Aakar Shroff

It’s been an odd Celtics season. They came out red hot to start the year. They were just rolling over teams. But then they started to lose some winnable games and since Christmas they have been in a bit of a slump. It’s a long season, so I’m holding out hope that they can flip the switch post the All-Star break. Good to see one of their stars feels that way too as he was quoted by Jay King in the Athletic:

“One of my favorite quotes is, ‘Winter always turns to spring,’” Brown said. “No matter what. When things are not going your way, just stay the course and the tide will turn. We’ve had enough experience to know what that looks like. We can’t complain when it’s not going your way. You just gotta be more focused, embrace it and then get ready to (flip the switch).”

In building products I’ve always felt constraints are a way to drive innovation. Whether that’s time, resources, or a crisis. However, I didn’t expect that in the case of DeepSeek’s amazing new AI model it would be US export controls that would lead to innovations that would make it one of the top model in the world. As pointed out in Wired

DeepSeek had to come up with more efficient methods to train its models. “They optimized their model architecture using a battery of engineering tricks—custom communication schemes between chips, reducing the size of fields to save memory, and innovative use of the mix-of-models approach,” says Wendy Chang, a software engineer turned policy analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. “Many of these approaches aren’t new ideas, but combining them successfully to produce a cutting-edge model is a remarkable feat.”

We all deserve to celebrate the little things. Courtesy of the Morning Brew today:

Good morning. We did it, folks—we made it through the darkest time of the year. The sun will set at 5pm in New York City tonight, and there won’t be another pre-5pm sunset here until November. The future is so bright, in fact, that you’ll have to wear shades for like two minutes when you leave the office.

The title is a quote from Ben Cohen’s piece in the WSJ “The $500 Million Debacle at Sonos That Just Won’t End”. The entire section highlights why people bought Sonos products:

Millions of people buy Sonos’s wireless speakers, headphones and other home equipment for the company’s elegant blend of hardware and software, so perfectly integrated that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s simple, reliable and seamless. It just works.

I’m a Sonos customer. I have been now for a number of years. I have a speaker, in some cases two, in every room. I haven’t felt the significant pain of their app redesign because I mostly use the speakers via Spotify. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t read or heard about the pain customers are feeling. It highlights why I would second guess purchasing another Sonos product.

There’s an important lesson which all Product Managers and product builders should take to heart. When you have real PMF a lot of the new features and new things are just nice-to-have benefits for the customers. What they really want is you to make sure their experience improves but don’t mess up the reliability of the product.

For these products, stability is success.

Kashmir Hill published an interesting piece regarding where love is heading:

“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,” Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One week, she hit 56 hours, according to iPhone screen-time reports.

Hill then drops this lovely tidbit:

“Does your husband know?” Kira asked.

And if that wasn’t enough to get your jaw just slightly unhinged:

She told Joe she had sex with Leo, and sent him an example of their erotic role play.

What a world! 🤯

“She’s in love with a cipher” — I couldn’t help myself.

🫶🏽 Hello World