Claude

Adversarial Multi-Model Peer Review

Have rival LLMs review each other's code and fight it out until no issues remain

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

AI at the Core vs AI at the Edge

Decide whether to sprinkle AI onto existing code or rebuild the workflow with the LLM as the core

AI Computer Interfaces (ACI)

Give AI agents purpose-built text interfaces, not the human GUIs they were never designed for

AI Rep-Loop Compression

Build AI tools that give you feedback 80% as good as an expert's, on demand, to get years of judgment-building reps in a fraction of the time.

Communication5 steps

Alignment-First Founder Meeting Protocol

Open every high-stakes meeting by locking success criteria, then anchor back to them when a combustible leader derails.

Alpha-Beta People and Process Design

Borrow finance's alpha/beta to decide where you want upside and where you want boring reliability.

Ambitious Retry (Pass@N) Tool Use

Get more from AI tools by asking for the ambitious change and fully restarting on failure instead of hammering the same attempt

Anchor the Pitch to the Exec's Incentives

Find the metric, OKR, or board pressure they own, then show how your idea moves it.

Answer the Question Behind the Question

When caught without a number, answer the adjacent question and surface the real concern.

Anticipated Regret Decision Test

Ask '10 years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn or do this now?' to unlock action.

Architect-Then-Delegate AI Product Building

Use AI to prototype and fill scoped sub-segments, but architect and lock the system yourself — don't cognitively surrender.

Bad vs Sad Quality Tiers

Classify every failure as bad (irrecoverable) or sad (recoverable pain) so teams triage quality across many surfaces.

Behavioral Activation

Act first, then feel better — keep a pre-written list of small actions that reliably reverse a low mood.

Best-Model-First Agent Workflow

Use the most capable model on max effort, start in plan mode, then auto-accept — counterintuitively cheaper.

Biggest-Bottleneck Prioritization

Solve the single biggest problem, then pick the next — don't dream up a long roadmap.

Binding-Receptor Theory of Product-Market Fit

Your market's demand is a fixed fact like a drug receptor — you find it, you can't market it into existence.

Boundaries Are What You Will Do

A real boundary is something you will do that requires the other person to do nothing — anything else is just a request

Brand as a Promise

A brand isn't a logo — it's a promise you make and keep, worth paying extra for.

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

Journal on questions that scare you — that's where the gold is

Broadcast How Leaders Think (Mental-Model Transparency)

Teach your team how key leaders think — not just what they decided — via weekly verbatim-plus-interpretation notes.

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

Build for Day 365 Retention

The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals

Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next

Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock

Build for the Exponential (Skate to Where the Puck Is Going)

Build products for the model that arrives in 6-12 months, betting that today's 20%-working features hit 100%

Build for the Future Model

Design product ideas for the model capability that is coming, not the one you have today

Build for the Model Six Months Out

Design your AI product for the model that ships in six months, not the one you have today.

Build for the Models Six Months Out

Ship for the AI capabilities that will land in ~6 months, not the ones available today

Building the Network Effect Into the Product

For SaaS, ask if the product works better when users tell others — if not, your marketing is doomed.

Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right

Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months

Build Only at the Magic Intersection

Don't ship what anyone could build off the shelf — build only where model and product uniquely meet.

Build the Company Only You Could Build

Reject the pivot-and-blitzscale playbook; commit to the one idea that dies without you.

CEDAF Delegation Framework

A five-part checklist for delegating without lowering your standards — to humans or AI.

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

Roll out new AI tooling by letting a few excited early adopters pave the way for the team.

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

Solve the real problem for real users; architecture and code quality are nearly orthogonal to success

Connect Before Correcting

Join someone's reality for 30 agenda-free seconds before you ask them to do anything — connection is the bridge to cooperation

Innovation5 steps

Constitutional AI Self-Critique Loop

Align a model to written principles by having it critique and rewrite its own outputs, then train on the fix

Context Loading (Additional Information)

Front-load all relevant task information — and put it at the top for caching

Context Over Models: The Data-Management Bet

AI products win on getting good, timely, well-structured data to the model — not on the model itself

Conway's Law Reorg: Go Functional Before You Go AI

Restructure engineering into one functional org before expecting company-wide AI or technical depth

Innovation5 steps

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

Ship an AI feature by naming its 3-4 core behaviors and teaching them with model-generated data

Counterprogram the Narrative (Take a Punch)

When you fear someone thinks less of you, take one small action that proves the opposite instead of litigating the past.

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.

Critique in Public, Build Trust in Private

Invert the management-book rule: debate directly in public, lavish reassurance in private.

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

Communication5 steps

Culture-Add Interview Diligence

Interview the company back with adjective and endemic-problem questions to judge culture before you accept.

Data Is a Compass, Not a GPS

Data disproves the ridiculous — it rarely hands you the answer, so validate findings before you trust them

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.

Defensible Moats for AI Startups

Four durable places to build in AI where foundation-model labs are least likely to squash you.

Finance3 steps

Deferred-Buyout Creative Pricing

Keep the exploration phase cheap by billing rights separately, so a late pivot doesn't mean you already paid to own dead work.

Deliberate Understaffing

You can't size a project right, so err toward too few people on purpose.

Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority

Optimize for the far larger future user base, then manage the unhappy few with authentic listening.

Designing Robots That Feel Non-Threatening

Make robots soft, attentive, and telegraph intent before they move.

Design the Dream Objective Function

You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.

Detach Self-Worth From the Outcome (The Art-Project Reframe)

Pursue the work as a puzzle you enjoy, not as proof that you're somebody

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Diagnose Agent Failure as Structural, Not Stupidity

When an agent does the wrong thing, check its context, tools, and scope — not its intelligence.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.

Differentiation vs Table Stakes

Balance the roadmap between what attracts new customers and what they require to switch at all

Influence3 steps

Don't Be Stingy With Words

People can't read your mind — make appreciation explicit, and never fake it.

Don't Box the Model In

Give the model tools and a goal, not a rigid workflow — scaffolding gains get wiped out by the next model.

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

Startup success isn't secret knowledge — it's executing the well-known basics far past normal effort.

Drive AI Adoption By Using It Yourself On A Real Problem

Executives using the tool daily on their own real problems beats any top-down mandate or think-piece

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

AI transformation moves when you impose hard constraints, sort people into three groups, and fix the slowest part of the system.

Sales3 steps

Dual-Motion Growth: PLG and Sales That Feed Each Other

Win by having both many customers and lots of revenue — with PLG and sales feeding each other

Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One

Stop eyeing the next promotion; be judged on impact delivered in the job you already hold.

Ensembling (Mixture of Reasoning Experts)

Solve the same problem several ways and take the most common answer

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

Innovation6 steps

Error Analysis: Open Coding to Axial Coding to Count

Turn messy LLM logs into a prioritized list of failures before you write a single test.

Escaping the Low-Impact PM Death Spiral

Low-impact work begets low-impact work until layoffs — break the cycle by proactively claiming high-impact work.

Ethnographic Insight Over Stated Preference

Observe what customers do, not what they say — AI transcript-reading is not true customer insight

Eval-First AI Product Development

Define what 'correct' looks like as evals first; the spec becomes the scorecard, not the build instructions

Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval

After counting failures, route each one to a prompt fix, a code check, or an LLM judge — not all three.

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Fear-to-Agency Reframe

When AI change triggers fear, lean in and ask what's within your control — turn it happening to you into happening for you.

Feedback and Escalations Are a Gift

Withholding feedback is the most selfish thing you can do — and escalations are a gift you chase to true root cause.

Feelings That Overpower Skills

Bad behavior at any age is feelings overpowering skills — set the boundary, then teach the missing skill, don't just punish

Few-Shot Prompting

Show the model examples of what good looks like instead of describing it

Find the Cocktail Party

To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive

Focused Hours Over Long Hours

Overwork lets you skip the hard work of deciding what matters — force the constraint that makes you decide

Follow People, Not Plans

Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.

Follow the Breadcrumbs and Calibrate Urgency

Act fast on an exec's subtle hints, but ask how strongly they actually feel first.

Marketing5 steps

Four Criteria for Choosing a Distribution Platform (Enter and Exit)

Score a new platform on retention, monetizability, value exchange, and scale — then plan your exit before you enter.

From Brick Layer To Architect

Reclaim the 10% of high-leverage architecture work by delegating the 90% of implementation to AI.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Generalist-With-A-Superpower Hiring

Hire people who care obsessively, have a generalist brain, and one absolute superpower — then trial them for a week.

Generative-First Skill Stack for the AI Era

When making things gets cheap, your bottleneck becomes idea generation — train that muscle, plus just enough coding

Peak Performance3 steps

Genius-Zone Time Budget

Spend at least 50% of your time on the work you're both great at and love — it's what keeps you showing up.

Go All-In When the Experiment Works

Big companies experiment plenty — they fail by hedging instead of doubling down on what works.

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Habit-Formation Model for Team Behavior Change

Drive team adoption (e.g. of AI) with behavioral psychology, not education: consistency, low friction, and a powerful reward loop.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

High Agency, High Accountability

Pair the freedom to solve problems your own way with clear ownership of the hypothesis and the outcome.

Hire an Organism of Strengths

Interview for three universal traits and compose a team of complementary strengths over hiring the most optimal individual stars

Hoard What You Know How To Do

Keep a searchable backlog of verified, working experiments so agents can recombine them into new solutions.

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

Keep the growth, hold the 'mindset' loosely — nailing it down turns growth into a fixed mindset

Hunting New Bottlenecks When AI Writes the Code

When AI removes the coding bottleneck, constraints shift up and downstream — go find them.

I Believe You + I Believe In You

For anyone struggling, pair 'I believe you' (one foot in the hole) with 'I believe in you' (one foot out) — doing both at once is magic

Impact Estimation in the Unit of Your Goal

Prioritize by estimating each option's impact in the exact same unit as your team goal, not an abstract score.

Just-in-Time Planning

Shrink long roadmaps to a lightweight monthly priority list and grant explicit permission to kill dead processes.

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets

Know When to Quit (Anti-VC-Persistence)

Winners hit big fast; if year 4-5 isn't screaming growth after a pivot or two, reset the clock.

Latent Demand Mining

Watch for people jumping through hoops to make your product do something, then make that the smooth path.

Latent Demand Product Discovery

Find your next product by watching people misuse your current one for something it wasn't designed to do.

Leader Dogfooding for Product Pulse

Live and breathe your product as a real user (or meet customers) and trust the anecdote over the dashboard.

Lean Into Your Spike

In the AI era, double down on your unfair advantage and stack disciplines to become a unicorn

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

LLM as Disconfirmation Engine

Point the model at where your strategy does NOT fit — and reverse-engineer competitors from their public docs

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

Structure your repo so the AI writes the least code possible — infrastructure absorbs the complexity.

Magic Questions (Statements That End in 'Do You Agree?')

To understand how someone thinks, feed them statements ending in 'is that right?' rather than asking open-ended questions.

Make Everyone a CEO

Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room

Make the End User Feel Like a Winner

Design agents that don't just do tasks — they make the user look good and feel like a winner.

Make the Other Mistake (Prompting for Brutal Feedback)

To get honest AI critique, over-correct toward brutal — the model won't actually overshoot.

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution

Manager-as-IC Onboarding

New managers ship as individual contributors first — and keep doing it — before and while they manage people.

Manager Visibility via an Always-On Agent

Enlist a standing AI session across all repos and channels to stay on top of 8x throughput and drive conversations.

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

Bring your manager a recommendation to react to, not an open question to solve.

Map Your Product Against What AI Can Do

Start from your product's core job, then classify each part as AI-replace, augment, partial, or not-yet

Marginal-Impact Reasoning Under Tail Risk

Prioritize catastrophic low-probability risks by expected value and by how few people are already working on them

Mastery Before Management

Get technical skill into your bones before you leave IC — then stay technical by listening, not coding

Meet the Bar and Be Different

Incumbents overshoot average utility — win by meeting the bar while being materially different

Marketing5 steps

Meet-The-Customer-Where-They-Are Marketing

Put your product into the customer's context and re-tune the message for each adopter tier and market.

Mega Trend vs Hype Cycle — The PhD Test

If you need a PhD to understand it, it's not a mega trend. Don't fight mega trends.

Micromanage the Decision, Not the Operation

Sweat only the few details that matter for the customer — control the decision, delegate the doing.

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

Don't spend a dollar on marketing until users start sharing your product unprompted.

Minimum Lovable Product Ladder

Replace the MVP with a three-rung ladder: minimum lovable, lovable, absolutely lovable.

Mirror the Founder's Intensity (Fight Entropy)

Every management layer leaks intensity; your job is to mirror the CEO's, not buffer it.

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

Route every cross-org tradeoff through a single shared mission so decisions are fast and everyone stands behind them

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Model Casting by Personality

Route each task to the model whose 'personality' matches, and split plans to fit

Model Introspection Harness Repair

When an AI agent misbehaves, ask it why — its explanation reveals the harness gap to fix

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

Spend two minutes pre-empting the objection you'll obviously get, and stop feeling blindsided.

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

Off-the-Shelf to Prove It, Custom to Ship It

Prototype with whatever works fastest; go custom only when KPIs demand it.

One Agent Per Lane

Beat context overload by running many narrow, purpose-built agents instead of one do-everything agent.

One-Step-Away Team Goals

Set your team's goal exactly one why-statement or one math operator away from a company goal.

One-Week Top-1% AI Fluency Sprint

Pick a real problem and spend one full week taking it end-to-end with AI — that alone puts you in the global top 1%.

Opinionated Simplicity

Ship one compelling opinion instead of ten confusing options — you learn faster being wrong than being neutral

Opinion-Based Decisions for 1.0 Products

For a first-of-its-kind product, empower a tiny 'tastemaker' team to make gut calls — data can't yet exist.

Optical Correction X-Ray

Blow a single letter up huge and probe its joints to see where a real type designer breaks geometry to look perfect.

Options-With-A-Recommendation Pushback

Never say yes or no to stakeholders — present options, trade-offs, and one clear recommendation.

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement

Don't forsake motion for progress — keep asking whether the metric you climb still serves the outcome.

Outside-the-Building Product Management

Spend 80% of your time thinking outside the building and argue every case from the market's point of view

Own the Story — No Packet Loss

The leader is the custodian of the message — deliver it to the front line yourself, never via cascade.

Pain-Plus-New-Technology Idea Selection

Judge what's worth building by pairing a habituated pain with a newly-arrived technology that can finally solve it.

Passion-Project Learning (An Eval for Your Life)

Learn new tech by picking one passion project that forces you to touch everything you need to learn

Pick Hard Problems to Attract the Best Team

Hard, important problems attract the best people — and business is a team sport.

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.

Platforms Are Products

When to start a platform team, who staffs it, and the impact metrics that keep it honest

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

PM Prototype-to-Production Handoff

PMs build a working V1 with AI, validate it with real users, then hand a working artifact to engineering

Precision Prompting for AI Builders

Never tell the AI 'it doesn't work' — state exactly what you expected and which parts do and don't.

Product-First, Add-AI-Later

Design the end-to-end product experience first, then add AI to solve specific problems — never retrofit AI into a broken flow.

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

Product-Led SEO

Treat SEO as a product you build for the search user, not content you optimize for a keyword.

Product-Manage the Platform Team From the Side

Frustrated by a slow internal platform team? Supply the product management they don't have

Product-Market-Story Fit

Great product in a great market still fails if the story is wrong or missing — add the third leg

Programmatic vs Editorial Decision Rule

Go programmatic only where scale meets a real use case — otherwise you scale nothing.

Prompt Decomposition

Make the model list the sub-problems first, then solve each before the whole

Prompting-as-Prototyping

Validate a product idea by prompting a model in a local browser before building anything

Prompt Injection Defense Stack

Stop trying to fix injection with prompts and guardrails — mitigate at the model level

Proven Better New

Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins

Pull the Thread on New Tools

Judge a new AI tool by where it'll be in a week or a month, not where it is on day one.

Question the Base Assumption Before Build-or-Buy

Before building OR buying a tool, ask whether the process needs to exist at all

Ramble-Mode Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent by voice-rambling everything you need, not by wiring up APIs and structured fields.

Red/Green TDD for Coding Agents

Force agents to write the test first, watch it fail, then pass — the compressed prompt is just 'red/green TDD'.

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

Build a fully-fleshed simulated world, inject real chaos, and reward the trajectory, not just the answer.

Resting in Motion

Treat the busy, working state as your normal baseline so heavy long-term work stays sustainable

Ride the AI Value Wave

Treat today's AI capability as the worst it will ever be and expand where it's most efficacious

Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)

Match robot form to the task; reserve humanoids for the long tail, not the line.

Right to Win via Permission to Play

Before building, ask if it's logical that YOU built it — and whether you have a route to market.

Roadmap-Less Agility for AI-Era Building

Drop the explicit roadmap and jump on capability drops the moment they land

Root-Cause Tooling Post-Mortem

When AI botches something, ask what in its prompt caused it — then patch the tooling

Sales Then Logistics

Sell the why before you explain the how, or your ask gets crickets.

Seeing the System

Strategic thinking is naming the invisible systems and their self-protecting culture so you can change the rules.

Seek the Counterfactual, Not Confirmation

The competitive edge lives in the data you're trying to prove yourself wrong with, not the data you hoped to see

Self-Criticism Loop

Get the model to critique its own answer, then implement its own critique

SEO Conversion-Metric Rigor

Rankings and traffic are not results. Hold SEO to the same efficiency standard as paid.

Separate Behavior From Identity (Good Inside)

Say 'this is a good person who is late' — split who someone is from what they did, so the conversation can actually be about the behavior

Ship-in-Research-Preview Speed Loop

Cut idea-to-user time from months to a week by branding launches as previews and pre-wiring the launch chain

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Influence3 steps

Shrink the Change to Build Trust

De-risk a scary idea into a two-week experiment with a fixed check-in date.

Signposting

Use structural cue-words to guide the reader through your writing without heavy formatting.

Single-Channel Build-in-Public Bet

Find the one channel that resonates with your exact audience, then double and triple down.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

Solve the Problem Behind the Problem

When an agent can't do a task, escalate API-to-browser, then reframe to the underlying need it can solve.

Song Exploder Your Intuition

Turn a gut reaction to a design into a reusable, articulable design rule by reverse-justifying why you feel it.

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

Match your stated confidence to your actual evidence — neither overreach nor over-hedge.

Spec-as-What-Good-Looks-Like Verification

Check your definition of good into the repo so AI code review can automatically validate work against it.

Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product

Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

SPOTAK: Decoding Hiring Intuition

Trust your gut on candidates, then use six traits to translate that gut into words others can act on.

Start Embarrassingly Small

The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

Narrow scope to the achievable thing in front of you, then build momentum on top of it

Stay Close to the Metal

The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product

Stewart Plus Two More

Never bring one option; show a Goldilocks three and hold the rest in the appendix.

Stickiness Over Moats

Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

Strategy Activation via Crossing the Chasm

Treat internal strategy rollout as an adoption curve — over-communicate the why and manage early adopters vs laggards

Strategy Not Self-Expression

Feedback's goal is behavior change, so cut everything that doesn't serve it — usually 90%.

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

Stuck-Point Scaling Law

Reliably improve an AI system by hunting where it gets stuck and tuning those spots with a fast feedback loop.

Sturdy Leadership (The Three Pilot Announcements)

Validate someone's experience as real without being overwhelmed by it — like a pilot who contains the cabin's fear and flies the plane

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy

Rank every component by how catastrophic losing it is — then pre-buy the killers.

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

Mine support tickets for recurring confusion, then rank-order self-serve landing pages that answer them

Survival Before Thriving

Make asymmetrically positive bets and protect the enterprise — you must survive long enough for timing and insight to arrive

Swinging the Pendulum

Spot an undesirable state, correct it — but know you'll overcorrect, so aim for the middle

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

Tasks, Not Problems

Delegate to AI agents by handing them scoped, verifiable tasks — never open-ended problems.

Taste and Standards as Meeting Spec

Good taste is knowing what people want just before they do; high standards means relentlessly improving the spec, not hiding behind perfectionism.

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you

Tension at the Center of Strategy

Every great strategy creates 'it might not work' tension — the possibility a customer falls in love with.

The 100%-or-Nothing Automation Rule

An automation that works 95% of the time isn't an automation — push it to 100% or don't rely on it

The 10-to-1 Input/Output Kill Test

When you pour 10 units of effort in for 1 unit of output, the project has run its course.

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

Two aligned checkpoints — strategy at 20%, execution at 80% — so process speeds you up instead of slowing you down

The 60-Second Meeting Reset

Buy a context-starved exec 30 seconds of orientation before you pitch.

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

The Access-to-an-Audience Moat

In human data the only durable moat is a trusted, targetable audience — not recruiters or ads

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

The AI-as-CTO Persona Project

Cast the AI as an opinionated technical co-founder to kill sycophancy and premature coding

The AI-Fit Accuracy Test

Deploy AI where the human baseline is low-accuracy — not where it's already near-perfect and you need the last 2%

Peak Performance5 steps

The AI Interview-Prep Coach System

Build an AI coach, mine the real question bank, drill weak spots — then mock with humans

The Aligned Binary LLM-as-Judge

Build a one-failure, pass/fail judge and align it to a human with a confusion matrix before you trust it.

The Anxiety Balance Sheet

Convert free-floating anxiety into a four-column ledger of known/unknown and controllable/uncontrollable.

Innovation5 steps

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

Break growth experimentation into four evaluable stages an AI can hill-climb, keeping humans on alignment

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

Appoint one trusted domain expert to own eval judgments instead of running it by committee.

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

The Blur Test

Take your glasses off and squint at a brand to judge its cohesion, color story, and overall feeling.

The Business-Rules Moat: Why 'Forms on Databases' Are Unclonable

B2B SaaS lock-in isn't the UI or data model — it's years of accreted, configured business rules

The Career Bingo Card

Deliberately take adjacent-but-different roles to fill in squares and become 'scribble-shaped'

The CEO Funding Test

Ask 'if I were CEO, would I fully fund my own team?' to expose whether your work is survivable.

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

Move from T-shaped to comb-shaped — multiple deep skills you deploy on-demand via diagnosis

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Company-Inside-a-Company Incubation Playbook

Spin a 0-to-1 business inside a mature company by ring-fencing it completely from the core

Peak Performance5 steps

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

Mastery needs many kinds of practice — imitate a master, get preference feedback, get graded, then live it.

The Complicity Question

Ask how you helped create the conditions you claim you don't want, to reclaim your agency

Sales4 steps

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

Treat a cold email like a growth funnel: open, then read, then reply — optimize each stage separately

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

The Dark Factory Software Model

Ship production software no human writes or reads — replace review with simulated-user QA swarms.

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

Diagnose, Analyze, Take a different path, Experiment — an engineer's anti-playbook for marketing

The De-Buzzword Test

Ask people to explain their idea without using the buzzword — if they can't, they haven't thought it through.

The Economic Turing Test

Measure transformative AI by whether you'd hire an agent for a real job without knowing it's a machine

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

The Expectations-Reality Delta

Unhappiness is the gap between expectation and reality — and expectations are far easier to change

The Exposure-Therapy Tool On-Ramp

Ease into coding tools in graduated steps so code stops being terrifying

The Fast-Feedback Flywheel

Fix every piece of user feedback within minutes so people feel heard and give you even more.

Sales4 steps

The Four Forces of Switching

Understand any adoption decision as a tug-of-war between attraction, anxiety, habit, and inertia

The Four PM Annoyances

The four PM behaviours that quietly destroy engineering trust — and the fix for each

The Four Principles of Building Hardware Fast

Sequence the work so hardware's un-updatable, one-shot nature can't sink you.

The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle

Every new growth channel opens then closes in the same four predictable steps — learn to see where you are.

The Four Strategic Choices

Choose customers, competition, validation, and distribution deliberately — each choice determines your product and your future.

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The Funnel-Position Defense Against AI Overviews

AI answers eat top-of-funnel search. Move your SEO to where intent and conversion live.

The Goals-First Refresh Cascade

Set the scope of a rebrand by naming the goal first, then let every later round cascade from broad to narrow.

Finance3 steps

The Gross-Margin Short-Circuit

Use high gross margin + healthy churn as a fast litmus test for whether a business is truly differentiated

The Hire-an-Agent Onboarding Model

Set up an AI agent exactly like you'd onboard a human EA: own identity, delegated access, earned trust.

The Impossible Shared Case Study

Give every candidate the same unsolvable problem and grade how far they drill and how they react.

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

The Insight Test

Before founding anything, prove why YOU uniquely hold an insight others don't — and why you'll endure it for a decade

The Learning-Opportunity Command

Turn every confusing moment into an 80/20 lesson aimed at your current skill level

The Lethal Trifecta

Any AI agent that combines three capabilities can be tricked into stealing your data — cut one leg.

Themes for Discussion at the Top of the Doc

Bubble up the spiciest 3 topics live; answer the hundred nitpicks offline.

The Middleman-Signal Disintermediation Play

When middlemen and end-customers both come to you directly, that's the signal to build the business yourself

The Modern Elder Playbook (Thriving in Tech as You Age)

Pair a mentor's wisdom with an intern's curiosity, lead with energy, and trade wisdom for tech in mutual mentorships.

The Most Generous Interpretation (MGI)

Ask 'what's the most generous interpretation of why they did that?' to turn judgment into curiosity and unlock better interventions

The Nielsen Number: Right-Size Your Research

Interview 7-14 people — fewer teaches too little, more teaches nothing new

The One-on-One Diet

Hold direct-report 1:1s sacred; cut nearly all the rest — relationship-by-1:1 doesn't scale

The Parallel Agent Workflow

Run several AI agents at once and insert yourself only where your expertise actually matters.

The Peak Hierarchy of Needs (Three Pyramids)

Apply Maslow to employees, customers, and investors to find the differentiating layer above the transactional base.

The Pickle: Iterated Product Quality List

A lightweight, memorably-named ship checklist you grow one line at a time from every miss.

Leadership6 steps

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

Run product and engineering as one leadership unit with clear ownership and async, iterated reviews.

The Power of Repair

Rebuild trust after a bad moment by owning your part, naming the impact, and stating what you'll do differently

The Purple Cow: Building Customer Traction

Make something worth remarking about, and engineer in advance what you want people to say.

The Quality-Volume-Speed Priority Stack

What high-stakes data buyers actually rank: quality first, then volume, then speed

The Reboot Leadership Equation

Practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = better leadership and resilience

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan

Never go away for a year to rebuild — uplift well-contained pieces of the system instead

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

Put proactive agents on a schedule to watch your metrics, surface misalignment, and coach you weekly

The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test

SEO is not free. Price it fully, then compare it against every other growth channel.

Productivity7 steps

The Seven-Command Build Loop

Six slash-commands turn vibe-coding into disciplined software delivery for non-coders

The Sharp Problem

Build for old, enduring needs re-imagined with new tech so the improvement is 3-10x undeniable

The Shipyard Team

Organize product work as a six-capability pod of controlled chaos with sensory 'tendrils' to customers

Strategy6 steps

The Six-Factor Company Stack Rank

Timing > market > team > product > brand > distribution — you need all six, ranked.

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

The Subtractive Goal-Shrinking Exercise

Make a bloated set of goals smaller and more concise each round until one specific, urgent number survives.

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

The Swipe File

Capture examples of communication that work — the act of collecting trains your eye.

The Thin Skeleton Template

Start every project from a minimal template — agents copy its style far better than they follow prose instructions.

The Three Generations Rule

Make the product, fix the product, then fix the business — innovation almost never lands in one generation.

The Three-Part AI Product Utility Equation

A useful AI product needs model intelligence, context/memory, and application/UI to all converge.

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

Great curation does two opposite jobs at once: kill the worst, surface the best.

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

Under two engineering weeks, the engineer is the PM; over two weeks, the PM owns it

The Vibe-Coding Blast-Radius Rule

Vibe-code freely when only you get hurt by bugs; stop and take responsibility the moment others could.

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

Judge a model-harness combo with heavy usage, a trusted five-person taste panel, and ~10 sharp evals

Three-Prototype Ideation

Since prototypes are now free, build a feature three ways and let real use pick the winner.

Three Worlds Theory of Change

Decide what to actually do about a hard problem by naming the pessimistic, optimistic, and pivotal worlds you might be in

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

Build disposable prototypes on real data to feel what works before writing any production code.

Top-Down Design Diagnosis

Before touching any detail, spend days naming the one big-picture reason a design bothers you.

Top-Down TAM SEO Forecast

Forecast SEO from market size down, not from keyword-tool volumes up.

Treat the Executive as Your Key User

Run stakeholder conversations as discovery interviews, not approval requests.

Triangulate the Customer's Truth

Don't take what customers say literally — reconstruct their economics and incentives independently, then find the urgent one

Truthful Storytelling Through Relentless Refinement

Sell the why, not the what — and refine the story out loud on real listeners until it comes off effortlessly.

Under-Resource to Force Automation

Deliberately under-staff projects and hand out unlimited tokens so people are forced to automate with AI.

Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time

Assign the model a role, feed it more context than you could read, and iterate the prompt until it works.

Peak Performance3 steps

Variety-as-Rest Anti-Burnout

Beat burnout by switching to a different kind of work when you lose steam, instead of stopping.

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Wide Aperture, Then Coalesce

Keep considering many ideas — including ones that look bad — and test cheap versions until the signals converge on one

You Are Not the Protagonist (Operationalize, Don't Impose)

Your job isn't to convince everyone of your vision — it's to understand the leader's vision and find the spiky places you can shape it.

You Only Get to Compile Five Times

Treat every hardware build as one of a handful of irreversible compiles a year.

Zero-to-One Team Building

For brand-new categories, hire generalists, adjacent-domain experts, and AI-native new grads.