Leadership
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
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.
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."
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…
It took me two years to get 1M plays. Now we get 1.2M plays per day on 20VC. Most people fail because they give up. This is a game of who can survive the longest.
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.
jensen mothafuckin huang
We often get asked how people who are not technical can contribute to AGI. One area is research recruiting. Tifa (@tifafafafa) is looking for exceptional recruiters from non-traditional backgrounds, former founders especially. We believe the best research teams are built through context, taste and a real feel for where the field is headed next; research recruiting is about finding people who will move the frontier forward, not just filling roles. Should be an interesting thing!
I meet a lot of founders who are worried by the rapid rate of technological change. They shouldn't be. It may feel uncomfortable, but techno-turbulence is net good for startups. They're much more likely to adapt successfully to some big change than incumbents are.
For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.
I am extremely excited to welcome @dylanscand to OpenAI as our Head of Preparedness. Things are about to move quite fast and we will be working with extremely powerful models soon. This will require commensurate safeguards to ensure we can continue to deliver tremendous
taste is a new core skill
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
Someone asked what's the most underappreciated quality in startup founders. I realized I could answer this by asking what's the most underappreciated aspect of startups. That's easy: how hard they are. So the most underappreciated quality in founders is sheer toughness.
every VC eventually starts a substack and a podcast and every substacker and podcaster eventually becomes a VC 😂
Someone asked about tricks for meeting eminent people. I said the best plan is just to do really good work. Then you'll tend to meet them organically. In the worst case you'll see one whenever you look in the mirror.
the core use case for openclaw is making better decisions more often
How to use AI for your next job interview @noamseg (my community research lead) interviewed 30 current and recent job seekers about how they use AI throughout the interview process. What he found went far beyond polishing resumes. People had built entire systems tailor-made for their own situations: ways to get feedback on what they actually said in interviews, methods to predict questions before walking in, workflows to surface stories they didn’t know they had. As he was pulling together a research report from these conversations, he quickly realized that most people on the job market are stressed and anxious enough. The best value he could offer wasn’t a list of tips but, instead, a way to plug-and-play the hard work these participants have already done. So he changed direction, took every interview AI technique that worked for these participants, added a layer of professional coaching techniques, and built a free Claude Code–based coach you can plug-and-play into your interview process today. The coach helps you with every step of the interview process: 1. Scores your interview responses and tells you exactly what to fix, based on what you said, not what you think you said 2. Mines your experience for stories you didn't know you had 3. Runs mock interviews that push back and interrupt you 4. Generates company-specific prep with predicted questions 5. Coaches post-offer salary negotiation with exact scripts and fallback language ...and much more Learn more and grab it here: https://lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-us…
