Ramen Log

Fuel for the journey 🍜

Collection of quotes I like from essays, videos, and podcasts. Or sometimes myself.

Metadata compatibility

You need to find problems so dire that users are willing try half-baked, v1, imperfect solutions. – Michael Seibel

Submission nodes

Ask your users how they’d feel if they could no longer use your product. The group that answers ‘very disappointed’ will unlock product-market fit. – Rahul Vohra

Table operations

If you have ambitious plans, a lot of people will be skeptical. You’ll seem like you’re getting above yourself, except perhaps to your parents. – Jessica Livingston

Surprisingly serious perspectives

The fear of big ideas prevents most people from even realizing they could expand a site for college students into a site for the whole world. But a few people are more excited than afraid when this happens. – Jessica Livingston

Context reset

Be intrepid. There’s room for lots of different kinds of people to be startup founders, but you do need a certain amount of boldness—to work on ideas that most people would consider stupid, and to keep going when you’re ridiculed or ignored. – Jessica Livingston

Z-fold terminal

The market doesn’t care how hard you work—it only cares if you do the right things. – Sam Altman

Dangerously trust

Do what you’re genuinely interested in and try to play to your natural strengths. A startup is so much work that you’ll give up if you’re not genuinely interested in it. – Jessica Livingston

Early farming

Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire. Everyone knows this, and yet everyone compromises on this at some point during a desperate need. – Sam Altman

Pushing margins

Hiring is one of your most important jobs and the key to building a great company. My first piece of advice about hiring is don’t do it. Employees are expensive. Employees add organizational complexity and communication overhead. – Sam Altman

Difficult harness

Start small so you can be nimble and open to change. We never could have pulled off moving our operations to Silicon Valley in a matter of months if we’d hired a bunch of people in Cambridge. To this day, YC has a tradition of trying things on a small scale before expanding…

Data Transformations

Focus on the road – When they teach you how to drive a racecar, they tell you to focus on the road when you go around a turn. They tell you that because if you focus on the wall, then you will drive straight into the wall. – Ben Horowitz

Plan and execute

If I use this new product you’re building, does it take away engagement or $ from something else. If so, then it’s truly a segment and a heads-on competitor. It’s counter-intuitive but I consider that a good thing, because they you are truly competing in a pre-existing…

Swarm conversations

Every existing market has a baseline of product quality, functionality, etc. We’d all love to build the minimum viable product, but sometimes it doesn’t work because the category has evolved sufficiently that you need more than the bare bones. – Andrew Chen

Assigned operation cost

There must be a large number of users who are pulling on this category in the market. By pulling, I mean folks are actively searching for the product. – Andrew Chen

Commit picture

One very specific thing you should not do is to become a scenester. Startups are considered cool at the moment. If you wanted to, you could occupy all your time playing at being a startup founder without ever actually doing the difficult and unglamorous work of building things…

PR based engineering

You want to build a “product improvement engine” in your company. You should talk to your users and watch them use your product, figure out what parts are sub-par, and then make your product better. Then do it again. – Sam Altman

View and steer

I don’t know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users. – Jessica Livingston

Speed of thoughts

A critical part of making users happy is to measure whether you actually are or not. Otherwise you can deceive yourself about how much users really like you. – Jessica Livingston

Friendly intro

If you have to choose between making users happy and the conventional wisdom, choose users. In fact if you have to choose between making users happy and almost anything, choose users. – Jessica Livingston

Uncertain forks

A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” – Chris Dixon

Airgapped realism

One of the most important kinds of luck is timing. The most successful founders have the right idea at the right time. And you have less control over that than you might think, because the best ideas are not deliberate: they tend to grow organically out of the founders’ lives.…

Processing audio

Good investors really do add a lot of value. Bad investors detract a lot. Most investors fall in the middle and neither add nor detract. – Sam Altman

Double one body

It is a bad idea to try to raise money when your company isn’t in good enough shape to attract capital. You will burn reputation and waste time. – Sam Altman

Steamed Crab

The secret to successfully raising money is to have a good company. All of the other stuff founders do to try to over-optimize the process probably only matters about 5% of the time. – Sam Altman

Marching sales

Sharpen your pitch, this is harder than it sounds because it forces you to make strong choices about what you’re building and why and who cares and what they’ll pay for it. – Jason Cohen

Intentional actions

Founders often hold too tightly onto solutions and too loosely onto problems. – Michael Seibel

PR Reviews

The Most Important Pricing Advice Ever: Charge. More. – Patrick McKenzie

Ship ship ship

Anyhow, feature segmentation can work, particularly if you have features where there’s a hard requirement among some customers, that they must have a particular feature. That segments people into, “Has a little money” vs. “Has a lot of money.” – Patrick McKenzie

Conceptual Reviews

Promise them one of two things. Either you’re going to increase their revenue, or you’re going to reduce their costs. – Patrick McKenzie

Watching agents

The best founders are unusually responsive. This is an indicator of decisiveness, focus, intensity, and the ability to get things done. – Sam Altman

Journal accessibility

You make what you measure. Pick a number you want to grow, and focus on that. The best number to measure is revenue, if you can. – Jessica Livingston

Parsing conversations

If I had to distill my advice about how to operate down to only two words, I’d pick focus and intensity. They are relentlessly focused on their product and growth. They don’t try to do everything—in fact, they say no a lot. – Sam Altman

Ticket tickets

When you find something that works, keep going. Don’t get distracted and do something else. Don’t take your foot off the gas. – Sam Altman

Theory of constraints

The prime directive of great execution is “Never lose momentum”. – Sam Altman

Code accountability

Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution. – Sam Altman

Lumberjack story

You must ship quickly so you can learn quickly so you can create the right product before you run out of money and willpower. – Jason Cohen

Because I can

Instead of taking one big swing with the launch of a new product—devoting months to the design of one technical feature or spending years in stealth mode developing a product without evidence that customers want it—it is an iterative approach to learn who the customer actually…

Moderator Scheduler

A word of warning about choosing to start a startup: It sucks! – Sam Altman

Paintbrush and chisels

You have to be immune to rejection. People are going to dismiss you at first. If that’s enough to stop you, you’re doomed. So you have to learn to ignore it. And that’s harder than it sounds—social pressure is so powerful. But everyone who does ambitious things has to learn how…

Super Gut Punch

Don’t let rejection distract you or hold you back. You’ll get rejected in so many different ways, but you must keep moving forward. – Jessica Livingston

Smelly Code

Believe the no and not the why when investors turn you down. – Jessica Livingston

Productivity Gambles

Dual insights needed, (1) an insight about customers that gives them product/market fit, (2) an insight about distribution that creates traction – Andrew Chen

Controlling your context

Founders need to be brutally honest with themselves. Good entrepreneurs are willing to make long lists of things at which they are have no ability. – Chris Dixon

Pivotal coordination

“MVP” implies a selfish process, abusing customers so you can “learn”. Instead, make the first version SLC: Simple, Lovable, and Complete. – Jason Cohen

Trying to meet baseline

Every giant company has faced worse competitive threats than what you are facing now when they were small, and they all came out ok. There is always a counter-move. – Sam Altman

Open source worries

Do not worry about a competitor until they are beating you with a real, shipped product. Press releases are easier to write than code, which is easier still than making a great product. – Sam Altman

Fork roads

Competitors are a startup ghost story. 99% of startups die from suicide, not murder. – Sam Altman

Keeping an open eye

An MVP is not an excuse to throw our beliefs about quality out the window; it’s simply an experiment on the way to excellence. – Eric Ries

Launch or die?

Remember that at least a thousand people have every great idea. One of them actually becomes successful. The difference comes down to execution. – Sam Altman

Containerized execution

When you are in The Struggle, nothing is easy and nothing feels right. You have dropped into the abyss and you may never get out. – Ben Horowitz

Too much work, too little time

The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. – Ben Horowitz

Open source uncertainties

The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. – Ben Horowitz

Clawdbots are interesting but annoying

In a startup, absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen. This one throws both founders and employees new to startups. – Marc Andreessen

Bad demos

Creating value in startups is less of a line and more of a staircase. Basically, it’s “grind-grind-grind” with little progress … then (hopefully) you unlock some new insight that propels you to the next step. The first step is knowing what problem you’re solving. – Sameer Ansari

Service containers

The fear you feel is the unknown, it’s what you don’t know. Just kind of recognize that it’s okay not to know. Work towards a knowingness of things. And the only way to do it is to not be in your head on it, but it’s just to start looking, go out and do it. One step at a time.…

Listening for incoming messages

There’s hard work and then there’s insanely hardwork. – Jensen Huang

ClaudeCode Meetup

One of the benefits of working hard is that good opportunities will come along, but it’s still up to you to jump on them when they do. – Sam Altman

Execution duration

What people misunderstand is somehow the best jobs are the ones that bring you happiness all the time. I don’t think that’s right. You have to suffer and you have to struggle, you have to do those hard things and work through it, in order to really appreciate what you’ve done.…

Going with the Flow

Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. If you need encouragement, don’t start a company. – Elon Musk

Filtering logs

No business has ever succeeded without sales. – Mark Cuban

useEffect infinite loops

You are doing sales because you failed at marketing. You are doing marketing because you failed at product. – Naval Ravikant

Storing states

You only have to be right one time. – Mark Cuban

Executor container

People like to talk to the founder of companies and they like to talk to the people that make software that they use. And they like to feel listened to and they like to feel heard. – Dalton Caldwell

Replaying history

Become formidable. Also become tough—the road ahead is going to be painful and make you doubt yourself many, many times. – Sam Altman

Show diffs

Once you’ve shifted from “interesting project” to “company” mode, be decisive and act quickly. Instead of thinking about making a decision over the course of week, think about making it in an hour, and getting it done in the next hour. – Sam Altman

Refresh persistance

You are nothing until you launch. – Michael Seibel

Ramen Buddy again

If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say Productize Yourself. – Naval Ravikant

Storage clean up

Relentless cadence of execution is incredibly predictive of success. – Sam Altman

Auto sort and auto scrolls

Who are the most desperate customer and how do you talk to them first? If you don’t feel like you’re dealing with desperate people, if you feel like you’re trying to get impressive customers who are not desperate, you’re probably doing it wrong. – Michael Seibel

Gemini Pro Art and Comics

The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have. You escape competition through authenticity, by being your own self. – Naval Ravikant

Consistency in handling events

Stay true, always be real with yourself and the world. Because the world don’t need more copies, it need originals. And trust me, ain’t nobody can do what you do, like you do. – Snoop Dogg

Peek-a-boo with chat history

Outlast: Commitment beyond what competitors are willing to replicate. Keep doing it. Sit dead center and compounding does the heavy lifting. – Garry Tan

Persistance: Local vs Remote

Play: Play that warps time. You know you’re at the edge of your capabilities. You’re learning, you’re growing. – Garry Tan

Tracking turns in conversations

Pull: Problems that are so painful, users pay to erase them. When you create something of great value, your customers and users will literally pull the product right out of you. Your inbox will be overflowing, they’ll say: “Take my money.” – Garry Tan

Retry after cooldown

You have to make every single detail perfect and you have to limit the number of details. If you pay attention to the smallest things while knowing what’s important, then everything else takes care of itself. – Jack Dorsey

API Boundaries

People don’t want to make choices, they don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them. – Naval Ravikant

Bug squashing day

To find real peace, you have to let the armor go. Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don’t let anything get in the way of the light that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory. – Jim Carrey

Keep pushing ahead

The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is. Because everything you gain in life will rot and fall apart. All that will be left of you is what was in your heart. – Jim Carrey

New Year New Commits

How will you serve the world? What do they need that your talent can provide? That’s all you have to figure out. – Jim Carrey

Quiet evening, messy thoughts

Resilience matters in success and I don’t know how to teach it to you except for “I hope suffering happens to you”. – Jensen Huang

Multi-claude engineering

To be simple you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. – Naval Ravikant

Building mountain stairs

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. – Richard Hamming

Tung tung tung sahur

In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your competitors will crush you. – Paul Graham

Bridging people

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That’s what you’re looking for. – Paul Graham

Finding users in a cafe

If you’re making something for people, make sure it’s something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. – Paul Graham

Free 2x Claude limit for Christmas!

The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. – Paul Graham

Storytelling

If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. – Sam Altman

Quiet progress

Craft is how you make something people want. – Garry Tan

Builder energy is highly infectious

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. – Naval Ravikant

Serialization / Deserialization

Choices for your users are an abdication of your responsibilities. – Naval Ravikant

Tracing breadcrumbs

Communication skills, I think are one of the most important founder qualifications that people don’t think about enough. So much of your job as a founder is about communication. – Sam Altman

Execution state graph

Focus intensely on the things that do matter. Every day, figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things for you to do are. Do those and ignore other distractions. Be a relentless execution machine. – Sam Altman

Server-Sent Events

Value is created by doing. – Sam Altman

Ramen Buddy

Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it’s possible, but it requires extraordinary effort. – Paul Graham

File conflict resolution

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. – Jeff Bezos

Checkpoint restoration

One golden rule of development is to make one change at a time. – James Dyson

See something, say something, fix it.

Leave time to get to zero bugs at the end of any given cycle. At a time of fast iteration, it’s easy to forget this part and just ship it. That’s not okay. – Garry Tan

Validators and Parsers

An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question. – John W. Tukey

Making human & agent plans

Visualizing just the goal creates fantasy, visualizing the process turns it into reality. – Self note

Agent context handoff

You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, “Yes, that was good.” – Richard Hamming

Agent skills are interesting

In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. – Paul Graham

Subagents can be efficient

Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating. – Bret Victor

In memory of Kuro, a very good boi.

Resilience means setbacks can’t change your morale, not that they can’t change your mind. – Paul Graham

You’re absolutely right!

Good products are hard to vary. – Naval Ravikant

Websocket heartbeats

You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. – Sean Maguire, Good Will Hunting (1997)

Long context condensation can be tricky

If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance. – Richard Hamming

Builders vs Practitioners

Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment, and if you don’t ever experiment, you will never innovate. If you don’t innovate, you don’t succeed. – Jensen Huang

Improving node customizations

I have never met a very successful pessimistic person. – Sam Altman

Backend improvements and error handling

I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful. – Sam Altman

Fixing chat message UI bloat

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else. – Donald Knuth

Writing is a great compass

They were unable to ask themselves, “What are the important problems in my field?” If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. – Richard Hamming

Thinking about You/sers

It is never a single thing. Everything is just incremental and you just have to keep doing lots of those things until you strike something. – Paul Graham

Impromptu demo and panelist

Pump out features, users love and expect a site to improve. – Paul Graham (paraphrased)

Coffee chat day with other founders

Focusing is about saying no. – Steve Jobs

AI.SEA week!

Everything that is valuable is hard, but not everything that is hard is valuable. – Peter Thiel

Keep on the grind!

As you begin on the way, the way appears. – Jalal al-Din Rumi

Almost done with a feature

Simultaneously be impatient, ambitious, and feel like you have a hair on fire thing while at the same time hold the idea that doing great work takes a long time. – Dalton Caldwell

I’m bad with social media

It can be surprising how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence and ability. – Paul Graham

Surprisingly thick soup

As the founder, it’s my job to: Set the pace, set the standards, and set the direction. – Self note.

Technical writing is fun sometimes

Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being water-boarded. – Paul Graham

RL Fine-tuning is a pain sometimes

Build relationships instead of growing email lists. – Self note.

Hard rice dunked in soup

The only reason to start a company is because you have an irrational desire to do so. Because it’s not worth the money. – Ben Horowitz

Late-night debug session

Every missed opportunity reminds you to grab the next one with both hands. – Garry Tan