How to get good advice from experts: ask what they'd do in your situation. Many experts feel they should just tell you all the options and let you decide. But they usually know which is the right one, and asking what they'd do gives them permission to tell you.

Peter Thiel: Distribution should be part of product design

“Every company needs to have someone asking why we can't launch next Monday instead of next month. Willing to accept and underwrite the risks needed to make it happen. And with a stomach for occasionally being wrong, eating the loss, but keep playing.” world.hey.com/dhh/don-t-lose…

Going through the latest YC batch companies you can instantly see how much opportunity there is with AI. This feels like over a decade ago again when there were endless wide open markets that software startups could chase after.

underused strategy in life!

👀 In our wildly popular Maki House Session this week, we had Mads Johnsen sharing his insights on leading Product teams at Calm, Uber and LinkedIn. Needless to say our founders we're thrilled to pick his brains! Here's a few key takeaways:

Friendly reminder that startups with a better product lose often to startups with better distribution, brand, marketing, storytelling, and sales.

My #1 advice for people early in their careers: Work at a company that is known for being very well run. Why? The biggest difference I've noticed between high performers v. underperformers is that they know what great looks like. High performers have seen how world-class

When I was young I fixed my parents’ computer and now that I’m older I fix computers for my kids. Are we the only generation that knows how computers work?

being paired with a really senior engineering manager (as a not so senior product manager) is such a cheat code for accelerating your skills. so much of your day is just keeping up with the EM. eventually their habits become your habits. then the real fun begins.

the secret to b2b saas is selling things that get people noticed by their boss and promoted

there’s a bug in my code I add logging the bug disappears I remove the logging the bug is back.

A surprising source of alpha is *actually using* new AI products - if you haven’t tried R1, Operator, DeepResearch, Cursor, Krea, Notebook LM etc you’re at a competitive disadvantage to builders / investors / consumers that have.

when people build anything, they want want to be unique so they default to reinventing the wheel for everything for no reason. the best founders & product people don’t do this—they change one variable. they solve one hard problem. that’s it. for everything else use existing

Abstraction is the mind killer Go to ground, be specific, have the direct conversation, try it yourself, if it doesn’t work ask why, don’t assume someone else already checked on this The devil is always in the details

an epic battle between the Growth PM and Legal

One of the biggest growth drivers at Discord over the last year has been the elevation of "Login with your LEGO Account." Incredible how much of Gen Z and Gen Alpha associate their core identity with their LEGO account. Wish we had done this sooner.

[9:00AM at the office] I came here to eat some snacks and burn some tokens, and I’m all out of tokens