Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 22

Techmeme

@Techmeme

Oct 22

1Password passes $500M in ARR, up from $400M in November 2025, driven by enterprise AI coding assistants and agents, and announces 1Password for Agents (@eschisgall / Wall Street Journal)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 22

claire vo 🖤

@clairevo

Oct 22

lots of security issues, cyberattacks, and hacks this week 🫠

copy this prompt to figure out whats at risk:

- go through my email and find all the services i’ve signed up for (including the ones i forgot about)
- use @-Browser or @-Computer to look through my connected apps ys, unused integrations, and anything that could expose my data
- check my AI data. old connectors i don’t need anymore
- check my repos for vulnerable dependencies
- put it all in a google sheet i can comment on, with what’s at risk, how urgent it is, and what i should do

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 22

⁵⁄₉

@fiveoutofnine

Oct 21

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

Gokul Rajaram

@gokulr

Oct 21

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 21

I was talking to another founder yesterday about a venture investor. I said I like them a lot because I think they are a “shock absorber.”

As a founder or exec, you go through lots of highs and lows. Won customer. Lost deal. Closed round. Investors passed. Hired candidate. Teammate quit.

And your board is along for much of the journey. The question is how do they react?

I’ve found that the best board members, including the one I was giving backchannel on, don’t add to the drama. They instead soften it out.

Imagine you miss a quarter. The drama investor jumps in, feels insecure themselves and immediately asks 100 questions as if you weren’t already thinking of them. The “shock absorber” board member is like @ajay_bcv , my longtime board member from @BainCapVC at Gainsight. I’ll never forget when we massively missed an early quarter (I think we were supposed to do $600K of bookings and we did $300K). He said “look - whether you do $300K or $600K is irrelevant. Set yourselves up for doing $10M a quarter a few years from now.” That’s a shock absorber.

On the flip side, imagine you closed a huge deal. It’s one thing to be totally “rah rah.” But a great “shock absorber” board member also says “that’s amazing. Now the key is making them successful.”

As legendary Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz famously stated:

“You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.”

It’s good to have folks around the table to remind of you of that and keep the ride as smooth as possible (it will never be smooth though!)

Amandeep Khurana

@amansk

Oct 21

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 21

I was talking to another founder yesterday about a venture investor. I said I like them a lot because I think they are a “shock absorber.”

As a founder or exec, you go through lots of highs and lows. Won customer. Lost deal. Closed round. Investors passed. Hired candidate. Teammate quit.

And your board is along for much of the journey. The question is how do they react?

I’ve found that the best board members, including the one I was giving backchannel on, don’t add to the drama. They instead soften it out.

Imagine you miss a quarter. The drama investor jumps in, feels insecure themselves and immediately asks 100 questions as if you weren’t already thinking of them. The “shock absorber” board member is like @ajay_bcv , my longtime board member from @BainCapVC at Gainsight. I’ll never forget when we massively missed an early quarter (I think we were supposed to do $600K of bookings and we did $300K). He said “look - whether you do $300K or $600K is irrelevant. Set yourselves up for doing $10M a quarter a few years from now.” That’s a shock absorber.

On the flip side, imagine you closed a huge deal. It’s one thing to be totally “rah rah.” But a great “shock absorber” board member also says “that’s amazing. Now the key is making them successful.”

As legendary Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz famously stated:

“You're never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.”

It’s good to have folks around the table to remind of you of that and keep the ride as smooth as possible (it will never be smooth though!)

Jason Evanish

@Evanish

Oct 17

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 17

I find the pattern of building in the AI world to be so fascinatingly different from SaaS.

In SaaS, product progress felt quite linear. Talk to customers. Get requirements. Build. Validate. Do it again. Every week it got a little bit better. But at no point in Gainsight history did it feel like an "aha moment."

But now, when you look at products, it feels like there is an activation threshold where it goes from "meh" to "magic."

My understanding is the personal assistant agents (eg instinct, muse) went through this in development. Things didn't really work and all of a sudden they did. Obviously the same thing happened with coding agents late last year.

Some of it is model improvements, of course. But a lot is just experimenting to see what will work. Thinking about different use cases that were impossible before. Trying different technical approaches. Basically - insane curiosity.

The meh to magic cycle is pretty incredible.

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 16

Patrick Collison

@patrickc

Oct 11

Brothers Karamazov was Einstein’s favorite novel, a verdict he shared with Freud, Hillary Clinton, and Murakami. Dostoyevsky was Pope Francis’s favorite author. Indeed, he approvingly quoted Elder Zosima; perhaps an interesting case of art molding life. At the risk of betraying my relative shallowness and inferiority, I confess that I did not love it.

Written in the shadow of the death of Dostoyevsky’s son (also Alyosha), and, more broadly, after a life of repeated tragedy, Karamazov attempts most of all to address the problem of evil in Christianity. Ivan presents a trenchant argument, asking how the suffering of children may possibly be explained given the existence of a supposedly benevolent God (Dostoyevsky collected real court cases for Ivan), culminating in Ivan’s famous return of the ticket.

The book gives some sense for how dislocating the nineteenth century must have been. The ascendant authority of science, the spread of materialist philosophy, the doctrine of evolution, the aftermath of the French revolution and its supposedly enlightened empiricism: in Karamazov, we get the feeling that finding some kind of consilience wasn’t just an abstract philosophical challenge, but a source of intense spiritual torment. If inherited tradition is no longer an adequate basis for faith, why would we rationally cleave to an apparently irrational theology? All of this was in the air: it was only two years later that Nietzsche declared God to be dead.

Perhaps demonstrating the utility of the novel as a medium, Dostoyevsky does not even attempt to solve the problem, but merely to illustrate a response, showing how individuals (Alyosha, Elder Zosima) may in the face of the inherent injustice present in the world nonetheless pursue lives of benevolence and charity: theodicy-by-example. In so doing, Dostoyevsky tacitly concedes that none of the teetering justifications expounded over the centuries can actually survive critical pressure and be defended through pure logic.

Ultimately, though, I don’t find myself being fully compelled by Dostoyevsky’s characterization of the problem or his proposed solution. As another sprawling confrontation with and attempt to reconcile the problem of evil, Grossman’s Life and Fate is maybe a useful counterpoint. Unlike Karamazov, Life and Fate shows actual people confronting great wickedness. Ikonnikov, a small but important figure, is ordered to help in the construction of a gas chamber. He refuses, with full awareness of the consequences that will ensue. The Karamazovs, by contrast, live middle class lives unvisited by greater events. Ivan has money, education, and leisure; his torment is the invention of his own mind and thus a kind of self-indulgence. Even Alyosha, the novel’s most sympathetic character, is never tested. His crisis is spiritual: there is a slightly comic kerfuffle about Zosima’s noisome corpse, which challenges his faith, but no circumstance requires him to stake his life or even his comfort.

Thus, a fundamental issue with Karamazov is that the problems of the book are on some level fake: they’re the self-inflicted derangements of febrile and dysregulated men. How much can or should we learn from the insane?

To be charitable to Dostoyevsky, we might say that he understood the spiritual dislocation of the era that later gives rise to the larger evils of totalitarianism in the twentieth, even prefiguring them in the Grand Inquisitor. (Dostoyevsky explored this theme in greater detail a few years earlier in Demons.) Camus in 1959: “The real nineteenth century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.” In this interpretation, the problems in Karamazov set the stage for those in Life and Fate.

Maybe. At least as a work of art, I’m not sure that this anticipation is enough to make the book stand on its own. In Karamazov, one continually wonders why the brothers don’t just pull it together. Dostoyevsky seems to transpose his own inner depths and spiritual torment onto his characters, but most people are not tortured writers, and it does not feel that the unhingedness of the characters is ever fully earned.

In attempting to address evil, Grossman’s conclusion is ostensibly similar to Dostoyevsky’s: the only resolution lies in senseless kindness. For Dostoyevsky, this message is embodied in Alyosha, who represents a kind of fervent innocence. For me, however, it’s not clear that Alyosha ever fathoms the realities and extremities of evil, and hence he’s not fully persuasive: does he even reckon with the misdeeds of his brothers?

Grossman is willing to engage head on. Far beyond gruesome newspaper anecdotes or neurotic and volatile siblings, Ikonnikov directly experiences the Holodomor in Ukraine and then the murders of the Jews. He has no patience for the kind of revolutionary ideas that animated Ivan’s contemporaries: “whenever we see [the dawn of an eternal good], the blood of old people and children is always shed.”

Alyosha believes in the Church and is willing to set aside its failures to address suffering. The book closes on his declaration that all shall rise again. That is, Alyosha does not accept the tragedy of Ilyusha, an innocent boy’s death, but rather seeks to deny and escape it. “We shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened.”

Life and Fate flatly rejects providential resolution. The heavens may be empty, and there is no greater meaning in evil. We can simply choose (freedom the other great theme of Life and Fate) to pursue acts of charity, generosity, and comfort:

“Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.”

These acts don’t ennoble the suffering but are instead justified on their own terms. Such altruism cannot become a catechism, as clearly lies in Alyosha’s destiny (and Karamazov was planned before Dostoyevsky's death as the first of two works); instead, our kindness must be senseless. And we should presume no salvation in adherence: Alyosha imagines a kind of sacred tutelage, but Ikonnikov is unceremoniously shot.

Karamazov doesn’t show true evil, and Dostoyevsky’s solution, such as it is, involves a kind of denial, or at least evasion through metaphysics. Grossman saw it directly, and instead argues, humanistically, that we should be kind just because.

—

If Dostoyevsky came to his works by trying to understand and depict Russian society, they in turn became tapestries for others to understand national souls.

In the aftermath of WWI, Russia was the great power defined in opposition to the West. As Germany tried to rediscover its own soul in the wreckage of defeat, it looked east to Russia, and frequently to Dostoyevsky himself.

Carl Jung thought that the German people had a kind of Karamazovian quality. In particular, he believed that Christianity had disciplined them without fully transforming the impulses beneath their ostensibly civilized conduct: the “Germanic barbarian” was divided into upper and lower halves. Religion had domesticated the former while leaving the latter untamed. Waning faith consequently threatened to release forces that its authority had long restrained: “As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. When this happens in the individual it brings about a psychological revolution, but it can also take a social form.”

Dostoyevsky was reputedly invoked on a weekly basis at Max Weber’s Sunday gatherings. At the beginning of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann’s later-repudiated 1918 nationalist polemic, he quotes approvingly Dostoyevsky’s characterization of Germany as the “protesting Western empire”, never quite adopting or feeling at home with the inheritance of Rome. In the same year, Spengler wrote Decline of the West, and explicitly perceived in Russia a youthful vigor, primitiveness, and irrationality that contrasted with the senile high culture of the German and Western worlds. In Magic Mountain, Mann later used Clavdia Chauchat to personify the seductive dangers of Eastern (i.e. Russian) illogic.

Hermann Hesse declared that, for all their differences, Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha are actually all of one type; the Russian man. In them, he perceived that “the ideal of the Karamazov, primeval, Asiatic, and occult, is already beginning to consume the European soul”, which was leading to the downfall of Europe. In Hesse’s conception, the Russian man rejects inherited ethics and morals, and even beneficent Alyosha represents an “amoral impartiality.” Man is, Hesse says, halfway between animals and higher consciousness; the former restrained through the process of civilization and domestication. The Karamazovs represent the fraying of the ties.

Hesse proceeds, ominously, to notice that the Germans in particular are more vulnerable than any European people to the temptations of “all those evils which one may regard in different ways, but which collectively signify the Karamazov.” While he was prescient in anticipating some of what would follow, he was in the end too sanguine in his hope that the spiritual dislocation could remain limited to that. “It is possible that the whole Downfall of Europe will play itself out only inwardly, only in the souls of a generation, only in changing the meaning of worn-out symbols, in the dis-valuation of spiritual values.” Alas!

In general, it is interesting to trace the mutual obsession between Russia and Germany: how preoccupied each was with the respective supposedly corrupting influences; how urgent the question of the national soul was felt to be. Many of the analyses seem a bit contradictory—Hesse actually inverts Dostoyevsky, for whom “everything is permitted” nihilism is a Western import for which Russian Orthodoxy is the cure—but there’s a striking intensity in the attempts to apprehend.

Most of all, I’m struck by how anachronistic it all feels today: a country’s writers investigating the national soul and the nation’s fate through the lens of foreign literature.

Which novels or works of art do we use to understand our contemporary issues? Should we be using such works? Do they inform or do they mislead? Today, the US worries a lot about China, but this mostly manifests at the level of trade balances, AI policy, and military prowess. We don’t seem to worry much about the spiritual force of Chinese ideals, and for all of the policy fractiousness, China continues to import and absorb American culture with enthusiasm that is mostly undimmed. There is a genre of jeremiad and cultural analysis in the US that rhymes a little with early twentieth century German criticism, but it today tends to be much more clinical, hinging around PISA scores, smartphones, lower fertility, and not around higher aspirations and ideals as such. So, to what extent should there be analyses of the national soul? And to what extent should they connect with major novels and works of art?

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 15

Joseph Cox

@josephfcox

Oct 15

New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tell…

Nick Mehta

@nrmehta

Oct 13

Ameya Kanitkar

@aktwits

Oct 13

How engineering leaders are changing the org chart for an AI-native SDLC:

Our survey:
• 40.8% moved to product/outcome teams
• 19.4% changed seniority/role mix
• 15.3% added roles in verification, agent platforms and AI enablement

larridin.com/data/engineeri…