🤖 AI Tactic

Personality Profiles, Instantly

If you, like me, are interested in personality tests, you’ll enjoy today’s prompt example. While I know personality tests are basically junk science, I like them in the way that some people like horoscopes. Obviously, they’re an entertaining way to seek self-knowledge. And as long as people see themselves in their results, you can use them to reason about people.

The trouble is that these tests can be really expensive. To do a battery of tests that I consider interesting (MBTI, OCEAN, Color Code, Clifton, Enneagram, Basadur, HBDI, VIA, Instinctive Drives, SVI), the cost for the base tests is $500. If you want a more thorough test, more detailed results, or a facilitator to help you understand the results, it gets much more expensive.

So let’s get into the prompt:

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⚡️ Execution Insight

Do One Thing

I’ve frequently heard an apocryphal story about Peter Thiel and his monomaniacal focus at PayPal. Whether or not you agree with his politics, Thiel basically hasn’t missed in business between PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Founders Fund, etc.

In Zero to One, Thiel remarked, “The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing (emphasis by Rahul). Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict … internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all.”

Here’s how Keith Rabois, current VC and former EVP at PayPal, recounts it:

It’s often very difficult for political or practical reasons to simply do one thing. But my acquaintance Claire Podulka put a finer point on this in an article for Chief of Staff Network:

1. When we say priorities, we mean that we don't have a clear vision.

2. When we say priorities, we also mean that we're scared to make a hard trade-off.

3. Finally, when we say priorities, we could also have fallen into the habit of busy-ness.

Understand which driver is causing you to cling to multiple priorities and address it at the source. Focus breeds excellence. Do one thing.

🧠 Curiosity Corner

Windsurf Acquisition Drama

Windsurf is an AI code editor that was going to be acquired by OpenAI. In a dramatic about-face, 49% of the company will be acquired by Google instead.

The founders and some of the staff will go to Google. This story bummed me out because one of the core promises of working at a startup is that, in the success case, everyone gets rich together. If that social contract no longer exists, people will become much more mercenary and startups will struggle for talent in the long run.

But in another twist, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin has agreed to buy the rest of Windsurf. I’m not sure if this is “all’s well that ends well” or a more troubling sign of things to come for startup employees.

(read more here if you can’t see the X embed)

💼 Job Board

Making stacks in marketing & sales

Here are the 3 most interesting remote job openings I’ve seen this week:

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That’s it for this week.

-Rahul from The DesAI Digest

P.S. Reply back to this email with a business challenge you’re facing! I’d love to help.

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