Recent content on Luke Kanies
Bluesky’s Atmosphere Protocol has the chance to become the base for a whole generation of applications. But it’s developing in surprising and disappointing ways. I spent part of last week at the Local First Conference in Berlin. I was not surprised to find that AI coding was on everyone’s minds. Less expected was how pervasive ATProto was. I’ve been considering trying to build on ATProto for a few…
I decided to finally give vibe coding a try. I’ve barely written any code since I hired developers at Puppet in like 2009. And I’ve been a staunch AI/LLM skeptic. But I figured I should at least be an educated skeptic. After a false start, and a couple of months of periodic usage, I’ve come to some conclusions about it. The first one is the most important: You should treat AI like an untrustworthy…
They’re built for people who hate meetings, not for those who need to be great at them. Photo courtesy of JEShoots . There is a new movement around tools for managing your calendar. My favorite is Reclaim , but there are many others. They provide help running meetings, rearranging them, and avoiding them. It’s great that these tools exist. The calendar is the least improved area in the…
Of course not. But the fact that people think I do says a lot. Photo courtesy of Andre Hunter . Seeking a round of funding is about the most miserable thing I’ve ever done. Truly. Fundraising was less pleasant and more demeaning than anything else I did at Puppet. But Clickety’s final ( abandoned ) round was uncomfortable in a new way. Two different investors asked me the same…
Most industries are dominated by monopolies. How we enforce antitrust law explains far more than you might think. Photo courtesy of BP Miller . My first monopoly was AT&T. I lived on a commune until I was eight. We didn’t have toilets, but we did have phones. We didn’t own them. It was a commune, after all. But they were in our house and we got to use them. When we reentered…
Privacy expectations are changing. How will companies change with them? Photo courtesy of Tobias Tullius Change is coming to how tech companies handle privacy. Everyone is going to have to adjust, but new startups are caught in the middle: Be as useful as the companies built in the old world, while following the new rules. Today’s dominant tech companies don’t care much about privacy.…
Why and how my team built board reports instead of PowerPoint decks. Fifty pages, less work than slides, and more valuable. Image courtesy of Drew Beamer . Board meetings are a critical time of communication and reflection for a company. You have to share enough information that the people in the room can make existential decisions about the business. Yet most CEOs I know share only slides (the…
How I got here, how it went, and what happened along the way. I didn’t want to start a company. But I had no choice. I was a SysAdmin after college, because I tried everything else and got fired from them all. I had seven jobs in two and a half years. I’m very fireable. System administration was just the chair where I happened to be sitting when the music stopped. More a safe, fun…
A single drink perfectly captures the weirdness of raising money for the first time. Photo courtesy of Dylan de Jonge I found myself at a hotel with some friends. I was visiting Portland for a conference. Puppet’s first investment round – and mine! – was closing. The money was being deposited. Have you seen a David Mamet movie, like The Spanish Prisoner ? They’re fantastic.…
The drive for social status created the worst, most important part of the Iliad. Now it’s filling up investment announcements. Picture by Mikuláš Prokop My fancy liberal arts school hazed me, like it does all students: I had to read The Iliad and The Odyssey . We did more than read. We wrote. We talked. We dissected, for meaning and history. Me, and a dozen other kids I’d just met. It…
Science has a problem. It’s kind of broken . Well. Not all of it. Mostly the social sciences and medicine. And I don’t just mean the fact that they consider Freud canon. It started with a trickle. A retracted paper here. A study that couldn’t be repeated, there. Then someone decided to get systematic . It opened the floodgates. A study in 2016 showed that 70% of scientists had…
Automation is not to blame for all the job destruction and wage stagnation. But you can still do great harm if you build it for the wrong reasons. We’re told that automation is destroying jobs, that technology is replacing people, making them dumber, less capable . These are lies, with just enough truth to confuse us. You can have my robot washing machines when you pry them from my cold, wet…
Blockchain without Blockchain There is powerful technology hidden in the blockchain. Just strip out the parts everyone cares about. Trusting more with the blockchain Society is built on trust, and improves or weakens with it. Decentralize Your Data What does owning your data even mean, and can the Blockchain help? An alternative crypto-history How I came to understand the blockchain from…
The Automator’s Dilemma Automation is not to blame for all the job destruction and wage stagnation. But you can still do great harm if you build it for the wrong reasons. The power of better tools Power tools can help us cross the productivity gap. But we have to stop fear-mongering about automation. The virtue of a tool Vendor success should be about customer needs, not its own. Great…
The Market Is Wrong About Your Problems What Voltaire and the Flaw at the Heart of Economics Have to Teach Us About Software That Doesn’t Exist. Moving beyond Silicon Valley software companies We need a new financing model to build new, better companies If You Take Venture Capital, You’re Forcing Your Company To Exit To understand venture capital, you must understand the consequences of how…
I’ve hated enterprise sales since long before I started Puppet. I just didn’t know why. Photo by Tim Trad You can either be a good example or a horrible warning. When it comes to enterprise sales, I had two horrible warnings before I started Puppet. In 2000, I worked at Bluestar, a business DSL startup in Nashville. Pretty much everything that can go wrong with a startup did with this…
My biggest articles, lessons learned, and plans for this year. Photo by Elijah O’Donnell I started a daily writing habit two years ago. If you look at my output since then, it’s a bit haphazard: Lots of advice to founders, discussion of venture capital and the blockchain, and a bit of telling my own story. My own review of my writing is mixed. I think the writing is good, and in most…
There are many upsides to the era of the smartphone and the cloud. But I’ll never forgive them for killing documents. Photo by Daniel Zurnau The limitations of mobile devices perfectly complement the strength of the cloud, as foretold by Sun Microsystems two decades ago: Your computers will be weak and hold no data, and the servers will be powerful and store everything. They were just wrong…
To really win, you have to seem strange to your true peers, not just the world at large. Photo by Elias Castillo Look, I have to say it: You’re weird. Even if I don’t know you, I’m confident: Somewhere, maybe lurking deep inside, something about you is just not right. I don’t know what, specifically. For all I know, you might be one of those weirdos whose particular…
The sideways logo gets hidden, rather than fixed. Photo by eleven x . Yes, I know this photo is of the old model. But it perfectly captures what’s still wrong with the new one. The iPad has been my primary mobile computing platform since a couple years after it came out. I’ve had every version since the very first, and I immediately replaced that one when a version with LTE arrived. I…
Work is not a zero-sum game Image courtesy of Clem Onojeghuo Remember those stories from a few decades ago, about how improvements in productivity and automation would mean that we’d only be working 5 hours a week by now? They seem as fanciful, and predictive, as The Jetsons. It’s almost a punch-line now, because many actually work more hours today than back then. How could they have…
Giving answers is easy, and usually worthless Photo by Blake Cheek Being an advisor to other founders is a contradictory affair: Be helpful, but do not give advice. That is, I want to help you do your best work, but I don’t think I can or should do it by telling you what to do or think. I obviously think I have value to add or I would not sign up to help. Well, maybe it’s not obvious;…
Founders need to retain their own mission while they build out the company’s. Photo by Sharon McCutcheon Managing a high-growth company is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. One big reason is that I only received problems that no one else could figure out. Some were organizational problems that should naturally route to the CEO, but a lot were functional issues that I was no more…
I know what it means to own my code contributions Github, but what does it mean to own my rides on Strava? Photo by William Hook I recently went mountain biking in Bend, Oregon , which is a few hours’ drive from my house. As I usually do, I used Strava to record the ride. This was a new trail for me, and I got lost multiple times, so I also used Trailforks to figure out how to get back to my…
Is that a compliment, or an insult? Photo by John Salvino My experience growing and fundraising for Puppet was full of inspirational-sounding phrases that cut like a knife. Aggressive goals got praise for wanting to “build a real product” and “really scale this thing.” These are some of my favorites. And when I say “favorites,” what I mean is, I hate them.…
Filesystems, version control, and the blockchain Image courtesy of Adarsh Kummur This is the fourth, and possibly final, article in my series on the blockchain without blockchain. I’ve always had a warm place in my heart for filesystems. I taught myself shell scripting while automating the installation of Disksuite , Sun’s free but sadistic disk mirroring software. I barely recall the…
Vendor success should be about customer needs, not its own. Photo by Philip Swinburn I am a tool junkie . I love the effortless balance of a well-known chef’s knife, like my hands know what to do all on their own. Heavy usage builds callouses and tunes muscles, its usefulness evidenced by scuff marks and changed infrastructure. Failure leaves blisters or even hospital visits in its wake. A…
I have plenty to share. I can even write it. I just can’t publish it. Picture courtesy of Cliff Johnson Last year I decided to write more. Daily, in fact. One of my first actions was to ask Om Malik for advice. I had been following him since he was writing for Business 2.0 , which was an actually valuable business magazine in the tech bubble. I am now lucky enough to know him through True…
What does owning your data even mean, and can the Blockchain help? Photo courtesy of Dennis Kummer Congress recently required Mark Zuckerberg to defend his lifelong practice of mistreating your private information. Movements to give you control of this critical data took the opportunity to claim they can prevent future such breaches. Blockchain is the new solution in search of a problem, and…
Society is built on trust, and improves or weakens with it. Photo by Nathaniel Tetteh I know I have trust issues. I don’t need the blockchain crowd telling me . Trusting is scary. We’ve all been burned at some point. But we can also look back and see trusting someone helped us develop, personally and professionally. None of us could be who we are if we had not learned this critical…
There is powerful technology hidden in the blockchain. Just strip out the parts everyone cares about Image courtesy of MemeGenerator People are very excited about the blockchain , convinced it’s going going to replace cash , or gold , or credit cards , or even the internet . I’ve even read claims that it’s the most important invention since little things like money and democracy.…
There is a solution to wage and productivity stagnation. Just don’t call it automation Image courtesy of Washington Department of Transportation I don’t know what the rest of the world thinks when they use the phrase ‘power tool’, but for me it’s visceral, literal. My experiences using them and watching them transform my family’s work permeated my time building…
What Voltaire and the Flaw at the Heart of Economics Have to Teach Us About Software That Doesn’t Exist Voltaire’s Candide juxtaposes an optimistic philosophy with unbelievable tragedy. He was angry at the 19th century philosophers who proclaimed that we lived in the best of all possible world while destruction and death unfolded around Europe on an epic scale. We might hear the claim…
It’s the message, not the medium I did more writing in 2017 than I ever have before, probably more than I had done in my entire life. I stated at the outset my desire to write in order to learn , and publishing regularly has delivered. More importantly, it forced me to capture and share many of the results of my R&D. The writing topics were primarily venture capital, the software startup…
Modern capitalism raises the flag of the free market while pitting centrally planned organizations against each other It’s quite a journey from being born on a commune to raising more than $87m in funding at a software company. This journey forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersected my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a…
On the value of change and focus I have been a passionate advocate of Trello almost since the day it came out. Visualizing the work is incredibly powerful, and its use of priority by ordering is so obviously better I could not imagine using anything else. I have brought Trello into companies, and caused hundreds of people to use it. Recently, though, I stopped using it in key functions, moving my…
The arrival of the smartphone has convinced the world of the value of great software design, but it’s not all good news The smartphone has reached more people and delivered more value faster than any technology ever seen. Much of the world has had to adapt to this arrival, but software design suffered the greatest reckoning. As the smartphone ascended, developers finally adopted reasonable…
The true story of trying to put Google’s planning system into use When Google was less than a year old, they began using a planning system presented by legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. When I went to put it into practice at Puppet in the early days of growing the team, things were not as easy as they appeared. Success involved creation of a complete solution, not…
Most of our software is confused about what job we’ve hired it for I’ve really enjoyed playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild , but my life has been changed more by one of its reviews than by the game itself. The review had a unique view on what made the game so great. It contrasted Zelda to other games - Destiny, for example - saying that while others tended to distribute gameplay across…
It’s only safe to learn from true stories Every startup has its founding myth, the story that it uses to help draw in and motivate employees, customers, and investors. In most cases, those myths were cultured years after the company’s founding, and bear little relationship to reality. When you dig deeply into a company’s true origins, what initially looked like the product of…
But it’s not what you think The iPad has made great strides in the last few years toward being a full-time computing platform. While many still cry that it’s just not very useful yet, others are out there using it as their only computer , or have at least shifted significant usage from desktops and laptops to it. I have been traveling at least a third of the time over the last few…
Software’s focus on world-dominance has crossed with my incessant tinkering to result in a computing environment that is failing me utterly. I’ve tried everything, and it still doesn’t work. My first computer was from basically the worst era Apple has ever produced, starting with MacOs 7.6.1 and finally quitting around MacOs 9, switching to BeOS. While I was using these for fun,…
Software should be for the people who do the work I’m not a technologist. I’m a software person, but not in the way people mean when they say that. I believe in the power of software to improve lives in big and small ways, and I have a hard time imagining doing much except through software. I’m less fond of the software industry itself. I think it is too slow at solving problems…
How you work determines your destiny Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This is often interpreted as culture being more important than strategy. These might not even be his words, which makes it hard to know his thoughts, but having built a company to almost 500 people, it’s obvious to me that culture isn’t more important than strategy, it…
To understand VC, you must understand the consequences of how they make money for their investors. Part 2 of a series . Originally published on NewCo Shift Modern venture capital is obviously successful, as demonstrated by the fact that five of the world’s six largest companies were funded by it. However, success is as much about what you say ‘no’ to as what you say ‘yes’ to, and venture capital…
The success of companies and founders in modern venture-backed startups is highly reliant on peer validation of investor decisions. Part 4 in a series . Originally published on NewCo Shift . Say you’re an entrepreneur building something new and different, and you know you need capital. After pitching up and down Sand Hill Road (and all over South Park ), you’ve finally found a believer, someone…
Venture capital’s reliance on unicorns provides cover for the huge failure rate of startups, and investors make no effort to reduce it. Part 5 of a series Originally published on NewCo Shift . Venture investing is fundamentally uncertain. You’re making big bets on people, ideas, and markets that might never work out, and there are more ways to fail than succeed. As a result, investing has to take…
Software has the potential to increase productivity as much as electrification or steam power did, but its impact is stunted by its reliance on random interactions. Part 6 of a series . Originally published on NewCo Shift . The venture capital ecosystem bills itself as a meritocratic miasma of genius, with smart founders getting smart money from smart investors. In reality, there is an…
It’s time to develop new sources of capital for founders, to help them generate wealth through solving their customer problems without the massive failure rate. Part 7 in a series . Originally published on NewCo Shift . The venture capital world that funds the technology ecosystem appears to be specially designed to back the best founders working on the economy’s most important problems. This…
In an industry built around investing large sums in uncertain ventures, the best companies seek out the best investors, and gains accumulate at the top. Part 3 in a series . Originally Published on NewCo Shift . Investing in software companies is inherently an uncertain activity. It’s called high risk, but highly uncertain is a better label. Yes, you’re taking a risk with money, but the real…