Lead local meetups, bring builders together, and partner with calude's team.
Build and lead the Claude community in your city. Host local events, bring builders together, and partner with Anthropic to shape the future of Claude.
Open to any background, anywhere in the world
Apply here.
The program provides credits, priority support, and production-ready infrastructure so startups can focus fully on building.
Selected startups get:
If you are a startup building with AI, apply here.
Anthropic is providing self-paced courses of around 1-2 hours each, which provides official certificate upon course completion.
Courses available for Free:
1) Infrastructure
2) Consumer
3) Crypto
4) Enterprise fintech
5) American Dynamism
Introducing Solidus, our latest Construction Website Template. With 14 ready-made pages and 35 flexible sections, it gives you everything you need to present your projects, services, and expertise in a clean and professional way.
Download now: https://uihut.com/designs/27532
What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty.
And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.
One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.
The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math.
What else you can get:
We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That's true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy extreme. Startups have a weekly growth goal before they really have any strong idea about what they want to build.
In the first few weeks of a startup's life, the founders really need to figure out what they're doing and why. Then they need to build a product some users really love. Only after that they should focus on growth above all else.
A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with 'growth hacking'. That sort of works-at least, it will fool investors for a while until they start digging into retention numbers-but eventually the music stops.
I think the right initial metric is "do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?" Until that's a "yes", founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.
The very best technology companies sometimes take awhile to figure out exactly what they're doing, but when they do, they usually pass that binary test before turning all their energy to growth. It's the critical ingredient for companies that do really well, and if you don't figure it out, no amount of growth hacking will make you into a great company.
As a side note, startups that don't first figure out a product some users love also seem to rarely develop the sense of mission that the best companies have.
“The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.”
Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”:
Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff.
The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore:
“In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.”
As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization:
“The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.”
He continues:
“You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.”
Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.
You can get free premium plans in India as per below details:
Hey guys! I'm a fellow startup founder and an aspiring podcaster. I'm no Nikhil Kamath or Raj Shamani but talking to people is my passion and I decided to cultivate my love for this and start my own show called 'Conversations Amplified'. I really want to make an impact with my podcast and help twenty something year olds like myself with words of wisdom and impactful conversations with industry leaders. Couldn't think of a better community to ask for some feedback.
Anyways, I cold emailed Ritesh Agarwal last month and his team invited me over to Gurgaon to record a quick podcast with him. We spoke about the rebranding from Oravel to Prism, where Ritesh sees Prism heading and the Indian startup environment
I'd love to hear some feedback on this and how I can improve the next time. I hope you enjoy it and take away some valuable insights as much as I enjoyed talking to him.
