Opting Out of the Unicorn Race; The Code Doesn’t Love You Back – former Meta/Google Exec on How Engineering is Changing; A Case Against Big Companies (Why People Are Gonna Get Laid Off); and More+++ [link blog]

Spring Links! All personal blog posts today. No corporate (or even indie) media 🙂

Outcome Engineering [Cory Ondrejka] – “The code doesn’t love you back.” That’s one of the memorable lines in Cory’s manifesto around the changing nature of what it means to be an engineer. Importantly he doesn’t just rant but here coins what he believes we’re heading into: outcome engineering (o16g). Alongside the term are 16 principles, such as #4 The Backlog is Dead, #9 Agentic Coordination is New Org, and #16 Audit the Outcomes. I worked with Cory at Second Life and he later moved between other startups of his own creation and BigCos (having led the mobile app transformation at Facebook, and served as a technical advisor to Sundar at Google.

Opting Out of Unicorn Economics [Bethany Crystal] – It was a brilliantly catchy way to describe the data in the moment, but the whole concept of ‘unicorns’ in startup world (and striving to be one), helped break some part of our community. Or at least created a narrative that was surface-level easy to understand but with implications that were slower to play out. More builders are realizing the tradeoffs and publicly talking about why they’re eschewing the goal, often aided by the power of AI tooling (which of course is built by mega-unicorns 🙂 ). Bethany, who has been on the inside at a top VC firm earlier in her career, now sits far from those aspirations.

“For a very long time, I believed the only way to start a company in the tech sector was to have an engineering degree and millions of dollars on your side. In other words, if you weren’t a unicorn chaser, you were just a small business owner. Or worse…a consultant.”

“When I started to notice that the most celebrated outcome in an industry of builders became check writers instead of company builders, something felt misaligned to me. After all, if the highest-status role is capital allocation, who is left to do the work of building?”

But also be wary of those folks selling solo founder plus AI equals the other model for success.

“But what do you notice about the people who are signing up for that program? All men. Most with engineering backgrounds. And so the lore lives on.

To be clear, I don’t think the answer is to replace one fantasy with another. It seems trite to trade unicorn chasing for solo founder worship, or to swap venture-backed pressure for an “AI for everything” grind dressed up as freedom.”

Knowing Bethany I can vouch that this essay is the outcome of choices she made – and is making – rather than just content marketing.

The Hidden Cost of Communication (A Case Against Big Companies) [Joe Fabisevich] – Joe published this right after the Block layoffs and I think was a little worried it would appear insensitive to the people who lost their jobs but it’s timely, accurate, and he seems to genuinely be a good human. In the post he makes the case that just about every company of significance is fundamentally overstaffed and that this results in lack of focus and underperformance from the communication complexity which occurs as a result. Joe doesn’t believe this is just an AI story – in terms of the need to rationalize team size – but that of course it’s now part of the consideration set.

“This is why the layoffs we’re seeing aren’t just about replacing workers with AI. They’re about companies finally accepting what was always inevitable — you don’t need 50,000 people to do the work of 30,000. You never did, but AI has made this reality impossible to ignore.”

Don’t Sell the Work [Evan Armstrong] – When your essay’s subtitle is “The most popular thesis in AI was wrong. Here’s why.,” I’m gonna lean in. And it just gets spicier from there.

“Unfortunately for all of us, this elegant idea turned out to be very wrong. There is exactly one category of startups where the model has been effective—AI customer service—and every other major AI application today uses a different positioning and pricing strategy.

So what happened? Why has “selling work” been such a dud?”

I’m not yet sure I totally agree with his framework, but as someone who is default skeptical of any single attempt (me sometimes included) to explain, create, and own the descriptions of tech transformation, this is a chewy complement.

Stop Being a “Maybe”: Emerging Manager VC Fundraising Advice on Qualifying LPs Like a Sales Funnel [Julia Maltby] – Oh thank goodness. I tell you, all these VCs have funding advice for their startups and then don’t take any of it to heart when raising their own funds. When backing EMs via Screendoor, our fund of funds, some folks are raising for the first time in their careers and the advice Julia provides here is pretty consistent with what I share.

“When you move from doing deals to raising a fund, you become the product. And like most products, you end up in a pipeline on someone else’s screen – color‑coded, half‑remembered, competing with a lot of other “pretty good” options.”

Enjoy your Sunday!

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