flâneur

Robert Crocker

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on the atlas — 5

highlights — 26

  • The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
    How To Be Successful
  • You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.
    How To Be Successful
  • Finally, remember to spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions.
    How To Be Successful
  • One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you.
    How To Be Successful
  • An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.
    How To Be Successful
  • Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.
    How To Be Successful
  • I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.
    How To Be Successful
  • Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.
    How To Be Successful
  • I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
    How To Be Successful
  • Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
    How To Be Successful
  • Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.
    How To Be Successful
  • All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability.
    How To Be Successful
  • Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.
    How To Be Successful
  • You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.
    How To Be Successful
  • Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.
    How To Be Successful
  • Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.
    Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
  • The point is: let the agent do the boring stuff, the stuff that won't teach you anything new, or try out different things you'd otherwise not have time for. Then you evaluate what it came up with, take the ideas that are actually reasonable and correct, and finalize the implementation. Yes, sure, you can also use an agent for that final step.
    Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
  • But it also requires you to actually observe the agent making that error.
    Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
  • Everything is broken
    Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
  • Enterprises must now focus on cultivating experienced engineering talent, prioritizing robust platforms and guardrails for AI-assisted development, and evolving consulting models toward fractional senior expertise rather than traditional body shopping. Success depends on building sound judgment within teams, ensuring SREs can address gaps in AI-generated code, and proactively developing the next generation of senior engineers.
    Software Engineering Splits in Three
  • Think of all the WordPress and Joomla customizations that small businesses relied on. Now extend that to actual custom applications. Actual solutions to problems that no SaaS product solves because the market is too small. This creates a new role: the software plumber. Local developers who serve local businesses.
    Software Engineering Splits in Three
  • The question shifts from "can we afford to build this" to "do we have the judgment to build and maintain this well." But to actually elevate decision-making, it is not only about cost or capability—it is about identifying where bespoke software can create an unfair advantage for your business.
    Software Engineering Splits in Three
  • If the answer is yes to two or more, you likely have a good candidate for custom software. If not, consider if a tailored off-the-shelf option gets you most of the way there without the extra investment.
    Software Engineering Splits in Three
  • This is where the model changes most dramatically. These organizations will rely on platforms that provide sane defaults and built-in guardrails. And they'll bring in fractional senior expertise when they need judgment they don't have internally.
    Software Engineering Splits in Three
  • These organizations need senior engineers who can review AI-generated code and catch the subtle bugs that pass tests but fail at scale. AI is a force multiplier here, not a replacement.
    Software Engineering Splits in Three
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business.
    Curius / Onboarding