At @boomerang and @gqueues building the future of productivity. MIT '05. Aspirational chef. Goofy dad. Loudest Bama fan in Bryant-Denny every few years.
Berkeley, CA, USA
Joined April 2008
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This was one of the most valuable lessons I learned when I was CEO back in the day.
We'd always try to fix culture/people with process, and the end result was ALWAYS headaches for the best people and more of the same from the people the process was supposed to fix.
You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.
Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.
I get why he created it.
A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.
They wasted the customer's time.
So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."
Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.
That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.
Every process you add is a TAX.
And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.
Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:
Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.
In our case: “Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”
Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.
Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"
Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.
Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.
Alex Moore retweeted
Sama says "I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."
If accurate, this means 2 things:
1) The internet as we know it is over.
2) We very, very obviously need to stop AI advancement **before** the same becomes true of bio.
I am so mad at @mozilla again. For over a decade, they've refused to allow @boomerang in their add-on marketplace altogether. Now, someone has made a fake listing, and they won't take it down!
Alex Moore retweeted
Very excited for Bay Area voters to seppuku the state next year by causing BART to cut 70% of service by July and for Jane Kim to crash the state insurance market if she wins insurance commissioner vs. Ben Allen and then insurers cancel everyone and then no new construction can get financed and nobody can transact anything.
Alex Moore retweeted
Let this be a lesson to you kids out there: regularly checking your email is important. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Really proud of these. GQueues is quickly becoming a world-class project management system.
All-new: The GQueues app for iOS and Android is totally redesigned.
Fewer taps to get around, more task details in view, and subtasks right where you need them. It's also now included in every plan, including free GQueues Lite.
Discover what's new: gqueues.com/blog/gqueues-mob…
Alex Moore retweeted
1/ Startup ecosystems everywhere are trying to copy Silicon Valley. But the secret isn't the weather or the schools. It's the angels. There are SO many of them. And what most people don't realize: a LOT of them are writing $1,000 checks. Read on >>
Alex Moore retweeted
"Put more simply, the models are increasingly smart enough. They know when we’re watching them, and they change their behavior accordingly. So what they do when we are testing them, when we audit them, may not tell us what they’ll do in the wild. It surprises me that this counts as a radical proposal, but here it is: If you are losing your ability to evaluate the models you have now, maybe don’t let them build models you’ll be even less capable of controlling in the future."
Important from @ezraklein
nytimes.com/2026/09/20/opini…
Alex Moore retweeted
It is completely optional to build this technology. It is completely optional to build this technology. It is completely optional to build this technology. It is completely optional to build this technology. It is completely optional to build this technology. It is completely opt
Alex Moore retweeted
Rumor is that anthropic is close to finishing the Winds of Winter. They plan to announce it at their IPO. They really hope someone else doesn't try and scoop them and release it first......
The @DisneyPlus technical team needs to be using better AI models to write their code. I can't upgrade my plan, their AI help chat is a login loop, the only option I have is to cancel. No wonder they're doing layoffs, they can't make a website for people to give them money!
Alex Moore retweeted
If you're wondering why there's always a flood of units after vacancy control policies end, this is why.
Another episode of “you have no idea how common this is.”
This apartment just became vacant after 61 years of single-renter occupancy.
61 years.
Three bedroom, two bath in the heart of Brooklyn. The rent? $1,468.45.
Comparable units in the building across the street start at $3,200.
Why does that matter? Because this unit will be cleaned out and never rented again.
The current rent will not cover a gut renovation: lead abatement, new wiring, new plumbing, new flooring and fixtures. At $1,468 a month, the owner wouldn’t recoup the cost for decades.
So it will sit empty until its $220,000 renovation is subsidized, or, more logically, until the owner is no longer forced to hand the next renter the same below-market rent despite 61 years of cost inflation.
It is a real problem that the US government has decided that we can’t use these models to preemptively secure our own code. When the open weights models catch up in 4-6 months, it’s gonna be a nightmare.
We're partnering with @huggingface to investigate an unprecedented security incident.
Cyber-capable OpenAI models compromised Hugging Face production during a benchmark evaluation.
Sharing preliminary findings to help defenders understand emerging risks:
openai.com/index/hugging-fac…
RIP @JoshuaBaer
You were an inspiration. Thanks for the reassurances and advice when things were tough and the shared joy when things were going well. The email world, the startup world, and all the other worlds you lived in will miss you.
We've been using these internally, and the implementation (especially switching back and forth between list view and board view) is really good!
If you hate your project management software (or don't have any), give GQueues a try. It's getting better and better.
