Essays, profiles, and reading notes on strategy, operations, and AI.
Twenty recurring lessons from 2,463 profiles, organized around choosing what matters, building, leading, deciding under uncertainty, and making work last. Each principle connects people across disciplines and includes a practical limit or tradeoff.
Read the article: What 2,463 Profiles Taught Me About Building, Leading, and LivingAs Vice President of Research at OpenAI, Mia Glaese leads teams focused on model alignment, human data, and capability evaluations.
Amanda Kahlow founded 6sense and grew it past $100 million in revenue before taking a five year break. She recently returned to build 1mind, a startup replacing traditional sales funnels with conversational AI agents.
Felix Rieseberg leads engineering for Anthropic's Claude Cowork and Claude Code Desktop, drawing on his background as a core maintainer of the Electron framework.
Joshua Achiam is an AI researcher who served as OpenAI's Head of Mission Alignment before becoming the company's Chief Futurist.
Walden Yan co founded Cognition AI, the company behind the autonomous coding agent Devin. A former competitive programming champion, he helped shift AI coding from simple text completion to asynchronous background execution.
Olivia Moore is a partner on the investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she focuses on consumer applications and the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki warns that reasoning models are nearing recursive self-improvement at the same time our ability to monitor their internal chain-of-thought logic is declining.