Deedy

A few software engineers at some of the best tech cos told me this week "My entire job these days is prompting Cursor or Claude Code with Opus 4.5 to do what I need and sanity checking it." We've crossed some intangible threshold of AI generalizing to "most" software.

Anthropic just dropped the best coding model, Opus 4.5! — #1 in coding (SWE-Bench) and novel problem solving (ARC-AGI-1+2) — 3x cheaper than previous 4.1, 2x more than Gemini 3: $5/M in, $25/M out — Available on AWS, GCP and Azure. The coolest thing is it does BETTER at SWE-Bench without thinking than with 64K reasoning tokens: super token-efficient model!

Figma stock down 68% in the 2.5mos since IPO. — Valuation: ~$19B (17x rev) — ARR: $1.1B in ARR, +38% YoY, NDR 131% — $1B in stock, 5% of the co, vested on IPO There's a good reason late stage private companies stay that way. Public markets are brutal.

Startup founders and employees are making "retirement money" ($10M+) from secondary sales in loss-making companies at speculative valuations. This is dangerous for innovation. A few weeks ago, OpenAI did a $6.6B tender offer where employees raked in $5-10M+ a piece. The entire company is loss-making and made $4.3B in H1 2025. This is not a one-off phenomenon. If you go to secondary share platforms like Hiive and Forge, many private companies that have never made profit and are valued at 100x their ARR have liquidity demand. In other words, startup founders and employees are making retirement money when no real "business" has been created. Secondary sales, when done correctly, are fantastic for innovation. You want people taking long term risky bets to be able to live well as proof of the value they've created starts to show. Newlyweds can go buy a house, afford a car - it was meant for basic life necessities to keep people from leaving to a bigco while ensuring the had skin in the game for the future of the company. Typically, the company goes public in an IPO or gets bought, which is usually "proof" that you made something of value. Today, employees and founders make so much money from secondaries that you see: — Founders have cashed out and use their entire company as their personal "AI R&D unit" to build their whims and fancies, leaving employees who haven't holding the bag. — Early employees who have cashed out just leave and retire while most of the business is lagging its valuation. — Startups are more incentivized to grow unsustainably for 1-2yrs and secure the "insane" valuation where they can cash out instead of be invested in the business long-term. — We see liquidity being dangled as a carrot for term sheets at the Seed and A, well before the company has even reached product-market fit! Many founders have taken out more in secondary than the entire revenue of the company. This is terrible for innovation, promoting short-term get-rich-quick schemes over building businesses of durable value.

I aggregated every media leak about OpenAI and Anthropic's revenues. This kind of growth has never been seen before by any company in human history.

Gemini 3's launch boosted Gemini's market share from 23% to 30%. Wild.

This new Gmail smart scheduling feature is a straight +4% to global GDP

This is why OpenAI is in a Code Red. In the 2 weeks since the Gemini launch, ChatGPT unique daily active users (7-day average) are down -6%.

This man dropped out of a no-name college in India to be a software engineer and by 33, worked his way up to being CEO of a $100M+ company in New York. Here's the never-before-shared incredibly inspirational story of Ershad Kunnakkadan: > be middle class kid in random state school in Kerala, India > get really into computers > senior hands you Ubuntu 8.04 CD, whole new world > starts contributing to SMC (a malayalam computing group) > gets into blogging cause SMC seniors are into it > go to no-name small private college in Kerala > spend more time in terminals than classrooms > shell scripting contests, Linux admin, security, virus cleaning, bots, paper presentations > doesnt see a point to college exams > drops out after 2nd year, promises family "I will earn a degree somehow" > lands internship at small software co > grows into being an architect > found security bugs in Github and Prezi > reads "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" and the "The Google Story", dreamt of being in the US one day > does Google Summer of Code > earns a degree remotely from Bharathiar University > gets remote job at BigBinary > moves back to Kochi to be near family > involved in local free software circles and workshops, events, meetups > building a quiet dense body of work over loud personal brand > gets introduced to Gumroad as a consultant first > joins Gumroad as a senior engineer > gets married > moves to Abu Dhabi to be closer to wife's family > does the boring crucial stuff - scalability, security, payouts, infra > grows to being a staff software engineer at Gumroad > support millions of users and $1B+ in creator earnings > just focusses on self-improvement > never once thinks about promotion > moves to New York City on an O-1 visa > Gumroad looking for a new CEO > board looks around and its clear who is best fit for the job > become CEO of a $100M+ gmv business I just love the story of Ershad. No brands, no pedigree, no MBA, no loudness. When I asked him the quality that got him here, he said "reliability". A truly kind, quiet and generous person. Who loves computers. Dropping out when you're rich is trendy in America, but to see someone Indian drop out and work their way up into the top role is pure inspiration. Don't worry if you don't have all the accolades and ornaments you see in people who achieve your dreams. Be a good person, and be reliable.

There is huge title inflation happening in tech right now. "Legacy" techcos are offering lofty titles to combat multi-million dollar offers from AI labs. I counted > 500 "Head of" something at Stripe on LinkedIn, a ~10k person company: >5%. And they're far from alone.