How to understand Anthropic

 Anthropic’s Safety Superpower - Ben Thompson, Stratechery 

The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté.

Anthropic, [in contrast to OpenAI], has perfect alignment between talent and mission and business. The company gets to sell to researchers the creation of a machine god, with the mantle of being the sort of person who cares about the dangers and is smart enough to navigate them on behalf of humanity; that every policy change that falls out of that happens to be great for business is the most beautiful coincidence in the world. 

The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not. 

Every SaaS product is bundling: Ruinous for companies, great for consumers

Paraphrasing, but I think about this 👇 from Ben Thompson/Stratechery every. single. day.

• All companies have the ability to produce more code/products cheaply due to LLMs 
• Most companies will use that ability to expand to adjacent areas currently occupied by another SaaS co 
• Competition between SaaS co's is going to explode for this reason and become ruinous 
• Established competitors offering similar products
• startups offering niche use case products for lower price b/c have superior cost structure compared to established competitors 
• both become a drag on pricing power

Related: Sandcastles & Silicon

We used to be building castles, now we're building sandcastles that are going to get washed away.

The 4 Most Boring Tech Takes on the Internet (and counting)

These takes are everywhere and good grief are they boring 🥱

When you see one, you can be certain of a few things:

• the most interesting, nuanced aspects of the topic won't be covered
• the author is optimizing for clicks over precision [that's fine, that's the game]
• the post tells you more about what the subject wants you to believe, or is afraid of, than the topic itself

In rank order

#1. Anything that contains the word "moat" 

There is a 90% chance the poster doesn't understand the term's serious meaning and that whatever they are referencing is neither new nor a moat

See: Some Notes on Moats

#2. "_________ is dead" 

Probably not, and definitely not on whatever timeline that's being proposed.

#3. "X just killed Y" 

90% chance the author doesn't understand one of the variables, if not both, and the entire analysis is flawed

#4. "Steve Jobs would have never [fill in the blank]"

This person never worked for Steve Jobs, probably doesn't understand Apple's strategy then or now, boring boring boring 

See: What's the point of invoking the ghost of Steve Jobs?

Quite Good - "Fight the fight 3 times"

 Molly Graham - Fight the fight 3 times

After the third attempt, you let it go.

...

there are some fights you are simply not going to win. Sometimes the timing isn’t right. Sometimes the CEO needs to see the chosen path play out for themselves. Sometimes you are just wrong about what will happen next.

The reality is that most decisions inside a startup are experiments.

People like to say disagree and commit. I’ve always preferred a slightly more honest version:

Disagree and let’s see!

Speed as a habit

A running list of resources on the importance of speed as a habit in startups. 

In case you ever need support to impel your team to ship quickly 🏁