PM @jiohotstar. Professional rapido hater. Apple fanboy. BITS-G
Bangalore, India
Joined December 2009
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found this tweet I made exactly 7 years ago
using a tool that does this exact same thing for twitter ☺️
chandsethi.github.io/twitter…
which is why these companies need to be bottom's up.
build things for individuals for their benefit (productivity or whatever)
the more they use, the more context they add
in background, keep funnelling the context from all employees to build the actual company brain
this phrase is now a keyboard shortcut for me
ALT codex chat box with this typed - "so verbose, yet unclear"
chand sethi retweeted
For the last ten years I have spent every moment thinking about nothing but air. And how to make better, more personalized air accessible to homes all over the world.
And today I can finally present the next huge step in that journey.
Introducing Breethr P1, the Personal Climate System.
Launching today. And open for pre-orders right now
Reserve your P1 for $99: breethr.com
Shipping Spring 2027.
Instead of this, I’d move App Library to the left of first homepage.
That space is prime real estate, but occupied with widgets you never see.
And search on library is blazing fast compared to spotlight search
All my attempts at ai-agent for work have failed largely bcs of memory drift.
I hope we don't have to babysit memory files like we have to do today
simple non-work example:
ordered fitbit for mom. agent saw it in email. added "owns fitbit" to its memory about me
thing w these bot model of assistants is you never know what model/level is at work
at its own whim, they can start serving you some gandu model and you have to go back to prompting “think very hard or I’ll kms” like its 2023
“I used claude code to reverse engineer a satellite and made an app to flash a spotlight at my current location so that i can walk home easily”
Came across this skill to avoid ai-slop writing, but its readme reads like ai slop 🤷♂️
any good, general purpose skill, to avoid ai-slop writing
github.com/ameenmo/humanize-…
products targeted at a specific group of people, for a specific problem, are always yum
I'm delighted to introduce Sundrop – a private photo app for parents. trysundrop.app ☀️
Sundrop finds your best photos and turns them into delightful keepsakes.
See your kids side-by-side at the same age. Watch timelapses of them growing up. Relive your family's week. And lots more.
Everything happens on your iPhone; your photos never touch our servers. (We wouldn't trust a company with our photo libraries, either.)
Sundrop has brought a lot of joy to our own families. We hope it does the same for yours!
How does a product/company reach its global maxima?
I'm coming from the assumption that global maxima is at least a function of
(a) profitability / self reliance, and
(b) user love (for low churn and free growth)
I don't think most companies even strive for global maxima. They just chase whatever it takes to get specific metrics up. Which makes sense, since sometimes thats about survival, but usually about reaching some milestone.
But in my very humble opinion, doing so takes you off track from reaching your global maxima. It makes you very tactical and shortsighted. Instead of gunning for a strong business with lots of user love, we find ways to say 'We grew a, b, c by x, y, z %'. It doesn't matter how we get those numbers at one point.
One of the mysteries I have had for years is how some of the things that are bad for users end up improving the metric, while the good ones often bring it down.
In hindsight, it's pretty obvious - the metric has little to no correlation with whats good or bad for users.
And the 'how' of increasing a metric is usually a lot of bets, each trying to add a tiny amount, hoping that all of it compounds. Which it usually doesn't. No cohesion what so ever. But what ends up compounds is the work it takes to manage those bets now. What it also costs is focus.
There's no proof here, just belief, that this lack of focus shows up to the users. Worse, it shows up to them when they get hands on something that HAS that focus.
Most business run on some weak moat, and when you lose that moat, you are left with a frankenstein of 20 local maxima. Your best case is to hope, that there's no one competing with focus to reach global maxima where they can make $$$ with users loving them.
V few companies come to mind that imo are tending towards their global maxima. Instagram, Linear, Zomato, Anthropic, Apple, and hopefully, my own employer.
One of the hallmarks of such companies is how they feel cohesive. A trained eye should be able to tell difference between companies that are cohesive vs those that follow org charts.
—
If I am being pragmatic, I completely get why this happens. Step 1 is to not die. Step 2 is to reach some local maxima. Global maxima is some fairy land that we don't need to aim for, when reaching a socially successful stage does the job.
apple’s agentic use cases:
- keep an eye on a website for sale
- reset passwords
- reframe a photo
there are so many everyday demos that could make ai, personal agents, & agents in general feel insanely powerful to normal ppl & yet ai companies keep choosing things like booking flights, planning travel, or god forbid planning a god damn wedding.
these are not everyday problems. they’re relatively rare events & worse for a lot of ppl they’re actually part of the joys of life. the best demo should make someone feel pain they already are familiar with disappearing. almost every company gets this wrong. they optimize for spectacle instead of relief which is fine in some cases but it doesn’t last.
one of my favorite historical examples is a product called head on.
the ad showed someone with a headache, then showed them applying the product directly to their forehead while repeating:
“head on. apply directly to the forehead.”
beautifully simple. you instantly understood the product, the problem, & the value. ai companies should be doing the same thing.
show me the annoying thing i deal with every single day then make it disappear. it’s not sexy, i guarantee it will work. when jobs demo’ed the iphone he picked universal simple problems that the iphone did better than anything else on the fucking planet.
anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
