peeyush

@peeyuzz

Oct 21

Moummar

@MoummarNawafleh

Oct 20

sf and x are a bubble and were so early to AI

everything feels saturated on here but talk to most people outside this app or sf and they have no idea what's going on

Matan Grinberg

@matanSF

Oct 7

Eno Reyes

@EnoReyes

Oct 7

Factory is a product company. In a year when a lot of smart money is betting on neoservices that is starting to sound contrarian.

The AI wave makes it tempting to sell outcomes and deliver them with people. We think the bigger opportunity is software that gets better every time it's used. That's what we build for our customers, and it's how we run Factory.

The products we build should help our customers build their own capacity to ship better software, faster. We think of the product as everything from the first time you hear about Factory through your Nth renewal.

Building the right product starts with the old advice: listen to your customers' problems, not their solutions. In 2023, many people believed we should have built autocomplete. We understood that we instead had to build toward self-improving software and software factories, since that is what would come next.

That is our product goal: self-improving software, which continuously improves from the data feedback loop of its users. Self-improving software doesn't happen on its own. You have to be data-backed and optimize the signal → deploy loop. That requires a software factory operating continuously and evolving alongside the software it produces.

The factory also has to know what good looks like. It has to help the organization extract its tacit knowledge and embed it into the software that operates the business. Taste is not sufficient. You must enforce the unique decisions that define your product. And it doesn't stop at the product. The entire company is going to be defined by software that listens to the rhythm of the business and enforces it. The clear goal of a leader is to ensure the quality and correctness of these systems.

We run Factory this way. Our unique product and technical decisions are codified as customizations to our harness, automations, CI/CD, lint rules, etc. Factory agents sit in our shared Slack channels, where they build context and execute tactical work on demand.

It also changes how we organize. Your Engineering, Product, and Design team will ship your org chart, so you must design an organization where incentives are maximally aligned. Our pod structure maps directly to our product taxonomy, which gives each pod deep expertise and agency. We work carefully to make sure the product feels cohesive and not like multiple disconnected teams. This is not easy, and we still haven't perfected it. We keep the minimal number of layers between leaders and the organizational lines. 1:25 is not unreasonable for a true people manager.

Our product operating system is itself self-improving software. It aggregates feedback, tracks launches across the team, and organizes our work. With it, our Head of Product @TaylorTheSavage runs a product surface that would otherwise require an army of PMs with just a handful of high-ownership, high-leverage ones.

When an org is designed this way, its impact scales with software, not headcount. That is the real difference between a product company and a services company. Selling outcomes is right. Delivering them with people is services. Neoservices arbitrage the gap between how fast the technology moves and how fast buyers adopt it, and some will become large businesses. But that gap closes every time a product company sells the same buyer a better long-term solution. The market already knows how to value services: Infosys does about $20B in revenue and trades at roughly 2x, not 50x, and it's down about 40% this year.

Being a product company is harder. @danlovesproofs once told me something I very much agree with. Product companies are like movie studios. You have to keep producing blockbusters, and that helps you build talent, brand, and resources. Gone are the days when you could coast on one hit. Do that, and you'll be acquired by Bending Spoons at a fraction of your value. The war is always being waged, and no winner is ever truly ahead by much. And demand for the movies is up.

That's true even against the model labs. There is a value gap between the models and outcomes for users. Anyone can close that gap, and there's no reason to believe any company has an automatic right to win the products that matter most. If anything, access to the full pareto frontier of cost and quality gives model-independent, product-focused companies a focus, cost, and quality advantage.

If someone asked me what to build today, I'd say go build a product company. It is harder, but the biggest outcomes are only possible through product.

peeyush

@peeyuzz

Oct 6

Andrew Curran

@AndrewCurran_

Oct 5

Text watermarking in ChatGPT and Codex is rolling out. The new development is that, unlike Anthropic and Google, OpenAI (for now) is launching their watermarking - textGrain - 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 in the EU, not globally.

peeyush

@peeyuzz

Oct 5

Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand

Oct 4

I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind.

Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs."

That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong.

The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family).

They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence.

The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building.

What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself.

What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks.

And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead.

So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever.

Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell.

It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor.

And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken.

So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (globaltimes.cn/page/202307/12…).

And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (agripost.cn/2026/08/17/chi…).

Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price.

Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (euromeatnews.com/aviagen-announ…)😅

And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources.

If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course.

As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.