"Built to Sell" is a better book, starting with the premise that your company needs to be positioned to be bought, not sold. If you are reaching out to someone to buy you, you are effectively accepting an 80% price cut.
Readit Newsmvkel commented on Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it derekyan.com/ma-book/... · Posted by u/zhyan7109
mvkel commented on RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) datatracker.ietf.org/doc/... · Posted by u/ipnon
A lot of programming languages uses "Foo bar" during introduction without actually explaining why "Foo" and why "bar". Before the age of Google and Internet it was perhaps one of the most common question from speakers of non-English language.
This was one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome when I was a wee lad combing through "Professional PHP Programming." All of the examples it gave were foo/bar, and I couldn't make the intellectual leap to understand what the real world use cases would be.
It wasn't until I tried building something (mad libs) that things "clicked"
mvkel commented on Claude is a space to think anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
Seems short-sighted to commit to not running ads exactly like OpenAI plans to. You win in the court of public opinion for a few months, then look like a hypocrite when you're inevitably forced to run ads because your investors demand it. Sort of like how safetyism was convenient marketing until it became clear that it was revenue repellant and they quietly walked it away.
We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffin is that the data is a large part of company moats, and new products need time in the market to get that. Migration is also a long process and risky...so to get customers, a newcomer needs to provide way more value than what the incumbent gives.
I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.
> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product
Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business.
"Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.
It's this generation's "build vs buy." I imagine it will play out the same way, like a revolving door. Customers churn because they can "build it themselves," then a year later when they're sick of maintaining a mess of code for some internal system instead of delivering value to their own customers, they come back. A blip.
mvkel commented on Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out boxc.net/blog/2026/claude... · Posted by u/fugu2
Why anyone wouldn't want to be using the SOTA model at all times baffles me.
Going dumb/cheap just ends up costing more, in the short and long term.
mvkel commented on AISLE’s autonomous analyzer found all CVEs in the January OpenSSL release aisle.com/blog/aisle-disc... · Posted by u/mmsc
So here we have OpenSSL, coded by humans, universally adopted by the Internet, universally deemed to be terrible code.
More evidence that "coding elegance" is irrelevant to a product's success, which bodes well for AI generated code.
This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally).
If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.
Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead...
Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment.
Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...
It's wild how the layers of abstraction just keep expanding