Daily Grind: Soham-gate, Power Law, and Bad Ideas
A short newsletter to start your day: One startup news headline, one page from a great book, and one question to ponder and journal on
Hello!
Welcome to The Daily Grind: an experiment I’m starting on the Damn Gravity newsletter.
Reflecting on the types of newsletters I read most often, they follow three themes:
Timely news on topics I care about (particularly startups/tech)
Great writing
Philosophical, but in a practical sense
There are many newsletters in each of these buckets, but very few that deliver all three. So that’s what we’re doing here.
The Daily Grind will be a short weekday newsletter to help you kickstart your day. You will get:
One news headline from startup/tech world
One page of a great book (~200 words)
One question to consider and maybe journal on
I was also inspired by the Mixergy podcast episode where Andrew Warner interviews Tim Huelskamp, founder of 1440 Media, the daily fact-based newsletter.
(It’s fun when your worlds collide. Andrew, of course, was Damn Gravity’s first author, and I will be interviewing Tim, alongside Mike Shannon, at Mike’s book launch event on July 22.)
Enough preamble! Thanks for reading. Let’s get into The Daily Grind.
📰 News: Soham-gate
In the early hours of July 2, Mixpanel and Playground.ai founder Suhail Doshi (@Suhail) posted this PSA on X:
After posting, Suhail immediately started to receive messages from founder friends who had recently hired or interviewed Soham Parekh.
And then the floodgates opened:
My favorite reply to this story is from Roy Lee, the 20-something founder of Cluely, the “cheating” AI platform that raised $15 million from a16z
Soham reportely crushes his engineering interviews. What are the chances he uses Cluely’s invisible AI assistant? I’d say pretty, pretay, pretttaayyyy good.
This guy seems to be everywhere, crushing engineering interviews and taking any job he can. Is he single-handely propping up Silicon Valley?
So is Soham just a bad actor, or is he a symptom of a larger problem?
We’ve all heard stories about people holding multiple jobs in the age of remote work, but Soham has seemed to perfect it: creating multiple profiles of himself, applying to every job he can, nailing interviews, and holding jobs long enough to get paid.
And he is not alone.
Turner Novak, an investor and podcast host, shared a story from a friend who runs a large engineering team. They have dealt with people like Soham before: They land every job they can, then farm out the work to cheaper labor:
There is even an entire Reddit community, with 438,000 members, dedicated to working multiple remote jobs. It’s called r/overemployed:
My only question now is… which startup is going to step up and hire this guy for real? Apparently he already has an offer:
Packy McCormick literally just wrote a thesis on the age of differentiation: essentially, the thing that matters MOST today is standing out. It doesn’t matter if you cheat, lie, and scam your way to differentiation, as long as you achieve it.
Beyond the technological implications of Soham-gate (is he really an AI agent?), what’s most interesting is what it says about today’s online culture.
Robert Greene’s #6 Law of Power is undefeated: Court attention at all costs.
📚 One Great Page: The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
I have been enjoying The Power Law, a history of Venture Capital by Sebastian Mallaby. It’s full of great stories and insight into the world of tech.
This section, from Chapter 12, recounts the start of Andreessen Horowitz and their knack for flair. This bit of history puts the current moment into context—attention is everything, and a16z knows it.
As Andreessen and Horowitz cheerfully admitted, brazen PR was a large part of their strategy. Horowitz was something of a Paul Graham figure, but on a grander scale: a computer scientist turned entrepreneur who wrote a blog on business and life that attracted a cult following. Andreessen, for his part, had an even stronger brand, and he and Horowitz were keen to exploit it. Known as the genius behind Netscape, memorable for his six-foot-five-inch frame and towering bald skull, Andreessen juggled ideas at intoxicating speed, nailing his conclusions with a rat-a-tat-tat of stories, facts, and numbers. Around the launch of his new venture firm, Andreessen appeared on the cover of Fortune and sat for an hourlong television interview. "Our claim to fame is 'by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,'" he declared confidently.
Of course, Andreessen's pitch was less original than he pretended.
Copyright 2022 by Sebastian Mallaby.
❓One Great Question: “What’s a cool thing that you think an investor wouldn’t let you do?”
Inspired by Andrew Warner’s interview with Tim Huelskamp, CEO of 1440. Tim’s company is essentially boostrapped (with a bit of revenue-based financing), which means 1440 can take bets that venture-backed companies could not.
So Andrew asked Tim: “What’s a cool thing that you think an investor wouldn’t let you do?”
I won’t spoil Tim’s answer (listen below), but the more important thing is YOUR answer:
What is something you think is awesome, that you’d love to do, that other people say is a bad idea?
And what’s stopping you from trying it anyway?
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback
That’s it for the very first Daily Grind! I’d love to hear what you think of this new format. Take the poll below and reply with any feedback or ideas.
I will NOT send out a Daily Grind tomorrow (July 4), so I will talk to y’all again next week. Stay safe and well-read out there.
Cheers,
Ben