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One of the biggest mistakes that new startup founders make is trying to get away from the customer-facing roles too early. Whether it's customer support or it's sales, it's an incredible advantage to have the founders doing that work directly, and for much longer than they find comfortable. The absolute worst thing you can do is hire a sales person or a customer service agent too early. You'll miss all the golden nuggets that customers throw at you for free when they're rejecting your pitch or complaining about the product. Seeing these reasons paraphrased or summarized destroy all the nutrients in their insights. You want that whole-grain feedback straight from the customers' mouth! When we launched Basecamp in 2004, Jason was doing all the customer service himself. And he kept doing it like that for three years!! By the time we hired our first customer service agent, Jason was doing 150 emails/day. The business was doing millions of dollars in ARR. And Basecamp got infinitely, better both as a market proposition and as a product, because Jason could funnel all that feedback into decisions and positioning. For a long time after that, we did "Everyone on Support". Frequently rotating programmers, designers, and founders through a day of answering emails directly to customers. The dividends of doing this were almost as high as having Jason run it all in the early years. We fixed an incredible number of minor niggles and annoying bugs because programmers found it easier to solve the problem than to apologize for why it was there. It's not easy doing this! Customers often offer their valuable insights wrapped in rude language, unreasonable demands, and bad suggestions. That's why many founders quit the business of dealing with them at the first opportunity. That's why few companies ever do "Everyone On Support". That's why there's such eagerness to reduce support to an AI-only interaction. But quitting dealing with customers early, not just in support but also in sales, is an incredible handicap for any startup. You don't have to do everything that every customer demands of you, but you should certainly listen to them. And you can't listen well if the sound is being muffled by early layers of indirection.
Trump is doing Europe a favor by revealing the true cost of its impotency. Because, in many ways, he has the manners and the honesty of a child. A kid will just blurt out in the supermarket "why is that lady so fat, mommy?". That's not a polite thing to ask within earshot of said lady, but it might well be a fair question and a true observation! Trump is just as blunt when he essentially asks: "Why is Europe so weak?". Because Europe is weak, spiritually and militarily, in the face of Russia. It's that inherent weakness that's breeding the delusion that Russia is at once both on its last legs, about to lose the war against Ukraine any second now, and also the all-potent superpower that could take over all of Europe, if we don't start World Word III to counter it. This is not a coherent position. If you want peace, you must be strong. The big cats in the international jungle don't stick to a rules-based order purely out of higher principles, but out of self-preservation. And they can smell weakness like a tiger smells blood. This goes for Europe too. All too happy to lecture weaker countries they do not fear on high-minded ideals of democracy and free speech, while standing aghast and weeping powerlessly when someone stronger returns the favor. I'm not saying that this is right, in some abstract moral sense. I like the idea of a rules-based order. I like the idea of territorial sovereignty. I even like the idea that the normal exchanges between countries isn't as blunt and honest as those of a child in the supermarket. But what I like and "what is" need separating. Europe simply can't have it both ways. Be weak militarily, utterly dependent on an American security guarantee, and also expect a seat at the big-cat table. These positions are incompatible. You either get your peace dividend -- and the freedom to squander it on net-zero nonsense -- or you get to have a say in how the world around you is organized. Which brings us back to Trump doing Europe a favor. For all his bluster and bullying, America is still a benign force in its relation to Europe. We're being punked by someone from our own alliance. That's a cheap way of learning the lesson that weakness, impotence, and peace-dividend thinking is a short-term strategy. Russia could teach Europe a far more costly lesson. So too China. All that to say is that Europe must heed the rude awakening from our cowboy friends across the Atlantic. They may be crude, they may be curt, but by golly, they do have a point. Get jacked, Europe, and you'll no longer get punked. Stay feeble, Europe, and the indignities won't stop with being snubbed in Saudi Arabia.
Europe has become a third-rate power economically, politically, and militarily, and the price for this slowly building predicament is now due all at once. First, America is seeking to negotiate peace in Ukraine directly with Russia, without even inviting Europe to the table. Decades of underfunding the European military has lead us here. The never-ending ridicule of America, for spending the supposedly "absurd sum" of 3.4% of its GDP to maintain its might, coming home to roost. Second, mass immigration in Europe has become the central political theme driving the surge of right-wing parties in countries across the continent. Decades of blind adherence to a naive multi-cultural ideology has produced an abject failure to assimilate culturally-incompatible migrants. Rather than respond to this growing public discontent, mainstream parties all over Europe run the same playbook of calling anyone with legitimate concerns "racist", and attempting to disparage or even ban political parties advancing these topics. Third, the decline of entrepreneurship in Europe has lead to a death of new major companies, and an accelerated brain drain to America. The European economy lost parity with the American after 2008, and now the net-zero nonsense has lead Europe's old manufacturing powerhouse, Germany, to commit financial harakiri. Shutting its nuclear power plants, over-investing in solar and wind, and rendering its prized car industry noncompetitive on the global market. The latter leading European bureaucrats in the unenviable position of having to both denounce Trump on his proposed tariffs while imposing their own on the Chinese. A single failure in any of these three crucial realms would have been painful to deal with. But failure in all three at the same time is a disaster, and it's one of Europe's own making. Worse still is that Europeans at large still appear to be stuck in the early stages of grief. Somewhere between "anger" and "bargaining". Leaving us with "depression" before we arrive at "acceptance". Except this isn't destiny. Europe is not doomed to impotent outrage or repressive anger. Europe has the people, the talent, and the capital to choose a different path. What it currently lacks is the will. I'm a Dane. Therefore, I'm a European. I don't summarize the sad state of Europe out of spite or ill will or from a lack of standing. I don't want Europe to become American. But I want Europe to be strong, confident, and successful. Right now it's anything but. The best time for Europe to make a change was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. Forza Europe! Viva Europe!
Just a day after JD Vance's remarkable speech in Munich, 60 Minutes validates his worst accusations in a chilling segment on the totalitarian German crackdown on free speech. You couldn't have scripted this development for more irony or drama! This isn't 60 Minutes finding a smoking gun in some secret government archive, detailing a plot to prosecute free speech under some fishy pretext. No, this is German prosecutors telling an American journalist in an open interview that insulting people online is a crime and retweeting a "lie" will get you in trouble with the law. No hidden cameras! All out in the open! Nor is this just some rogue prosecutorial theory. 60 Minutes goes along for the ride with German police, as they conduct a raid at dawn with six armed officers to confiscate the laptop and a phone of a German citizen suspected of posting a racist cartoon. Even typing out this description of what happens sounds like insane hyperbole, but you can just watch the clip for yourself. And this morning raid was just one of fifty that day. Fifty raids in a day! For wrong speech, spicy memes, online insults of politicians, and other utterances by German citizens critical of their government or policies! Is this is the kind of hallowed democracy that Germans are supposed to defend against the supposed threat of AfD? As I noted yesterday, even Denmark has some draconian laws on the books limiting free speech. And they've been used in anger too. Although I've yet to see the kind of grotesque enforcement -- six armed officers at dawn coming to confiscate a laptop! -- but the trend is none the less worrying all across Europe, not just in Germany. I suppose this is why European leaders are in such shock over Vance's wagging finger. Because they know he's dead on, but they're not used to getting called out like this. On the world stage, while they just had to sit there. I can see how that's humiliating. But the humiliation of the European people is infinitely greater as they're gaslit about their right to free speech. That Vance doesn't know what he's talking about. Oh, and what about the Gulf of America?? It's pathetic. So too is the apparent deep support from many parts of Europe for this totalitarian insanity. I keep hearing from Europeans who with a straight face will claim that of course they have free speech, but that doesn't mean you can insult people, hurt their feelings, or post statistics that might cast certain groups in a bad light. Madness. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." -- Orwell, 1949
More in programming
As well as changing the way I organise my writing, last year I made some cosmetic improvements to this site. I design everything on this site myself, and I write the CSS by hand – I don’t use any third-party styles or frameworks. I don’t have any design training, and I don’t do design professionally, so I use this site as a place to learn and practice my design skills. It’s a continual work-in-progress, but I’d like to think it’s getting better over time. I design this site for readers. I write long, text-heavy posts with the occasional illustration or diagram, so I want something that will be comfortable to read and look good on a wide variety of browsers and devices. I get a lot of that “for free” by using semantic HTML and the default styles – most of my CSS is just cosmetic. Let’s go through some of the changes. Cleaning up the link styles This is what links used to look like: Every page has a tint colour, and then I was deriving different shades to style different links – a darker shade for visited links, a lighter shade for visited links in dark mode, and a background that appears on hover. I’m generating these new colours programatically, and I was so proud of getting that code working that I didn’t stop to think whether it was a good idea. In hindsight, I see several issues. The tint colour is meant to give the page a consistent visual appearance, but the different shades diluted that effect. I don’t think their meaning was especially obvious. How many readers ever worked it out? And the hover styles are actively unhelpful – just as you hover over a link you’re interested in, I’m making it harder to read! (At least in light mode – in dark mode, the hover style is barely legible.) One thing I noticed is that for certain tint colours, the “visited” colour I generated was barely distinguishable from the text colour. So I decided to lean into that in the new link styles: visited links are now the same colour as regular text. This new set of styles feels more coherent. I’m only using one shade of the tint colour, and I think the meaning is a bit clearer – only new-to-you links will get the pop of colour to stand out from the rest of the text. I’m happy to rely on underlines for the links you’ve already visited. And when you hover, the thick underline means you can see where you are, but the link text remains readable. Swapping out the font I swapped out the font, replacing Georgia with Charter. The difference is subtle, so I’d be surprised if anyone noticed: I’ve always used web safe fonts for this site – the fonts that are built into web browsers, and don’t need to be downloaded first. I’ve played with custom fonts from time to time, but there’s no font I like more enough to justify the hassle of loading a custom font. I still like Georgia, but I felt it was showing its age – it was designed in 1993 to look good on low-resolution screens, but looks a little chunky on modern displays. I think Charter looks nicer on high-resolution screens, but if you don’t have it installed then I fall back to Georgia. Making all the roundrects consistent I use a lot of rounded rectangles for components on this site, including article cards, blockquotes, and code blocks. For a long time they had similar but not identical styles, because I designed them all at different times. There were weird inconsistencies. For example, why does one roundrect have a 2px border, but another one is 3px? These are small details that nobody will ever notice directly, but undermine the sense of visual together-ness. I’ve done a complete overhaul of these styles, to make everything look more consistent. I’m leaning heavily on CSS variables, a relatively new CSS feature that I’ve really come to like. Variables make it much easier to use consistent values in different rules. I also tweaked the appearance: I’ve removed another two shades of the tint colour. (Yes, those shades were different from the ones used in links.) Colour draws your attention, so I’m trying to use it more carefully. A link says “click here”. A heading says “start here”. What does a blockquote or code snippet say? It’s just part of the text, so it shouldn’t be grabbing your attention. I think the neutral background also makes the syntax highlighting easier to read, because the tint colour isn’t clashing with the code colours. I could probably consolidate the shades of grey I’m using, but that’s a task for another day. I also removed the left indent on blockquotes and code blocks – I think it looks nicer to have a flush left edge for everything, and it means you can read more text on mobile screens. (That’s where I really felt the issues with the old design.) What’s next? By tidying up the design and reducing the number of unique elements, I’ve got a bit of room to add something new. For a while now I’ve wanted a place at the bottom of posts for common actions, or links to related and follow-up posts. As I do more and more long-form, reflective writing, I want to be able to say “if you liked this, you should read this too”. I want something that catches your eye, but doesn’t distract from the article you’re already reading. Louie Mantia has a version of this that I quite like: I’ve held off designing this because the existing pages felt too busy, but now I feel like I have space to add this – there aren’t as many clashing colours and components to compete for your attention. I’m still sketching out designs – my current idea is my rounded rectangle blocks, but with a coloured border instead of a subtle grey, but when I did a prototype, I feel like it’s missing something. I need to try a few more ideas. Watch this space! [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
One of the biggest mistakes that new startup founders make is trying to get away from the customer-facing roles too early. Whether it's customer support or it's sales, it's an incredible advantage to have the founders doing that work directly, and for much longer than they find comfortable. The absolute worst thing you can do is hire a sales person or a customer service agent too early. You'll miss all the golden nuggets that customers throw at you for free when they're rejecting your pitch or complaining about the product. Seeing these reasons paraphrased or summarized destroy all the nutrients in their insights. You want that whole-grain feedback straight from the customers' mouth! When we launched Basecamp in 2004, Jason was doing all the customer service himself. And he kept doing it like that for three years!! By the time we hired our first customer service agent, Jason was doing 150 emails/day. The business was doing millions of dollars in ARR. And Basecamp got infinitely, better both as a market proposition and as a product, because Jason could funnel all that feedback into decisions and positioning. For a long time after that, we did "Everyone on Support". Frequently rotating programmers, designers, and founders through a day of answering emails directly to customers. The dividends of doing this were almost as high as having Jason run it all in the early years. We fixed an incredible number of minor niggles and annoying bugs because programmers found it easier to solve the problem than to apologize for why it was there. It's not easy doing this! Customers often offer their valuable insights wrapped in rude language, unreasonable demands, and bad suggestions. That's why many founders quit the business of dealing with them at the first opportunity. That's why few companies ever do "Everyone On Support". That's why there's such eagerness to reduce support to an AI-only interaction. But quitting dealing with customers early, not just in support but also in sales, is an incredible handicap for any startup. You don't have to do everything that every customer demands of you, but you should certainly listen to them. And you can't listen well if the sound is being muffled by early layers of indirection.
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop in Brooklyn. I have a warm drink, and it’s just started to snow outside. I’m visiting New York to see Operation Mincemeat on Broadway – I was at the dress rehearsal yesterday, and I’ll be at the opening preview tonight. I’ve seen this show more times than I care to count, and I hope US theater-goers love it as much as Brits. The people who make the show will tell you that it’s about a bunch of misfits who thought they could do something ridiculous, who had the audacity to believe in something unlikely. That’s certainly one way to see it. The musical tells the true story of a group of British spies who tried to fool Hitler with a dead body, fake papers, and an outrageous plan that could easily have failed. Decades later, the show’s creators would mirror that same spirit of unlikely ambition. Four friends, armed with their creativity, determination, and a wardrobe full of hats, created a new musical in a small London theatre. And after a series of transfers, they’re about to open the show under the bright lights of Broadway. But when I watch the show, I see a story about friendship. It’s about how we need our friends to help us, to inspire us, to push us to be the best versions of ourselves. I see the swaggering leader who needs a team to help him truly achieve. The nervous scientist who stands up for himself with the support of his friends. The enthusiastic secretary who learns wisdom and resilience from her elder. And so, I suppose, it’s fitting that I’m not in New York on my own. I’m here with friends – dozens of wonderful people who I met through this ridiculous show. At first, I was just an audience member. I sat in my seat, I watched the show, and I laughed and cried with equal measure. After the show, I waited at stage door to thank the cast. Then I came to see the show a second time. And a third. And a fourth. After a few trips, I started to see familiar faces waiting with me at stage door. So before the cast came out, we started chatting. Those conversations became a Twitter community, then a Discord, then a WhatsApp. We swapped fan art, merch, and stories of our favourite moments. We went to other shows together, and we hung out outside the theatre. I spent New Year’s Eve with a few of these friends, sitting on somebody’s floor and laughing about a bowl of limes like it was the funniest thing in the world. And now we’re together in New York. Meeting this kind, funny, and creative group of people might seem as unlikely as the premise of Mincemeat itself. But I believed it was possible, and here we are. I feel so lucky to have met these people, to take this ridiculous trip, to share these precious days with them. I know what a privilege this is – the time, the money, the ability to say let’s do this and make it happen. How many people can gather a dozen friends for even a single evening, let alone a trip halfway round the world? You might think it’s silly to travel this far for a theatre show, especially one we’ve seen plenty of times in London. Some people would never see the same show twice, and most of us are comfortably into double or triple-figures. Whenever somebody asks why, I don’t have a good answer. Because it’s fun? Because it’s moving? Because I enjoy it? I feel the need to justify it, as if there’s some logical reason that will make all of this okay. But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe joy doesn’t need justification. A theatre show doesn’t happen without people who care. Neither does a friendship. So much of our culture tells us that it’s not cool to care. It’s better to be detached, dismissive, disinterested. Enthusiasm is cringe. Sincerity is weakness. I’ve certainly felt that pressure – the urge to play it cool, to pretend I’m above it all. To act as if I only enjoy something a “normal” amount. Well, fuck that. I don’t know where the drive to be detached comes from. Maybe it’s to protect ourselves, a way to guard against disappointment. Maybe it’s to seem sophisticated, as if having passions makes us childish or less mature. Or perhaps it’s about control – if we stay detached, we never have to depend on others, we never have to trust in something bigger than ourselves. Being detached means you can’t get hurt – but you’ll also miss out on so much joy. I’m a big fan of being a big fan of things. So many of the best things in my life have come from caring, from letting myself be involved, from finding people who are a big fan of the same things as me. If I pretended not to care, I wouldn’t have any of that. Caring – deeply, foolishly, vulnerably – is how I connect with people. My friends and I care about this show, we care about each other, and we care about our joy. That care and love for each other is what brought us together, and without it we wouldn’t be here in this city. I know this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. So many stars had to align – for us to meet, for the show we love to be successful, for us to be able to travel together. But if we didn’t care, none of those stars would have aligned. I know so many other friends who would have loved to be here but can’t be, for all kinds of reasons. Their absence isn’t for lack of caring, and they want the show to do well whether or not they’re here. I know they care, and that’s the important thing. To butcher Tennyson: I think it’s better to care about something you cannot affect, than to care about nothing at all. In a world that’s full of cynicism and spite and hatred, I feel that now more than ever. I’d recommend you go to the show if you haven’t already, but that’s not really the point of this post. Maybe you’ve already seen Operation Mincemeat, and it wasn’t for you. Maybe you’re not a theatre kid. Maybe you aren’t into musicals, or history, or war stories. That’s okay. I don’t mind if you care about different things to me. (Imagine how boring the world would be if we all cared about the same things!) But I want you to care about something. I want you to find it, find people who care about it too, and hold on to them. Because right now, in this city, with these people, at this show? I’m so glad I did. And I hope you find that sort of happiness too. Some of the people who made this trip special. Photo by Chloe, and taken from her Twitter. Timing note: I wrote this on February 15th, but I delayed posting it because I didn’t want to highlight the fact I was away from home. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
Humanity's Last Exam by Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI
