Hacker News: garrickvanburen

New comment by garrickvanburen in "The worst job interview I ever had"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:34:17 +0000

My worst job interview ever - in-house creative team at telecom company in downtown Chicago.

I walk into a darkened cubicle farm, down to the only lit corner office for a 'lunch interview'.

Interviewer is sitting at their desk eating a hot pocket on a paper plate.

Didn't even offer me any.

First interview I walked out of.

Not the last.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:54:23 +0000

I agree. We don't need a nondeterministic 10quadrillion vector model. We need an deterministic expert on our narrow business. Something small, that can be run on the 2026 version of the spare PC under the CTOs desk.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "He Lost It at the Movies"

garrickvanburen — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:54:09 +0000

I think Dan Olson and Folding Ideas is doing a fantastic job of bringing thoughtful criticism to all kinds of modern media, most recently Mr. Beast Games.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyNtlmLB73-7gtlBz00XOQQ

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now"

garrickvanburen — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:25:35 +0000

Agreed. Also, as every media organization is free to make editorial decisions on both what they cover and how they cover it, left/right is often far too simplistic and vague to actually reverse engineer a media orgs bias.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

garrickvanburen — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:23:48 +0000

I agree.

Between: more efficient models - tuned for the task at hand, the ability to run those models in-house, or even at the edges, plus Google and Microsoft are well positioned to stay ambivalent as they’ve got lots of products to sell and whether or not LLMs are part of the portfolio mix is completely dependent on enterprise customer demand.

Anthropic/OpenAI have a number of aggressive downward pressures on their pricing.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for two-sided marketplace?"

garrickvanburen — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:15:54 +0000

it's a great reminder that Uber wasn't a 2-sided marketplace to begin with, just an on-demand black car service, and Travis drove early on. The marketplace model came later, copying Lyft, more as a low-cost expansion strategy than a business model.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?"

garrickvanburen — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:13:12 +0000

This. Stated another way, you need to start by either: fulfilling existing demand yourself....or being the demand yourself.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Claude Design"

garrickvanburen — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:33:32 +0000

My default position: If an LLM can create it, we probably don't actually need it.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:29:53 +0000

I agree, and a willingness to experience failure as soon as possible has always been a competitive advantage.

If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

garrickvanburen — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:41:55 +0000

https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:32:11 +0000

I flip this around.

Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:30:38 +0000

“The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” - Peter Drucker

I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:15:20 +0000

Considering: - Anthropic decides how much a token is worth. - Users have no visibility or ability to control in how many tokens a given response will burn.

This is the only expected answer. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

New comment by garrickvanburen in "The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it"

garrickvanburen — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:22:58 +0000

Based on my math, taking development in-house doesn’t make sense until we’re talking >$5K/mn.

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-72-vibe-code...

Strategic Leadership Is Lacking, Not Trust

garrickvanburen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:13:46 +0000

Article URL: https://garrickvanburen.com/strategic-leadership-is-lacking-not-trust/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433979

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Vibe-Code vs. Buy for B2B SaaS in 2026

garrickvanburen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:51:07 +0000

Article URL: https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-72-vibe-code-vs-buy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47417396

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by garrickvanburen in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

garrickvanburen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:50:29 +0000

I'm reminded of the original Agile joke, "software you don't want in 30days or less." today it's "software you don't want in 5days or less."

New comment by garrickvanburen in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

garrickvanburen — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:46:07 +0000

The most hyped use cases for AI/LLM make me wonder, "why are we doing this activity to begin with? We could just not."

The End of Cargo Culting Startup Accelerators

garrickvanburen — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:59:01 +0000

Article URL: https://garrickvanburen.com/end-of-accelerators/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041965

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by garrickvanburen in "Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)"

garrickvanburen — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:38:54 +0000

If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.