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Genius Business retweeted
I've spent $10K+ on anti-aging supplements, and most of them ended up being marketing scams.
So here are the top 7 longevity supplements actually proven to work (based on data):
1. Resveratrol
Tobi Lütke's framing of the Shopify AI memo: it started as a performance review problem. Two equally good programmers 15 minutes ago, one clicks with AI, now one has more impact. Shopify grades on net impact.
"The moment that is said, it feels like an incredibly unkind to not tell people."
Genius Business retweeted
In 2023, Palantir CEO Alex Karp explained why America can't pause AI.
Three years later, senators are pushing for a pause, and his argument is back in the spotlight:
Genius Business retweeted
Harvard Senior Fellow Arthur Brooks on the strangest wealth finding in his 25 years of research: The more you give away, the richer you get.
When his data showed that people who give money to charity earn more in the years that follow, he didn't celebrate.
He assumed he'd made a mistake.
"Now, I was thinking when I first saw this, got to be the hand of God. No, it doesn't make sense. I didn't believe it. Actually, I thought there was something wrong with my data."
The data wasn't wrong. A psychologist he was working with told him the pattern was already well known in his field:
"No, we've been seeing this for years and years. People who give more money away, they get richer and they make way more money back than that which they give away."
So what's going on?
@arthurbrooks rules out the mystical explanation first:
"This isn't like a karma thing like you get what you give what you get. It's not one of those."
The real answer is psychological. Giving money away changes how you see yourself:
"What happens is when you give money away, you become a problem solver and your mind changes. You become a more effective person."
And people who see themselves as effective act like it, and earn like it:
"People who solve problems and give their money away are people who feel more effective and they earn more money."
Genius Business retweeted
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's message to everyone using Claude or ChatGPT at home: "I won't lie to you. There are real dangers."
Amodei was asked what he would say to an ordinary person using AI at home, someone like the aunt of his interviewer, Jo Ling Kent.
He started by naming the mood:
"Look, my message is there's a lot of fear right now."
From there, he took that fear head-on with three points: the benefits are real, the dangers are real, and you should get a say in what happens next.
First, the benefits:
"First of all, as always, this is a great technology and it has lots of positive uses. So let's just start with that. You know, we have hundreds of millions of people using our technology every week to do wonderful things."
He points to messages that land in his inbox regularly:
"Every week I get an email from someone who says this, you know, I was talking to Claude and Claude diagnosed this disease that my doctors had missed. I get emails like this every week. So, let's not forget that."
Then came the part he says too much of the industry wouldn't admit:
"But in terms of the dangers of the technology, I won't lie to you. There are real dangers."
He calls out his own industry directly:
"And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risk. The idea was that they would present it as positive as [possible]. We've never done that, but too much of the industry did that."
For Amodei, the fix starts with honesty and extends to the person at home:
"And so it starts with telling the truth. And the truth is there are risks. Risks are real. But also, you have a say in how these risks are addressed."
He explains what that looks like in practice:
"We're doing the best we can to work with government to create the proper oversight of this technology to give voters and elected officials a say in how this technology is deployed. And we want to work with those folks as much as we can."
His goal is for everyday users to get both the benefits and a voice in the decisions:
"I want everyone to feel like they're appreciating the incredible benefits of the technology, but also they have a say in their voice and in their vote in determining how this technology is deployed."
And @DarioAmodei rejects the idea that AI's future belongs to a handful of people:
"This isn't a decision for a few people alone. This is a decision for everyone."
He's also clear about how much is riding on it:
"But it is an important decision. I won't lie that the stakes aren't high."
Genius Business retweeted
Weeks into his job at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer got into his first big clash with Bill Gates, one that left them not speaking for 3 days.
The company had 30 people and more customer work than it could handle, so Ballmer asked for 18 new hires. Gates feared it would bankrupt the company:
Genius Business retweeted
Terence Tao on the actual mystery of AI: "We don't have good rules, even heuristic rules of thumb for predicting which tasks are good, which ones are not."
Jack's throwaway is the whole theory of the company: "sure, we'll Build seat belts and everyone else can copy them. That's good. That's like good world."
Genius Business retweeted
Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin becoming his best business ever:
Bigger than Amazon? "Yeah."
Genius Business retweeted
Senator Bernie Sanders argues that even a 2% chance of human extinction is too high a price to pay for faster AI:
Bill Ackman’s thesis on Amazon and Google:
"All of these companies require massive amounts of compute, and the cloud is the safest, most scalable place to get access to it."
Genius Business retweeted
Warp founder and CEO Ayush Sharma (@ayushswrites) on what it means to build an AI native product.
Build the product, platform and architecture so every task, starting with deep tax compliance workflows, can be performed by an agent.
(Warp runs payroll, taxes and HR for fast-growing companies using AI agents.)
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Full video on "YC Root Access" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
🤝 Paid partnership
Genius Business retweeted
Somewhere, a finance team is building a spreadsheet to explain what changed in last month’s spreadsheet.
Add screenshots of bank statements and enough people to hold it all together.
We call this “closing the books.” Then do it all again next month.
Just listened to Parker Gilbert from @numeric_io break down how to finally get out of this loop.
🤝 Paid partnership
Genius Business retweeted
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Partners, on why the right response to AI is curiosity rather than paranoia:
Reid is asked about the arrival of AI tools that can do the work people currently do by hand. He opens with a recommendation:
"I always recommend hope versus fear and curiosity and optimism versus paranoia, but it doesn't mean that it isn't painful to do the transition."
He's blunt about what's coming:
"So yes, AI tools will be available in a small number of years for everything and there will be AI tools for not just the thing I've created with Reid AI, but like real time interaction with Reid AI and all the rest of that and that will happen."
In his framing, the arrival of the tools is settled. What matters is your response to it:
"But what we should be doing is figure out how do we add our own creativity? I mean, you're one of the creators. And how do we add our own creativity and amplify ourselves with the tools?"
He then gives a concrete example, aimed directly at the creator he's speaking to. Short-form video editing:
"So like for example, of course you could have an AI just do all your short editing. I bet you the AI doing your short editing is not as good as the AI plus a human doing it."
That's the whole argument compressed into two sentences. Human plus machine beats machine alone, and the gain compounds into leverage:
"And a human using it can now do a whole bunch more than they before and they might be able to say let's create 15 different versions and like test them to see which are good and do that and all of a sudden you have that acceleration of superpower."
Fifteen versions instead of one. Tested instead of guessed at. The human still decides what's good; the tool just removes the cost of finding out.
Reid then names the mechanism he's actually advocating:
"So fear is generally best converted to curiosity."
But he immediately refuses to let that land as a platitude:
"That doesn't mean it won't be difficult and that doesn't mean that you won't be learning new things because AI will be learning new things and becoming better and better."
Which is why his prescription is a behaviour rather than a feeling:
"But it's part of the reason why I encourage people to go play with it. Go try it because as they realize it, they go, 'Oh, I can still do these things using AI.'"
Then he describes his own workflow with writing, one of the tasks people most often assume AI is coming to take:
"So, you know, for example, if I'm writing an essay, as opposed to starting with a blank page, I'm probably going to start with a GPT-4 prompt, right? And say, 'Hey, I think about this, this, this, this, and this. I got this. Okay, now this is what I'm going to start working from.'"
Note what he's outsourcing: the blank page, not the thinking.
"And that, by the way, just accelerates me and makes my ability to bring in my intelligence as opposed to having to type a lot and stare at the blank page. I can move faster and get to more interesting things."
That's the actual trade on offer: less time on the mechanical part of the work, more time on the part where your judgement is the scarce input.
@reidhoffman closes without a promise:
"And so it's a be curious and hopeful but doesn't mean don't expect, you know, potholes, transitions, difficulties. Those will be there too."
Genius Business retweeted
Apple CEO John Ternus on the wavy, wrinkly surface that makes foldables feel cheap (and how Apple engineered it out):
Ternus was asked about the design philosophy behind the display and the hinge on Apple's first foldable.
Most of his answer is about something far less glamorous than the fold: what the screen feels like under your thumb.
He starts with the constraint nobody gets to opt out of:
"The inner display, that front top surface, unlike a traditional phone, isn't a glass surface — it's a polymer surface."
Glass that thin and that flexible doesn't survive being folded tens of thousands of times. So every book-style foldable puts plastic where your finger goes.
Ternus is blunt about what that has meant so far:
"I think if you've seen what's been out there, just kind of cheap-feeling plastic surfaces, they don't feel good to touch. They're kind of wavy, wrinkly, all that sort of thing."
His target is the texture of the whole panel, the waviness you feel dragging a thumb across it, rather than the crease down the middle.
Reviewers rarely have vocabulary for it. Buyers register it in about two seconds: two thousand dollars, feels like laminate.
Apple's fix came from a treatment it already ships elsewhere, rebuilt from scratch for a surface it was never designed for:
"People love the nanotexture on iPad and on MacBook Pros, and we kind of came up with an entirely new way of making that."
An entirely new way, because nanotexture on an iPad is etched into glass. Applying it to polymer is a different manufacturing problem, and solving that is the real engineering claim here.
The result, in his words:
"The nanotexture just wipes that all out. It's beautifully flat, it feels amazing to touch, and it's incredibly durable."
Underneath that surface sit two more decisions, and Ternus is clear none of the three were made separately:
"The entire approach to the display and the hinge was kind of traditional Apple. What do we do? We get into it, we go to first principles, we start thinking how can we make this great. You design it as a complete system."
The hinge: "It's this incredibly complex hinge that's built to maximize flatness."
The panel: "This really unique display stack-up" with glass on both sides of the OLED, "so that it makes it more durable and flatter."
One requirement, three subsystems. The hinge delivers flatness, the double-sided glass holds it, the nanotexture finishes it.
Asked what he felt the first time he saw it working, @johnternus describes the moment hardware teams actually steer by:
"It was like, 'Yes, that's it.' This is what happens when we get — you know, we always know we're on the right track when we get that first design model or prototype. You go, 'Oh, this is it. This is what I want.' And then once we have that, then it's like, 'Okay, how do we go make it happen and make it real?'"
"If you've got all your chips on the table, you got to play the hand yourself." — @elonmusk
When the 2008 market collapsed, Tesla faced certain death unless Musk committed all his remaining capital.
Genius Business retweeted
In 2001, Google brought in Eric Schmidt, a seasoned tech executive, to lead a startup founded by two Stanford PhD students.
His first meeting felt like grad school: great conversations, no deadlines, no deliverables.
Here's how he got them to plan:
Genius Business retweeted
Terence Tao, UCLA math professor and Fields Medalist, says AI is still terrible at genuinely hard problems but unbeatable at breadth:
Genius Business retweeted
Y Combinator Partner Emeritus Michael Seibel explains how Slack got 80% of employees using it before executives even knew it existed:
When Slack went up against Microsoft, it faced an opponent with a well-known playbook. Michael describes it bluntly:
"Microsoft's number one way of competing against a startup is literally just copying the product and, or buying a shittier competitor and then giving it away for free. It's such a great strategic way to compete."
The obvious response would have been to build a big sales team and go after enterprise deals. Slack saw that this was a trap:
"If you look at how Slack played the game, right, they knew, well, if we hire a bunch of salespeople and try to compete against Microsoft salespeople, we're fighting on Microsoft's terms. We're not going to win that battle."
So Slack skipped the executives completely and went straight to the people doing the work:
"So instead they thought, well, if we can distribute through the employee base. So by the time the executive team even knows that Slack exists... 80% of their employees are daily active users. And it'll be super painful to rip it out."
By the time leadership noticed, Slack wasn't a vendor waiting for approval. It was already part of how the company ran. Removing it would mean disrupting most of the workforce.
Michael says this worked because it targeted the exact point where Microsoft was weakest:
"That's kind of how you attack where your opponent's the weakest. Most people don't voluntarily use Microsoft software. It is hoisted upon them at some point. And Slack could attack the different way."
Microsoft won by selling to the people who make purchasing decisions. Slack won by appealing to the people who actually use the product, the group Microsoft had never needed to win over.
@mwseibel then turns this into a lesson for every founder raising money:
"So what investors really want to understand is what's your understanding of the competitive landscape? Slash the big incumbents, and where are they weak? So when they ask your secret sauce, your competitive advantage, those are all just like, identify the weak point that you're going to exploit."
He points out that this is exactly where many founders come up short:
"What's so interesting is that oftentimes founders obsess about their idea and they think that's super important, and they kind of leave this thing behind."
And he ends by stating plainly what building a meaningful company requires:
"In some fundamental way, the world is a certain way and you want to change it. That usually means you have to disrupt someone or something or some company, which means you have to kill them."