Reading notes & insights on product, leadership, and building organizations
(For lab notes and more operational articles on management and technology, see dr-knz.net.)
Spent a year in a community of 20-somethings. They're unashamedly self-obsessed, surprisingly good at spotting BS, and can't afford houses but excel at casual mental health talk. The anonymity helps and hurts. Future prognosis: cautiously optimistic. 🔄✨
Products with warts love their users. Your data model is your destiny. AI boom won't enrich investors (just operators). Bonus: memory is O(n^⅓), ChatGPT triggers psychosis, and you could just choose optimism. Try it! ⚡🧪
Exploring how startups can build product organizations that scale while maintaining velocity and avoiding common pitfalls in cross-functional alignment.
Pareto's 80/20 is wrong (it's 80/40), AI hallucinations are mathematically permanent, and reverse centaurs turn workers into slop-cleaners. Lemon markets kill online authenticity while tech crushes small orgs. September reads: minds, markets, machines. 🍋🤖
"Conservative" and "liberal" don't forecast your business risks anymore. Grid capacity, chip supply, housing, and water do. If you're still modeling strategy around 19th-century labels, you're running 2025 problems on antique software.
August's reading trail winds from Alex Hormozi's sales psychology to sobering AI science results: why LLMs misalign when fed mistakes, why dehumanization creeps in when we treat AIs like machines, and why the startup bubble might pop before the AI one. Plus, a Greek philosopher exiled for noticing the Earth moves. Value, hype, and hubris—served with notes in the margins.
Influence psychology transformed my view of sales, LLM context rot discovered, and developers overestimate AI productivity gains. Also: feudalism exists within democracies via corporations, and "being too ambitious is clever self-sabotage." Time to weaken belief edges, not fight facts. 🎯
Apple proves LLM "reasoning" is just cosplay—accuracy collapses beyond training complexity. Cursor pricing will create AI "haves" vs "have-nots." Also: spending time with LLMs is like being gaslight by bad people. The authenticity crisis demands we go smell things. 👃
Building Quintism philosophy and a calm digital companion while discovering that friction is the most valuable commodity in the world. Also: narrative prison constrains creativity, the "Who Cares Era" reflects institutional trust breakdown, and we need new social structures. 🧘
Silicon Valley is preparing a coup against geography-based government, hyperlegibility is trading secrets for attention, and LLMs can't do what we think they can. Also: we won't live to see the consequences of our AI investments. How do we guide choices responsibly? 🎭
The public internet is broken—even when you know what to watch out for. Algorithmic feeds are destroying our ability to search for knowledge and form memories. LOTR is brain-rot for technologists; read Discworld instead. We're approaching zombie war. 🧟
Jordan Peterson is a fraud, RISC-V threatens US/UK hegemony, and Calm Tech certification could save our sanity. Also: DeepSeek demolished NVIDIA, and we have a moral duty to write human content before LLMs train on it. The PC is dead—time to make computing personal again. 💻
Decoded lullaby language ("just" means unpredictable complexity), learned about systematic design vs empirical methods, and discovered universal moral principles. Also: advanced civilizations might be indistinguishable from nature. 🌱
Mentoring a California CTO, learning that care doesn't scale, and discovering the 70% AI problem. Also: moral education might fix America's meanness, and egoless engineering beats strict division of labor. 🧠
Learned the power of networking through the Ambassador vs Sympathizer vs DJ vs Figurant matrix. Also discovered the spiritual evolution of brands: traditional → modern → post-modern → network. What comes next after community brands? 🤝
Joined an incubator program and discovered I need 4-5 important things in life to stay balanced, not just one. Started international trade consulting and ADHD career coaching. Turns out my focus is fine—I just need variety! 🎯
Health forced me from reading to YouTube, but I found gems between the garbage. Started serious projects: international trade, AI-generated smut (yes really), urbanism, and a funnel factory. Marc Lou's ShipFast is virtual gold! ⚡
DoorDash = payday lenders for restaurants, Bruce Schneier explains how tech companies borrow from our collective social future, and group chats are the new web. Also: teenage plagiarists monetize audio+visual content demand. 📱
AI leaves accessibility behind, misallocated talent builds video games instead of solving real problems, and self-expression economy breeds cognitive dissonance. Also: phantom stock plans and why beautiful terminal animations matter. ✨
Spent a month as a full-time construction project manager and learned that leadership is all about relationships. Delayed decisions, soft accountability, and empathy work better than pushing for perfection. Also: Kelly's criterion and why big companies suck. 🔨
Peter Thiel = Ayn Rand with computers and venture capital. Zero to One meets Seven Habits meets "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Also discovered demurrage currency, statistical paradoxes, and why React/Vue/Svelte are all awful for prototyping. 🤔
Ego is the enemy, fractal dimensions explain project cost overruns, and trust saves money. Also: AI will only simulate the most deeply flawed versions of our collective intelligence. Sometimes the hardest learnings aren't easily teachable. 🔍
Rebooted my reading habit and discovered that most corporate structures are social games where participants don't realize they can influence the rules. Also: LangChain brings order to AI chaos, and I learned what I'm "allowed to do." 📚
Plot twist: after 15 years solving the hardest CS problems, I realized I'm actually a product person at heart. Leadership science is mostly descriptive, not prescriptive—and that CEO looking for their "first technical hire" has the cart before the horse. 🐎
From coding to campaigning: one techie's journey toward political office starts with building executive credibility. Sometimes the loudest complainers about politicians should actually become politicians. 🗳️