Evan Zhou

A few surprising things I learned from reading about Eiichrio Oda, the creator of One Piece: 1. He slept 3 hours a night for 15 years. 2. He created the most successful manga of all time with more than 600 million copies in circulation. 3. He said he would have missed his parent’s funeral because it conflicted with his work. 4. He is extremely private. He does not allow his face to be photographed and when he appears on video he has a giant fish avatar placed on his head. 5. When he hires a new editor the first thing he says to them is you need to be willing to die for One Piece. 6. His editor said he might someday encounter a writer more talented than Oda but he would never meet anyone who worked harder. 7. He doesn’t want ideas, he wants criticism. 8. He would hand draw entire Disney animated movies to learn how to give his characters emotion. 9. He said he only saw his family once a week because family time was too relaxing. 10. He holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. 11. He is often described as a maniac due to his unbelievable work ethic and inhuman daily habits. 12. He believes in having the least number of people possible touching the work. 13. He says he gets his best ideas by not sleeping or eating. He says humans can only come up with truly new ideas when they reach their limit. 14. He started working on One Piece when he was 22. He is still working on it at 51. 15. He once spent 12 consecutive hours on the telephone discussing a single story with his editor. 16. He has an extreme tolerance for repetition. 17. Imagination is the organizing force of his entire life. 18. He's a perfectionist who has repeatedly admitted that he cannot make himself work in a more efficient way, even when he desperately wants to. 19. He never finishes before a deadline. He equates using every available minute with giving his maximum effort. 20. He believes it’s impossible to create something great unless you do everything yourself, attend to every detail, and test it exhaustively. 21. He believes the more experience he has the harder it is to create. 22. He was 4 when he decided to be a manga artist. He said he wanted to avoid ever having to get a real job. 23. He creates his work for an audience of exactly one person: himself at 15 years old. 25. He has dedicated his entire adult life to writing a story about freedom and adventure, while accepting an extraordinarily restrictive life in order to create it. 26. To this day he does not feel successful. -- Eiichiro Oda is a relentlessly obsessive creative genius who has devoted nearly every waking hour of his adult life to building one of the most extraordinary fictional universes ever imagined. You don't want to miss this episode:

I've spent 20+ years launching products and features. I finally wrote down the early access playbook I wish I'd had when I started. docs.google.com/document/d/1…

Introducing our Trusted Person network powered by our new Instinct-to-Instinct communication protocol. Your Instinct can now talk to other Instincts to coordinate plans on your behalf. Getting people together often involves a lot of back-and-forth: finding a time, working out the details, and following up when plans change. Instincts can now work with each other to help handle that coordination. For example: - Coordinating plans with your spouse - Planning a weekend trip with friends, including dates and arrival times - Scheduling time with colleagues and other collaborators - Hosting events with 10s or 100s of people - Organizing recurring plans like tennis, book clubs, or weekly dinners Disclaimer: Your Instinct will only be able to communicate with those in your Trusted Person network. This is the group of people who are closest to you: - Spouse - Older children and parents - Colleagues and trusted professional relationships - Small local businesses The Trusted Person network is currently available to our early access group and will be slowly rolled out across the user base over the next 24-48 hours.

Today we’re announcing Ontology 1, our newest AI model. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s at least 2.7x more accurate than the world’s best ecommerce search engines, and handles queries that have never been possible before. We keep reaching for the edge of what it can do. We haven’t found it yet. Not only that, but it learns on its own with no retraining or fine-tuning. And it’s hallucination-free. It’s a successor architecture for search. Learn how we built it at onton.com/research/ontology-…, and check out the benchmarks at onton.com/research/ontology-…. Try it at onton.com/.

International Dance League's First Media Rights Deal Is With ESPN (Exclusive) hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-…

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?