Growing Startups: A Series
Approaches, failures, and lessons in making a new business work.
Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
On making use of large thinking models.
For a year, I’d been coding almost every day with Cursor and Claude Sonnet. Anthropic’s 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet each rightly earned their dominant place on the programming model charts: they were the least-bad coding models yet. In the earliest days of LLMs, there was tremendous interest in ever-larger model...
Testing the Untestable
The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features.
I gave a talk version of this article at the first Infer meetup earlier this month. Let’s say you want to build an LLM-powered app. With a modern model and common-sense prompting, it’s easy to get a demo going with reasonable results. Of course, before going live, you test various...
Starting Forestwalk
A wild startup appears.
Last month, I started full-time on a new startup. It’s early days, but we’re having a lot of fun. A startup, fundamentally, is a search for a repeatable, scalable business model. You rapidly try things, run experiments, learn, and iterate your theories about how to build a useful product that...
Pushing the Frontier
If – and when – GPT-5 might eat your lunch
Lately I’ve been working with a lot of teams and founders that are building products on top of LLMs. It’s a lot of fun! To be an AI product engineer today is to constantly ask new questions that impact how you build products. Questions like: “Is there a way we...
Feeding the Baby
On accidentally becoming a CEO.
A lot of startups with first-time founders have unclear roles. When I started my first business, Steamclock’s co-founder Nigel was far more experienced, being ten years my senior. I’d assumed he would take a more CEO-like role, but other than that I’d put little thought into our positions. We were...
Sell First, or Build First?
An age-old startup question.
Recently I’ve been talking to potential customers about a product space I’ve been exploring. One thing I’ve wondered as I do this is, “At what point should we ask our first customers to pay?” Writing on how to develop a SaaS product tends to advocate one of two approaches: “Sell,...
Splitting Services and Product
The story of a plan: take a break, and get focused.
Last year, I realized it was time to switch things up. In 2010, my co-founder Nigel and I started Steamclock. The vision was to build products for clients, and use those profits to fund our own product development. Which worked! Mostly. We’ve built a client business that’s been growing and...
How Leaders Manage Time & Attention
Some findings on productivity.
Last month, I wanted to better understand into how leaders manage their time and attention. While this seems like a core leadership skill, a lot of the managers I know have a fractious relationship with productivity tools. Given this, I had two high-level questions: What are the popular approaches in...
How to Not Build a Social Network
I attempt stop you from making a mistake.
I hear that you’d like to build a new social network. Seems like a good idea, right? Today’s social media is a tire fire, the companies that dominate it rake in billions monthly, and you have a novel concept for a social app that might make people feel less blue,...
Chain of Fools
We dive into smart contracts - and bananas.
I’m officially sick of hearing about blockchain. As the recipient of various “idea for an app” emails every week, I don’t have much patience for get-rich-quick schemes. Suure, you’re going to put hyperlocal photo messaging “on the Bitcoin”, good luck with that, don’t talk to me or my son ever...
The Joy of Shortcuts
Parse teaches us about shipping.
Some time ago, we had a client come to us with a problem. Their app was a mess. It consisted of roughly 400 kilograms of copy-pasted Objective-C, written by a departed team member in some kind of over-caffeinated fever dream. There was no server logic, or anything else that would...
The Fall and Rise of Podcasting
Podcasting just keeps getting better.
In February 2005, Ev Williams and Noah Glass launched an exciting new podcasting business called Odeo. Podcasting, or “audioblogging”, was booming. The Great Startup Cynicism of the early 2000s was lifting, and podcasting was the Next Big Thing. The New York Times explained: Mr. Williams, who is 32, helped found...
Anchoring startups
Yesterday I put fuel on Jesse’s fire by talking about the importance of helping startups be physically close to one another. Work spaces are a small part of the bigger issue: how do we get great tech companies to grow and anchor in our city? Greg and Danny at BCIC...
Leaving Apple
I leave my dream job.
Today was my last day at Apple. Working there has been the experience of a lifetime. The people, the products, and the coffee are all wonderful. I’m going to miss laughing at rumour sites, hiding prototypes, and not needing to explain where I work. At Steve Jobs’ commencent address at...