✨How to be human in a digital world✨—(& other helpful perspectives). Remember to relax, it’s just a game.🎙️INTERVIEWS: @beyondwithnicb
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Joined January 2010
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Everyone who spends more than 7 hours of their day on a mobile device or computer is at risk for becoming an NPC and there are absolutely no exceptions.
You have to break the pattern, do something different, do something new or else you’re cooked.
Eventually you will lose your mind, your individuality, your critical thinking skills, most of your social skills, and your soul.
Highest aura is a real category. Welcome to 2026
Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026.
cosign.co/awards
Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category).
For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes.
Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page.
True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration.
We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products.
People categories:
- Future Founders
- Rising Stars
- Engineering
- FDE
- Product
- Design
- AI Researchers
- Marketing
- Comms
- Growth
- Chief of Staff
- Operations
- Talent
- Finance
- Public Intellectuals
- Podcaster of the Year
- Newsletter Author of the Year
- Poster of the Year
Company categories:
- Rising Stars
- Best Place to Work
- Founder Mafia
- Talent Density
- Highest Aura
Product categories:
- Product of the Year
- Launch of the Year
- AI Assistant
- AI Language Model
- AI Coding
- Dev Tools
- Open Source
- Consumer
- Productivity
- Creative & Media Tools
- Product Design & UX
- Enterprise B2B
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Self-Driving
- Healthcare
- Vertical Fintech
- Legal
Nicole Behnam retweeted
the ppl i like & respect the most are often the ones i disagree with the most.
there’s something beautiful about being able to not necessarily agree on a lot of stuff, remain genuinely curious about each other's thinking, & still enjoy the convos.
it’s kinda sad that so many others don’t feel this way. in many facets of life having a complimentary brain alongside you is much more advantageous than a supplementary one.
Nicole Behnam retweeted
If I invested in all of the companies that when referenced someone said “total dumpster fire, stay away” I would be 100x more successful. Hope that helps.
When I was ghostwriting social posts for authors 6 years ago, I was shocked by how many of them couldn't write for social. People who had written entire books couldn't get their point across in two sentences.
Put them on a podcast or in front of a camera and it was worse. Almost none of them could give you a good sound bite.
Now I'm seeing the exact same thing with founders, who suddenly have to be the face of their company.
If that's you, do this: figure out what your company does in one sentence your mom would understand, and say it out loud until it feels natural. Lead with the point instead of building up to it. Cut the bs. And when you have a choice between a stat and a story, tell the story. That's the only part people actually remember and repeat.
If this is too hard for you, hire someone. It’s that important
Nicole Behnam retweeted
creating new networks might be one of the last remaining sources of alpha in most software.
ai is rapidly commoditizing software creation but the ability to bring people together, establish new relationships, & enable entirely new behaviors remains still remarkably difficult to replicate. i suspect even more so now because there is a lot of noise & ppl have incredibly shallow attention spans.
Nicole Behnam retweeted
My thoughts on getting married young as someone who got married at 25 and is still very career driven
1. It is underratedly rewarding to find someone before you are successful. The number of times I have heard “series A then I’ll date” only to lead to “series B then I’ll date” six months later. I made a fraction of what I make now in an extremely IC position when I met Tyler and there is nothing better than knowing we got here together.
2. Two years ago, my husband went through and acquisition and joined NVIDIA. Half of the team had partners and or was married, the other half was single. We appreciate the fact we met pre-acq because there was never any question of whether someone is with you for the $$. Not that it would be a problem, but why have things spoil the relationship when it doesn’t need to.
3. Dating takes an absurd amount of time and emotional bandwidth and imagine if you just didn’t have to do that.
4. You can take a lot more risks with your career and personal life because you have another person to keep you emotionally and financially stable. If you take these big financial bets and they are successful then INCREDIBLE. If they are not successful, you will still be perfectly fine.
5. You pool your networks together and you know probably 50% more people (assuming you also have heavy overlap) and this is extremely helpful and makes me feel better when I stay at home on a Friday night 😅
6. In many ways the person you marry is an investment and the earlier you invest the better the outcomes! But more seriously, I optimized for a partner who I could grow a lot with in a very complimentary way. And this has worked out nicely.
“Do you think that getting married young has made you less ambitious?”
Welcome to the first episode of SOTA Wives with Sarah Chieng (Head of DevX at Cerebras, @MilksandMatcha) x Vivian Midha Shen (General Partner at Y Combinator, @vivianmshen).
In episode 1: finding your person before getting rich, turning down startup funding to finish MIT, what a YC partner sees in founders, and how a birthday post became “psychological violence.”
4:08 Finding your husband before the exit
8:48 Did we marry away our ambition?
18:04 The internet called Sarah's birthday “psychological violence”
20:47 Does your YC partner secretly think you’re doomed?
23:47 Building a startup with your ex-boyfriend
28:54 SF cat parties
Nicole Behnam retweeted
about 3 years ago, micro1 lost 60% of its revenue overnight and almost went bankrupt.
today, i'm proud to share we've surpassed $1B annual run rate while remaining historically profitable.
it’s been a special journey. we’re grateful for every struggle, moment, and person who has been part of it.
we've taken a very untraditional path to get here. our core team is only ~180 people, spanning 14+ countries, and fully remote.
many of our decisions sacrifice hundreds of millions of revenue and slow us down short term. but we believe they compound into advantages that are impossible to replicate long term.
the long term is now.
these are the 8 principles that made micro1 a leader in the data industry and will soon make us number one:
1.) human 1st AI: treat the tens of thousands of experts helping train models with absolute best-in-class care. our goal is to make AI training one of the largest, highest paying, and most enjoyable job sectors in the world.
2.) U.S. first: we refuse to work with adversarial nations, or export data that improves models against the interests of Americans.
3.) long-term research over short-term ARR: invest in deep research, products, and infrastructure for years from now, not just the next customer pipeline.
4.) proper incentives for intensely hard work: no arbitrary requirements like 996. inspire people to work extremely hard with outlier incentive structures instead of forcing weekend work. we’ve maintained close to 100% core team retention as a result.
5.) stay lean and global: we’ve reached $1B run rate with ~180 people, and intend to slow team growth significantly from here. exceptional talent is found around the world, and pedigree is the wrong thing to over-index on.
6.) execution alignment: company to retain a streamlined board so we can optimize for the next several decades, remain light-weight and dynamic, and take bold & calculated risks.
7.) abundant intelligence improvement: invest in building data generation models to make high-quality datasets and RL environments dramatically less expensive and more abundant.
8.) scale data on realism and horizon: realism brings the complexity of the real world into training models, while horizon extends how long models can work and how much complexity they can handle. both have enormous room to scale, and we’re pushing the limits of both.
additionally: after surpassing $500M run rate this summer, we priced our Series B at a $4B valuation, alongside a ~$25M tender to give our early employees liquidity as we build for the long term. the round was led by Dream Ventures, a longtime supporter and one of our earliest investors, alongside Microsoft, Javelin, Flybridge, G Squared, Up Partners, and LG.
we’re also grateful to be backed by incredible industry leaders, including Guodong Zhang (co-founder of xAI), Andy Fang (CTO of DoorDash), Igor Babuschkin (co-founder of xAI), Behnam Neyshabur (founder of Mirendil), Jerry Tworek (ex-VP of Research at OpenAI), and many more.
data is on its way to becoming the largest industry humanity has ever seen, and we're certain this is just the beginning.
best,
Ali
