brettgriffin

You don't see the risk that is created when you allow unexercised options get called at a later date, when they're in the money, because the company is 'doing well'?

I would liken it more to the male equivalent of facial beauty or weight: most men have a general level of facial beauty and weight they expect in a partner. And if not met, there is really nothing else that can help bind the attraction. For women, that is height. But yes, it is "evolved intuition."

Anything else I can read about smol?

also, are you using a tool to collect those metrics? what is it?

Look at Cursor CLI: https://cursor.com/cli

I met with ~80 funds over two rounds and they were all great experiences. Especially in the early ones, when I was still learning the dynamics of pitching, they were all overly patient and polite.

I'm following this trend on Twitter. It's shown a few abhorrent ones, for sure. But mostly just benign interactions with people who have to do this ten times a day, every day.

The P&L of every software company has an R&D expense (R) in a total cost (T). We can debate what R is, and R might be approaching 0, but it is not 0.

This does not mean that R is on the only cost (T-R grows over the life of the company). It does not mean that, even if R were 0, you could launch a product. But R is a real cost.

Apologies. When I met you in circa spring 2019 you described Ashby to me as mid-market ERP, which I had quite a few thoughts on given the amount of ERP work I had done. Sorry for droning on about ERPs to you, then.

He didn't say there wouldn't be competitors. He was actually acknowledging the competitors exist, but he was expressing how none of them are in the consideration set of Greenhouse's buyers because they lacked an enormous number of features that Greenhouse had. My point is, at least behind closed doors, he and most CEOs would admit that their features are an eroding defense as the cost of code approaches zero.

> Our thesis is that the cost of producing code is heading towards zero

This (correct) thesis should illicit an interesting question about the future of SaaS markets: What happens to the SaaS markets when the cost of code approaches zero?

Coincidentally, the company that authored this post is a perfect case study.

Few people truly grasp how hard bringing a software product to market is. The feature density required to even begin selling your product often requires more human capital than early stage investors are willing to underwrite. Some founders have the background to command those terms, but most have to wedge into a market with some very small insight.

I was at a dinner with the CEO of Greenhouse in 2021 and vividly recall him explaining just how deep the feature set of a new ATS needs to be to even enter the consideration set of a buyer.

One serendipitous way companies could enter these markets is by being founded in one market, and pivoting into another. Ashby didn't start as an ATS. They were originally targeting a mid-market ERP (a hot thesis at the time). Ashby is a prime example of a company that likely could not have entered their current market because of the sheer engineering resources required to break through (and kudos to them for doing it!)

But as the cost of code approaches zero, the deterrents of entering the market also drop to zero. The next Ashby could just pursue ATS from day one. In a sense, this is the entire story of humanity and especially software (consider the cost of building an ATS in 2012 when Lever was founded vs the cost Ashby faced in 2019).

But the slope of this change is unlike anything before it.

ATS, like many other markets, has a handful of big players and a long tail of smaller offerings. No matter how many long tail providers there are, the economics of entering a market suppressed that number compared to what can and will exist tomorrow. The cost of building an ATS a decade ago was literally orders of magnitude more than it is today.

In 2016 I heard a A16Z partner describe a future where every software market would have offerings in virtually every little niche one could imagine. Years before the LLM renaissance, this sounded insane. How could the market afford to build and sustain each offering?

I don't think companies are going to start building their ATS in house, but I do believe that cost of producing code is approaching to zero, and that means hundreds or even thousands of offerings will exist in every shape, way and form we can imagine.

This is just a tragic way to view the world, on so may levels: 79 is a great run for anybody. And more importantly, Craig Venter did more in 79 years than most people could do in two or three lifetimes. Lastly, of course, life is literally the longest thing you will ever experience, regardless of how long it lasts.

I learned a lot about Craig Venter after reading My Life Decoded in college. Truly an amazing person.

The only reference I can find to this is a Business Insider story[0], and they are known for salacious and dishonest articles.

It looks like they paused hiring for some number of weeks after the law was passed, probably because someone forgot to update the job listings and run interference on the salaries.

That's what you're upset about?

[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/digitalocean-pauses-hiring-i...

> That’s what dies if I can’t keep going.

Your priorities are completely wrong. You need to redirect the time and energy you're spending on this project towards getting back to stable ground, starting with utilizing the safety nets that your government and community make available to you. You need to find psychiatric care and shelter immediately, and eventually, gainful employment of any kind.

It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.

The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.

There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:

In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.

The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.

I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.

> I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top

What top are you referring to?

We're in a thread about a US company announcing its new $30B fundraise from a group of elite US growth investment funds arguing about whether this company will be able to overthrow the $4T US tech behemoth and suggesting that all the other US tech behemoths are actually stifling progress.

Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires.

Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.

That website has an uncanny resemblance to Hex circa 2024.

> There is an amount of baby cash that would work

Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.

I just read both articles and I think his summary is accurate enough to stand behind his claim that putting off having children (if you want them) because of a theoretical situation qualified as 'hysterical' (assuming everyone in your household is authorized). I don't think he was replying in bad faith, even if you two disagree.

> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.

Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].

As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.

[0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

Something I've come to accept and try to remember: people will complain about literally anything you give them to opportunity to complain about.

The world is better today in every conceivable way for more people, than it was at any point in history. But it isn't good enough for enough people, and the people who remind you of that are usually doing the least to improve anything, for anybody.

I don't really understand why. It seems fall under this larger victimization umbrella. The best answers I've seen for it are that it is either some cathartic response to just how good things have gotten, or that the complaint itself represents some marginal effort, enough to elicit a dopamine response.

I was born in the 80s and have vivid memories of the 90s. I absolutely loved everything as it was at that point in time. But to look at the world around us today and to think anything before was the peak is just incomprehensible to me.

If there was serious interest, they would taken a next step by now. They won't give you a hard no unless you're an absolute joke.

They will wait and see if there's any deal heat.

Are you talking to other funds? You need to talk to as many funds as possible in a 2-3 week period to create leverage. Do not talk to a single or small number of funds in a process[0]. Best case they will snake the round at a discount, worst case you'll give up a ton of leverage and kill the process.

[0] unless you have close relationships with a stable of funds. you do not.

I've built up to a very similar process, but it looks like yours is a much better oiled machine. Specifically I struggle with getting enough architecture thoughts in place for the programming agent to really do what it needs to do without me going behind it and refining its work. Your research repo is incredibly inspiring and has given a lot of think about.

It's sort of surreal to feel the change in the software development lifecycle over the last 24 months - what you are describing will very likely become the norm amongst most developers.

> Cursor is happily charging me something like $100 a day. If anyone from Cursor is reading this – is there a “solo dev building absurdly large systems” discount tier I’m missing?

I'm also paying a similar bill (but honestly I think it's incredible value). I'm curious about this comment though - I picture LLM pricing as consumption rather than per-seat (token in/token out) - would it really make sense to offer volume discounts on a single seat versus total volume? These platforms shouldn't really care about how many developers are consuming the tokens, just the total consumption, right?

You'd have to be using very antiquated (by nearly two decades!) patterns or practices for SQL injection to be a concern.

> Nah. Just write the good SQL for your database.

You may not need to use an ORM, but hand writing SQL, especially CRUD, should be a terminable offense. You _cannot_ write it better than a process that generates it.

That's not really how data is requested. Most of these identifiers are foreign keys - they exist in a larger object graph. Most systems of records are too large for people to associate surrogate keys to anything meaningful - they can easily have hundreds of billions of records.

Rather, users traverse that through that object graph, narrowing a range of keys of interest.

This hacker news article was given a surrogate key, 46272487. From that, you can determine what it links to, the name/date/author of the submission, comments, etc.

46272487 means absolutely nothing to anybody involved. But if you wanted to see submissions from user pil0u, or submissions submissions on 2025-12-15, or submissions pertaining to UUID, 46272487 would in that in that result set. Once 46272487 joins out to all of its other tables, you can populate a list that includes their user name, title, domain, etc.

Do not encode identifying information in unique identifiers! The entire world of software is built on surrogate keys and they work wonderfully.

> Stripping information from an identifier disconnects a piece of data from the real world which means we no longer can match them. But such connection is the sole purpose of keeping the data in the first place.

The surrogate key's purpose isn't to directly store the natural key's information, rather, it's to provide an index to it.

> The solution is not to come up with yet another artificial identifier but to come up with better means of identification taking into account the fact that things change.

There isn't 'another' - there's just one. The surrogate key. The other pieces of information you're describing are not the means of indexing the data. They are the pieces of data you wish to retrieve.

Has anybody written about why this is? I recently canceled my ChatGPT subscription that I had held since November of 2022.

I don't follow the benchmarks closely, but I know quality and speed when I see it. ChatGPT feels like its from another generation compared to the others.

No moral hazard, but there is a hazard to not brushing your teeth: cavities, and more explicitly, the financial cost of having cavities repaired. Even the best dental insurance plans in America are capped at $1500 - $3000 of benefits a year, usually less than a single root canal or crown.

But that does open the door to a very interesting question (far outside of the scope of this discussion): would people change their habits of brushing their teeth if that hazard didn't exist, e.g. your dental repairs were free? D:

For the uninitiated, what's the subtext here? Is this about a trend in behavior of teens in Germany?

Asking for the same reason I asked OP my question. I was just in Berlin and, second only to Tokyo, I've never* seen such conscientious group of people, including teens.

* I'd actually place two other cities from that trip into the same #2 position: Zurich and Vienna.

It's more common in larger metro areas - NYC, LA and Atlanta are infamous for it - but can happen anywhere depending on what is going on further down the exit lane (an emergency vehicle, car breakdown, etc).