farceSpherule
Here are questions I would ask if I were on your board.
1. If you stepped away for six months, what would actually break? not emotionally, but operationally?
2. Which decisions still require your involvement today that should not? and why haven’t you let them go?
3. Is there any executive role at this company you could fully replace yourself in right now? If not, what does that say about how you’ve built the org?
4. Are you rejecting executive candidates because they’re weak or because they would force you to change how you operate?
5. What critical work only exists because it still routes through you?
6. Is OCTO a temporary incubator or a permanent workaround for your inability to decentralize zero-to-one work?
7. How many senior leaders are truly accountable without needing your implicit approval?
8. Are you optimizing this company for scale or for a version of the future where you still feel indispensable?
9. What would have to be true for selling the company to be the responsible decision, not the exciting one?
10. If the company needed you to be less central in order to become great, could you accept that?
Your identity is tightly fused with the company -- You speak about the company as your primary source of meaning, energy, and long-term purpose. -- Life outside the company is framed as something that would quickly feel empty or boring for you.
You retain control under the banner of high standards -- The VP of Engineering search stalled because no candidate met a bar that is implicitly shaped by how you think, operate, and decide. -- When leverage through delegation feels risky, responsibility naturally flows back to you.
You are the center of cultural gravity -- Culture, values, language, and priorities are largely authored and reinforced by you personally. -- Much of the organization's shared meaning still routes through your judgment and voice.
You delegate execution, but not full ownership -- Even when you are not directly involved, successes are framed as outcomes of foundations you previously built. -- This keeps you psychologically present in nearly every major win.
You created a parallel structure that still depends on you -- OCTO exists to do zero-to-one work, unblock hard problems, and pursue opportunistic bets. -- By design, it reports directly to you and sits outside normal org constraints, reinforcing dependence on your judgment.
You remain the default DRI for existential issues -- Reliability, support breakdowns, reorgs, executive hiring, culture, and innovation still escalate to you. -- This conflicts with the principle you explicitly endorse: if there is no DRI, don’t expect it to get done.
You have not made yourself truly replaceable -- There is no clear path for a future CTO with comparable scope, authority, and trust. -- The role, as it exists today, is inseparable from you.
Your personal fulfillment shapes strategic decisions -- The decision not to sell is framed largely through your motivation, energy, and desire to keep building. -- The company functions as a long-term vehicle for self-actualization now that financial stress is gone.
If this remains unchanged, the long-term risks are predictable: -- Senior leaders will eventually hit a ceiling. -- Innovation will bottleneck on your bandwidth. -- Strong leaders may leave quietly in search of real ownership. -- Succession becomes a deferred crisis rather than a designed transition.
> This was never about addressing ... national security
You have no idea what you are talking about.
ICE did not simply show up and start arresting people.
When ICE conducts these large scale raids, they do no stand there and check people as they are arresting them. They round up everyone, arrest them, and then sort out everyone's status after the fact.
He pulled his people back into the office because he said he "felt" like they were not working. Despite graduating from Harvard and from Harvard Business School he could not offer any qualitative or quantitative data to back up his "feelings." He lets his people WFH on Friday's but says he schedules video calls on that day to make sure they are working.
He said, "When they are working from home, I do not know if they are walking their dog for an hour but if they are in the office, I know they aren't."
What made this conversation laughable was that he and I were at a country club having lunch and bullshitting for half the day, on a weekday, while our kids (who had the day off from school) were playing a sport together. He stepped away more than once for "meetings" that he took from his cell phone.
It was laughable.
It's a standard McKinsey & Co. playbook that is going around the various tech companies as a way to reduce headcount.
And, productivity is going to tank. If you force me to RTO, I will show up exactly at 8am, take my 1 hour lunch away from the office, and leave exactly at 5pm. And, when I do leave the office at 5pm, my work phone gets turned off and I will not do anything work related until 8am the next morning.
You would think these tech companies would do something innovative. A f*cking monkey can cut costs by firing people. How about you stop over hiring? How about you stop leasing building space and use the products you create that enable remote collaboration?
Parents with higher education and stable incomes have the resources, time, and knowledge to supplement their children's education. This includes tutoring, enrichment programs, monitoring social media and phone use, and advocating within schools, as well as sending their children to smaller, private schools.
Most Joe Six Pack parents hand their children unrestricted iPhones and let the schools raise and baby sit them, while the parents sit back getting fat soaking up social media and TV.
They erroneously construct responses (i.e., confabulation).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ijfqfLrJWLUVBfJZ_Yal...
Metaverse will never be FaceBook.
It takes 10 to 20 times as long to debug because the code is impossible to change or understand how it works.
It emphasizes "AI adoption linked to 13% decline," which implies causation. The study itself only claims "evidence consistent with the hypothesis."
The article also largely highlights job loss for young workers, while only briefly mentioning cases where AI complements workers.
The study's preliminary status -- it is not peer reviewed -- is noted but only once and at end. If the article was more balanced it would have noted this at the beginning.
Articles on the same subject by the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs are more balance and less alarmist.
When the Internet arrived, it opened up the floodgates of information. Suddenly any Joe Six Pack could publish. Truth and noise sat side by side, and most people could not tell the difference, nor did they care to tell the difference.
When social media arrived, it gave every Joe Six Pack a megaphone. That meant experts and thoughtful people had new reach but so did the loudest, least informed voices. The result? An army of Joe Six Packs who would never have been heard before now had a platform, and they shaped public discourse in ways we are still trying to recover.
AI is following the same pattern.
It frames the decline in international student enrollment primarily as a problem caused by the Trump administration's policies and frames the visa restrictions as unnecessary and harmful while highlighting the cultural and economic benefits of international students.
It uses emotionally charged phrases like "awful," "very painful," and "tremendous levels of uncertainty" from student and administrator voices, which humanize the challenges but also tilt the narrative toward a sympathetic view of international students and critical of federal policy. The transcript reinforces this framing by explicitly saying the administration's actions were taken "without much evidence," a value judgment that signals skepticism of government justification.
-- The phrase "without much evidence" is the reporter's judgment, not a neutral presentation of fact. It signals to the reader that Trump’s justification is untrustworthy.
-- The verb "clamped down" is emotionally charged and suggests harsh, authoritarian behavior.
-- "What they bring to the university is this incredibly rich, diverse cultural experience..." and "...They really bring a different flavor to campus" while attributed to a university official, are presented without balancing perspectives. The article amplifies positive language about students' contributions without offering an opposing view.
-- "It was awful." (Romanian student), "It would have been very painful." (Indian student), and "...the key to warding off homesickness that comes from being seven thousand miles from home." humanize international students and emphasize suffering, which steers the reader emotionally toward sympathy. While valid journalism, the imbalance (little equivalent emotional content from the policy side) makes the bias overt.
-- "The loss of international students will lead to a significant downturn in innovation,” leans heavily on NAFSA (an advocacy group for international education), presenting their economic and innovation warnings as authoritative. But it doesn't feature equivalent experts who support visa tightening for security or workforce reasons.
Typical NPR writing.
Ghost jobs help companies do one important thing: hire the person they already selected and want in the position but have to go through the "interview" process to make things look "transparent." They post the job, "interview" some folks, included their preferred candidate, then miraculously "select" their preferred candidate over everyone else.
As someone who works in AI, any CEO who says that AI is going to replace junior workers has no f*cking clue what they are talking about.
- Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder - Narcissistic Personality Disorder - Borderline Personality Disorder
He thought he could cure his cancer with energy crystals and fruit juice.
Widespread adoption before understanding risks - embraced globally before fully grasping the mental health, social, and political consequences, especially for young people.
Delayed but significant harm - can lead to gradual impacts like reduced attention span, increased anxiety, depression, loneliness, and polarization
Corporate incentives misaligned with public health - media companies design platforms for maximum engagement, leveraging psychological triggers while downplaying or disputing the extent of harm
It's a cash cow.