We are the nerds
Flounder mode | Make something heavy | The end of software | The modern PM | balance is the enemy of greatness + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
Welcome to the first issue of 2026. I’m not going to bore you with a list of changes I propose to the newsletter this year, as nothing’s going to change. There is no specific cadence to these newsletters going out; it’s basically down to me having enough interesting things to share.
This month, I’ve been playing around with the much hyped Claude Code. So far, I’ve spent most of my time navigating Terminal and feeling like an old school hacker. Standby for my thoughts in the next issue. Who knows, I might end up with one of these Clawdbot’s. If you want to learn more about this new viral craze of personal assistants check out this TBPN podcast episode with it’s founder. What a story!
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last edition’s top clicked link: The thinking game
🔗 Hyperlinks
Why balance is the enemy of greatness
I’ll rarely listen back to a podcast episode more than once, but this is one of them. In this episode of My First Million, Sam Parr chats with Founders podcast David Senra. This guy is a walking encyclopedia, having read well over 300 biographies on history’s greatest entrepreneurs. What’s startling in this chat is his ability to recall such detail, the fascinating stories he’s acquired, consuming and distilling decades of hard‑won business and life lessons into a couple of hours of (what kids say these days) alpha.
But the main reason I find this fascinating is his ambition, drive and relentless pursuit to learn and share his knowledge. It’s infectious to listen to. He strives to be the best in the world at what he does and is honest about the sacrifices he’s willing to make to achieve that ambition.
I think I was lying to myself for a while that I don’t need anybody else. I wanted professional success to say I was born in the wrong environment and I will prove to you that I am not like the rest of these people. It’s almost like a revenge for being born.
Yeah, at times he can come across as arrogant, and he loves a name drop, but if you need some inspiration, give this a listen.
🎁 Bonus content: Hooked after listening to the episode? Or just curious? Here are some of my favourite Founders podcast episodes. #235: Steve Jobs Pixar story, #275: Paul Graham, #306: David Ogilvy Confessions of an advertising man & #313: Christopher Nolan.
We are the nerds
Like a few billion others at this time of year, I have a New Year's resolution to read more books. This year i kicked off with a fantastic book documenting the birth and life of Reddit.
For someone who isn’t a “DAU” of Reddit, it wasn’t my first choice of book to pick up. However, I’ve had too many recommendations not to give it a shot.
The author Christine Lagorio-Chafkin began researching Reddit back in 2011. In the years that followed, she interviewed more than 100 former and current employees, executives, investors, friends, and others involved in the years of bizarre management decisions, user/mod revolts, and fascinating moments of what's now Internet history that unfolded.
With $12,000, a graph-paper notebook, and a few healthy shoves from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, Reddit became “the front page of the Internet.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me was Reddit’s inability to effectively capture the value it was creating for it’s obsessed users financially, despite it being, at the time, the 6th most visited website on the planet. The journey of Reddit is fascinating, having gone from an idea of Paul Graham’s to the first batch of YC, wild growth hacking, hundreds of millions of users, being acquired, Aaron Swartz unfortunate death, founders leaving, multiple CEOs, moderator controversy, and the list goes on.
This needs to be a movie, but in the meantime, check out the book.
📚 Next up on my reading list: The new new thing by Michael Lewis.
📓 Articles
Flounder mode
What starts out as a heavy puff piece on Kevin Kelly eventually provides a great insight into his unique approach to work. The title is also a nice play on the viral Brian Chesky’s talk “Founder mode”, which Paul Graham produced an essay on.
Anyhoo, Kevin Kelly is the patron saint of people who refuse to pick a neat, ladder-shaped career. Brie Wolfson sets him up against the standard Silicon Valley script: if you’re truly ambitious, you should build a unicorn, stack titles, chase term sheets, and grind yourself into dust in the name of “greatness.” Kelly has done the opposite. He’s spent decades hopping between projects, including the Whole Earth Catalog, WIRED, Spielberg, and a 10,000‑year clock, by following his curiosity and turning his interests into things other people can actually use.
My learning, flounder more and follow curiosity, not what i feel i should be doing based on the consensus.
Also, just check out Kevin’s studio! incredible.
🎁 Bonus content: One of my favourite essays of all time by Kevin Kelly is 1000 true fans.
🎁 Bonus bonus content: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice by Kevin Kelly
My top X articles
Despite X launching their native articles feature back in early 2024, just recently, my timeline has been flooded with them. This is most likely due to some algorithmic enhancement, and in all honesty, most of the content I’ve that’s been put in front of me has been great. To that effect, here are some of my favourites over the last couple of weeks:
Two modes of storytelling: Studio and Newsroom
2025 brought a new role to tech startups: storytelling. Companies such as Vanta, Forage, Notion and Chime have all created internal Storytelling teams or hired specific Storytelling roles. So it’s fitting that the co-founder of Notion Akshay Kothari shared his take on what he refers to as ‘studio’ and ‘newsroom’ storytelling/content.
What you need to know to build with coding agents, if you're not technical
Finally, someone has written content explaining coding with AI agents for us non-tech folks without using big fancy words. Ben Tossell provides a comprehensive introduction to the foundational knowledge that he thinks you need to work with today’s AI coding agents, if you’re not that technical.
The Modern AI PM in the age of Agents
Shubham Saboo, a very new PM at Google, argues that when agents can take a well-formed problem and produce working code, the PM's job shifts. They are no longer translating for engineers. They are forming intent clearly enough that agents can act on it directly. In this post, he shares where he sees the PM role heading and which aspect of the traditional roles and responsibilities is changing, for better or worse.
My contrarian take: Product specs will become more valuable than code in the new AI workflow.
Make something heavy
This post by Anu, really hits hard. For years, I’ve been self-aware of the fact that I consume more than I create online. This self-awareness has at times improved my consumption to creation ratio some years, but mostly, i succumb to consuming as it is much easier.
The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. (Make slop if you have to.) Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does.
Even the content I do create now is mostly lightweight, as my longer form blog writing, product creation, video tutorials, you name it, has somewhat stalled, and as Anu points out, this trend is only going to continue with AI and its frictionless ability to generate AI content or code in seconds.
Someone asked me the other day if I had seen much improvement with AI use in the workplace, and he responded yes, i can create more documentation which no one reads.
But don’t get me wrong, light isn’t bad necessarily, it’s an onramp, but I’m tired of light, and I want something heavy to get stuck into.
The end of software
Once a quarter i feature a take from a VC which is written in a Google Doc and distributed on X. That quarter is this quarter, so here we go.
I was reluctant to share this, given that in the last issue I shared something with a similar thesis, which shares the same historical analogies and conclusions. However, this post must have touched a nerve as Chris Paik, the author, managed to get a staggering 3.4m views on his post. Most likely due to him dangling a provocative title in a hipster Google Doc format. I was one of those people, of course.
Chris argues AI will collapse the cost of creating software the same way the internet collapsed the cost of creating media, which triggered an explosion of user‑generated content and shifted power from traditional publishers to platforms that aggregate and route attention. Today’s software companies exist because developers are expensive, so software has to make money, and classic SaaS metrics describe that world. As LLMs become hyper‑cheap “developer equivalents,” the cost of building and maintaining software trends toward zero, leading to an explosion of small, specialised tools that collectively replace big monoliths like Salesforce.
I just wish he enabled comments in the doc - but the X algo wouldn’t have kicked in as much i guess.
🆕 Products
Geo: Explore the world’s knowledge structured by communities, organised for everyone.
Vibecode: AI native mobile app builder.
Google Disco: turn tabs into mini apps.
Poly: Store, browse, research, and organise your files with A.I.
Nimo: unify all your AI workflows in one infinite canvas
🐽 Other links to consume
Google engineer builds Sim City style isometric interactive map of NYC
We let AI run our office vending machine. It lost hundreds of dollars
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
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Until the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻
It was definitely 🔥.
Great job Sam. Packed-full of interesting things and thoughts. Keep it up.