How do you picture a superintelligence (if true superintelligence could ever be real)? I like a trick from Dungeons and Dragons for running villains with 25 Intelligence: don't try to out-plan the players. Instead, whatever they do or roll, play it like the big bad saw it coming.

Everything in life is sales The sooner you learn that, the sooner you will be free

Personal software should be deeply malleable. Studio lets you change BASICALLY ANYTHING. Since it can access its own source code, it can fully modify itself. Easily add any new features you can imagine, like keyboard shortcuts and automations. Or make your own avatars & themes.

Every startup talks about their Cash Runway. They should be more concerned about their Relevance Runway. There are a lot of companies right now sitting on plenty of cash. They raised a big round a couple of years ago and on paper they have years left. But the race they are actually in is against becoming irrelevant and it is more pressing than any financial pressure. Take data integration - workflow tooling and the long tail of specialized pipeline and orchestration products. That whole layer of tooling got heavily funded over a 2-3 year window, and a lot of those products were best-in-class when they shipped. Now the frontier models and the coding agents are encroaching on "good enough." You can have an amazing product, and your customer can still get to a good-enough version of it with a few Codex prompts. Categories that used to be categories are consolidating fast. So what do you do if you are running one of these companies? Three things come to mind. 1. Decide whether you're staying independent. If you can't see a path back to relevance, find a home while there is still a buyer. It is one of the best M&A markets I’ve seen in years. Look hard at whether you have enough momentum with customers and enough surface area of product to hoover up the adjacent companies in your space and be the biggest banana in the bunch. More surface area means more data flywheel and more proprietary understanding of how customers use you. 2. Gird yourself for battle. Assume you are going to have to reinvent the product, probably more than once. It didn't used to work this way. Once you were past $50 or $60 million in revenue and growing, you might think you could stop worrying that everything might change underneath you. That would be a huge mistake. A friend of mine runs a company with >$100 million ARR and I wouldn’t be surprised if they have another pivot ahead of them. 3. Rebuild your vision. Cash buys time. It does not buy motivation. If you are going to reinvent the product, your team needs to see where it's going before they'll follow you there. The people who can help you pull off a reinvention are also the ones with options elsewhere. @andrewdfeldman put it well at our summit last year: give them great teammates, give them great problems to work on. If your team can't see a future worth building, you won't get the chance to build it. All that said, nobody can tell you how long your relevance runway is. Figure it out before your best engineer does.

Dear Followers Over the next three days I am going to respond to @DAcemogluMIT 's questions on AI. There are lots of reasons to do this but I also wanted to send a big FU to that Economist piece that suggested we economists aren't willing to challenge Daron. That is not my experience and I know people who challenge him all of the time. None are shy about it. If anything, they do so in our normal circles more than, say, here. So let's do it more here too.

I think we have a problem