I'm Flo, founder & CEO of Lindy. This is my personal blog, where I muse on philosophy, business strategy, technology, and really anything that catches my fancy.
A prominent VC recently posted a long thread on Twitter about his conversations with ChatGPT, which had convinced him he was experiencing an attack from a "non-governmental entity" to disrupt his "recursion". He wasn't being ironic. Mental health issues are hardly new, but
It feels like there's a new tech scandal every week these days — companies spying on their competitors, startups lying on their metrics during fundraising, etc. Interestingly, I think the fact that we are now routinely seeing startups (mostly in AI) go from $0 to $100M+ in
We recently onboarded a new PM at Lindy — spent a full night working on her onboarding guide, which turned into a "PM Standard of Performance," which turned into the tactical guide I wish I had when I got started. Decided to release it publicly now that it&
One of the main things standing in the way of people’s success is their desire to be liked, making them sacrifice objective correctness for social acceptability. In effect, that means that whatever goal people claim having, their actual goal — the one revealed by their actions —
You should take much more risk, and try new things much more often. Much of your comfort with risk is hard-coded genetically, a variable carefully tuned by millions of years of evolution, balancing the upside and downside of risk. But this is one of these cases where the modern
I drew this myself, obviously The best analogy I’ve heard for startups is that they’re like looking for gold. Not because of the adventure, or the camaraderie, or the riches awaiting you on the other end. But because a gold-seeking expedition has two very different
This is a memo I sent to the Lindy team last month, with slight edits. Thoughts on Remote I’ve made a 180º on remote. I think everyone here can attest to the fact that we tried harder than anyone else. And I’m more bummed out
We can't even reason about the problem, because humans are bad at reasoning about exponentials; even if we could, we wouldn't worry about it (and the folks closest to the problem are least likely to worry); and even if we did worry, we probably wouldn't be unable to do anything about it.
“Hell is other people.” Sartre I’ve come to view the idea that you absolutely need a co-founder as one of the most harmful memes in Silicon Valley. It’s probably killed more companies than any other misconceptions out there. Instead, I think one should
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” — Shakespeare A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build . In case you haven’t read it, It’
Publishing this memo I shared with Teamfellows. Everyone agrees with good-sounding principles until they experience their downsides. “Working out is healthy!” Haha, yes! Yes! “So hit the gym!” Well this sucks. “Hire slow!” Yes! Yes! “There’s this seat you’
I strongly recommend General Magic , a documentary about the eponymous company, founded in 1990 with a clear vision of what smartphones could be, and how huge they could be. It built one of the most impressive teams in Silicon Valley’s history to make this vision a reality: its
I ran this poll the other day on Twitter: Which would you prefer, assuming both cost $700 (and no dual boot) — Flo Crivello (@Altimor) September 12, 2019 The answers highlight a point I often make: that when people buy an iPhone for $1,100, they’re really paying
In his seminal book Seeing Like a State , James Scott describes what he calls “high modernists:” lovers of orders who mistake complexity for chaos, and rush to rearrange it from the ground up in a more centralized, orderly fashion. Scott argues that high modernists end up optimizing for
Marshall McLuhan’s theory that “the medium is the message” famously describes how media are not neutral. Rather, a medium’s nature has a deep impact on the very content of its messages. One misunderstood aspect of the theory is that it applies to all technology,