🇪🇺euacc.com 📸PhotoAI.com $125K/m 🏡InteriorAI.com $40K/m 🛰RemoteOK.com $38K/m 🌍Nomads.com $16K/m 👙levelsio.com $14K/m 💾pieter.com $6K/m
📕 My book $5K/m 👉
Joined July 2013
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@levelsio retweeted
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think getting and renovating a big office is a good use of time and money when you're extremely pre-PMF. Spending money is not success. Making money is.
This was our office when we were half the size and 10x the revenue as this team. Our main perk was all-you-can-drink horse electrolytes (3rd pic). Rent was $6k.
I also wouldn't delude myself into thinking that the fancy office is a recruiting tool. You don't want people joining you because of your sauna and surfboards. You want those who do because of your mission, your team, your traction.
Having a fancy office gives everyone the false impression that you've "made it." My intention is the exact opposite: we haven't made it, we can die any moment, and we better work our asses off (not go surfing of sauna'ing) if we want to increase our odds of survival.
I spent $1.5M building our office after raising a seed round. My co-founder thought I was crazy. Here's what changed his mind...
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭:
After our seed round, I looked at our team. Mostly immigrants. Working 6-day weeks. Building something incredibly hard. The office wasn't just where they worked. It was becoming their home.
So I made a bet, what if we actually designed for that?
The requirements I gave our real estate agent:
- Shower (for ocean swims between meetings)
- as close to the beach as possible, ability to quickly go surfing/kiting etc.
- Big enough kitchen for a chef
- Room for an actual sauna
People thought I was building a vacation house, I thought: I am building a place worth the sacrifice.
𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤:
- Found one of SF's best real estate lawyers. Negotiated hard.
- Negotiated Tenant Improvements + First year for free
- Effective cost: $250k (not $1.5M)
Then I was extremely prescriptive with design and construction. No endless back-and-forth. I drew what I wanted. Told them to build it.
Cut iteration time by 80%.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭:
- Nordic vibes (keeping our European souls)
- Industrial kitchen
- Sauna room (yes, like our product: sauna.ai)
- Ocean access
- Space that feels like home
Conclusions:
- This "expensive" decision already paid for itself.
- In SF, recruiters charge $100k per engineer. We've closed multiple hires -because candidates walked in and said: "I want to work here."
But the real ROI isn't only financial.
It's this:
- We do Friday AMA as a BBQs on the beach.
- People actually use the surfboards.
- The team's lifestyle supports the intensity of the work.
EVERYONE WANTS IN, doesnt matter if events, hiring or using the space as coworking (@bertie_ai and I open it up for our portfolio companies)
My co-founder's response after 3 months:
"You were right."
Some founders optimize for low burn rate.
I optimize for: Can great people sustain this pace for years?
Because great companies aren't built in one sprint.
They're built by people who can go the distance.
We're hiring: wordware.ai/careers
(Comment if you want intros to our real estate agent, lawyers or construction team - happy to connect)
Emdash spotted —
Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.
@levelsio retweeted
Took Qwen Image Edit - Camera Angle Control LoRA for a spin with the distracted boyfriend meme.
Thoughts?
@levelsio retweeted
The thing you have to remember about this woman and those like her is that she genuinely doesn’t know that anyone disagrees with her basic worldview. She doesn’t even see it as a worldview. It’s just the obvious truth.
Of course she knows abstractly that half the country voted for Trump. But those aren’t people. Those are cartoon characters. They’re either fat slobbering rednecks in klan hoods, or mustache-twirling robber barons manipulating the rednecks for profit. Her mental models of them are less complex than her mental model of a squirrel. Anyone she might actually sit down and talk to is, of course, a person, and therefore agrees with The Obvious Truth. It is inconceivable to her that anyone capable of being a pleasant dinner party guest would not share her basic beliefs and values.
She wasn’t trying to do a gotcha or extract a pledge of fealty. She was certain that Sydney Sweeney is a person, and therefore only got mixed up in the whole jeans/genes fiasco by mistake. She was trying to do Sydney a favor by giving her a chance to clarify that she is in fact a human being who agrees with the things all real people agree with.
Why none of the models can do real top-down views? It's always in an angle?
I was curious if I'd get this and I do
Airpods Pro 3 in plane, you get what sounds like a feedback loop, high pitched quite loud and uncomfortable ringing
I think the noise cancelling mic records the sound it plays to noise cancel (like inverse waves) and then it goes wrong and you get a loop
It especially happened when I tried my gf's Airpods which have smaller ear tips and don't fit my ears, which makes sense cause it'd close off the wear less well then giving more potential for feedback loop I guess
It only happened when messing around with my Airpods like repositioning them though
@Apple
AirPods Pro 3 Flight Problem ✈️
At 39,000 feet, Apple’s latest noise-cancelling earbuds expose an issue you’d never notice on the ground.
basicappleguy.com/basicapple…
Lies, lies and financial charts where you can change the timeline to fit your argument
If you zoom out the Brazil stock exchange it's still down (hint: it always goes down due to the BRL devaluation)
Trump trying to make the USD cheaper by crashing it is helping Brazil a bit though
Anyone working at Chinese AI companies like Kling and ByteDance?
I'm in China again soon and would be sick to visit their offices and meet the ppl behind the models and tweet about it to all of you
I think of visiting Shanghai now but maybe Shenzhen and Chongqing too? Didn't pick cities yet
Just fun Asia trip but since still nobody visits China, I'm def gonna visit China
Last time was 2018 to Qingdao and Beijing!