John De Goes

Really enjoyed speaking with Belle L. from The Wall Street Journal at NYC Summit yesterday about the state of AI adoption. A few of the themes we touched on: 1/ ROI has to be super measurable and defensible before enterprises move beyond pilots. If you can’t show in dollars how much a project will save or generate, it’s tough for any team to prioritize it. 2/ We’re seeing the most traction in customer support for industries like finance, hospitality, tech, and retail (places where support volumes are high and regulation is lighter, with finance being the notable exception). 3/ Voice is a big focus area in customer support because there’s a huge payoff in making it more efficient. More than half of customer interactions happen over the phone, and it’s by far the most expensive channel to serve. Grateful to everyone who joined the discussion and for the chance to share what we’re seeing in the field.

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When I first saw Tuomas Artman's post about Fixing Bugs First at Linear (link in comments), I nodded a bit, and then a lot. I'm so glad Thorsten Ball and I radically adhered to this from day 1 when building Amp at Sourcegraph. Here's what I've learned: • Fix Bugs Now (not First): The overhead to file an issue, prioritize the issue, assign the issue, and update the issue is often greater than the time it takes to fix it. Just Fix Bugs Now, right when you hit them or hear about them; don't bother filing an issue. The reporter need not be the fixer, but you must confirm it's going to be Fixed Now before you let go of it. • Backpressure: You will never be drowning in bugs if you truly Fix Bugs Now because you won't have time to build new features that would introduce new bugs. If you're drowning in bugs, it means you're insufficiently adhering to Fix Bugs Now, and new stuff is sneaking through. Fix that. Cut scope immediately if needed, no matter how painful. • Go Direct: When fixing a bug, devs talk directly to customers. No middlemen. Fixing Bugs Now for a real person you're talking to is rewarding and effective; anything else is grunt work that requires a lot more motivation and management pep talks. Plus, customers love talking to devs. • The 15-Minute Rule: From the moment a customer reports a bug, you need to be able to ship a fix to them within 15 minutes. Some fixes take longer, of course, but let's say it's a simple one-line fix: 15 minutes to the customer's screen. If it takes longer, you break the customer's flow, so they won't bother reporting most bugs (since they wouldn't benefit from the fix in their current task). Also, you kill the reward loop for your own devs and kill their focus, since they'll keep mentally tracking the bug until it's resolved. And if it takes days to ship a fix, then you'll need a process for tracking and communicating fixes, and so on, and all of a sudden the overhead dominates the time to code the fix. • Repeat Repeat Repeat: Fixing Bugs Now is so radically different that your team won't believe that you really, truly mean it at first. Or even after you've repeated it 10 times. You need to say it in every single team message for it to stick. Even knowing you need to repeat it more than you think, you won't repeat it enough. • The Stick: Yes, praise your team for Fixing Bugs Now. But for 80% of devs, the reality is you'll need to (at least once) give them direct, constructive feedback when they stray (with good intentions) from Fixing Bugs Now. You need to use the stick for it to stick: "I know you had good intent in building xyz feature while ignoring bugs, but that is not how we build here, and I need you to not do that again." • Sorry and Thanks: Bugs are a fact of life, but that doesn't make them OK. Call me old-fashioned, but I think you should apologize to customers when they hit a bug and thank them for raising it. Knowing you appreciate it, customers will give you more feedback.

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Prominent / loud VCs are praising the good old 9-9-6 schedule for founders. You know, the work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week. So I asked good old AI what my life would be as a VC on a 996 day... Hour 1: Morning Run. This is counted as working hour as it clears the mind before a day of calls, meetings, and deal flow. Hour 2: Drinking Coffee Also counted as work. It's the ritual that fuels both thought leadership and inbox zero attempts. "sent from Superhuman" doesn't come without this essential moment. Hour 3: Social Media Hour(s) Building a public voice matters more than ever in deal sourcing. Hour 4: Taking Pitch Calls Back-to-back founder meetings, each one a potential unicorn, or a company I'll circle back to because they're bit too early for me. Hour 5: Online Board Meeting Supporting portfolio companies, one Zoom square at a time. Hour 6 and 7: Going to the Gym Resilience requires more than mental stamina. Counted as work because one hour in the gym returns two hours in productivite. I'd do two hours for maximum ROI. Hour 8: Typing Emails Quick responses keep reputation high, even when the answer is maybe. As a VC, yes or no are not part of my vocabulary. Hour 9: Podcasting A scalable way to share ideas, differentiate, and attract founders. I'll call it 3 minute investor, despite each episode clocking in at 90 minutes. Hour 10: Writing a Newsletter The weekly pulse of markets, reflections, and frameworks. Prompted to perfection! Hours 11 and 12: Dinner with Other VCs Relationships with peers are as important as investments. This is where the FOMO is born. Hour 12: Meditating A rare pause to reset before the cycle repeats. Essential part of my working hours. This one I tend to multi-task. If you're a founder putting in the long hours at a minimum wage and a maximum pressure, rest assured that I'm in the trenches with you, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week! The 9-9-6 schedule isn’t just a founder’s burden. VCs live it too. It just looks different.

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New from 404 Media: Spotify is publishing AI-generated songs on the official pages of real artists. One problem: those artists died years ago. "One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so." https://lnkd.in/efZq5sjJ

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We just made Flank’s brain visible. For months the magic of an agent running an entire workflow on its own was hard to show. Emails and Teams messages gave a glimpse but never the full picture. Now we have a visual interface for our orchestrator. It makes ~17 API calls to different models to create and adapt a plan in real time (excluding any tool use). It decides which tools to use, who to ping, when to escalate, and how to keep moving when something changes. Out of office? It finds the right alternative. Unexpected redline? It updates the plan and keeps going. For the first time I can show the thinking process, from drafting to adapting to applying guardrails, and people instantly get it.

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Every tech startup has technical debt, but nobody wants to admit it until it becomes a crisis. Technical debt is basically your company's dirty laundry… Which is all the shortcuts, quick fixes, and temporary solutions you made to move fast that eventually come back to haunt you. I learned this lesson the hard way when I got an email saying that our entire mobile platform would be unsupported in 8 months. That's technical debt coming due, and it is absolutely terrifying. We had to rewrite millions of lines of code while still supporting over 200 customers. It was either do that massive rewrite or watch our platform die. The thing about technical debt is that you can't just ignore it and hope it goes away. You need to give it regular attention and not lose track of the other lanes in your development process. Planned upgrades need to be part of your development routine, not something you only think about when you're forced to. Code and system documentation are extremely important too, even though they're boring and nobody wants to do them. For what it’s worth, AI will definitely play a role here, too. Here's what I learned from going through this crisis: prevention is always better than having to do emergency repairs. But if you do find yourself in a technical debt crisis, use it as an opportunity to elevate your platform instead of just fixing what's broken. Never waste a good crisis. Stay current with your dependencies, monitor what you're building on, and plan for things to break before they actually do. Document everything so that when someone needs to understand how something works, they don't have to reverse-engineer it. Watch for warning signs like: - Aging platforms that no one in your company understands anymore - Declining system performance - Your team's declining ability to innovate because they're too busy maintaining old systems If you ignore technical debt long enough, it will eventually kill your ability to compete in the market.

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