Hi, I'm Allen Pike. I’m currently building Forestwalk Labs, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out.
Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode with Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb.
The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features.
Voting is now open for BC’s election, which concludes in one week on Sat Oct 19.
I’ve done voting guides for Vancouver and Canada in the past, but I’ve never done a BC one since the decision here has traditionally been simple. There has long been two viable parties: one on the left, and one on the right. This continues, with no centrist party on the ticket and the Green Party unviable in almost every riding.
The main difference this time is that instead of the center-right BC Liberals, the NDP now faces the actually-right BC Conservative Party. While they might not have seemed electable only a few weeks ago, this recently-fringe party has been downplaying and walking back some of their more extreme statements in the hope of assuaging centrists who would have voted Liberal.
With such a close race between two very different choices, the outcome will ultimately come down to who turns up.
If you live in BC, make a plan to vote this week. Early voting continues on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with the final decision on Sat Oct 19.
Further reading:
Next week, we’ll be kicking off a new speaker series in Vancouver called Infer. The goal of the meetup is to bring together folks who are doing great AI engineering work, so we can learn from one another.
The format will be familiar to folks that have attended my previous meetups: two speakers, often one of whom will be visiting from out of town, with time to chat afterward. Events will happen roughly every two months, when we have compelling topics lined up.
If you’re building LLM-powered apps in Vancouver, you can subscribe to our event on Luma. There are still a few spots open for our first “beta” event on October 9th, and we’ll be hosting another during NeurIPS in December.
There’s something electric about getting smart people who are working in a rapidly-changing field in a room together. I recommend it.
How self-driving cars become mundane.
A wild startup appears.
If – and when – GPT-5 might eat your lunch
On accidentally becoming a CEO.
A path to continued model improvement.
Two of Slack’s original employees, Johnny Rodgers and Ali Rayl, have started writing a delightful newsletter/blog called Building Slack. There are some great passages already.
The clarity of the initial pitch from Stewart:
“You’ll know it’s working when you don’t have to use email at work any more.”
The very high bar for great customer support:
We turned around fixes and adjustments as quickly as we learned about them. We responded to each message personally — often directly from Stewart. This pattern and the fundamental respect that it demonstrated for our customers would become essential to Slack’s early success and eventual longevity.
The impact of Stewart’s famous “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” memo:
He encouraged us to take personal responsibility not just for the tasks we were assigned, but for our shared mission in the biggest sense. This was operationalized in the early days. We would say “Somebody doesn’t work here.” As in, “Somebody should fix the typing lag in the search input” or “Somebody should follow up with the teams that churned last week.” Nope. It’s our shared responsibility, and you need to do it yourself or chase things down to ensure it’s going to get done.
It’s great. Start at the beginning.
An age-old startup question.
I wrote today about Nick Wilkinson taking the helm at Steamclock over on the company blog:
This year, it’s time for Nick to take the largest leadership role of all, as our Managing Director. With the support of our CTO Nigel, as well as the excellent Jenn Cooper and myself continuing on the Board, Nick’s going to keep doing what he’s been doing for some time: driving Steamclock forward, growing the culture we’ve built, and also putting his own spin on it.
This summer, I’ll share more about what I’m building next. For today, I’m feeling grateful for the team we’ve built at Steamclock, and the fact they’re still growing and iterating. ⭐
© Allen Pike. 👋🏼 Feel free to contact me.