Pay attention to the story, and live a life well examined. A peaceful and thrilling existence.
Pay attention to the story, and live a life well examined. A peaceful and thrilling existence.
2023
source: apple notes
Pay attention to the story, and live a well examined life. A peaceful and thrilling existence.
As tools continue to become more powerful, I must focus on consuming reality. Reality is fuel for our creativity, and engaging with reality makes our experience more salient. We owe it to ourselves to design and adopt technologies that serve our ability to fully experience the world around us.
I need to be active in the world to fuel my creative spirit. My imagination thrives from new inputs, when i’m paying attention to the reality around me to make each moment more salient. This will make my daily life more enjoyable, but it will also be ‘richer’ data for my imagination.
How we apply technology is our lives is becoming increasingly important. This has been true since humans began using technology. However as technologies become more powerful, and permeate our life more deeply, how we design and apply these technologies continues to have a greater impact on human life. Designers and engineers need to focus on building things that are aligned with a lifestyle that truly serves our best quality of life. What that means is up to the individuals. We should focus on designing tools to give humans this control, and humans will need to be opinionated about what the best version of their life looks like.
These days, I try to focus more on inputs than outputs. There is a push and a pull with letting chips fall where they may, and having desired outputs. I’ve found that sometimes we thought we wanted is often not so much, and some of my greatest joys have been things I could not have possibly imagined. But I also think some form of structure is important for me, and as I’ve progressed through life, certain outputs do seem aligned with the life that I’d like to live. It seems true that we fall to the level of our systems. My strategy has been to think deeply about what I value, and what I want, introspection. Then shift focus to building the inputs that align with those things. Outputs can also change, particularly makes sense to have different desired outputs in different stages of your life.
Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself. - Paramahansa Yogananda
I am focused on moving more slowly. Being more methodical and operating through my days with a certain slowness. I have been finding that when I try to force outcomes in the world will is can lead to consistent angst and oftentimes suboptimal outcomes. I’ve found a more playful approach to be more peaceful and more effective.
I’ve found a focus on slowness is also germane with teams building technology. Work methodically to be consistent with the right inputs, do continuous reflection for desired outcomes as new information becomes available, and let the chips fall where they may. (let the score take care of itself - bill walsh). Constantly reflect on if you’re solving the right problem. Avoid the engineers sin of optimizing a part of process that should not have existed in the first place.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - Abraham Lincoln
On teams, working well with others requires an ability to clearly articulate your thinking. I’ve noticed the importance in articulate and useful writing in evangelizing ideas to others. The job of a designer is to go on the spiritual journey of collecting all the inputs, align the group on principles, and orchestrate a collaborative process to build the machine and the machine that makes the machine.
Demos are a critical tool for designers to provide a tangible way to convey ideas, gather feedback, and iterate on designs, fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Protect early ideas and socialize them when you have the necessary components to properly represent the idea. Present your ideas in the context of the problem(s) you’re solving for. Help your audience visualize a better future. Evangelize your work to the group and organization often.
Focus on the customer experience and work backwards from there. Design a solution that delivers that experience, while being pragmatic about constraints. (it’s easy to make a prototype, hard to manufacture: see Elon Musk). Design is the entire thing. Earn the right to do new things. Do less, focus on quality. Do not release two legged stools. Minimum viable complete experiences. Each iteration should be a complete solution. Challenge your idea of what a complete solution is from first principles. Think deeply about the essence of what is fundamental to the experience you’re creating.
Evangelize products to customers. Remind them why they need what you’ve built (and why they may have not known they needed it). When demoing, imminently acknowledge the naysayer, plant the virus of doubt (see Tony Fadell), and present your solution in the context of the purpose that it serves, the problem you’re solving. Be venerable and authentic to the craft and creative process that went into what you’re showing the audience. Avoid scripted explanations, and speak from the heart about your intimate experience with the problem and solution at hand.
Need to be truth seeking when doing research, focus energy to understand and see the world as it actually is (see scout mindset - Julia Galef). Be aware of personal and organizational bias, and actively work to resist its influence on your judgment. Find data that that is high signal for the output you’re trying to achieve. Don’t bring business people into the product process to early, be a steward of organizational outcomes when assessing the right time to engage with broader stakeholders. Be opinionated when presenting early ideas for discussion. Do the work of thinking deeply about the problem and possible paths. Neatly deliver precise insights to begin feedback and discussion with a broader group. There is a burden on the designer to orchestrate the groups creative process, and to facilitate collaboration in a way that keeps you close to agreed upon principles and avoids group think. Methodically invite cross functional teammates into the process as ideas become less fragile. Be truth seeking to refine ideas and solutions as you collaborate and designate a decision maker on the final path forward. (crisp document, messy meeting: see Jeff Bezos).
Group meeting rules:
Present your goals
Have an agenda
Taking care of my health is a critical part of my personal structure. On a day to day, hygiene, moving my body, doing active recovery, drinking water, eating for fuel all get me to a baseline where I have a chance to be creative. Specific things like walking, sauna, coffee, and sunlight are big multipliers for me. On a week to week, intense exercise, cleanse from stimulating technologies, gathering weekly goods and resources, and cleaning environments where I spend my time is important. On the month to month, I try to see a chiropractor and have a massage. On a bi-annual and annual basis, I tend to focus on routinely doing blood work, visiting drs, and doing extended reflection. By committing to these things, I don’t think much about them, and thus unlock more of my time to sit in a mode of creative thinking. Components of our structure can also be creative. When I default to moving my body and exercising, I find myself experiencing those moments as creative moments. Harmony can be the combination of these components of structure and free space. I’m often walking, exercising, in the sauna, or doing active recovery when i am stumble upon moments of clarity, thought connection, and creative thinking. When I work and make things, I’m often burning fuel from these moments of discovery in these other periods of time.
Realizing this has led me to focus on creating data for these moments. I write in notes and docs all day long. Much of it fleeting thoughts that may never amount to any relevance. But over time, these thoughts seem to reveal patterns, and connection to what may have otherwise looked like unrelated thoughts. I have notes for the people I work and collaborate with, I have a daily note for each day, and I have a weekly note that I use to think through each week’s work.
My perspective today is that creating personal data is a good thing if we have consumer technologies that empower the individual to protect and have complete control over their data. One of the more important jobs of AI will be to help us organize our data in ways that are useful to us. Products and services will help us leverage this data to live more fulfilling and productive lives. Consumer technology platforms will be tasked with creating secure ecosystems that allow consumers to protect their data, control over how that data is used, and the ability to take that data elsewhere. Protect it best you may.
Reflecting on my notes from this year as revealed some themes. I find purpose in craftsmanship, service, art. I try to produce more than I consume. Own less, but better-made things. Service to others, gives me purpose and strength. I feel a lot gratitude for my life. I want to spend my energy adding value for others, particularly in the local community around me. I am grateful to be able to move my body each day. I value environments that deliver a real meritocracy, where the best ideas win, and people are rewarded for doing good. A culture and society that encourages people to work together to make things in support of a future they want to see.
Becoming more interesting seems to be less about finding out which type of character you’d like to become, and instead more so about finding out more about the character that you already are. Self discovery and self actualization in search of discovering more about our authentic selves makes us more interesting and further unveils what we have to offer to the world. Our experiences and reality enhance our ability to go deeper and actualize the most authentic version of us, unlocking our potential to positively impact the world around us. Before changing the world, one starts in their own home.
Ambition should not be channeled into pressures to become something specific. It means comparing ourselves to who we were yesterday, who we have the potential to become, and approaching the opportunity to realize self-actualization with a playful mindset. Earnestly following our curiosity adds value to those around us.
2024 is about mastery. I’ll be focused on improving my craft each day, balanced against the core pieces of my life that give me harmony.
2024 is the year of simplification.
2023 collections
Japanese craftsmanship, known as "monozukuri," translates to "making things," and it represents a deeply ingrained commitment to excellence, attention to detail, and continuous improvement.
Local Kitchens - Guest
At Local Kitchens, we start from the guest experience and work backwards. We are a vertically integrated company with limited resources, and that means being very deliberate about what we build and when.
We focus on earning the right to do new things. When creating our roadmaps, we are focused on investing in things that we have a high degree of confidence that will they will be true years from now. We leave whitespace on the roadmap to ensure everything we build meets our quality standard, and make space for iteration. We choose to do less work so we are able to do quality work.
We are a very cross-functional team with a diverse background. This means different people value different things, but we all agree that we are working to serve the guest and create the best experience possible for them. This is our guiding principle when settling internal disputes.
Local Kitchens - Store
A massive part of the Local Kitchens experience are our stores. A core part of our strategy is to build highly visible and assessable retail storefronts to put high quality food on the map. We serve dine-in guests, pickup guests, and delivery drivers in the front of house. We acquire a lot of new guests in these retail locations, and also have returning guest hop between store channels and ordering at home. These insights have informed how we think about how we invest in the stores as core to the service.
We’ve been refining what a Local Kitchen store is, how it feels, and have been designing the in-store experience to be magical.
Local Kitchens - KitchenOS
Software brings leverage to service in a multi brand kitchen by orchestrating high quality, accurate, efficient and timely completion of orders while taking into consideration guest expectations, the physical layout of the kitchen, and the available labor. Kitchen OS acknowledges that before fully adopting robotics, humans and robots will work together in a shared environment.
Kitchen OS reason for being: Local Kitchens Kitchen OS exists to serve our guests high quality food and to optimize the fundamental inputs to a great guest experience. To achieve this goal across our fleet of kitchens, Kitchen OS aims to minimize waste while maximizing menu uptime, enable Kitchen OS users to do their best work while providing a fulfilling experience for these operators, and craft high quality dishes at scale for a profit. Kitchen OS leverages technology. We do this to reduce signal points of failure in our systems, simplify our processes, enable data guided decision making, and to manage the complexities of our business at scale. Our competence is making complex technology easy to use and self-discoverable. We strive to understand traditional and historical processes/systems in the industries we operate in, so that we are able to question, challenge, and reason from first principles to assess if these processes/systems help us achieve our goals, or wether they need to be disrupted. We build our products, features, systems, and processes with empathy. Kitchen OS is built with our kitchen operators to better understand their needs and challenges. Kitchen OS is built and evolves through a culture of prototypes and demos to enable tangible representation, communication and collaboration, rapid iteration and learning, feedback and validation, building momentum and buy-in, and better decision-making. We value simplicity, focus, and quality in our products. Kitchen OS serves a growing, changing, and evolving business; our products and systems are built to last by being built for change. We aim to evangelize Kitchen OS through storytelling to accelerate the Local Kitchen’s mission of serving high quality food in each neighborhood across America.
Values:
Guest Experience
Profit (to engage in commerce, we must turn a profit)
Quality of food and service
Craft
Simplicity
Kitchen operator fulfillment
Our competence is making complex technology easy to use and self-discoverable
Make something where nobody needs to know anything about the technology to love it
Evangelize kitchen OS through storytelling
Retain people by building an environment that makes them not want to leave
Value building for people: intrinsic motivation, rewarding work, valued, embrace moral building and human connection, promote valuing your craft, build fulfilling journeys for our people
Principles:
Build from first principles: We strive to understand traditional and historical processes/systems in the industries we operate in; so that we are able to question, challenge, and reason from first principles to assess if these processes/systems help us achieve our goals, or wether they need to be disrupted.
Build with empathy: Kitchen OS is built with our kitchen operators to better understand their needs and challenges. Kitchen OS is built and evolves through a culture of prototypes and demos to enable tangible representation, communication and collaboration, rapid iteration and learning, feedback and validation, building momentum and buy-in, and better decision-making.
Kitchen OS is malleable: Kitchen OS serves a growing, changing, and evolving business; our products and systems are built to last by being built for change.
Motivate with carrots, not sticks: Provide a fulfilling experience for operators. We value craftsmanship, quality, and enable Kitchen OS users to do their best work. Retain people by building an environment that makes them not want to leave.
Simplify everything: Our competence is making complex technology easy to use and self-discoverable. Delete the part or process step (if you’re not adding back 10% of the things you’ve deleted, you’re not deleting enough)
Kitchen OS leverages technology: Reduce signal points of failure in our systems, simplify our processes, enable data guided decision making, and manage the complexities of our business at scale.
Wisdom of the kitchens: have trust in kitchenOS operators by giving them quality, timely, and easy to access information to maximize the outcomes of their decision making. Be precise about giving data and information specific to function, role, and persona.
Accessibility to information: Minimize screen and information discovery for users in the kitchen to make information accessible in live service.
Flexible: KitchenOS is not rigid and is built to account for the inconsistencies of operating in live service kitchens.
Automate: optimize then automate repeat and superfluous tasks.
Goals:
Maximize guest experience
Maximize efficiency of our kitchens
Minimize waste
Maximize menu uptime
Retain people
Local Kitchens - Kitchen Display System
Kitchen Display Systems are used by kitchens to receive guest orders. There will be a different iterations of the kitchen display system, but today it is a 2D interface about the cooking stations in the kitchen. Cooks use kitchen display systems to see orders coming into the kitchen, and which items to cook first. Overtime, I believe robotics (prep), contextual computers (service), and VR (training) will become a larger part of how we prepare food in commercial kitchens.
Local Kitchens - Recipe tools
Local Kitchens is a restaurant and technology company that provides a wide range of dishes in each of its kitchens, with no two kitchens having the exact same dish SKUs. At the time of writing (May 2023), Chipotle serves approximately a dozen dishes with a total of 53 ingredient SKUs, while Local Kitchens serves over 100 dishes in each kitchen with more than 250 ingredient SKUs. To add to the complexity, our assortment rotates over time, meaning dishes and ingredient SKUs come and go from our kitchens regularly. As a result, it is unrealistic to expect our cooks to remember all of our dishes to 5 star specifications, adding risk to executing these dishes at a high quality across a scaling fleet of kitchens.
One potential approach to improving the execution quality and predictability of Local Kitchens is to reduce the number of dishes in our restaurants. Additionally, we could settle on a more fixed selection, reducing the number of dish swaps and changes that occur in our restaurants. However, both of these options conflict with our unique value proposition to our guests: a vast selection of dishes across a wide range of cuisines, with a rotating assortment to keep the menu fresh. Furthermore, these approaches do not align with our business goals of utilizing a rotating assortment to retain and acquire guests, while also using a flexible assortment to tailor menus to specific locations and communities as we gain a better understanding of location-specific menu gaps and guest preferences.
In order to support this business model, we must develop tools that can manage these complexities and improve the likelihood that our cooks are serving high-quality food to our guests in a scalable and predictable manner.
Building recipe tools comes with many constraints. We needed to design a solution that did not add work for culinary operators, and was compatible with the data entry they were already doing for recipe management. Because we are a vertically integrated company, designing to meet these needs is easier.
Peek
Peek is a live service tool that provides core dish information, including a final image, to fill knowledge gaps. It's oriented towards both experienced and inexperienced cooks, giving them access to the most critical recipe data in a more lightweight feature. Unlike physical build cards, Peek can be more accurate/up-to-date, have a final dish picture, and show all ingredients in the order they're used, alongside each ingredient's unit of measure or tool.
Local Kitchens - CoPilot
Copilot is a training tool that teaches each dish. It should cover the full level of detail that culinary experts want to convey to teach an entire dish to spec. However, this can be an overwhelming amount of information in certain use cases. Despite this, cooks still want to be able to leverage it in live service, which is why having an intelligent Copilot and changing recipes from the guest order makes it far more usable and useful in live service.
Local Kitchens - ETAs
Worked closely this year with a fellow engineer Sai Nadendla on building a new foundation for ETAs at Local Kitchens. Design and Engineering created a long term plan to build an ETA model that best served Local Kitchens and our guests.
We began with the guest experience and worked backward. We knew we wanted to prioritize by provider/channel, to be able to dynamically update real time etas across services and touchpoints, and leverage ETAs for kitchen orchestration. Sai began a year long effort to begin articulating a vision for what a new ML powered ETA model could look like.
We spent some time considering where in the kitchen we needed to reduce lossy data, where we needed to manufacture additional data, and began adjusting kitchen workflows to align with these goals. Then, Sai began prototyping and training the new ETA model alongside our existing one. Long story short, within a quarter we had a model we were confident was better than our existing ones, so we began testing it in production at a few kitchens. Over the course of a few months, we rolled the new model our across our locations.
The next phase in the plan was to leverage a more accurate and powerful ETA model across our guest touchpoints. We spent time analyzing what the best guest ETA experience looked like. Where do guests want real time ETAs? Do different guests in different situations want a different ETA experience? Where do guests ETA needs differ? We did both qualitative and quantitive research.
We’ve started designing this vision to land in our product experiences throughout 2024.
Local Kitchens - Alert widget
We had a long list of notifications that were relevant to kitchen operators during service. We needed a way to surface these alerts to operators while ensuring we didn’t disrupt kitchen workflows. So we build an alert widget, inspired with similar properties as Apple’s dynamic island.
Alerts can range from mission critical to playful gamification. Widgets are contextual to the situation, and are guided to help you resolve any immediate issues.
Local Kitchens - Next
Exploring more contextual and mobile based tools for kitchen operators in live service. We built an internal prototype of a tool that is a feed of tasks. Follow up on specific tasks that are taking place with correct team member, our internal chatbot, or create issues that will be triaged by centralized support resources.
Local Kitchens - Kitchen operator retention
Fulfillment → Retention: “As the janitor famously answered in 1962 when president Kennedy asked him what he did for NASA, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
Speaking and working alongside operators made it clear that technology is not seen in the kitchens as only a useful tool. It can be a surveillance tool, giving you the stick when you make mistakes and serving as a big brother watching over your every move. When i began focusing on building KitchenOS with the team, we wanted to start from principles that made it feel like technology in our kitchens was there to serve operators, not the other way around. For the individual we asked how we can promote a culture of craftsmanship, autonomy, community/Team, upward mobility (transparent leveling, inspire and track progress as you work, I’m able to say what my goals are, know what is required of me to get to the next level, I feel like I have a path of upward mobility, align my experience with my goals). Ultimately, we wanted technology to help transcend the individual to give kitchen operators a sense of purpose, a part of a shared mission that is bigger than themselves.
We also focused on making our kitchens a joyful place to be. Kitchen culture is special and we like to focus on making it a fun place to spend time. A place full of joy, laughs, craft, and delight. We believe this will lead to higher food quality. Here is a prototype from earlier this year where music plays when the team moves to the top of the kitchen level competition leaderboard.
Local Kitchens - Menu Boards
We began rolling out menu boards across our locations. The goal of the menu boards is to help guests discover the menu. The menu board browsing experience supplements the kiosk ordering experience. A guest should be able to completely discover the menu and order what they’d like all on the kiosk, but the menu boards have the potential to help guests grok the range and breadth of the menu more quickly and effortlessly, and speed up their kiosk ordering session. This not only improves a guest’s in-store experience, but keeps kiosk queues shorter for other guests.
Local Kitchens - Storytelling
Guests love the food at Local Kitchens when they try it, but our unique concept leaves them wondering where recipes came from. We have a unique business, and we have a range of partnerships we offer to food creators. We needed to find ways to help our guests understand the difference between menu items and partnerships when they wanted to know, and an opportunity to lean into brand IP where it carried weight.
Additionally, the food creators that participate in our curated marketplace are special, and we have a a unique opportunity to help guests feel a deeper connection with their food, and the people who created it.
We focused on not disrupting transactional journeys, but instead sprinkle the most important components of story’s into the product experience where it mattered most.
Local Kitchens - Media and merchandising
Local Kitchens has a unique ability to feature content in our product experiences. In turn, we’ve oriented around an art direction that allows content to shine. We protect content at all costs, remove opinionated color in our digital applications, show high quality content, alternative content, and have designed an entire internal merchandising process to ensure all the food on our platform goes through a consistent and robust content creation process. We designed our content process to allow top quality content and consistency across 3rd part dishes, co-developed dishes, and LK exclusives. We make kitchen and guest facing content production a core part of culinary development in our test kitchen reach our merchandising potential. This is a core advantage of our vertical integration.
Local Kitchens - Rewards
Guests love Local Kitchens, not our rewards program. Loyalty rewards are a common tool for businesses to deepen their relationship with their customers. In my opinion, most rewards programs are in service to a businesses goals rather than enhancing the customer experience. I’m embarrassed to admit that we fell into this category. Thankfully, we identified this mistake and designed a new program that is focused on adding value to our guests, everything else secondary. We knew for this to be the case, the program had to be simple. We had conflicting offers, lots of nuanced redemption requirements, all riddled with bugs. We wanted to focus our initial rewards products on adding value for our loyal guests as opposed to influencing behavior or driving activation.
We landed on a new program, spend $150 get $10 back, auto applied at checkout. Removing points from our rewards avoids a guest having to learn our rewards conversions and is more aligned with the expectation that our guests want to have with our service, simple and low effort. We combined competing offers into cash to avoid errors upon redemption. Finally, we accepted the tradeoffs and decided to make Local Kitchens rewards auto-applied when they are unlocked. We have guests who would appreciate having the extra flexibility, but think this design decision is most aligned with the service our guests are asking for. We designed every single touchpoint across the service for the new rewards experience, and we’ll be rolling our our new rewards foundation out in early 2024.
Local Kitchens - Cart and Checkout
When asking what we needed to accomplish to do something new, improving our cart and checkout experience came to the top of the list.
Local Kitchens - Guest authentication
We overhauled the experience for guest authentication across channels, and designed new technical foundation for our auth system that is aligned with were we are headed in the coming years.
Local Kitchens - Kiosk
Guests ordering at Local Kitchens can order on our app, on our website, or in our stores. When ordering in our stores, we do not have cashiers or wait staff to take orders. Guests use in-store displays, the physical store, and greeting staff to learn more about our food, then use kiosks to place their order.
Local Kitchens builds stores in high traffic retail locations, so our stores are a big source of guest acquisition. This means we have a lot of our 1st time guests experiencing Local Kitchens in our retail locations for their first visit. After, many guests also adopt our app and become multi-channel guests oscillating between ordering in our stores and on our app. While there area a lot of compelling reasons to consume our app as the primary interface for our service, it’s clear to us that guests still value coming into our stores to order from time to time, even when they have the app. I observe this to be particularly true when dining with a partner, friends, family, and groups. For example, a couple may come to Local Kitchens on a date, discover and socialize the menu together using the physical retail space and digital menus, and then proceed to the kiosk where they may place their order together or separately.
We launched a version of the Local Kitchens kiosk at our earliest locations in the bay area. Over the course of our first 10 kitchens or so, we designed and built a second iteration of the in-store ordering kiosk. One part of this 2nd iteration was adding menu boards to help discover the menu before starting a kiosk session. We’ve learned a lot since then, and are now designing our 3rd version of the Local Kitchens in-store experience to make it far more simple and improve from our learnings of the previous version. This is a core focus on Q1 2024.
Protocols
Protocols continue to become more relevant in the world. Protocols are not new to the internet. Email is built on Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was a protocol introduced in 1982, and is still a core part of society today. The protocol for email is a public good, and individuals and groups are able to build clients and services on top of this shared infrastructure. Prosperity and freedom in the digital age will require individual control over personal data, and the ability for people to take it with them from service to service. Banking, communication, health, and so on.
Global and local
Two things can be true at once. It is good for the world to trade and share with eachother. On a long enough time scale, we should be moving towards shared visions for tuture
Cotton
Cotton is the fabric of the year. I’ve also been making some custom clothes at Al’s.
Interfaces
Interfaces are a core differentiator. This is especially true to protocols and services that are reaching greater maturity in the market.
Bitcoin
https://damus.io/note1h64gfn4wryx3dvf6ygugzzhw899g6rds09suv8sfj24dk4ckxn2q6xem5p
A special and honorable life lived.
Wonderful essay.
Great website.
Making bitcoin more accessible.
Elite bitcoin dashboard.
A new bitcoin hardware wallet.
A well designed ethereum wallet.
A new hardware form factor that i’ll be experimenting with in 2024.
Available in us on feb 2. Introduction to visionOS operating system, and Apple’s first spatial computer. I’m excited to experiment and play with it. Imagine it could have big initial use cases in education, training, creating
A delightful addition to the iPhone.
Wright Brothers
An inspiring journey.
Molecule of More
A frequently revisited book, and reminder that understanding our biology is critical to understanding how we feel and act.
A real problem, i’m removing it from my life where i can.
An important entrepreneur trying to avoid plastic taking down our civilization.
An opinionated design group.
An exciting protocol.
A well designed take on backyard homes.
A relic of stories from a true craftsman.
Putting great food on the map with the greatest retail food technology company in the world.
Robinhood
Interface and consumer experience as a moat.
Cash App
Relevant brand in a crowded space, also winning with good interface / experience. Appreciate focus on bitcoin and excited to see how functional the bitkey integration are.
Block
A company with potential to become a ‘cool bank’. Culturally relevant, important leadership, creating financial tools for the next generation of artists, eco systems of well made technology products, and investing in the future of bitcoin.
PP Editorial New
I love this font. As one example, Multi app has done a beautiful job using it.
Poolsuite
Cool brand, authentic.
Apple Health
Surfline
Apple Watch Ultra
Pleasantly surprised. Quality product and reduces my phone usage.
Apple Wallet and Apple Pay
Use them everyday, and would be frustrated to go to a world without.
There will be Blood
My favorite movie right now.
Starship
Opening the gateway to exploring the cosmos.
Starlink
Changing the world by giving everyone internet connectivity everywhere. One of the most important technology products taking place, and will be an unbelievable business.
A Hunter Gatherer’s guide to the 21st century
A theme that is becoming more important everyday. Human body is evolving at a much slower pace than the world around us.
Learning has been fun. Focused on swift in 2024.
Fun site.
Walt Disney
Visualizing plans.
Van Man
I like the products.
Sol Scents
Thumbs up.
Grounded athlete
Good quality, made in Iowa.
Organic cottons
My favorite basics.
iPhone 14 Pro
Been a good piece of hardware. Dynamic island is a good.
Macbook Pro
A staple to my life. Love working on my mac.
Rains Backpack
Solid everyday backpack. Only nerds wear backpacks.
Apple Maps
I use maps all the time, and like apple maps.
Apple Notes
One of my most used products, everyday. Elite.
Apple Music
Started trying apple music this year, good app. Like simplicity and artwork.
Apple Photos
An under rated apple app.
ChatGPT
Blasted onto the scene this year, have been using daily and find value.
Lyft
The best human rideshare app in the bay area right now.
Cron
I like iCal and google cal, but cron has some nice subtleties, and use it as my primary calendar right now.
Cleanshot
Elite.
Figma
The canvas where I work.
Xcode
Intuitive.
Apple Mail
Simple and does the job. Primary mail client for me right now, and has been for a long time.
Oura
Been wearing one for many years, and am still enjoying it + finding value.
Apple Books
My favorite books app.
Google Docs
Most used writing tool within an organization.
Safari
A great browser.
Arc
An interesting new take on the browser. Excited for their attempt at revolutionizing the computer, rooting for them.
One Medical
A nice service.
Slack
Still enjoy and would not want to have to use teams. Still underrated, but feels like they’ve lost the culture and ethos that was unique to them when Stewart was driving the ship.
Waymo
Experiencing fully autonomous car rides has me convinced it will deliver on it’s promise to positively revolutionize transportation.
Tesla
Executing. Excited for the consumer energy business to continue to manifest.
SpaceX
Likely the most competent institution in the history of the world.
I’ve always been particular about the clothes I’ve worn, and have enjoyed the journey learning more about my desired style as an adult, particularly in the environments where I spend the most time. I have a fairly simple wardrobe, and wear a lot of black to work, with my sandals. Enjoying creating some new stuff.
Mountain Valley
My favorite water.
The Mission
Where I spent the most time working this year.
Sightglass
Favorite coffee shop in the mission.
375 Alabama
The office I spent the most time at this year.
Still in the Christmas spirit
01/05/2023
Lunch on Polk
01/07/2023
Peacock Gap in February
02/02/2023
The Mission
02/09/2023
Kyle scored game winner in OT
02/18/2023
Walking to a meeting
03/29/2023
Visiting Andy and LK HQ LA
04/08/2023
At the park
04/23/2023
LK Hackathon
05/12/2023
An evening at 375 Alabama
06/29/2023
Mom in San Francisco
Celebrating Grandma Pfeiffer
06/12/2023
Afternoon round at Cal Club
06/25/2023
LK HQ LA
04/17/2023
Mission
06/14/2023
Grabbing a coffee
06/17/2023
Krugel
07/09/2023
Hong Kong
10/6/2023
Signapore
10/12/2023
Mark and Debra visit SF
welcome C-unit
Walking to work
12/04/2023
A night on the town
12/05/2023
Morning round in the Presidio
12/09/2023
Morning
12/12/2023
Got my bread in the Mission
12/15/2023
Morning in SF
12/18/2023
Night at Alabama St.
12/21/2023
Home for Christmas, Andy flying others this Christmas
12/24/2023
On a walk
12/30/2023
2024
Getting outside more.
Swift
Growing up, I spent so much time thinking about the future. This year, i’m going to spend more time learning about the past, starting with US history.
Health technologies. How is technology going to level up our ability to take better care of ourselves, unlock our athletic potential, and increase the quality of our everyday lives? What are some of the technologies that will help us achieve this in the short term? Medium term? What are the technologies that help us connect more deeply with the natural world? (think surfline, all trails, starlink)
Further manifestation of the ability for individual home owners and families to vertically integrate their households to live independently from the grid, using consumer energy technologies like solar roof, battery storage, and vehicle charging ports.
Continuous and steady evolution in human computer interface, and the way we engage with technology. Will be exciting to experiment with new hardware products.
When thinking about people I’ve admired over the years, a common thread is that of multidimensionality.
Rooting to see further individual empowerment and decentralization through consumer technologies. Apple hardware, bitkey hardware wallet, nostr, tesla energy stack are in the freedom stack for 2024.
Our ability to write will become even more useful as we get closer to programing computers with words. Any a lot of other reasons.
Storytelling mediums
Thinking more this year about my dream to design a hotel and home. Will write more about the plans i’ve got so far. Hint: i’m building an earthship.
LLMs local to device will become in higher demand, Apple has been getting ready for this moment for decades.
First principles
Daily notes
serve others
it’s the good ole days
be humble
practice storytelling
listen to learn, not to respond
compete against yourself
calm is contagious
share your work
simplify
start small
have craftsmanship
be pragmatic
balance efficiency and optimization with wandering and exploration
am i trying to be an important person, or am i trying to accomplish important things? do you care about credit or do you care about getting things done? do you care about accomplishments, or do you care about impact? to be or to do.
if you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices. if you want to be excellent, make excellent choices
put your day up for review everyday
listen more than you talk
tolerant with others, strict with yourself
focus on what you can control. will i have a chance coach? is this up to me?
never in a hurry, never worried, never desperate, never stopping short.
envision a master practicing an exceedingly difficult craft: making it look effortless. no strain, no struggle, so relaxed, no exertion or worry, just one clean movement after another
tested in the crucible of adversity, forged in the furnace of trial
Lucas