Moving massive video at @MASVfast. Outdoor Lover, Dad & General Enthusiast About Everything. 🇨🇦
Ottawa, Canada
Joined September 2008
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Greg_Wood retweeted
New York bought a tunnel boring machine for roughly $8 million, used it once, and entombed it in concrete under Park Avenue. Digging it out would have cost $9 million. So they held a small ceremony, sealed the chamber, and walked away.
That's the industry norm. When the Channel Tunnel was finished, machines on the British side were steered off the main line and buried under the seabed. One that made it out was auctioned on eBay for £39,999 and cut up for scrap.
Boring machines get treated as single-use because retrieval requires a massive reception pit and cranes, which usually costs more than the machine itself.
Which is why the quietly radical word in this update is "re-launch."
Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and digs itself into the ground within 24 hours. No launch shaft. When the tunnel is done, it angles upward, breaks the surface, and mines its way onto a trailer that drives it to the next job. The Boring Company calls the maneuver porpoising. Prufrock-1 has already dug six tunnels this way.
It's the SpaceX booster playbook underground. The biggest hidden cost in tunneling was throwing the machine away, so they built one that comes back.
There's a second change buried in the design. Conventional soft-soil machines advance about 5 feet, stop, erect a concrete ring, then start again, so they spend roughly half their life not digging. Prufrock installs the liner while it mines.
The company keeps a pet snail named Gary, because a garden snail tunnels 14 times faster than a conventional boring machine. Elon's stated definition of victory is beating the snail. Even at Prufrock's target of a mile per week, Gary still wins.
Greg_Wood retweeted
Hear Roger Doucet perform O Canada in CANADA VIGNETTES: THE PERFORMER → bit.ly/4cz1lYU
On this day in 1919, Roger Doucet was born in Montreal.
A gifted tenor, he became famous for singing O Canada at Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Expos and Montreal Alouettes games in the 1970s. He popularized the bilingual version of the anthem.
He died in 1981.
ALT A black-and-white photo of Roger Doucet standing and singing into a handheld microphone. He is dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and tie. His mouth is open wide mid-note, and his expression is intense and focused. His hair is light-colored and neatly styled, swept back from his forehead. He grips the microphone firmly in one hand, holding it close to his mouth. The background is slightly blurred, with indistinct figures and what appears to be an arena or large indoor venue behind him.
Greg_Wood retweeted
Sundar Pichai explains Google Search latency budgets:
"I’ve always internalized speed as one of the distinguishing features of a great product. It almost always reflects the technical underpinnings of the product having been done well.
It's easy to say you want low latency, but you're constantly adding capabilities. The capability frontier is progressing. That's where it gets more complicated.
But to give an example, Search they now have latency budgets, in the milliseconds. If you ship something which shaves off three milliseconds, you earn 1.5 milliseconds for your latency budget, and 1.5 milliseconds gets passed onto the user.
Depending on what we think you're doing, some people may get a latency budget of 30 milliseconds or 10 milliseconds. That's how much we think it matters."
@sundarpichai @eladgil @collision
Greg_Wood retweeted
Just talked to an AI Product manager making $375K at a frontier lab.
She hasn't written a PRD in 8 months.
Not "she uses AI to help write them faster." She has not opened a PRD template in eight months because she just doesn't need it anymore.
Her day looks nothing like what PMs do:
She wakes up, opens Claude Code, and has a working prototype running before her first meeting of the day (not a wireframe or a figma mockup someone needs to hand off to an engineer). A testable version of the idea - built/shipped by her in the same morning.
While that prototype is running, she's pulling model outputs and running evals. She knows what hallucination looks like in her specific use case. She knows what latency threshold breaks the user experience. She knows the token cost per query and what that means for margin at scale.
She reasons about infrastructure the way a CFO reasons about a P&L. When something needs to be built for real, she doesn't go write a ticket and wait two sprints. She ships the first version herself. hands it to engineering as a working reference implementation, not a requirements doc full of edge cases nobody reads.
The meetings she's in aren't about alignment. They're about what's already shipped and what's blocking the next thing.
Her mental model isn't:
- "manage the roadmap."
- "be the voice of the customer."
- "facilitate cross-functional collaboration."
Those aren't wrong exactly, they're just from a different era.
The mental model that gets you to $480K at a frontier lab in 2026 is simpler and harder at the same time:
- You are the builder.
- The agents are your team.
- Your job is to ship.
She said the output gap between PMs who operate this way and PMs who don't is already 3 to 4x. And this is inside a lab where literally everyone around her is working the same way.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the "I write specs and run standups" PM isn't being replaced by AI. The job isn't disappearing into a chatbot. It's being absorbed by the PM sitting two desks over who stopped waiting for engineers and started building herself.
Really crazy how fast the job description changed and really crazy how few people have noticed.
Greg_Wood retweeted
Yesterday Mark Cuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and told me to keep telling my story.
So here it is.
I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. 15 years pulling wire in Kentucky. Zero coding background. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to trade school.
Every week I'd show up to a home where someone just bought a Tesla or a Rivian. And every time, someone had already told them they needed a $3,000-$5,000 panel upgrade to install a charger.
70% of the time? They didn't need it.
The math is in the NEC — Section 220.82. Load calculations. But nobody was doing them for homeowners. Electricians upsell. Dealers don't know. And the homeowner just pays.
I got angry enough to build something about it.
I found @claudeai. No coding experience. I just started talking to it like I'd explain a job to an apprentice. "Here's how load calcs work. Here's the NEC code. Now help me build a tool that does this."
6 months later — @ChargeRight is live. Real software. Stripe payments. PDF reports. NEC 220.82 calculations automated. $12.99 instead of a $500 truck roll.
I'm still pulling wire. I still take service calls. I wake up at 5:05 AM for work.
But something shifted.
Yesterday @vivilinsv published my story as Claude Builder Spotlight #1. Mark Cuban saw it. The Claude community showed up. And for the first time, I felt like this thing I built in my kitchen might actually matter.
I'm not a tech founder. I'm a dad who wants to coach little league and be home for dinner. I just happened to build something that helps people.
If you're in the trades and thinking about using AI — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try.
EVchargeright.com
Lost Daleks episodes of Dr. Who have been discovered! bbc.com/news/articles/c4g7kw…
"Do want you want to." If you're seeking fulfillment in your life, watch this. youtu.be/Xn87-mcnoVc
Greg_Wood retweeted
Brian Chesky's vision for an AI-first world is miles ahead of the Silicon Valley narrative. Haven't seen it this clearly since Steve Jobs.
Greg_Wood retweeted
I hired an ex McKinsey consultant to compile all my sales materials to document how GrowthAssistant company reached $22M in ARR.
He collected:
- Recordings of sales calls
- Sales scripts
- SOPs
- Lead gen systems
- etc
100s of top companies paid me for access to it.
Today I'll give it away for free.
RT + reply "GA" to get a copy in DMs.
Greg_Wood retweeted
Greg on why building a consumer company is brutally hard. You have to be world-class at product and growth.
"In consumer, there are no quick fixes. Growth hacks are not a real thing. You have to be black belt at building products and growth.
You have to love extracting information and creating solutions. It's not "I think it should be." That's how consumer companies die because they just freaking guess. And it doesn't match what the consumer is looking for.
Great product, no growth. Doesn't get funded. Great growth engine, no product. Leaky bucket doesn't become a big company. Both those things have to be true.
It's not going to be six months or a year. It's 10 years of constantly problem solving along the way."
.@joinladder was my first angel investment, made entirely on trust in @ThomasDigan when I had no idea what I was doing in venture. What followed is one of the most unlikely and dramatic business stories I've been part of.
Today, Ladder is the number one strength training app approaching $100M in ARR with over 300K members. But it should have died several times and survived through sheer force of will from Tom and CEO @GregoryFStewart.
Tom left a lucrative hedge fund career and moved his family to Austin. He raised money from me, my family and his friends. Tom talks about how when you take money from people that close to you, you have to know deep down that you're willing to do whatever it takes.
During the early years, they were in constantly in debt with no customers and no sign of PMF. They celebrated raising $10k checks at night while negotiating with creditors and rebuilding the product during the day.
Greg describes copying thousands of App Store reviews into Word documents and color-coding them by theme to know exactly what feature to build next. He talks about going into what he calls a "cave process," disappearing to study a single problem until he masters it. He spent months cracking TikTok with no background, dissecting every minute detail -- the hook in the first three seconds, what the coach was wearing, the gym setting -- to grow from $3M to nearly $100M in ARR in four years.
Ladder is becoming the operating system for health and fitness, but this conversation is about how hard it really is to build something valuable, told by two people who were willing to do absolutely anything to make it work.
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:07 The Genesis of Ladder
3:04 Engineering DNA vs. Content Libraries
4:31 Scaling to 300,000 Paying Members
5:36 Leaving the Safety Net
9:00 Restructuring
13:58 Survival Mode
25:48 Ruthless Prioritization
27:15 Integrating Nutrition and Listening to Members
33:53 Cracking the TikTok Growth Loop
44:25 Expanding the Brand Beyond Short-Form Video
46:54 Financing Growth
51:10 Leveraging AI
58:10 Long-Term Vision
1:05:32 Kindest Thing
Greg_Wood retweeted
Day two at #HPATechRetreat!
We kicked off with our networking brunch sponsored by @awscloud, setting the stage for a jam-packed day of discussions. TR-X took center stage, diving into affordable production. And to wrap it all up? A lively cocktail hour in the Innovation Zone 💫
Greg_Wood retweeted
The smallest changes can make the difference between a believable, pleasant sound and a harsh, abrasive one for Foley artists.
We take a look at how they create footsteps sounds for movies and television. 👇
Greg_Wood retweeted
Why wasn't this taught in school⁉️🧐
Yet another glimpse at the cage we (were) all in...🥹
-NewsWithoutLies-
"Spite app" -- never underestimate the power of a grudge
Ladies and gentlemen, I pleased to announce my latest app:
Introducing Explode
· Send disappearing texts & photos inside iMessage
· Only the sender needs the app: Drop them right into your chats
· Screenshots are blocked too
Why did we build it? Explode is a spite app. Yes, an app to spite Snapchat.
Two years ago, I met with Snapchat’s CEO to discuss acquiring my previous company. I openly shared how fast we were growing. Just a week later—over the Thanksgiving holiday—Snapchat kicked our app off the SnapKit platform, abruptly halting our growth.
As Ghengis Khan once said: the greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, rob them of their wealth and see them bathed in tears.
Get Explode below ⬇️
Greg_Wood retweeted
Join COVE to explore dual-use innovation and NATO DIANA's approach to the future of defence and civilian technology.
This is an excellent analysis of Greenland+US story.
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Greg_Wood retweeted
betterdwelling.com/canadian-…
"Policymakers are now acknowledging it wasn’t a supply side issue. They originally attributed the rise in home prices to regulatory hurdles. Lifting those measures boosted land values, actually reducing the amount of building."
Oh.
To mitigate this, taxpayers pumped hundreds of billions into state-backed loans and stimulus to incentivize developers, to no effect."
Oh-boy.
