EDIT - please read the below post with the following quote in mind from Oscar Wilde on the art of writing things in public, this is in the preface prologue thing for A Picture of Dorien Grey (1890 - and it feels like that was how long ago i read it too)
In my experience, the more advanced version of "getting whatever i want" tends to be a matter of being in a good position to achieve the next goal or step on the road to the promised land. Envisioning the promised land is easy. The hard part is getting
As a forward-deployed engineer (FDE) my job is to manufacture customer-product alignment. As Nina has pointed out, I love documentation, guides, thinking in procedures, and systematizing relationships such that they are maximally useful and well-lubricated. The best calls are no calls, meaning you don't have
Working again, man it's hard and fun! As I anticipated in my previous post, chapter 3 of Andy's professional life has begun: 1. Landing my first real job at Scale AI as employee #83-ish. 2. Funemployed founderhood culminating with Shuffle as #2, cofounder. 3. now
The old world had a name for the person who could think farther than he could execute: impractical. He saw structures before he could move them. He built private theories of work, people, machines, language, markets, and futures, then struggled at the ordinary business of turning those theories into finished
are all-encompassing. I truly mean that. It's hard to grasp what that means. ALL is a huge little word. Encompassing everything seems impossible. And yet, with Alexandra, this seems to be occurring. And with others to a lesser extent but Alex highlights the impact best. Specifically to
"Andy, remember when you hired me three years ago? If you recall, I think I said something about how my life goals were: (1) to get a job in an American company, (2) then to become a founding engineer at a YC startup, (3) then to become a tech
Tim Ferriss introduced me to Jim Collins, the man behind one of my favorite business classics, Good to Great. They discuss how Jim dissects his behaviors, literally calling himself a bug to be studied. Blogging has created my own "bug book" of sorts. The latest surprise result to
I wrote a piece called "Families, Not Kings" here: Greenville.substack.com Please subscribe to that newsletter if you want to get more travel blogs and personal updates and photo content from me. I'm considering it more of my "normal people zone" while this
You are a legend and I want to extend genuine congratulations on your joining Anthropic. For at least a couple years, it has had the highest talent density on my personal radar, including many many great people like Drew Bent and Cat Wu all converging simultaneously and seemingly independently to
My girlfriend moved in with me end of March beginning of April. We met last year on July 27, and looking back thru my google photos from around that time, it seems I have enough visuals to tell the story quite well here. All the more magically, for me it
We often learn structure only to unlearn it later. Here are a few false dichotomies: academia vs industry, work-life balance, and category theory in algebraic topology vs the more standard word "categories". You don't stop learning just because you get a job. The best kind