draw the line?
dark at 5pm in amsterdam and every dutch person is still cycling home in the rain like it's june. in sicily it's 18 degrees and nobody leaves the house without a coat. cold is a feeling, but it's also a culture.
monday in amsterdam: my dutch friends start at 8:30 and are home for dinner at 6. american founders keep posting 80 hour weeks. no idea which one ships more, but i know which one still likes the job in year five
top of hn today: ubuntu still hasn't shipped a kernel patch for a linux 0day rce, almost three weeks in. users forgive bugs. what burns trust is the silence about when the fix lands.
ai made writing free, so a long pitch proves nothing now. the only part of a deck i still read is the list of people who did something that cost them. everything else is formatting. convince me otherwise.
hn is arguing that ai for everyone costs a tenth of a kettle a day. the bill founders actually feel is per user: a solo dev on reddit just capped each ai research run at 40 cents because 30 runs ate his whole $12 plan
juan atkins has died at 64. a kid from belleville with a cheap synth and a futurist reading list helped invent techno. every bedroom producer opening a daw tonight walks through a door he built. rest easy
scores don't change founder behavior. a 4/10 says stop, and nobody who quit their job for this idea is going to stop. what actually moves people is a name, a reaction, a reason v2 is different. disagree?
in amsterdam a meeting ends on time and nothing gets decided after. in sicily it runs an hour late and the deal closes at dinner. i've stopped calling one efficient. they just keep the real conversation in different rooms
stack overflow logged under 1,000 new questions last month. the questions didn't stop, they moved into private chat windows. the public record of what people actually struggle with is shrinking, and that's where founders used to look
a waitlist signup is the cheapest yes in startups. nobody ever lost anything by typing an email. if your validation can't fail, it isn't validation. tell me where i'm wrong
a us founder sells the story and fixes the numbers later. a european founder fixes the numbers and never tells the story. i keep watching dutch teams with real revenue lose rooms to decks with none. both are missing half the pitch
a techno dj on r/beatmatch asked if he's doing it wrong because he barely touches the controller for 4 minutes after a blend. on instagram that looks lazy. on a dancefloor it's called letting the track work. it's the first thing we teach on Seedj