Company culture
Frequently Asked Questions
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack
Radiant CEO @DougBernauer on the lessons he learned working at SpaceX and The Boring Company, and reporting directly to Elon Musk: "I would just go and talk to whoever I needed. I'd cross every line possible. I didn't use the right channels of communication. I just pulled all the assets - I'm building a thing, and I'm ignoring everything else. That's still how I operate." "I loved it. It's why I stayed 12 years. It's the coolest mission - make life multi planetary. I left to make a reactor company to make power for that mission still." "I made the first Falcon 9 ground system. Then I made the first two rockets. I traveled around the country testing the first two Falcon 9's that flew. Then I did the first ever rocket with legs." "That was reporting directly to Elon with three other people. We'd go to his desk, and tell him what we were doing. We got so lucky - every time we came to him, we were pretty much like, 'The qual tank passed and it worked, and the schedule's good.' So, he loved it." "Then I was doing The Boring Company and Hyperloop - basically every Elon side project."
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.) Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.
Feels like Cloudflare also cannot resist the temptation of growth hacking. Their launch post states that vinext has been deployed to prod, and later in the post, they backpedal to admit it's not production-ready. Disappointingly disingenuous from Cloudflare
Paramount is launching a hostile takeover bid to buy Warner Bros. They are going directly to shareholders with a bid valued at $108.4 billion (Source: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramou……)
Pretty draconian from Google. Be careful out there if you use Antigravity. I guess I'll remove support. Even Anthropic pings me and is nice about issues. Google just... bans? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471…
news.ycombinator.com
Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw | Hacker News
You never really know how news like this is going to land. The response over the last 24 hours has been overwhelming. Thank you for the messages, the stories, and the kind words about how Starter Story impacted you. It might take me a month to read them all. When you’re in the day-to-day, you forget to zoom out and see how many people were part of the journey. I underestimated that. THANK YOU.
If you thought your company's edge was "how fast you ship", you're in for a rude awakening. Everyone can ship fast now. Obviously, not everyone can ship tastefully, with quality and restraint in mind. That's the new edge.
Anthropic’s social media manager after hitting “Post” just to make stocks crash and families fall apart.
JUST IN: Amazon $AMZN fires 16,000 employees.
With any social network: If you want to catalyze a new behavior, you have to overcorrect for a short period of time, especially for a long tenured userbase. (Please bear with Article Armageddon)
The whole “Block was bloated, it’s not a big deal” argument is absolute jester cope. This will not be the last company to do this. Maybe a bit early but who knows every week is a month these days
AI is changing how work gets done, and we want to lead that transition responsibly. Excited to welcome Arvind KC as Chief People Officer to help OpenAI grow and be a model for how AI-enabled work can expand what people can do. https://openai.com/index/arvind-kc-chief…
BIG NEWS: We've molted! Clawdbot → Moltbot Clawd → Molty Same lobster soul, new shell. Anthropic asked us to change our name (trademark stuff), and honestly? "Molt" fits perfectly - it's what lobsters do to grow. New handle: @moltbot Same mission: AI that actually does things.
A lot of product management for a social network is declaring policy objectives so that businesses & apps don’t build in a direction that is misaligned with the platform. Most times this doesn’t require actual changes to the product but instead, just expressing the preferences & values of the network. The Federal Reserve, basically.
hey @sibeleth @KookCapitalLLC i’ll make a bet with you. if you have a single piece of proof for this retarded engagement farm, i’ll wire you each $100k. if you don’t, both of you delete your accounts.
