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Field notes & essays

Year reviews, conversations with founders, and early-career lessons that still apply.

19 posts

2025

  1. Ten years of building with AI: 2015 to 2025

2023

  1. 2023: the year the ceiling came off

2020

  1. Tim Draper's 'Hero Mindset' - what it means after two years of watching it work
  2. The EIR model: what it is, how to use it, and when to leave

2019

  1. The decade in AI: what actually changed between 2010 and 2019
  2. What Zillion Pitches taught me about building with AI
  3. Aaron Levie on building Box: the distribution insight nobody talks about
  4. Tony Hsieh on culture: notes from a Draper session
  5. What Phil Libin talked about - and why product longevity is harder than product growth

2018

  1. NLP in 2018: mostly heuristics with a transformer on top
  2. What Biz Stone talked about - and why it stuck
  3. Draper University: what it looks like from the inside
  4. San Francisco, 2018: What the City Taught Me About AI That No Conference Could

2017

  1. Deep Learning Became Boring - and That's the Most Important Thing That Happened This Year

2016

  1. TensorFlow 0.x: First Impressions From Someone Who Had No Idea What a Computation Graph Was

2015

  1. The Year I Stopped Being Afraid of Machine Learning
  2. Why I Rewrote My MSc Thesis Project Three Times
  3. Understanding Backpropagation Without the Math Degree
  4. My First scikit-learn Classifier and Everything I Got Wrong